Sociology Archives - Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Dealing with Darwin

Book 265 pages Level: university In this 2014 book published by Johns Hopkins University Press, author David N. Livingstone explores reactions to Charles Darwin’s ideas among different groups of people with apparently the same religious beliefs. The groups he considers are all people with ties to Scottish Presbyterianism. Livingstone shows that these different groups all responded to Darwin in dramatically differing ways. From this Livingstone argues that what might be considered “religious” opposition to Darwin’s ideas, or to other ideas in science, might not be “religious” at all. If “religion” was the driving force in the how these Presbyterians responded to Darwin, then we would expect their responses to be somewhat similar. But since their responses were not, then other factors such as “place, politics, and rhetoric” must carry the greater weight in religious engagements with evolution and other ideas. The full title of the book is Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. From … Continue reading →

The Secret History of Science and Religion

Radio program 90 minutes in 3 segments Level: all audiences This series aired on the BBC Radio 4 in 2019 and is hosted by Nick Spencer of Theos Think Tank in the UK. The show features accomplished scholars such as John Hedley Brooke and Bernard Lightman, and touches on scientific figures ranging from Robert Grosseteste to Isaac Newton to James Clerk Maxwell to Georges Lemaître. Spencer argues that the supposed conflict between science and religion hinges on ideas about what it means to be human. Therefore often the conflict is not really about religion and science in the usual way that people think about them. For example, Spencer interviews Fern Elsdon-Baker (Professor of Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society at Birmingham University in the UK), whose research suggests that professed atheists reject a strictly materialistic evolutionary explanation for human origins at a similar rates as professedly religious people. Click here to access the web site of this program, courtesy of … Continue reading →

Claiming Darwin

Article 4000 words Level: high school and above This article by Myrna Perez Sheldon was published in 2015 in Cosmologics Magazine, which is a project of the Science, Religion, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School. Sheldon discusses the impact on evolutionists of both the resurgence of Creationism and Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas about “punctuated equilibrium” during the 1970’s and 1980’s. She notes that Gould framed Charles Darwin as a historical figure who had been influenced by his time and place. According to Gould, Darwin’s theory did come down to explaining natural order without recourse to God, but largely because of Darwin’s own historical context—“all the higher order harmony that used to be seen as the source of evidence for God’s benevolence is epiphenomenal upon the struggle of something lower for personal gain. That’s all.” If this framing sounded a great deal like “Adam Smith’s economics translated into nature,” it was “no accident” according to Gould. Gould went on to … Continue reading →

From Cosmologics: On Darwin and Place

Articles (two) 4500 words (total) Level: high school and above These are two articles related to work by David Livingstone of Queen’s University, Belfast, who gave the 2015 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard Divinity School. They were published in Cosmologics Magazine, which is a project of the Science, Religion, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School. Click here to access “David Livingstone: Putting Darwinism in Its Place” from Cosmologics Magazine. This is an excerpt from Livingstone’s book Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Livingstone argues that how Darwin’s ideas were received varied widely. In some places Darwin’s ideas were rejected. He notes how some sought to cast “Darwinism and Catholicism as twin allies against the inductive truths of science and the revealed truths of scripture. It thus became possible to conflate as a single object of reproach an old enemy—popery—and a new one—evolution…. these were indeed the enemies of God.” Others welcomed Darwinism as endorsing … Continue reading →

Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective

Article 14 pages Level: high school and above Authors Raphael Sassower and Jeffrey Scholes argue for the existence of a “postsecular” view of religion and science in this 2015 paper from the Journal of Religion and Society. The authors write that, Depending on which scholar one reads, postsecularism represents the failure of secularization, an extension of the secular, a reenchantment of culture, a resurgence of religion, or the harbinger of a new political reality. Each representation may reach slightly different conclusions, some for ideological purposes, but common to all is the recognition that the secular has not made good on its promise to eliminate religion. From the abstract of the article: There are various ways in which religion and science have been perceived to interact in the cultural domain. After critically assessing the “separation view” of their relationship and finding it untenable, this essay recounts various “interaction views” wherein either religion or science is assumed to be taking precedence over … Continue reading →

Rebecca Catto: Using Science to Study Religion

Article 2000 words Level: university A discussion by a sociologist of how people view science, and how they tend to accept it regardless of their religious outlook. This article by sociologist Rebecca Catto was published in Cosmologics magazine, which is a project of the Science, Religion, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School. Catto writes: People may be entitled to believe what they wish and science unable to adjudicate upon the veracity of all religious beliefs, but it nonetheless ultimately triumphs: “I think inherently there seems to be sort of a wide recognition that people come from different cultural backgrounds and different beliefs, different religions, and if people choose to ignore the scientific facts there’s a long history of that and people are free to believe whatever they want to believe and sort of put their blinders on. I mean that’s a personal choice but when it comes to developing sound governmental policy and scientific policy you’re even building airplanes… well … Continue reading →

The Triumph of the Cross

Article 21 pages Level: university This 2018 article, published in the journal Ohio Valley History, revolves around the Cincinnati Observatory, the oldest professional observatory in the United States and the first public observatory in the Western Hemisphere. The full title of the article is “The Triumph of the Cross: President John Quincy Adams, Archbishop John Baptist Purcell, and the Reclamation of Cincinnati’s Mount Adams as a Sacred Site”. The author of the article, C. Walker Gollar, is Professor of Church History at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Mount Adams was the original site of the observatory, and the article traces conflict related to the observatory that stemmed in part from remarks that Adams gave in a speech for the founding of the observatory, in which Adams claimed that St. Ignatius Loyola founded the Inquisition. The article also traces the parallel history of the observatory and of a Catholic church on Mount Adams, as well as changing views about science both in the … Continue reading →

The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions

Book 468 pages Level: university This is a book by an artist and a scientist. The artist is Robert Wagner, who has produced several books of illustrated poems and translations of the Psalms, and created a stained glass window for St. Mary’s Iffley in Oxford. The scientist is Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials at Oxford, who holds degrees in both physics and theology. The authors argue that over time, science and metaphysics have grown side by side as mankind has asked questions central to our existence. The book, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, discusses a wide range of historical figures, from Anaxagoras to John Philoponus to Al-Ghazali to Kepler to Maxwell to the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider. The use of illustrations is a prominent feature of the book. From the publisher, Oxford University Press: When young children first begin to ask ‘why?’ they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of … Continue reading →

Pierre Duhem, Entropy, and Christian Faith

Article 18 pages Level: university In this 2008 article published in the journal Physics in Perspective, historian of science Helge Kragh discusses Pierre Duhem and the status of science and religion in the second half of the nineteenth century, when developments in the science of thermodynamics challenged the idea of an eternal, unchanging or cyclic universe. Kragh writes: The French physicist and polymath Pierre Duhem was strongly devoted to Catholicism but insisted that science and religion were wholly independent. In an article of 1905 he reflected at length on the relationship between physics and Christian faith, using as an example the cosmological significance of the laws of thermodynamics. He held that it was unjustified to draw cosmological consequences from thermodynamics or any other science, and even more unjustified to draw consequences of a religious nature. I place Duhem’s thoughts on “the physics of a believer” in their proper contexts by relating them to the late-nineteenth-century discussion concerning the meaning and … Continue reading →

These Are Not Your Mother’s Sundials: Or, Time and Astronomy’s Authority

Article 26 pages Level: university A discussion by Sara Schechner of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, regarding sundials in the collection of the Adler Planetarium. This essay was published in The Science of Time 2016: Time in Astronomy & Society, Past, Present and Future, of which Fr. Pavel Gabor, S. J., an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory, is a co-author. Schechner writes: Drawing upon the exquisite collection of sundials and time-finding instruments at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago—currently being catalogued by the author—this essay offers examples of sundials made of silver, gilt brass, ivory, wood, and stone between 1500 and 1900. They were designed to be portable or fixed, pocket-sized, or monumental, but all did more than tell the time. By critically examining them, we can see the influence of the cultures in which they were made and used. These material objects tell stories of race, empire, labor, religion, fashion, and politics. And by so … Continue reading →

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Category Archives: Sociology