Religion and the Origins of Modern Science

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was famously described by Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield as an event that 'outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.' It was the emergence of science, Butterfield argued, that marked the real origin of the modern world and the modern mentality. While historians of science are now less enamoured of the idea of a scientific revolution, and somewhat less celebratory of its putative accomplishments than Butterfield, it is nonetheless clear that the seventeenth century witnessed a series of remarkable scientific developments and, equally importantly, saw the emergence of a set of values that placed a high priority on scientific achievement.

One question that continues to exercise historians is how this all came about. When considering the origins of modern science, historians have long been interested in the question of why the West, and why the seventeenth century. Refining the question with contrast cases, we might ask why not China, or medieval Islam, or, for that matter, medieval Christianity?

This project seeks answers to these questions in certain characteristics of the religious culture of early modern Europe. More specifically, it will explore various features of religious beliefs, values, practices and institutions with a view to determining whether these might be said to constitute necessary conditions for the rise of a scientific culture and, beyond this, how they might explain its persistence and dominance. In addition to the question of the influence of religion upon the development of science, the project will also seek to illuminate the issue of the influence of science upon religion - not so much in terms of how particular religious doctrines have been shaped by scientific discoveries, but in terms of the more fundamental question of how the success of science has altered our perception of what religion is, and how its central claims are justified.

While the question of the religious origins of science is one that has been asked before, this project promises to shed new light on this old question in a number of ways. First, this work will go beyond standard accounts of the influence of religion on science, by building upon discussions of the identity of 'religion' and 'science' in this period, and demonstrating how the formation of these essentially modern ideas was shaped by interactions between natural philosophy and religion. Second, it will offer a critical analysis of existing work on science-religion relations in the early modern period. Third, this project will consider whether, in the light of these considerations, it is still possible to speak of 'the scientific revolution' as a founding event of Western modernity.

To conclude, historian Richard Westfall has claimed that 'the relation of science to religion in the seventeenth century is the central problem in the history of modern Western thought'. While we have made considerable progress since Westfall's earlier work on these issues, the burden of this project is nonetheless to vindicate Westfall's claim by showing the importance of the mutual interactions of science and religion, and demonstrating how these differentiated institutions - which are distinctive features of Western modernity - began to assume their characteristic forms in the early modern period.

Non-academic beneficiaries of this project fall into three groups: (1) members of the general public who have an interest in science and religion issues; (2) practicing scientists who have a similar interest; and (3) the most clearly identifiable professional and practitioner groups: teachers of Religious Studies in secondary schools and members of the clergy.

These groups benefit from the research in different ways - the last in terms of what we might broadly term professional development, the first two in terms of their general education.

The plan for ensuring that these individuals benefit involves dissemination of the research in the following five ways.

1. The first formal outputs of the research will be the six Gifford Lectures, to be delivered at the University of Edinburgh in February 2011. This is a significant public event, and the lectures generally attract a good audience, many of whom are not academics, and some of whom are academics in fields other than the history of science. The University of Edinburgh does an excellent job of publicizing this series, and the content of the lectures is subsequently made available on the University's Gifford Lectures website, http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/giffordexemp/index.html via videostreaming. A generic Gifford Lectures website http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/giffordexemp/about.html offers additional resources, including information about the publication of the lectures in book form.

2. I presently convene a series of public seminars at the Ian Ramsey Centre in Oxford, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~theo0038/seminar.html and will take the opportunity to offer a seminar which summarises the chief argument of the lectures. This university Centre is devoted to interdisciplinary research in the field of science and religion. Its remit includes the promotion of the public understanding of these issues. The seminars it offers typically attract a broad audience which includes university students and faculty, and interested members of the general public. When the book of the lectures is published there will also be a public launch, hosted by the Centre, which will provide further opportunities to publicise some of the findings of the project to a wider audience.

3. I am also a regular speaker at the Faraday Institute at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. (See http://graphite.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Speakers.php) Like Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre, the Institute has, as a major part of its mission, 'the public understanding of science and religion by means of courses, lectures, seminars, and the media.' I have been a frequent participant in the activities of the Institute, having spoken about my work in summer courses, public lectures, and in various media-DVDs, podcasts, and teaching materials. I plan to use the resources of the Institute, and events that it hosts, to communicate the findings of this research more broadly.

4. I will publish an accessible summary of the research findings in journal article form in a journal such as Science and Christian Belief or Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. The first is the journal of the UK organization Christians in Science; the second of the American Scientific Affiliation, a comparable US organization. The audiences of these journals tend to be scientists who have an interest in science and religion issues. I have a standing invitation to write on this topic for PSCF.

5. Insofar as the students to whom I lecture include both future teachers of Religious Studies and future members of the clergy, my lectures, which will incorporate this material, will disseminate the results of the research to the appropriate professional and practitioner groups.