Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew
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Last annotated on May 6, 2017
Introduction Read more at location 15
Note: scienza e religione. la versione classica: white e draper: conflitto perenne. job roberts: l idea che nn muore mai. da galileo a scopes... ma qual è la natura del contendere. del resto si sa che molti religiosi si sono dedicati allo studio della natura. lindberg: nel medioevo i r. erano i più ardenti supporter della filosofia naturale. heilbrono: tra il 1300 e il 1700 l istifuzione che più massicciamente ha finanziato l astronomia è stata la CC. whithead: la religione (in particolare il puritanesimo) con la sua idea di natura ordinata ha contribuito all emersione della scienza. minimizzato il ruolo dei greci e dei mussulmani medievali. stark: la teologia cristiana è essenziale x la scienza. brooke: tesi della complessità. la storia è troppo caotica su qs punto. a volte r. ha favorito s. altre volte l ha ostacolata. una visione che nn prestandosi a molte polemiche ha avuto poca firtuna... evoluzionismo. moore: paradosso: solo una teologia ortodossa può digerire darwin... hull: i primi studiosi dell evoluzionismo erano tutti atei... roberts: alcune confessioni protestanti americane rigettano l e. ritenendolo onconciliabile con alcune teorie. ma l eterogeneitá di qs confessione implica atteggiamenti divrrsi... anche tra i cattolici c è eterogeneità. mentre il vatocano accetta la civiltá cattolica è inquieta... glick: è il centralismo che salva i cattolici dalla condanna di e. livingstone: persino tra i calvinisti scorgiamo atteggiamenti antitecici rispetto all evoluzione... spesso l avversione a e. nn è dottrinaria ma legata agli attacchi atei subiti dai religiosi. il caso dei calvinisti di belfast è clamoroso: in un discorso l e. tyndell auspicava la sparizione di tutto il pensiero credente. altrove i rapporti sono stati cordiali. le circostanze locali sembrano contare più della dottrina vera e propria... livingstone: ogni religione ne contiene dieci. basta parlare di s. e r. in astratto. nn ha senso. la ricezione di darwin deve essere studiata a livello più locale... hull: nessuno ha mai trovato correlazione tra ricezione del darwinismo e qualche altra caratteristica della società studiata... il darwinismo significa cose diverse in oaesi diversi ma varia anche nel paese stesso. marxisti: l accettazione di darwin è legata alla classe di appattenenza. le evidenze sulla classe media nn confrrmano: ci sono forti varazioni intraclassiste. gli operai sembrano poi disinteressati a darwin e alla scienza in generale. meglio puntare sulla psicologia che sulla classe... sulloway: è più probabile che siano i figli minori a supportare d. il discrimine è nella famiglia e non tra le famiglie.... moran: la ricezione in base alla razza... genere: le femministe hanno sempre avuto probleni con d. maxsoprattutto le chiese in cui le profetesse giocano un ruolo chiave... studiare la scienza senza postulare dio? un metodo comunr anche tra i religiosi... il linguaggio neutro godless della scienza è un segno di secolarizzazione? no. molti svienziati credenti lo adottano senza xdere la fede... INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Prominent nineteenth-century scholars such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1gi8) and John William Draper (1811-1882) assured their readers that science and religion existed in a state of perpetual opposition.Read more at location 16
Draper identified the primary aggressor as the Roman Catholic Church, whose "mortal animosity" toward science had left its hands "steeped in blood." Despite the efforts of less bellicose historians during the past quarter century or so to craft a more accurate and less prejudicial narrative, the notion of warfare between science and religion continues to thrive, particularly at both ends of the politicotheological spectrum.Read more at location 19
Everyone knows about the trials of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) in seventeenth-century Italy and of John Thomas Scopes (1900-1970) in twentieth-century Tennessee.Read more at location 24
Many of the bitterest conflicts over science have taken place within religious communities, where differences easily mutate into heresies.Read more at location 25
Proponents of the warfare thesis have typically failed to recognize that religious people and institutions have often cultivated the study of nature. During the Middle Ages, as David C. Lindberg and other medieval historians have convincingly shown, churchmen were the most ardent supporters of natural philosophy and natural history;Read more at location 27
"the Roman Catholic church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.Read more at location 29
Another popular "just-so" story about science and Christianity portrays the latter-or one of its subdivisions, such as Protestantism or Puritanism-as the fountainhead of modern science.Read more at location 30
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), in Science and the Modern World, argued that Christianity, by insisting that nature behaves in a regular and orderly fashion, allowed science to develop. Understandably, many Christians have found this self-congratulatory view more attractive than the narrative of conflict.Read more at location 31
it ignores or minimizes the contributions of ancient Greeks and medieval Muslims-it, too, refuses to succumb to the death it deserves.Read more at location 33
The sociologist Rodney Stark at Baylor University, a Southern Baptist institution, is only the latest in a long line of Christian apologists to insist that "Christian theology was essential for the rise of science. s3 Read more at location 34
historians of science and religion have turned increasingly to what has been called the complexity thesis, the notion that the record of the past is too chaotic to reveal a simple pattern.Read more at location 35
No one has advanced this view more successfully than John Hedley Brooke, who has identified a wide range of interactions between scientific and religious impulses. At times, religion has stimulated the investigation of nature; on other occasions it has inhibited it.Read more at location 36
However, because this view tends to strip the subject of its polemical value, it has found comparatively little favor with present-day cultural warriors fighting one another in the trenches.4 Read more at location 39
In The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979) a young James R. Moore underscored the importance of theology in determining individual responses to evolution in Great Britain and North America. He insisted that only "those whose theology was distinctly orthodox"-that is, Calvinist-could swallow Darwinism undiluted. (Contrast this with David L. Hull's equally hyperbolic claim "that almost all the early proponents of Darwinism were atheistic materialists-or their near relatives.")5 Read more at location 42
Subsequent studies by Jon H. Roberts, David N. Livingstone, and me have undermined Moore's sweeping claimRead more at location 44
In a new introduction to his meticulously researched Darwinism and the Divine in America (1988), Roberts argues that "the great majority of American Protestant thinkers who remained committed to orthodox formulations of Christian doctrine actually rejected Darwinism;Read more at location 45
evolution could not be reconciled with their views of the origin, nature, and `fall' of man, the nature and basis of moral judgment, and a number of other doctrines-allRead more at location 48
Given the theological heterogeneity of Protestantism, it is not surprising to find a range of responses to evolution. But even in the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church, where one might expect relative uniformity, we also find diversity.Read more at location 51
In an early essay on "varieties" of Catholic reactions to Darwinism, Harry W. Paul contrasted "the power Catholicism was able to exert against Darwinism in Spain" with its virtual impotence in Italy. Even more telling, however, are the revelations coming out of the recently opened Vatican archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which hold the records of the old Congregations of the Holy Office and of the Index. In researching their book, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877-1902 (2006), Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martinez discovered six instances in which the Vatican dealt with complaints about Catholic evolutionists, with two of the accused coming from Italy, two from England, and one each from France and the United States. These complaints resulted in no official condemnation of evolution, though some individual works were proscribed and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.Read more at location 53
The strongest opposition to Darwinism came not from the Vatican itself but from La Civilta Cattolica,Read more at location 59
Glick identified "centralization of power" rather than cultural isolation as the "crucial variable" in determining how various countries responded to evolution. In contrast to the largely Protestant United States, where church and state remained constitutionally separate and Protestant sects competed openly, the more centrally controlled Latin American countries presented an environment relatively inhospitable to new ideas.Read more at location 60
even among Calvinists, responses to evolution varied markedly from one locale to another. Irish Calvinists in Belfast, for instance, strongly resisted Darwinism, in large part, it seems, because of John Tyndall's (1820-1893) infamous 1874 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Read more at location 66
Historians, he wisely urged, should quit speaking "of the encounter between science and religion in a generalized, decontextualized, delocalized way."9 Read more at location 74
David L. Hull's decades-old observation that no one had yet demonstrated a correlation "between the reception of Darwin's theory around the world and the larger characteristics of these societies," including their religious cultures, still largely holds.'° Read more at location 78
Note: OGGI: MOLTI STUDI SU BASE NAZIONALE DELLA RIC DI DARWIN. MA ANCORA NESSUNA REGOLA INDIV. STALLO Edit
Not only did Darwinism mean different things in different countries, but its meaning varied even within national settings.Read more at location 80
John Stenhouse has drawn attention to the way some New Zealanders drew on Darwinism to justify, in terms of "survival of the fittest," their harsh treatment of the native Maori. But rivalries among white Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians undermine generalizations about New Zealanders as a whole." Read more at location 82
Adrian Desmond, perhaps the most influential of this group, has noted that the godless "working classes" and the "lowlife in the medical schools," eager to create a new social and economic order, found Lamarckian evolution especially attractive.12Read more at location 84
James Secord, however, looking primarily at responses to one widely read evolutionary tract, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), has argued that the ensuing debates "contributed to fracture lines within the middle class; they were intra- rather than interclass, with a crucially important religious dimension....Read more at location 86
The historian of science Frank J. Sulloway has also downplayed class-based explanations. In a statistical analysis of the dynamics of intellectual revolutions, including the one associated with Darwin, he makes a strong case for paying more attention to psychosocial than to socioeconomic factors.Read more at location 88
personalities, formed in large part by the order in which they were born into their families and by the ensuing competitive strategies they adopted in dealing with their siblings.Read more at location 90
later-borns were 4.6 times more likely to support evolution than firstborns.Read more at location 91
"the focus of the battle over the theory of evolution was within the family, not between families.1714 Read more at location 92
Historians of evolution have rarely investigated the importance of race and gender, two analytical categories of great importance to social historians.Read more at location 93
as Eric D. Anderson has shown, African American intellectuals for decades regarded theories of plural human origins more threatening than Darwin's monogenetic theory.Read more at location 95
Jeffrey P. Moran found African American elites much more willing than the conservative black clergy to embrace evolution.'5Read more at location 96
Because of Darwin's use of sexual selection and the implications that he drew about female inferiority, gender became integral to the evaluation of Darwinism-and problematic for some feminists. However, religious concerns tended to trump gendered ones. As Moran has shown, antievolutionists often spoke in the name of mothers concerned about the irreligious effects of evolution on their children.Read more at location 96
Among the mothers who spoke for themselves were Ellen G. White (1827-1915), the founding prophetess of Seventh-day Adventism and the godmother of creation science, who traced evolution back to its "satanic origin," and Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), the flamboyant founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, who damned evolution in public debate in the early 1L3 0s.16Read more at location 98
