Magisteria
The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Most things you ‘know’ about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.
‘A deeply researched history of the interplay between the two ways of understanding the world.’ ECONOMIST, BEST BOOKS OF 2023
The true history of science and religion is a human one. It’s about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It’s about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history – Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it’s about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say – a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before.
From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via medieval Europe, nineteenth-century India and Soviet Russia, Magisteria sheds new light on this complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war, Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively shaped human history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spencer (Darwin and God), a senior fellow at Christian think tank Theos, surveys the entwined history of science and religion in this dense, ambitious outing. From the classical world until the present, Spencer argues, science and religion have not been locked in an "endless war," and, conversely, they have often worked hand-in-hand. For instance, the first successful attempt to measure the effect of pressure on the temperature and volume of a gas was "based in the gardens of a monastery, drew on the help of its monks, conducted by the Catholic Florin Périer suggested... by the Catholic Descartes." Meanwhile, Isaac Newton contended that the solar system "could not have arisen without the design" of an "intelligent" being. Spencer touches on the Islamic "Golden Age" of science and draws links between Protestantism and empiricism in 18th-century Europe, spurred partly by a reading of scripture that posited "humans were created to know." The most provocative section probes artificial intelligence and the question of "what/who is the human... and who gets to decide?"—a dilemma that has preoccupied religious thinkers over time. While Spencer presents a nuanced account, it sprawls to its detriment and hinges on arguments that often rely on a glut of repetitive anecdotes rather than deeper analyses. Readers will have to be patient to get the most out of this.
