God and Nature
McCue, James F.
THE CHURCH & THE RISE OF SCIENCE GOD AND NATURE HISTORICAL ESSAYS ON THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE Edited by David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers University of California, $50,...
...Perhaps the best article in the collection is Margaret Jacob's "Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview...
...Gary Deasan, in "Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature" would derive basic conceptions of "the mechanical philosophy" from the Reformation (i.e...
...Yet her remarks need to be seen as suggestions rather than as achieved results...
...The essays collected in God and Nature — written for a symposium at the University of Wisconsin — address the problem of the relationship between Christianity and science in a number of different ways and with a variety of theories...
...And if we can, can we say anything convincing about the role of Christianity in creating (or impeding) those conditions...
...Hence the authors are able to put together a more convincing picture of the actual interaction of science and religion...
...James F. McCue It is not easy to describe "encounters" between entities like "Christianity" and "science...
...The first shows that, yes, the early church was somewhat interested in some bits and pieces of earlier science and did transmit some of that heritage...
...But we will have to have better developed models for the understanding of cultural change before we will have a convincing general picture of the relationship between Christianity and science...
...The best essays are those in the middle, focusing on the seventeenth century...
...Yet even here it is striking and important to note how tentative the analysis has to be...
...The second points up some of the similarities and differences between early modern scientists and post-1277 medieval scholasticism (the condemnations of certain theological and philosophical propositions by the bishops of Paris and Oxford in that year being accorded a major causal role...
...For both the earlier and later periods, the authors seem to have dealt less satisfactorily with the question of where they want to direct their attention and what questions they want to ask...
...They do make a counterstatement to White...
...The essays contained in God and Nature well represent that state of the art and the state of the question...
...We can note a metaphorical congruence between the Newtonian harmony of a world of atoms and the intended social world of his time and place, but this is to suggest rather than to show that Newtonianism served to buttress that social order...
...Neither, unless we assume that science naturally and inevitably emerges in a society in which it is not confronted by an insurmountable obstacle (a view that seems sometimes to have been taken in the past), can we view it as the obstacle that had to be overcome for science to emerge...
...They show that the relationship between Christianity and science has been complex and differentiated...
...It would seem, on good Baconian principles, that the former cannot be considered the necessary and sufficient condition for the latter...
...No one else makes comparable claims, fortunately, but many see some form of Christianity playing a positive role in the evolution of science...
...THE CHURCH & THE RISE OF SCIENCE GOD AND NATURE HISTORICAL ESSAYS ON THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE Edited by David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers University of California, $50, $17.95 paper, 516 pp...
...Jacob is concerned to see Newtonianism in its social and ideological role, and at many points she advances interesting suggestions as to the role played by Newtonian thought in validating the new dispensation in England after 1660 and 1688...
...It is also a time and place for which we have a highly developed body of literature on the political, social, and economic development of society...
...Lutheran or perhaps Calvinist) understanding of justification and divine sovereignty...
...Here and there there have been people who conceived of themselves rather simply and exclusively as either Christians or as scientists...
...and there is some conflict — William Shea's "Galileo and the Church...
...But for the most part there is a complex and more or less positive interaction...
...Can we say anything convincing about the conditions that gave rise to the flurry of activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that is not improperly called a revolution...
...But in between these two extremes is a void that these two articles do little to fill or even to elucidate...
...So much is covered in this collection that it is difficult to know where to begin...
...But the difficulty of the subject is created by the fact that across the last four centuries or so, from the time of the "Scientific Revolution" to the present, many people have been both scientist and Christian...
...300: Commonweal...
...Almost all of the essayists are at pains to distance themselves from the perspective of Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896...
...In such cases the encounter has been as simple as that of billiard balls...
...There are a few battles — Ronald Numbers's "The Creationists," for example...
...So that the problem of the encounter is the problem of the relationship between two aspects of a single personality and of a single though complex culture...
...This may simply be because the key actors are more easily identifiable there, and because there already exists an intense and quite sophisticated scholarly literature...
...The most closely argued section of the book has to do with the interaction of S May 1987: 299 Christianity and science in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . this reflects the fact that this is the time and place in which the history of science has been most closely studied and in which it is clear what the most significant action is...
...The first two essays, on science in the early and medieval church, leave me dissatisfied...
...But both essays suffer from the lack of a clearly defined agenda...
...The essays begin with "Science and the Early Church" and end with three studies of relationships between 298: Commonweal science and various forms of twentiethcentury English-speaking Protestantism...
...However, as one might expect in a collection of essays, no single metaphor replaces "warfare...
...Christianity existed for almost 1600 years, and Western Christianity almost as long, before the Scientific Revolution...
...People encounter people, billiard balls encounter billiard balls, but one has to construct some fairly complex theories in order to have Christianity encounter science and vice versa...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
