Religion always has to interact with the assumptions of the cultures with which it deals. To understand an ancient religion like Christianity (and Judaism, on which it is based) it is essential that we know the “ancient and medieval world views” that were prevailing when its sacred scriptures were written and its basic theology was developed.
The documents shown here help to explain the cosmology of those days, the things that may seem strange to us but which everyone assumed without question back then…
A Critique to Astrology from “De Civitate Dei”
Book excerpt- 4500 words
- High school level and above
An excerpt from Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God concerning the topic of astrology. Augustine uses the issues of twins to criticize astrology from a practical standpoint, but he also attacks astrology from a theological standpoint. This excerpt has been selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti.
Click here for Augustine’s critique, from Inters.org.
Anselm of Canterbury and Nicholas of Cusa
- Source page with links to many articles
- More than 100 particles linked
- University level
A source page, with many links, prepared by the philosopher Jasper Hopkins, about two key philosophers of nature during the scholastic era:
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), often called the Father of Scholasticism, was born in Aosta, in the Kingdom of Burgundy. Today Aosta belongs to Italy, specifically to the region of Val d’Aosta. Anselm later became prior (1063), and then abbot (1078), of the Monastery of Bec-Hellouin in Normandy, France. In 1093 he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in England. As an intellectual, he is known above all for his three works the Monologion, the Proslogion, and the Cur Deus Homo.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), sometimes misleadingly referred to as the first “modern” philosopher, was born in Kues, Germany (today Bernkastel-Kues). He became a canon lawyer and a cardinal. His two best-known works are De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) and De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God).
Antecedents to Modern Science
- Article (PDF)
- 11 pages
- Secondary / Academic / University and higher level
Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, writes “From Plato to Newton the contest as to what part mathematics has had in coming to a scientific understanding of the universe took place in a religious framework. Today, after a period of what might be called ‘atheistic rationalism,’ we again hear the refrain of discovering ‘the mind of God’ coming from scientists.”
A version of this essay appear as part of Fr. Coyne’s essay “Evolution and Intelligent Design: Who Needs God” in Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith, and Evolution (World Scientific, 2009).
[Download PDF]
Antecedents_to_Mod_Sci
Book Review – Opportunities lost
Article- 800 words
- General audience
Fr. Paul Mueller, S. J., of the Vatican Observatory reviewed the book The Abacus and the Cross, The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages, by Nancy Marie Brown. The book concerns Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, a mathemetician at the end of the first millennium. Fr. Mueller’s review appeared in Physics World, Volume 24, Number 10:
The Abacus and the Cross is a book with a hero and a villain. The hero is Gerbert of Aurillac, the 10th century shepherd boy who became monk, schoolmaster, scientist, mathematician, and abbot, and then reigned at the turn of the first millennium as Pope Sylvester II. Gerbert was the first to introduce Arabic numerals to Europe, using them on his abacus; he wrote a leading textbook on geometry, which was supplanted only after 200 years when full translations of Euclid became available in the West; and he constructed and used astronomical instruments such as armillary spheres and astrolabes. Little remains of his own writings. Evidence for his genius can be inferred for the most part only indirectly, by examining how his knowledge spread to his students. His achievement is also complicated by his popular reputation as a “devil’s tool” and master of dark arts – which Brown insists is inaccurate and unfair.
The villain is Gerbert’s lifelong intellectual and political enemy, Abbo of Fleury. Like Gerbert, Abbo became monk, schoolmaster, scientist, mathematician, and abbot. Abbo was not a pope, but he has been named a saint. For Brown the most crucial difference between the two men is that Gerbert showed great creativity, introducing a whole new tradition in mathematics and science, in a manner distinctively modern and “experimental,” whereas Abbo was anything but creative: the copious written works he left behind are “disappointingly derivative,” involving merely “well-organized rearrangements of sources common used” to create a “fine and tidy summation.”
“Brown’s style is more Abbo than Gerbert. She capably synthesizes other scholars’ evaluations and translations of the primary source materials, but the ample notes at the end of the book do not give evidence of direct work with primary sources from Gerbert, Abbo, or their contemporaries.
Brown compensates for the lack of documentary evidence concerning Gerbert’s life by describing in substantial detail what life would have been like for someone like Gerbert. This includes detailed notes on the typical diet, style of life, and pattern of education of a monk; the manufacture and use of parchment, paper, and ink; the construction and use of books; and the processes and dangers involved in travel.
Her summary of Gerbert’s accomplishments in mathematics and science whets the appetite, but will not satisfy a reader with some scientific background. Brown describes what Gerbert could do with his abacus and other instruments, but she does not discuss in any detail how he could do these things.
Her outline of Gerbert’s political entanglements and his ascent to the papacy will be difficult to follow for a scientifically-minded reader without a background in turn-of-the-millenium history and intrigue. Brown’s account is more about what happened (with many names and dates) than about why. Most frustrating is Brown’s account in Chapter 9 of a “figurative poem” which was written by Gerbert. Brown communicates that this was an extraordinary accomplishment, marvelously complex and well worth exploring, but she does not help her reader to enter into the poem and its complexities in any serious way. Brown sets the table, but she does not serve the meal.
Three themes run through this book. First, Gerbert’s work in mathematics and science serves to show that the Dark Ages weren’t all that dark: creative things were happening, knowledge was advancing, and math and science were already rational and experimental. Second, science and religion are not (and were not) really at war; Gerbert himself is an important example of a religious person who also did first-rate work in mathematics and science. Only much later did Petrarch, Washington Irving, William Whewell, John Draper, and Andrew Dickson White construct the whiggish notion of an eternal war between science and religion, by circulating the charge that religious people persisted in the uncritical belief that the earth is flat, not round (a version of history that Brown goes to great lengths to refute). And finally: if only Gerbert’s hopes and ideals had been realized, history would be different: religion and science would be one, and science would bridge the tensions and differences that separate Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But Brown displays a whiggish tendency of her own. She accepts and employs without critical comment the Enlightenment notion of science as an enterprise that is straightforwardly and simply rational and experimental.
This book represents an intellectually honest, good-faith effort to portray Gerbert and his accomplishments at a popular level. But both scientifically and theologically minded readers can only echo her own plaint of “what-if.” If only she had gotten inside the scientific issues. It would have been fun, for example, to hear in some technical detail how Gerbert’s Abacus actually worked, or for that matter how his “figurative poem” played out on multiple levels of meaning. Or if only she had gotten inside the theological issues. It seems strange for a book concerned with debunking the notion of a “war” between science and religion to take no account of theological issues. But Brown deals with religion only as an institutional and sociological force; in this book, the only place the Cross shows up is in the title.
Book: Commentary on Genesis, Commentary on Exodus, Homily on Our Lord, and Letter to Publius.
St. Ephraim the Syrian
- Book
- 393 Pages
- University level
Click here for a preview of this book, Selected Prose Works: Saint Ephrem the Syrian, from Google Books. The book’s publisher, Catholic University of American Press, writes:
This volume presents for the first time in the Fathers of the Church series the work of an early Christian writer who did not write in either Greek or Latin. It offers new English translations of selected prose works by St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. A.D. 309-373). The volume contains St. Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis, Commentary on Exodus, Homily on Our Lord, and Letter to Publius. The translators have enhanced the volume with a general introduction, extensive bibliography, and specific introductions to each of the works. Together these features provide an overview of the major scholarship on St. Ephrem and Syriac Christianity.
St. Ephrem, the “Harp of the Spirit,” composed prose commentaries and sermons of skillfull charmand grace, in addition to beautiful hymns, during the time he spent teaching at his native Nisibis and at Edessa in Syria. In the two commentaries presented here, Ephrem focuses only on portions of the sacred text that had a particular theological significance for him, or whose orthodox interpretation needed to be reasserted in the face of contemporary heterodox ideas. He does not provide a continuous, verse by verse exposition. The elaborate rhetorical figures and stylistic devices of the Homily on Or Lord andLetter to Publius succeed in creating language and imagery nearly as striking as Ephrem’s poetry.
St. Ephrem marshaled his considerable theological and rhetorical talent to challenge the appeal that the doctrines of the Arians, Manicheans, Marcionites, and the followers of Bardaisan might have had to the minds and hearts of Syrian Christians. In the face of their rational systems, his was the voice that insisted on the incomprehensibility of the divine nature.
Book: The Irrational Augustine
- Book
- 240 pages
- University level
A book suggested by our research team. This description is from the publisher, Oxford University Press:
The Irrational Augustine takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. Catherine Conybeare reads Augustine’s earliest works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, who values changeability and human interconnectedness and deplores social exclusion. The novelty of her book lies in taking seriously the nature of these early works as performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. The theological consequences are considerable. A very human Augustine emerges, talking and playing with friends and family, including his mother – and a very sympathetic set of ideas is the result.
Click here for a preview, available from Google Books.
Copernicus and the “High Seas”
Article (blog post series)- 3600 words
- General audiences
In this series of posts, written for The Catholic Astronomer blog, Christopher Graney discusses “Two Spheres Theory” regarding the shape and composition of the Earth. The Two Spheres Theory was a medieval idea that came to be taken as scientific evidence for existence of, and direct action in the world of, God. However, the Two Spheres Theory was soundly disproven by, among other things, Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the lands now known as the Americas.
Click here to read Part II of this series.
Copernicus’s On the Revolutions—A Book That Continues to Challenge
Article (blog post)- 2000 words
- General audiences
In this post for The Catholic Astronomer blog, Christopher Graney writes about the groundbreaking 1543 book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium, or On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, written by Nicolas Copernicus, a cleric at the cathedral in Frombork, Poland. The post discusses Copernicus’s arguments for the counter-intuitive supposition that the Earth moves around the sun, over the more common-sense supposition that the sun moves around the Earth; it introduces objections to the Copernican system, and Copernicus’s invoking of the power of God to answer those objections; it also discusses how the Copernican system has implications for an evolving universe and life on other worlds. Graney concludes, “And so even five centuries after Nicolaus Copernicus wrote it, De Revolutionibus continues to challenge all who engage with its bold claims. It is a remarkable work. Few other books can match its boldness and its impact.”
The Mind’s Road To God: St. Bonaventure and String Theory.
Article (blog post)- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Fr. James Kurzynski on The Catholic Astronomer blog. Modern science is not inconsistent with the spiritual ascent of Saint Bonaventure from the standpoint of the beginning of our ascent to God. However, we need to avoid an implicit reduction of our defense of God’s existence to only the scientific.
Copernicus and the “High Seas”
- Article (blog post series)
- 3600 words
- General audiences
In this series of posts, written for The Catholic Astronomer blog, Christopher Graney discusses “Two Spheres Theory” regarding the shape and composition of the Earth. The Two Spheres Theory was a medieval idea that came to be taken as scientific evidence for existence of, and direct action in the world of, God. However, the Two Spheres Theory was soundly disproven by, among other things, Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the lands now known as the Americas.
Click here to read Part II of this series.
Anselm of Canterbury and Nicholas of Cusa
- Source page with links to many articles
- More than 100 particles linked
- University level
A source page, with many links, prepared by the philosopher Jasper Hopkins, about two key philosophers of nature during the scholastic era:
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), often called the Father of Scholasticism, was born in Aosta, in the Kingdom of Burgundy. Today Aosta belongs to Italy, specifically to the region of Val d’Aosta. Anselm later became prior (1063), and then abbot (1078), of the Monastery of Bec-Hellouin in Normandy, France. In 1093 he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in England. As an intellectual, he is known above all for his three works the Monologion, the Proslogion, and the Cur Deus Homo.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), sometimes misleadingly referred to as the first “modern” philosopher, was born in Kues, Germany (today Bernkastel-Kues). He became a canon lawyer and a cardinal. His two best-known works are De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) and De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God).
A Critique to Astrology from “De Civitate Dei”
- Book excerpt
- 4500 words
- High school level and above
An excerpt from Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God concerning the topic of astrology. Augustine uses the issues of twins to criticize astrology from a practical standpoint, but he also attacks astrology from a theological standpoint. This excerpt has been selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti.
Click here for Augustine’s critique, from Inters.org.
La astronomía de Ptolomeo y el caso Galileo: dos aportes histórico-epistemológicos
- Article
- 31 pages
- University specialist level
In this article by Gonzalo L. Recio of the Universidad de Quilmes-Conicet, Argentina and published in the journal Scientia et Fides in 2017, the author uses the example of Ptolemy, astronomy, and physics to analyze the debate over the Copernican system in the early seventeenth century. The author discusses the extent to which Ptolemy believed that astronomy could tell us much about the structure of the universe, and what that tells us about Galileo. Recio writes:
La incoherencia no es buena amiga de la ciencia. Eso, sin embargo, no significa que no puedan vivir juntas. De hecho, al menos desde hacía trece siglos ambos cuerpos teóricos, la astronomía ptolemaica y la física aristotélica, habían convivido en las comunidades científicas musulmanas y cristianas. Esta convivencia despertaba, como vimos, rispideces. No obstante ello, la experiencia mostraba que no era suficiente para derrumbar a ninguna de las dos partes. Ambos paradigmas existían juntamente. El advenimiento de la hipótesis heliocéntrica, con su Tierra móvil y fuera del centro del cosmos no creó un nuevo problema, sino que sólo volvió más tirante una relación que ya mostraba signos de conflicto desde hacía tiempo. Como señalé antes, ciertamente que el movimiento de la Tierra implicó un gran paso en ese camino de divorcio entre ambas partes. En ese sentido, la postura galileana fue en cierta manera novedosa.
Click here to access the article courtesy of Scientia et Fides.
Click here to download a PDF of the article.
Book Review – Opportunities lost
- Article
- 800 words
- General audience
Fr. Paul Mueller, S. J., of the Vatican Observatory reviewed the book The Abacus and the Cross, The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages, by Nancy Marie Brown. The book concerns Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, a mathemetician at the end of the first millennium. Fr. Mueller’s review appeared in Physics World, Volume 24, Number 10:
The Abacus and the Cross is a book with a hero and a villain. The hero is Gerbert of Aurillac, the 10th century shepherd boy who became monk, schoolmaster, scientist, mathematician, and abbot, and then reigned at the turn of the first millennium as Pope Sylvester II. Gerbert was the first to introduce Arabic numerals to Europe, using them on his abacus; he wrote a leading textbook on geometry, which was supplanted only after 200 years when full translations of Euclid became available in the West; and he constructed and used astronomical instruments such as armillary spheres and astrolabes. Little remains of his own writings. Evidence for his genius can be inferred for the most part only indirectly, by examining how his knowledge spread to his students. His achievement is also complicated by his popular reputation as a “devil’s tool” and master of dark arts – which Brown insists is inaccurate and unfair.
The villain is Gerbert’s lifelong intellectual and political enemy, Abbo of Fleury. Like Gerbert, Abbo became monk, schoolmaster, scientist, mathematician, and abbot. Abbo was not a pope, but he has been named a saint. For Brown the most crucial difference between the two men is that Gerbert showed great creativity, introducing a whole new tradition in mathematics and science, in a manner distinctively modern and “experimental,” whereas Abbo was anything but creative: the copious written works he left behind are “disappointingly derivative,” involving merely “well-organized rearrangements of sources common used” to create a “fine and tidy summation.”
“Brown’s style is more Abbo than Gerbert. She capably synthesizes other scholars’ evaluations and translations of the primary source materials, but the ample notes at the end of the book do not give evidence of direct work with primary sources from Gerbert, Abbo, or their contemporaries.
Brown compensates for the lack of documentary evidence concerning Gerbert’s life by describing in substantial detail what life would have been like for someone like Gerbert. This includes detailed notes on the typical diet, style of life, and pattern of education of a monk; the manufacture and use of parchment, paper, and ink; the construction and use of books; and the processes and dangers involved in travel.
Her summary of Gerbert’s accomplishments in mathematics and science whets the appetite, but will not satisfy a reader with some scientific background. Brown describes what Gerbert could do with his abacus and other instruments, but she does not discuss in any detail how he could do these things.
Her outline of Gerbert’s political entanglements and his ascent to the papacy will be difficult to follow for a scientifically-minded reader without a background in turn-of-the-millenium history and intrigue. Brown’s account is more about what happened (with many names and dates) than about why. Most frustrating is Brown’s account in Chapter 9 of a “figurative poem” which was written by Gerbert. Brown communicates that this was an extraordinary accomplishment, marvelously complex and well worth exploring, but she does not help her reader to enter into the poem and its complexities in any serious way. Brown sets the table, but she does not serve the meal.
Three themes run through this book. First, Gerbert’s work in mathematics and science serves to show that the Dark Ages weren’t all that dark: creative things were happening, knowledge was advancing, and math and science were already rational and experimental. Second, science and religion are not (and were not) really at war; Gerbert himself is an important example of a religious person who also did first-rate work in mathematics and science. Only much later did Petrarch, Washington Irving, William Whewell, John Draper, and Andrew Dickson White construct the whiggish notion of an eternal war between science and religion, by circulating the charge that religious people persisted in the uncritical belief that the earth is flat, not round (a version of history that Brown goes to great lengths to refute). And finally: if only Gerbert’s hopes and ideals had been realized, history would be different: religion and science would be one, and science would bridge the tensions and differences that separate Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But Brown displays a whiggish tendency of her own. She accepts and employs without critical comment the Enlightenment notion of science as an enterprise that is straightforwardly and simply rational and experimental.
This book represents an intellectually honest, good-faith effort to portray Gerbert and his accomplishments at a popular level. But both scientifically and theologically minded readers can only echo her own plaint of “what-if.” If only she had gotten inside the scientific issues. It would have been fun, for example, to hear in some technical detail how Gerbert’s Abacus actually worked, or for that matter how his “figurative poem” played out on multiple levels of meaning. Or if only she had gotten inside the theological issues. It seems strange for a book concerned with debunking the notion of a “war” between science and religion to take no account of theological issues. But Brown deals with religion only as an institutional and sociological force; in this book, the only place the Cross shows up is in the title.
The mathematical world
Article 2500 words General Audiences An article published in Aeon in 2014 by James Franklin, professor of mathematics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and author of the book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics. Click here to access this article directly from Aeon. What is mathematics about? We know what biology is about; it’s about living things. Or more exactly, the living aspects of living things – the motion of a cat thrown out of a window is a matter for physics, but its physiology is a topic for biology. Oceanography is about oceans; sociology is about human behaviour in the mass long-term; and so on. When all the sciences and their subject matters are laid out, is there any aspect of reality left over for mathematics to be about? That is the basic question in the philosophy of mathematics. People care about the philosophy of mathematics in a way they do not care about, say, … Continue reading →
Science, Intelligibility, Creation: How the Doctrine of Creation Unites, Delineates, and Ennobles Modern Science
Article- 19 pages
- University level
This article (by Scott G. Hefelfinger, published in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture in 2011) provides an overview of ancient science, contrasts ancient science with modern science, and comments on philosophy and modern science while promoting the idea of Creation as a means of tying all these together in a meaningful manner. Hefelfinger writes:
If the province of modern science seems today to be all encompassing, a quick survey of the situation will prove otherwise. Science can often seem to have no room for philosophy, no time for the immaterial, and no patience with God. Through all of these factors it seems we are left with no hope for reconciliation between science and philosophy, science and theology, and ultimately, science and ordinary life.
If a “theological doctrine” were to come to the rescue and serve to make sense of the divide between ancient and modern science that would indeed be something. This is precisely what I would like to suggest. I hope to show that the doctrine of creation best accounts for and makes sense of the situation found today between departments of science and departments of philosophy and theology: a historically diverging but essentially complementary relationship between ancient and modern science.
Was the Bible Meant to be Taken Literally?
- Video
- 4 minutes
- General audience
This excerpt from a longer interview in 2008 features Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J. of the Vatican Observatory discussing the question of taking the Bible or other texts “literally”. Click here for information on the full interview.
We Saw His Star in the East: BBC Radio Sunday Worship for Epiphany
- Audio program
- 40 minutes
- General Audience
From the BBC Radio 4:
“We saw his star in the east”. On the feast of Epiphany, Fr James Hanvey SJ travels to the Pope’s summer palace outside Rome, home to the Vatican Space Observatory, to explore how God can speak through space and science. Preacher: Dr Guy Consolmagno SJ, Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory.
First heard in 2008
This program first aired on BBC Radio’s Sunday religious program for Epiphany. This program, hosted by Fr. James Hanvey, explores the meaning of Epiphany, with readings and music as well as a visit to the Vatican Observatory.
Click here to see the original BBC web site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01946pc.
St. Macrina the Younger on Science and Technology
- Article (book excerpt)
- 3100 words
- High school level and above
A fourth-century discourse by St. Macrina the Younger on how human beings use observation, calculation, and reasoning to study the natural world and to develop technology—and what these things tell us about both God and the human soul and mind. (St. Macrina’s discourse is taken from a much larger dialogue between her and her brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, recorded in his On the Soul and the Resurrection. Click here for On the Soul and the Resurrection, courtesy of Google Books. Click here to access it courtesy of New Advent.)
[Download PDF]
Macrina-Sci-Tech
John Philoponus – Impetus
- Article excerpt (PDF)
- 850 words
- High school level and above
One of the first people to develop something like the modern (Newtonian) scientific theory of motion was John Philoponus of Alexandria, who lived in the sixth century. This brief excerpt from the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy introduces Philoponus and his ideas about impetus in physics.
Click here to access this article directly from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Translations of Philoponus’s work on physics and Aristotle are available from Bloomsbury Publishing. Click here for information from Bloomsbury. Click here for information from Google Books.
[Download PDF]Impetus-Philoponus
Antecedents to Modern Science
- Article (PDF)
- 11 pages
- Secondary / Academic / University and higher level
Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, writes “From Plato to Newton the contest as to what part mathematics has had in coming to a scientific understanding of the universe took place in a religious framework. Today, after a period of what might be called ‘atheistic rationalism,’ we again hear the refrain of discovering ‘the mind of God’ coming from scientists.”
A version of this essay appear as part of Fr. Coyne’s essay “Evolution and Intelligent Design: Who Needs God” in Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith, and Evolution (World Scientific, 2009).
[Download PDF]
Antecedents_to_Mod_Sci
Nicolaus Copernicus – Making the Earth a Planet
Book- 128 pages
- High school level
This book by Owen Gingerich and James MacLachlan is part of the Oxford Portraits in Science series for young adults. The general editor of this series is Gingerich, a historian of science with Harvard University, and an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This book discusses both the astronomical work of Nicolaus Copernicus (including some technical detail) and his life as a canon in the Cathedral of Frombork, Poland.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.
From the publisher, Oxford University Press:
Born in Poland in 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus launched a quiet revolution. No scientist so radically transformed our understanding of our place in the universe as this curious bishop’s doctor and church official. In his quest to discover a beautiful and coherent system to describe the motions of the planets, Copernicus placed the sun in the center of the system and made the earth a planet traveling around the sun. Today it is hard to imagine our solar system any other way, but for his time Copernicus’s idea was earthshaking. In 1616 the church banned his book Revolutions because it contradicted the accepted notion that God placed Earth in the center of the universe. Even though those who knew of his work considered his idea dangerous, Revolutions remained of interest only to other scientists for many years. It took almost two hundred years for his concept of a sun-centered system to reach the general public. None the less, what Copernicus set out in his remarkable text truly revolutionized science. For this, Copernicus, a quiet doctor who made a tremendous leap of imagination, is considered the father of the Scientific Revolution.
Oxford Portraits in Science is an on-going series of scientific biographies for young adults. Written by top scholars and writers, each biography examines the personality of its subject as well as the thought process leading to his or her discoveries. These illustrated biographies combine accessible technical information with compelling personal stories to portray the scientists whose work has shaped our understanding of the natural world.
Twelve Lectures on the Connection Between Science and Revealed Religion – Nicholas Wiseman
Book (and book excerpt)- 448 pages (excerpt is 3200 words)
- High school level and above
Nicolás Patricio Esteban Wiseman was Cardinal and first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850. His discussions of religion and science in the early nineteenth century became well-known.
The complete text of Wiseman’s lectures is available from Google Books (click here).
Click here for an excerpt selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti. In this excerpt Wiseman defends Rome as a center of learning and writes of various early figures in the church who promoted the study of mathematics or the natural world, including Clement of Alexandria:
Clement of Alexandria … devoted several chapters of his learned Stromata to the vindication of his favorite studies. He observes very justly, that “varied and abundant learning recommends him who proposes the great dogmas of faith, to the credit of his hearers, inspiring his disciples with admiration, and drawing them towards the truth which is in like manner the opinion of Cicero, when he says, “magna est enim vis ad persuadendum scientiae.” Clement then illustrates his argument by many quotations from the Holy Scriptures, and from profane authors. I will read you one remarkable passage.
“Some persons, having a high opinion of their good dispositions, will not apply to philosophy or dialectics, nor even to natural philosophy, but wish to possess faith alone and unadorned: as reasonably as though they expected to gather grapes from a vine which they have left uncultivated. Our Lord is called, allegorically, a vine, from which we gather fruit, by a careful cultivation, according to the eternal Word. We must prune, and dig, and bind, and perform all other necessary labor. And, as in agriculture and in medicine, he is considered the best educated who has applied to the greatest variety of sciences, useful for tilling or for curing, so must we consider him most properly educated, who makes all things bear upon the truth; who from geometry, and music, and grammar and philosophy itself, gathers whatever is useful for the defence of faith. But the champion who has not trained himself well, will surely be despised.”
These words, I must own, afford me no small encouragement. For if, instead of geometry and music we say geology, and ethnography, and history, we may consider ourselves as having, in this passage, a formal confirmation of the views which we have taken in these Lectures, and an approbation of the principles on which they have been conducted.
The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution
Book- 264 pages
- University level
This book by Dennis Danielson tells the story of Georg Joachim Rheticus, the only person to “study heliocentrism” under Nicolaus Copernicus, and the person largely responsible for getting Copernicus’s book De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions) published. As the book’s Prologue states, “No Rheticus, No Copernicus”. But Rheticus did not work in isolation—he was a member of a community of scholars who were motivated to study the universe. Rheticus notes:
It is absurd to presume that God the Architect established these wondrous and precisely regulated manifold motions [of celestial bodies] in vain. It is fitting therefore that we should cultivate the science of these motions… God gave the human race shadows to be schoolmistresses of these things; moreover, he gave us numbers and measures so that we might discern how great a mind has constructed this amazing machine, and so that we should seek and cherish him.
Click here for a preview, courtesy of Google Books.
Click here to borrow an electronic copy, courtesy of Archive.org.
From the jacket cover of The First Copernican:
In the spring of 1539, Georg Joachim Rheticus, a twenty-five-year-old mathematics prodigy from Wittenberg, set off on an arduous three-week journey to northern Poland in order to meet the elderly but not-yet-famous amateur astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. While Copernicus had yet to publish anything on the topic of a new cosmology, rumors had abounded for years about his revolutionary theory (some would call it heretical) that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe, and about a manuscript he had almost completed on the subject.
Intending to stay a month, Rheticus spent three years at Copernicus’s side, during which time he sought means—both great and small—of heralding his teacher’s radiant vision of beauty: a cosmology that moved the earth and immobilized the sun. By the early autumn of 1541, the aging astronomer had completed his manuscript, De revolutionibus, and Rheticus persuaded his mentor to let him take it to a printer in Germany for publication. Though no one could have known it at the time, this action changed the course of civilization. Without the intervention of the young mathematician, Copernicus’s seminal work would likely have sunk into oblivion; instead, it ushered in a new understanding of the physical universe, and today is acclaimed as a landmark of scientific and cultural history.
The First Copernican is the first popular account of the life of Georg Joachim Rheticus—Copernican muse, founder of modern trigonometry, and champion of new science at the threshold of the modern world. Dennis Danielson’s biography provides a prism through which the dawn of the Copernican Revolution shines in fresh and illuminating ways, revealing the intense curiosity and singular community from which science itself took flight.
Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass
Book- 234 pages
- General audiences
This book by Marvin Bolt was published in 2009, the year of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the telescope. It provides a readable history of the telescope by way of highlighting items that are on exhibit in the “Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Scattered throughout this beautifully illustrated book can be found references to the works of various clerics, such as Bartholomaeus Anglicus (1203-1274), Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688), Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729), and others. Those planning a visit to the Adler might enjoy a look through this book in advance.
From the publisher, Adler Planetarium:
Through the Looking Glass celebrates the 400th anniversary of the telescope and the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. This exhibition catalogue focuses on ninety-nine artifacts from the Adler Planetarium’s world-class collection of historic telescopes. From the simple lenses of the world’s earliest telescopes 400 years ago to the complex computer-driven mirrors of current telescopes, these tools have gathered information about our nearest astronomical neighbors and the most distant objects in the universe. Through the Looking Glass examines this story through select rare books, works on paper, telescopes, and other instruments from the Adler Planetarium’s collection. Introductory paragraphs provide background information for each of four time periods, with each section featuring artifact entries that describe each object’s place in the fascinating history of the telescope. Telescope-makers intended for their work to be looked at as well as looked through. With this catalogue, readers can enjoy the craftsmanship of telescope-making over the centuries, and catch a glimpse of their importance and of the significant discoveries they enabled.
Click here for a preview of Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass.
Adler Planetarium website for the exhibit entitled “Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass”—click here.
Crowe: Theories of the World – from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution
Book- 256 pages
- High school level and above
From the publisher, Dover:
This newly revised edition this accessible and enlightening book by Professor Michael J. Crowe of the University of Notre Dame (USA) recreates one of the most dramatic developments in the history of thought: the change from an earth-centered to a sun-centered conception of the solar system. Written in a clear and straightforward manner, the work is organized around a hypothetical debate: Given the evidence available in 1615, which planetary system (Ptolemaic, Copernican, Tychonic, etc.) was most deserving of support?
Beginning with an introductory chapter on celestial motions, Dr. Crowe proceeds to a discussion of Greek astronomy before Ptolemy, mathematical techniques used by ancient astronomers, the Ptolemaic system, the Copernican and Tychonic systems, and the contributions of Kepler and Galileo. In an epilogue, quotes from writers, philosophers, and scientists reveal the impact of Copernican thought on their work. Easily within the reach of anyone with a background in high school mathematics, this absorbing study offers a sound introduction to our solar system and an opportunity to relive one of the most momentous periods in intellectual history.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.
Click here for information from the publisher, Dover.
Book: The Irrational Augustine
- Book
- 240 pages
- University level
A book suggested by our research team. This description is from the publisher, Oxford University Press:
The Irrational Augustine takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. Catherine Conybeare reads Augustine’s earliest works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, who values changeability and human interconnectedness and deplores social exclusion. The novelty of her book lies in taking seriously the nature of these early works as performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. The theological consequences are considerable. A very human Augustine emerges, talking and playing with friends and family, including his mother – and a very sympathetic set of ideas is the result.
Click here for a preview, available from Google Books.
Ibn Al-Haytham: First Scientist
Book- 128 pages
- High school level
This book by Bradley Steffens concerns Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, who lived around the year 1000 in Basra in what is now Iraq, as well as in Egypt. Ibn al-Haytham did work in a number of areas of science and mathematics, especially in the field of Optics. His optics work became well-known and well-regarded in Europe (where he was known as “Alhazen” or “Alhacen”). Ibn al-Haytham argued that, “for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge”. Like many Christian thinkers, he developed a strong appreciation for the work and insights of Aristotle. From the publisher:
Ibn al-Haytham, also known in the West as Alhazen, who lived from approximately 950 to 1040, was a pioneer in several scientific and mathematical fields, including physics, optics, astronomy, and analytical geometry. His experiments on how light is refracted by the atmosphere were later developed by Isaac Newton, and he discovered the first law of motion centuries before Galileo. Most importantly, Ibn al-Haytham, a devout Muslim, was committed to a scientific method based on observation, hypothesis and testing, and he helped keep alive the classical spirit of inquiry first developed in ancient Greece. Ibn al-Haytham’s groundbreaking work reflects a life of travel and adventure, and this biography introduces this fascinating scientist to a new generation of readers.
Click here to download a preview of Ibn Al-Haytham: First Scientist.
Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
- Book
- 320 pages
- High school level and above
This 2009 book, edited by Ronald Numbers, contains much that will be of interest to many readers. From the publisher, Harvard University Press:
If we want nonscientists and opinion-makers in the press, the lab, and the pulpit to take a fresh look at the relationship between science and religion, Ronald L. Numbers suggests that we must first dispense with the hoary myths that have masqueraded too long as historical truths. Until about the 1970s, the dominant narrative in the history of science had long been that of science triumphant, and science at war with religion. But a new generation of historians both of science and of the church began to examine episodes in the history of science and religion through the values and knowledge of the actors themselves. Now Ronald Numbers has recruited the leading scholars in this new history of science to puncture the myths, from Galileo’s incarceration to Darwin’s deathbed conversion to Einstein’s belief in a personal God who “didn’t play dice with the universe.” The picture of science and religion at each other’s throats persists in mainstream media and scholarly journals, but each chapter in Galileo Goes to Jail shows how much we have to gain by seeing beyond the myths.
Click here for more information from the publisher.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.