The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, in front of an audience composed of many leading men of science as well as other ladies and gentlemen with an informed interest in scientific questions, the bishop of Oxford, ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, sarcastically asked Thomas Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on the side of his grandmother or his grandfather. Huxley, apparently white with rage, rose to his feet and tremulously responded that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop, especially one who used his intellectual abilities to try to block the progress of science. This exchange caused such excitement that one woman was reported even to have fainted and been carried from the room. Behind this colourful legend, however, was much more than a simple conflict between a champion of science and a conservative defender of religion. As in the Galileo case, there were theological, scientific, philosophical and political dimensions to the conflict. Liberal theologians had no problem with accepting the Darwinian theory as an explanation of how God had brought plants and animals into existence. But other Christian writers saw the acceptance of Darwinism as tantamount to atheism. Scientists disagreed over whether there was enough evidence to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution; and philosophers over whether it had been produced according to the proper inductive scientific method. There was also an important political dimension to the Victorian conflict: Huxley and others were engaged in a campaign to separate scientific research and teaching at schools and universities from the influence of the established Church of England. Highprofile assaults on bishops and theologians were useful rhetorical weapons in this battle to create an autonomous and secular scientific profession (Brooke 1991, 2003; James 2005; Moore 1979; Turner 1993).

Turning to early twentieth-century America, a disturbance that appeared on the surface to be a conflict between science and religion again turns out to have resulted from tensions running along deeper social and political fault-lines. In Dayton, Tennessee in a swelteringly hot courtroom in the summer of 1925, a local schoolteacher, John Scopes, was successfully prosecuted under new legislation for teaching his pupils that humans had evolved from lower animals. The prosecution was led by the three-times Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, and the defence by the most celebrated lawyer of the age, the agnostic Clarence Darrow. While many at the time (including Bryan and Darrow) saw the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ as a classic case of the conflict between religion and science, the reasons for the amount of political heat generated were more complicated. These included the continuing political hostilities between North and South, even sixty years after the Civil War; a popular resentment at the perceived autocracy of a Northern intellectual elite; tensions between the ideals of intellectual freedom and majoritarian democracy; and conflicts between the rights of individual states and the authority of the federal government (see Larson 1997).

What historians of science and religion have demonstrated is that for every individual who argues that a particular scientific advance is a threat to their religious faith, there will be another who can explain why, on the contrary, it is compatible or even confirmatory of that faith. One of the most interesting questions to ask, both historically and with reference to present-day debates, is what the broader political motives are for presenting such developments as either in conflict or in harmony with a particular kind of religion.

Philosophy of science and theological method

Philosophers of science interested in the project of demarcating science from other activities (including religion and theology) have often focused on the scientific method. Some have

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emphasised the inductive nature of scientific work – the way that it produces laws and generalisations only after painstakingly collecting empirical data from which to generalise. On this view, scientific theories can be verified by collecting a sufficient amount of confirmatory empirical evidence. Others, such as Karl Popper, have been less optimistic and argued that the hallmark of science is the quest not for verification but for falsification. No matter how many black ravens you observe, you cannot conclusively prove that all ravens are black simply by accumulating observations. The next one you see could be white. However, the observation of a single white raven is sufficient to falsify conclusively the hypothesis that all ravens are black. Thus the scientist can expect evidence to provide certain falsification of unsuccessful theories but, in the case of apparently successful hypotheses, the best that she can hope for is provisional corroboration. Even very well confirmed theories are sometimes eventually falsified, partially or completely. Imre Lakatos, and the highly influential Thomas Kuhn (1996; first published 1962), subsequently suggested more sophisticated accounts of falsification, which acknowledged that the lack of a match between theory and data more often results in a rejection (or at least reinterpretation) of the data, or a questioning of the competence of the experimenter, than in a rejection of the theory that was being tested. The way that Lakatos put this was to say that every research programme has a ‘hard core’ of assumptions that are never discarded, no matter what the empirical evidence, and a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary assumptions (about calibration of measuring instruments, possible sources of interference in the experimental set-up, and so on). The latter are more likely to be modified or discarded when experimental observations fail to match up with theoretical predictions.

Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos are just three of many philosophers of science to whom theologians have looked when formulating their arguments about the differences and similarities between theological and scientific methods (Barbour 1966, 1997; Knight 2001; McGrath 1998; Scott and Moore 2007). One of the central issues has been the question of whether science and religion can both be considered rational activities. According to one familiar caricature, scientific theories are rational because they are based on the facts, but religious beliefs represent an irrational sort of wish-fulfilment; science demands strong empirical evidence, but religion encourages blind faith in the complete absence of evidence; the scientist is the very embodiment of objectivity and reason, but the religious practitioner is, by contrast, a creature of irrational emotions and obscure mystical experiences. There are some grains of truth in all this. Certainly there has been a strand of thought within Christian theology that has celebrated the rejection of worldly wisdom, and has emphasised the contrast between the logic of secular reason and the ineffability of religious faith. However, it is unfair to suggest that most religions encourage people to believe things in the absence of any good evidence. Most theologians would see faith and reason as being more closely connected than that.

Writers on ‘religion and science’ have tried to overcome the stereotyped idea that science is supremely rational and religion is the opposite in two ways: talking down the rationality of science, and talking up the rationality of religion. Appealing to post-positivist philosophers of science, including Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn, those following the first strategy have noted that science is not quite the value-free, fact-based, truth-producing machine that it was once thought to be. They point to the fact that scientific observations are more loaded with theoretical assumptions than was previously supposed, that scientists are sometimes prone to be as dogmatic and inflexible in the face of recalcitrant evidence as the most doctrinaire of theologians, and that non-scientific factors (such as social and political concerns) seem to

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have a considerable impact on theory-choice in scientific communities. Writers following the second strategy have tried to draw close analogies between theological and scientific methods. Arthur Peacocke and Nancey Murphy have argued, each in their own way, that theology is very much like a scientific discipline: it makes inferences from the observable realm to the unobservable; it deploys models and metaphors to represent the unobservable, just as the natural sciences do (for instance, when physicists use models of ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ to understand the subatomic realm); and it has a set of hard-core theoretical commitments, which, just as in the natural sciences, are surrounded and supported by a belt of more flexible ‘auxiliary hypotheses’ (see Murphy 1990; Peacocke 1984).

Taken together, these strategies would be self-defeating, since the former questions the superior rationality of science, while the latter takes it for granted. There are problems with each of the strategies taken on its own too. Most religious traditions have a strong commitment to the careful study of nature and the rigorous application of human reason. In such traditions it is important that the rationality and success of the sciences are nurtured and encouraged. Talking down the sciences, in any case, does nothing to enhance the rationality of religion and theology, which are equally vulnerable to critiques that draw attention to hidden assumptions, prejudices and political interests. The problem, on the other hand, with suggesting a close analogy between scientific and theological methods is that it can look too much as though theologians have abandoned the distinctive skills and prophetic voice of religion in an attempt to mimic the high-prestige methods of the sciences. For many, this represents too much of an intellectual and cultural surrender to an anti-theological and scientistic world-view.

Physics and divine action

Early modern debates about the physical sciences (specifically about astronomy and cosmology) provided the centrepiece for one of the most well-known controversies concerning religion and science, namely the Galileo affair. For most of the modern period, however, physical science has frequently provided the basis for a more positive engagement. One of the pre-eminent figures in the history of modern science, Isaac Newton, is a case in point. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation laid the foundations for modern physics and were taken, by some, to depict a deterministic universe from which God had been banished. Newton himself, however, was devoutly religious and believed that there were many points in the system he described at which divine intervention was not only possible, but absolutely essential. He invoked the hand of the Deity to explain, for example, the rotation of the planets on their own axes, and the fact that matter was spread evenly throughout the universe rather than collapsing into a single great mass through the force of gravity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, alongside the development of explicitly atheistic and deterministic cosmologies by some French Newtonians, more pious writers on the physical sciences continued to discern divine authorship in the elegant mathematical laws that governed the movements and interactions of terrestrial and celestial bodies. In the later nineteenth century, physicists interested in the ways that different sorts of energy could be converted into one another, and in the role of the ‘ether’ as a vehicle for electromagnetic forces, became fascinated by psychical research, and the controversial idea that the human spirit could be understood as some sort of physical or electromagnetic phenomenon. Physicists in late Victorian Britain accordingly undertook investigations of the fundamental forces of nature in darkened seance rooms as well as in experimental laboratories (Oppenheim 1985).

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The twentieth century saw an explosion of new ideas in the physical sciences. The theory of relativity, quantum physics, chaos theory and ‘Big Bang’ cosmology all brought with them suggestive new religious and theological ideas. The fuzzy, indeterminate mathematics of quantum theory seemed to indicate that physical reality was not, after all, closed and deterministic. The central role of the observer in determining the outcome of quantum events challenged the modernist dichotomy between subject and object. Big Bang cosmology could be interpreted as confirming something like a biblical view of a moment of creation out of nothing, or alternatively as describing a closed system with no boundaries and no need for a Creator. This all opened up new possibilities in debates about divine activity, which continue to be discussed by theologians and scientists (Clayton1997; Drees 1990; Polkinghorne 1994; Russell et al. 1999; Saunders 2002). A key danger of which such writers are constantly aware is that they might end up constructing a ‘God of the gaps’ – in other words, locating God simply in gaps in current scientific knowledge. If those gaps turn out to be temporary ones that disappear with advances in science, rather than being permanent, metaphysical gaps, then the cause of theism will have been weakened rather than strengthened.

Darwinism and design

There is a stark contrast between the images of God and nature suggested by the physical sciences on the one hand and those conjured up by the biological sciences on the other. Physicists have often found it natural to infer the existence of an intelligent designer from the awesome scale and mathematical beauty of the universe, and from the apparent fine-tuning of its fundamental laws and constants, as discovered by modern physics. The biological sciences, on the other hand, deal not with immense expanses of space and time, nor with grand, elegant and satisfying mathematical proofs, but rather with the messy, violent realities of the Darwinian struggle for existence. A famously gruesome example of this struggle is to be found in the case of the parasitic ichneumon wasp. The female ichneumon lays her eggs inside the body of a caterpillar, with the result that, for their first meal, her offspring eat their host alive. Having observed this phenomenon, the young Charles Darwin wrote to a friend: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!’ And since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, others too have found it harder to discern in the natural world the benign and intelligent Deity of Newton or Paley.

Indeed, for many, the question of evolution, especially human evolution, remains the central one in discussions of religion and science. It is certainly a question that polarises opinion, especially in the United States. Polls have found that about 45 per cent of the population of the US believe that man was created in roughly his present state at some time in the last 10,000 years; about 40 per cent prefer to say that humans were the result of a divinely guided process of evolution; and only about 10 per cent believe that human beings evolved in an entirely natural way over millions of years through a process in which God had no part. Among professional scientists, of course, the vast majority would believe in the minority view – that humans have a common ancestry with all other animals and have evolved in an entirely natural way. The philosophical question of the demarcation of science from pseudo-science takes on a new political urgency in the context of debates about creationism and evolutionism. Creationists, from the early twentieth century onwards, have claimed that the theory of evolution is scientifically unsound and, in reality, is merely a dangerous atheistic ideology dressed up in scientific clothing – a new pied piper leading the

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children of America into a pit of unbelief and immorality. Evolutionists return the compliment, arguing that ‘creation science’ is nothing more nor less than fundamentalist Christianity mischievously masquerading as science, in an attempt to confer on itself a bogus academic credibility. Arguments on both sides range from partisan bluster to careful philosophical and scientific argumentation. The most recent incarnation of this debate has focused on the scientific, philosophical and religious credentials of the new ‘intelligent design’ movement (Dembski and Ruse 2004; Sarkar 2007). The way that these confrontations are resolved has particularly important implications since what is most often at issue is the practical question of who should determine the content of the science curriculum in public schools, and what should be on it. Thus, deciding how to answer the question of whether the biological sciences reveal a world of design or of chance, of divine purpose or of meaningless strife, continues to have concrete political consequences, as has been evident in American court cases from the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 to the ruling against the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005 (Bowler 2007; Dixon 2008: Chapter 5; Larson 1997; Numbers 2006; Ruse 2003).

Science and the soul

While some reactions to Darwinism have centred on the difficulty of reconciling the theory of evolution by natural selection with the teachings of the Bible about the creation of separate species, the sticking point for others has been the question of the existence and status of the human soul. The problem of how to combine an evolutionary understanding of human origins with anything other than a materialistic understanding of the soul is a difficult one. If the brain is the organ of the mind, and the brain, like all our other organs, gradually evolved from much more basic beginnings, it is hard to see how an immaterial or supernatural ‘soul’ can be inserted into the process. If human beings are nothing more than large-brained apes who live in particularly complex and violent societies, what sense can be made of religious ideas about the dignity or even immortality of the human spirit? Scientific writers from Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man (1871), up to popular writers of more recent times such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker have produced intriguing accounts of the evolutionary origins, and genetic basis, of moral and religious feelings. For many theologians, however, the human soul, created in the image of God, with its faculties of will and intellect, is something that marks human beings out as quite different sorts of creatures from other animals. For them, the soul is the seat of reason and morality, which are both lacked by non-human animals.

It is not only modern evolutionary science that has posed problems for traditional understandings of the soul. Developments in medicine, psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had already illustrated evercloser links between the physical structures of the brain and nervous system and the healthy or pathological functioning of the human mind. As these links were made with ever greater precision and certainty through the twentieth century, theologians were confronted with difficult questions about the relationship between the body, on the one hand, and the mind, soul or spirit on the other (Dixon 2008: Chapter 6; Dueck and Lee 2005; van Huyssteen 2006; Watts 2002). The simplest explanation, that all our thoughts and feelings were simply states of the brain, seemed incompatible with religious ideas about an immaterial soul and a freely acting will. One response to these questions was the development of a philosophical position termed ‘non-reductive physicalism’ (Brown et al. 1998). Proponents of

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this view favoured a holistic understanding of human nature instead of the sort of soul–body dualism that modern science seemed to make untenable. As well as seeking consonance with scientific views of mind and brain, these writers also invoked biblical teachings about the indissolubility of the soul–body unity to support their case for physicalism, seeing the doctrine of the bodily resurrection, for instance, as more authentically biblical than belief in an immortal and immaterial spirit. In short, Hebrew holism was to be preferred, they said, to Hellenistic dualism. Others still need further convincing that a totally physicalist understanding of human beings can really do justice to traditional religious teachings about the soul.

From theory to practice: technology, ethics, politics

Many academic discussions about religion and science have taken place at an intellectual level. Religion and science are both, however, fundamentally practical activities. They both seek not only to describe the world, but also to change it. The prophetic voice in religion denounces injustices and abuses of the present day and calls for personal and social regeneration, reform, rebirth. Similarly, one of the leading justifications of the funding of scientific research is that it will provide the means of material improvement, for both rich and poor, through all sorts of new technologies, especially in the areas of communications, agriculture and medicine. In their different ways, religion and science both offer salvation. The leading questions driving academic discussions of religion and science have therefore often been about technology, ethics and politics rather than simply about competing intellectual positions. Historically, it has frequently been the spokespeople of religious traditions who have led the way in raising ethical concerns about experimentation on animals, the use of contraceptives, the development of nuclear weapons, the cloning of human beings, the patenting of genes, or the causes and consequences of climate change. Religions can also provide resources for those concerned with ecology and the ‘stewardship’ of the natural world.

Religion and science both have fraught and ambiguous relationships with the political world. Scientists have often claimed to be ethically neutral creatures, driven only by the pursuit of truth. On this view, it is down to elected politicians or, indeed, religious leaders, to form committees and make decisions about moral and political questions arising from science. Such a view, however, does not stand very close scrutiny. All scientific research programmes have to be funded, either commercially or from public money. Such funding generally has strings attached. The decision to accept funding from a pharmaceuticals company, an arms manufacturer or even a charity, a campaign group or a government agency is always an ethical and political one. Scientists have a good deal of cultural and political clout as a result of the status of their profession. That status, in turn, rests very heavily on the belief that scientists are objective and detached, motivated by purer motives than, for instance, party politics or sectarian religious views. One of the most interesting lessons of the history of science is that in the modern world few more powerful rhetorical strategies exist than claiming scientific status for one’s political ideology. Laissez-faire individualists, Socialists, Nazis and Communists have all claimed scientific authority for their political creeds. But while scientists and politicians today are quick to denounce such examples from history as perversions of both science and politics, they are not always so quick to notice cases in the present when science and politics have become closely intertwined. Interpreting scientific findings relating to physical and mental differences between people of different races, sexes,

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or sexual orientations, for instance, is inevitably a political activity, no matter how much people, on all sides, try to present their case as purely scientific or empirical, while depicting their opponent’s case as ideologically loaded (Dixon 2008: Chapter 6).

Connections between religion and politics are similarly double-edged. One of the most important functions of religious leaders has been to draw attention to the failings of political rulers. For such complaints to seem authentic, they must be seen to come from outside the political system itself. While scientists can appeal to the authority of nature and of scientific objectivity, religious writers can invoke a moral, spiritual, even divine authority which is, like the authority of the scientists, based on something beyond and above the messy and corrupt world of human affairs. Indeed, if any single rhetorical strategy has been more effective in political debates through history than the appeal to nature or science, it has been the appeal to God and morality. Disputes over the teaching of evolution and creation science in schools in the United States in the twentieth century illustrate perfectly these complex relationshipsÂ

between religion, science and politics.

Concluding remarks

Even in this brief survey of issues arising in the study of interactions between the worlds of religion and science, we have seen how many different philosophical, theological, ethical and political interpretations can be given to the results of scientific research. From the gruesome habits of the ichneumon wasp to the mysteries of psychic phenomena – from parasitology to parapsychology – there has always been controversy about what the natural can reveal about the divine, and how such revelations should shape our actions. Scientific understandings of the universe and our place in it, together with the technological advances that come with them, will undoubtedly continue to provide material for a wide range of intellectual and political controversies as long as human civilisations survive. Students of ‘religion and science’, through their attempts to get to grips with the huge variety of engagements to which these fundamental human endeavours have given rise, will perhaps be less surprised than others to find, lying around the cradle of every science in the future, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules, extinguished scientists and their defunct research programmes, extinguished ethicists and their superseded philosophies, extinguished politicians and their exploded ideologies and, no doubt, one or two extinguished theologians too.

Bibliography

Barbour, Ian (1966), Issues in Science and Religion, London: SCM Press.

—— (1997), Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco (in the UK as London: SCM Press, 1998). A thorough and wide-ranging survey by one of the central figures in the field.

Bowler, Peter J. (2001), Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—— (2007), Peter J. Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Brooke, John H. (2003), ‘Darwin and Victorian Christianity’, in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 192–213.

——Â and Geoffrey Cantor (1998), Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

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—— and Ronald Numbers (eds) (2009), Science and Religion around the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Warren S., Nancey Murphy and H. Newton Malony (eds) (1998), Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Cantor, Geoffrey and Chris Kenny (2001), ‘Barbour’s Fourfold Way: Problems with his Taxonomy of Science-Religion Relationships’, Zygon 36: 765–81.

Clayton, Philip (1997), God and Contemporary Science, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dawkins, Richard (2006), The God Delusion, London: Bantam.

Dembski, William A. and Michael Ruse (eds) (2004), Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, Thomas (2002), ‘Scientific Atheism as a Faith Tradition’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33: 337–59.

——Â(2003) ‘Looking Beyond “The Rumpus about Moses and Monkeys”: Religion and the Sciences in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-century Studies 17: 25–33.

——, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey (eds)Â (2009), Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drees, Willem B. (1990), Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God, La Salle, IL: Open Court. ——Â (1996), Religion, Science and Naturalism, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.

——Â (2003), ‘“Religion and Science” Without Symmetry, Plausibility, and Harmony’, Theology and Science 1: 113–28.

Dueck, Alvin, and Cameron Lee (eds) (2005), Why Psychology Needs Theology: A Radical-Reformation Perspective, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Ferngren, Gary B. (ed.) (2000), The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, New York and London: Garland.

Harrison, Peter (2006), ‘“Science” and “Religion”: Constructing the Boundaries’, The Journal of Religion 86: 81–106.

Huxley, Thomas H. (1893), Collected Essays, Volume 2: Darwiniana, London: Macmillan.

James, Frank (2005), ‘An “Open Clash Between Science and the Church”? Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker on Darwin at the British Association, Oxford, 1860’, in David Knight and Matthew Eddy (eds), Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 171– 93.

Knight, Christopher C. (2001), Wrestling with the Divine: Religion, Science, and Revelation, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Kuhn, Thomas (1996), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Larson, Edward J. (1997), Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, New York: Basic Books.

Lindberg, David C. (2003), ‘Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds), When Science and Christianity Meet, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 33–60.

McGrath, Alister E. (1998), Science and Religion: An Introduction, Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell. Midgley, Mary (2002), Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, revised edition, London

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Moore, James R. (1979), The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Oppenheim, Janet (1985), The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in Britain, 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paley, William (2006), Natural Theology, edited with an introduction by Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peacocke, Arthur (1984), Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

——Â(1993), Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine, and Human, enlarged edition, Minneapolis: Fortress Press (in the UK as London: SCM Press).

Polkinghorne, John (1994), The Faith of a Physicist, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (in the UK as Science and Christian Belief, London: SPCK).

Ruse, Michael (2003), Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Russell, Robert J. (2003), ‘Bridging Theology and Science: The CTNS Logo’, Theology and Science 1: 1–3.

——, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering and Michael A. Arbib (eds) (1999), Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

Sarkar, Sahotra (2007), Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution, Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Saunders, Nicholas (2002), Divine Action and Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scott, Michael and Andrew Moore (eds) (2007), Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Turner, Frank M. (1993), Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Huyssteen, Wentzel (2006), Alone in the World: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology; The Gifford Lectures, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Ward, Keith (2008), Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins, Oxford: Lion. Watts, Fraser (2002), Theology and Psychology, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Suggested reading

Brooke, John Hedley (1991), Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

An excellent place to start: an erudite, engaging, informative and thought-provoking historical survey.

Clayton, Philip and Zachary Simpson (eds) (2006), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

A comprehensive collection of over fifty concise essays by leading experts on all the key issues.

Dixon, Thomas (2008), Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. An introductory book expanding at somewhat greater length on the historical, philosophical and theological issues touched on above.

Ferngren, Gary B. (ed.) (2000), The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, New York and London: Garland.

An invaluable reference work with contributions by leading scholars on historical, philosophical, religious and scientific themes coming right up to the present day and paying attention to particularities of time and place. Also available in condensed form as: Gary B. Ferngren (ed.) (2002), Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Larson, Edward J. (1997), Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, New York: Basic Books.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning study, combining a vivid account of the Scopes trial with perceptive broader reflections.

Lindberg, David C. and Ronald L. Numbers (eds) (2003), When Science and Christianity Meet, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

A collection of studies by leading historians in the field, aimed at a broad readership.

Polkinghorne, John (1994), The Faith of a Physicist, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (in the UK as Science and Christian Belief, London: SPCK).

An engaging and sophisticated study by an eminent theoretical physicist now ordained in the Anglican Church.

Post, Stephen G. et al. (eds) (2002), Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy and Religion in Dialogue, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

A substantial interdisciplinary work seeking answers from scientists, philosophers and theologians to fundamental questions about human nature and human morality.

Watts, Fraser (2002), Theology and Psychology, Aldershot: Ashgate.

An engaging and accessible survey of the theological implications of scientific accounts of the human mind, from evolutionary psychology to artificial intelligence.