Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science by
The present collection examines the many different ways in which religions appeal to the authority of science. The result is a wide-ranging and uniquely compelling study of how religions adapt their message to the challenges of the contemporary world.
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science by
The field of 'religion and science' is exploding in popularity among academics as well as the general reading public. Spawning an increasing number of conferences and courses, this field has shown an unprecedented rate of growth in recent years. Here for the first time is a single-volume introduction to the debate, written by the leading experts. Making no pretence to encyclopaedic neutrality, each chapter defends a major intellectual position - at the heart of the book is a series of 'pro' and 'con' papers, covering each of the current 'hot topics' (such as evolution versus creation, naturalism versus the supernatural). In addition to treatments of questions of methodology and implications for life and practice, the Handbook includes sections devoted to the major scientific disciplines, the major world religions, and the main sub-disciplines in this exciting and ever-expanding field of study.
Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by
The debate between science and religion is never out of the news: emotions run high, fuelled by polemical bestsellers like The God Delusion and, at the other end of the spectrum, high-profile campaigns to teach'Intelligent Design'in schools. Yet there is much more to the debate than the clash of these extremes. As Thomas Dixon shows in this balanced and thought-provoking introduction, many have seen harmony rather than conflict between faith and science. He explores not only the key philosophical questions that underlie the debate, but also the social, political, and ethical contexts that have made'science and religion'such a fraught and interesting topic in the modern world, offering perspectives from non-Christian religions and examples from across the physical, biological, and social sciences.. Along the way, he examines landmark historical episodes such as the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633, and the famous debate between'Darwin's bulldog'Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in Oxford in 1860. The Scopes'Monkey Trial'in Tennessee in 1925 and the Dover Area School Board case of 2005 are explained with reference to the interaction between religion, law, and education in modern America. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Science and Religion : An Introduction by
Now thoroughly updated to reflect the latest debates, this popular textbook introduces readers to the central questions in the field of science and religion. Ideally suited to those who have little or no prior knowledge in either area, it incorporates numerous student-friendly features, including maps, summaries, and historical references, resulting in the most up-to-date introduction to the study of religion and the natural sciences available.
A Science and Religion Primer by
A Science and Religion Primer is a unique resource: an encyclopedia, an annotated bibliography, and a survey of the relationship between two equally complex fields. Editors Heidi Campbell and Heather Looy begin their work with four chapters from expert contributors: history of the science and religion dialogue, the role of philosophy in the science and religion dialogue, theology's intersection with the science and religion dialogue, and science and technology in light of religion. Entries cover such diverse topics as philosopher of science Karl Popper, the anthropic principle, Gaia, theodicy, hermeneutics, Intelligent Design, and more. Professors and students of theology, religion, and scienceat both the undergraduate and graduate levels will welcome this contribution. A Science and Religion Primer is an accessible and affordable contribution to interdisciplinary studies and provides a respectful conversation between science and faith.
The Big Questions in Science and Religion by
Can religious beliefs survive in the scientific age? Are they resoundingly outdated? Or, is there something in them of great importance, even if the way they are expressed will have to change given new scientific context? These questions are among those at the core of the science-religion dialogue. In The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith Ward, an Anglican priest who was once an atheist, offers compelling insights into the often contentious relationship between diverse religious views and new scientific knowledge. He identifies ten basic questions about the nature of the universe and human life. Among these are: •Does the universe have a goal or purpose? •Do the laws of nature exclude miracles? •Can science provide a wholly naturalistic explanation for moral and religious beliefs? •Has science made belief in God obsolete? Are there any good science-based arguments for God? With his expertise in the study of world religions, Ward considers concepts from Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity, while featuring the speculations of cosmologists, physicians, mathematicians, and philosophers. In addition, Ward examines the implications of ancient laws and modern theories and evaluates the role of religious experience as evidence of a nonphysical reality. Writing with enthusiasm, passion, and clarity, Keith Ward conveys the depth, difficulty, intellectual excitement, and importance of the greatest intellectual and existential questions of the modern scientific age.
Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality by
Gathering thinkers from ten countries and from a variety of scientific and spiritual backgrounds, Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality leads readers on a fascinating tour of distinctly non-Western approaches to topics in these two fields. These voices add fresh and invigorating input to a dialogue that has thus far been predominantly guided by scholars from the United States or Western Europe. The award-winning researchers represented in this volume were selected from a pool of over one hundred and fifty applications, and they offer the very best scholarship from underrepresented regions around the globe. The essays cover a wide spectrum of scientific fields, spanning mathematical physics, robotics, biosemiotics and other new schools of theoretical biology, embryonic stem cells, cognitive science, and the concept of opening the human mind to broader ideas of reality. Hailing from some of the top research institutions in India, Japan, Russia, Korea, China, and a variety of Eastern European nations, contributors offer unique insights into the spiritual and philosophical traditions of their cultures. At the same time, they also deftly engage concepts from the ongoing Western dialogue in its own terms, delving deeply, at times, into schools of thought like phenomenology or process thought. Scholars, students, researchers, and anyone seeking new ways of understanding the interplay of spirituality and science will discover in these truly interdisciplinary essays a multitude of windows into previously underexplored areas of research. Indeed, any one of these pieces could serve as the basis for entirely new programs of long-term study.
Religion and Science in Context by
How should we think about religion, science, and their relationship in modern society? What indeed is religion: belief or trust in God's existence? How do we distinguish sense from superstition? What does science have to say on such issues? Willem B. Drees considers contemporary discussions of these issues in Europe and North America, using examples from Christianity and religious naturalism, and reflections on Islam and Tibetan Buddhism. He argues that the scientific understanding leaves open certain ultimate questions, and thus allows for belief in a creator, but also for religious naturalism or serious agnosticism.
Science and Religion by
Lays out three distinct ways of responding to the main theological concerns and religious difficulties raised by the natural sciences today: conflict, contrast, and convergence.
Science and Religion: A Critical Survey by
This landmark book, first published in 1987, is now back in print, with a new introduction by its award-winning author. An interdisciplinary approach to the central themes of scientific and religious thought, this book was widely heralded upon its publication for the richness and depth of its contribution to the science and religion dialogue. “notable for its breadth and depth... filled with admirably argued and powerfully presented treatments of critical issues.”—Joseph Pickle, Colorado College, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science “a superb and subtle book.”—David Foxgrover, Christian Century “a monumental work... [T]he book is truly outstanding.”—John H. Wright, Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, Theological Studies “Rolston's presentation of the methods of science, along with up-to-date summaries of the main achievements of the various sciences, is commendable for its clarity and critical acumen.”—Choice According to Holmes Rolston III, there are fundamental questions that science alone cannot answer; these questions are the central religious questions. He uses the scientific method of inquiry to distill key issues from science, and then he integrates them in a study that begins with matter and moves through life, mind, culture, history, and spirit. Incorporating religious and scientific worldviews, he begins with an examination of two natural sciences: physics and biology. He then extrapolates examples from two human sciences: psychology and sociology. Next, he moves to the storied universe and world history, raising and addressing religious questions. “Never in the histories of science and religion have the opportunities been greater for fertile interaction between these fields, with mutual benefits to both,” states Rolston. The re-publication of this book provides current researchers and students in the field an invaluable, timeless methodological resource.The new introduction offers updated insights based on new scientific research.
Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives by
The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991). Almost two decades on, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives revisits this argument and asks how historians can now impose order on the complex and contingent histories of religious engagements with science. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume explores the history and changing meanings of the categories'science'and'religion'; the role of publishing and education in forging and spreading ideas; the connection between knowledge, power and intellectual imperialism; and the reasons for the confrontation between evolution and creationism among American Christians and in the Islamic world. A major contribution to the historiography of science and religion, this book makes the most recent scholarship on this much misunderstood debate widely accessible.
Science and Religion Around the World by
The past quarter-century has seen an explosion of interest in the history of science and religion. But all too often the scholars writing it have focused their attention almost exclusively on the Christian experience, with only passing reference to other traditions of both science and faith. At a time when religious ignorance and misunderstanding have lethal consequences, such provincialism must be avoided and, in this pioneering effort to explore the historical relations of what we now call'science'and'religion,'the authors go beyond the Abrahamic traditions to examine the way nature has been understood and manipulated in regions as diverse as ancient China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa. Science and Religion around the World also provides authoritative discussions of science in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- as well as an exploration of the relationship between science and the loss of religious beliefs. The narratives included in this book demonstrate the value of plural perspectives and of the importance of location for the construction and perception of science-religion relations.
Essays on Religion, Science, and Society by
Herman Bavinck, the premier theologian of the Kuyper-inspired, neo-Calvinistic revival in the late-nineteenth-century Netherlands, is an important voice in the development of Protestant theology. This volume, now in paper, is the capstone of his distinguished career. These seminal essays offer an outworking of Bavinck's systematic theology as presented in his Reformed Dogmatics and engage enduring issues from a biblical and theological perspective. The collection presents his mature reflections on issues relating to ethics, education, politics, psychology, natural science and evolution, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Pastors, students, and scholars of Reformed theology will value this work.
Evolution and Religion by
Michael Ruse, a leading expert on Charles Darwin, presents a fictional dialogue among characters with sharply contrasting positions regarding the tensions between science and religious belief. Ruse's main characters—an atheist scientist, a skeptical historian and philosopher of science, a relatively liberal female Episcopalian priest, and a Southern Baptist pastor who denies evolution—passionately argue about pressing issues, in a context framed within a television show: "Science versus God— Who is Winning?" These characters represent the different positions concerning science and religion often held today: evolution versus creation, the implications of Christian beliefs upon technological advances in medicine, and the everlasting debate over free will. The second edition of this innovative text incorporates the influence of Eastern religions and philosophies on the debate on human origins, broadening the contextual reach of the dialogue into comparative philosophy and religious studies.
The Great Rift : Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide by
In their search for truth, contemporary religious believers and modern scientific investigators hold many values in common. But in their approaches, they express two fundamentally different conceptions of how to understand and represent the world. Michael E. Hobart looks for the origin of this difference in the work of Renaissance thinkers who invented a revolutionary mathematical system--relational numeracy. By creating meaning through numbers and abstract symbols rather than words, relational numeracy allowed inquisitive minds to vault beyond the constraints of language and explore the natural world with a fresh interpretive vision. The Great Rift is the first book to examine the religion-science divide through the history of information technology. Hobart follows numeracy as it emerged from the practical counting systems of merchants, the abstract notations of musicians, the linear perspective of artists, and the calendars and clocks of astronomers. As the technology of the alphabet and of mere counting gave way to abstract symbols, the earlier "thing-mathematics" metamorphosed into the relational mathematics of modern scientific investigation. Using these new information symbols, Galileo and his contemporaries mathematized motion and matter, separating the demonstrations of science from the linguistic logic of religious narration. Hobart locates the great rift between science and religion not in ideological disagreement but in advances in mathematics and symbolic representation that opened new windows onto nature. In so doing, he connects the cognitive breakthroughs of the past with intellectual debates ongoing in the twenty-first century.-- Provided by publisher.
The New Sciences of Religion by
Performing a critical analysis of new scientific research on religious and spiritual phenomena, Grassie takes a two-staged phenomenological approach working from the 'outside in' and the 'bottom up' without privileging at the outset any religious traditions or philosophical assumptions.
Original Knowing : How Religion, Science, and the Human Mind Point to the Irreducible Depth of Life by
"Did Lucy know God? Could Neanderthals talk? Was Ardi self-conscious? These are the strange new breed of questions emerging as we discover more and more about our prehistoric origins--questions about knowing. While fossil digs and carbon dating tell a remarkable story about the bones and times of our ancient ancestors, we cannot help wondering what they knew, and when. Exploring such questions Original Knowing takes contemporary science as seriously as religious tradition and searches for the story behind this odd creature who senses more to the universe than meets the eye. In limestone bluffs and butterfly migrations, from Stone Age tool-making to Sumerian beer-making, clues are sought to better understand this strange mind that ponders the origins of its own existence. When do babies point, and why does it matter? What does throwing a Frisbee reveal about our distant ancestors? Is language the key to our minds as many believe? Or perhaps the heart of knowing rests in something more basic, in a smile, and the powerful social abilities at work allowing us to sense a depth to life--to our own lives--a depth that our minds help us glimpse if only through a glass darkly."--Publisher's website
Philosophy, Science and Religion for Everyone by
A Science and Religion Primer is a unique resource: an encyclopedia, an annotated bibliography, and a survey of the relationship between two equally complex fields. Editors Heidi Campbell and Heather Looy begin their work with four chapters from expert contributors: history of the science and religion dialogue, the role of philosophy in the science and religion dialogue, theology's intersection with the science and religion dialogue, and science and technology in light of religion. Entries cover such diverse topics as philosopher of science Karl Popper, the anthropic principle, Gaia, theodicy, hermeneutics, Intelligent Design, and more. Professors and students of theology, religion, and scienceat both the undergraduate and graduate levels will welcome this contribution. A Science and Religion Primer is an accessible and affordable contribution to interdisciplinary studies and provides a respectful conversation between science and faith.
The Religion and Science Debate by
Why does the tension between science and religion continue? How have those tensions changed during the past one hundred years? How have those tensions impacted the public debate about so-called “intelligent design” as a scientific alternative to evolution? With wit and wisdom the authors address the conflict from its philosophical roots to its manifestations within American culture. In doing so, they take an important step toward creating a society that reconciles scientific inquiry with the human spirit. This book, which marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Terry Lecture Series, offers a unique perspective for anyone interested in the debate between science and religion in America.
Religion and Science in Context by
How should we think about religion, science, and their relationship in modern society? What indeed is religion: belief or trust in God's existence? How do we distinguish sense from superstition? What does science have to say on such issues? Willem B. Drees considers contemporary discussions of these issues in Europe and North America, using examples from Christianity and religious naturalism, and reflections on Islam and Tibetan Buddhism. He argues that the scientific understanding leaves open certain ultimate questions, and thus allows for belief in a creator, but also for religious naturalism or serious agnosticism.
Religion and the Sciences of Origins by
This concise introduction to science and religion focuses on Christianity and modern Western science (the epicenter of issues in science and religion in the West) with a concluding chapter on Muslim and Jewish Science and Religion. This book also invites the reader into the relevant literature with ample quotations from original texts.
Science and Religion in Dialogue by
"This book provides an overview of the history of interactions between science and religion, with an emphasis on Christianity. Raymond E. Grizzle examines his own history of self-reflection on science and religion, focusing on what we have learned about the structure, history, and functioning of creation. Both histories are interpreted as histories of discarded images, largely consisting of the replacement of images of creation provided by religion with those provided by the natural sciences. Grizzle assesses the major kinds of creationism that exist today and explores conflicts arising from young Earth creationism and intelligent design. He also provides examples of productive dialogue regarding how science and religion might inform one another. Two major themes that run throughout the book are the importance of underlying beliefs and the reliability of modern science in producing a truthful understanding of the cosmos and the creation process. Science and Religion in Dialogue concludes with some suggested principles for constructive self-reflection and thoughts on how today's conflict might be replaced with productive discourse involving both science and religion."--Publisher's website.
Science and Religion in Quest of Truth by
[This book] covers what I believe to be the critical issues in the contemporary vigorous debate between science and theology, concentrating on what I judge to be the essential insights that are relevant to the issues raised. References are given to my earlier writings where chapters can be found that afford a more detailed engagement with particular issues, but I believe that on its own the present book lays out the core concepts that are fundamental in what is surely one of the most significant interdisciplinary interactions of our time, pursued in a wide quest for truthful understanding. The book concentrates on my own work, not at all because I think that I have said all that need be said, but simply because, after more than thirty years of reflection, this is what I have to offer.' From the Introduction
The Warfare Between Science and Religion by
The "conflict thesis"--The idea that an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict exists between science and religion-has long been part of the popular imagination. In The Warfare between Science and Religion, Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley have assembled a group of distinguished historians who explore the origin of the thesis, its reception, the responses it drew from various faith traditions, and its continued prominence in public discourse. 0Several essays in the book examine the personal circumstances and theological idiosyncrasies of important intellectuals, including John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, who through their polemical writings championed the conflict thesis relentlessly. Other essays consider what the thesis meant to different religious communities, including evangelicals, liberal Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Finally, essays both historical and sociological explore the place of the conflict thesis in popular culture and intellectual discourse today. Based on original research and written in an accessible style, the essays in The Warfare between Science and Religion take an interdisciplinary approach to question the historical relationship between science and religion. This volume, which brings much-needed perspective to an often bitter controversy, will appeal to scholars and students of the histories of science and religion, sociology, and philosophy.