Science and Spirituality: The Volatile Connection

Until the end of the eighteenth century, almost everyone believed that the empirical world of science could produce evidence for a wise and loving God. By the twenty-first century, this comforting certainty had virtually vanished. Why? What caused such a cataclysmic change in attitudes to science and to the world? Science and Spiritualityis the history of the interaction between Western science and faith, and of the sometimes productive and occasionally disastrous ways in which scientists have engaged with religious beliefs and institutions. It details the cultural and intellectual politics that ignited the descriptive "cause" of science, eventually bringing about its ideological separation from its former ally, the Church. Journeying from the French Revolution to the present day, and taking in such figures as Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Charles Darwin, Immanuel Kant, Albert Einstein, Mary Shelley and Stephen Hawking, David Marcus Knight shows how science evolved from medieval andRenaissance forms of natural theology into the empirical discipline we know today. Focusing on the overthrow of Church and State in revolutionary France, and on the crucial 19th century period when a newly emerging scientific community rendered science culturally accessible, Science and Spirituality explores the volatile connection between science and faith and challenges the myth of their being locked in inevitable conflict. The book shows how scientific disenchantment has provided some of our most flexible and powerful metaphors for God, such as the hidden puppet-master and the blind watchmaker, and illustrates that questions of moral and spiritual value continue to intervene in the scientific endeavour.

David Knight is a Professor at Durham University and former President of the British Society for the History of Science.