When Science & Christianity Meet

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity. Among the events treated inWhen Science and Christianity Meetare the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, and the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity. "Taken together, these papers provide a comprehensive survey of current thinking on key issues in the relationships between science and religion, pitchedas the editors intendedat just the right level to appeal to students."Peter J. Bowler,Isis

David C. Lindberg is the Hilldale Professor emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450, which won the Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and Natural Science.

Ronald L. Numbers is the Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Darwinism Comes to America, which also won the Templeton Foundation Prize. Together Lindberg and Numbers edited God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science and are currently editing the eight-volume Cambridge History of Science. Both Lindberg and Numbers are past presidents of the History of Science Society.