Science and Religion Category
Images of the Man of Science
Posted on June 10, 2013 2 Comments
Historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin is one of the leading practitioners of constructivist historiography. Constructivitism assumes that scientific knowledge is locally created, produced, and situated. The local in scientific knowledge and the processes by which it becomes universally accepted are the two central issues in constructivist historiography. Constructivists, moreover, view scientific knowledge not […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That the Scientific Revolution Liberated Science from Religion
Posted on June 5, 2013 1 Comment
On May 12 of 2010, the general reading public witnessed a robust, if not at times acerbic, exchange between two prominent scholars of modern European history. It began with the publication of a review essay entitled “Mind the Enlightenment” in The Nation magazine by Samuel Moyn, professor of modern history at Columbia University. In that […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That Christianity Gave Birth to Modern Science
Posted on May 16, 2013 Leave a Comment
In these posts I have often focused on the close interaction between science, or natural philosophy, and Christianity. But as Noah J. Efron helpfully reminds us in his entry in Galileo goes to Jail, “Christian ideas about nature were not exclusively Christian ideas.” Efron admits that the claim that Christianity led to modern science captures […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That Galileo was Tortured and Imprisoned for Advocating Copernicanism
Posted on April 30, 2013 8 Comments
The “Galileo affair” is perhaps the most commonly discussed case of conflict between science and religion. According to widespread popular belief, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was a martyr of science; that he was not only tortured, but imprisoned by the Roman Catholic Church. Although this myth may make for good drama, it is seriously deficient as […]
A Prolegomena to A History of Evolution: Taking Biology from Metaphysics
Posted on April 24, 2013 1 Comment
A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir’d at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts, While from the bounded level of our mind Short views […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That Giordano Bruno was the First Martyr of Modern Science
Posted on April 4, 2013 4 Comments
In 1600, on the seventeenth of February, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, was ceremoniously burned at the stake in Rome’s Flower Market by the Roman Inquisition. His end is brutal to modern sensibility but not exceptional in the early modern period. But Bruno’s death stands out, mentioned in passing […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos
Posted on March 20, 2013 1 Comment
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Dennis R. Danielson tells us, alleged that science had inflicted on humanity “two great outrages upon its naive self-love”: the first, associated with the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), “when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a […]
The Secularization of the European Mind
Posted on March 18, 2013 Leave a Comment
A popular mind, even when that mind is middle class…has a need to inflate if it is to understand. It seizes upon a salient point; the point which is easy to identify; the point which is graphic, can be pictured; the point which a newspaper can make readable. In seizing upon the salient point it […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That Medieval Christians Taught that the Earth was Flat
Posted on March 14, 2013 7 Comments
Here is the classic story. People living in the “Dark Ages” were so ignorant (or so deceived by Catholic priests) that they believed the earth was flat. For thousands of years they lingered in ignorant obscurity, and were it not for the heroic bravery of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and other explorers, they might well have […]
James C. Ungureanu 