Book Review

Comparative/World

The relation between science and religion has commanded the attention of sagacious minds in every age. For two millennia, the notion of harmony between the two realms was a core doctrine of Western thought. The argument from design, which is a form of natural theology, and the metaphor of the two books—that God reveals himself both in nature and in Holy Scripture—was part of an intellectual tradition that ran from Plato and Augustine through the Cambridge Platonists to Isaac Newton and the writers on physicotheology—John Ray, William Derham, and Cotton Mather—who followed in Newton's wake. Years later, Charles Darwin and others challenged the ancient and familiar design argument, provoking a continuing controversy.	1
The volume under review aims at showing how evangelicals among Protestant Christians have thought about science since the Reformation and especially since the late seventeenth century. The book locates the encounter between science and religion in the broader landscape of scientific history and religious life in Britain and North America. Evangelicals, as defined here, are marked by belief in the need for a new birth, activism in spreading the Gospel, biblicism, and the centrality of the Cross to their theology.	2
An introduction is followed by five parts. In part one, "An Overview," John Hedley Brooke discusses some evangelical dimensions of the history of science and religion, concluding that we can identify ways in which evangelical beliefs might have been relevant to the portrayal of science. In part two, "Orientations," John Morgan revisits the relation of Puritanism to the rise of science. After examining the Merton thesis and its critics, he finds that the evidence makes it difficult to see a positive connection between Puritanism and natural philosophy. Edward H. Davis discusses Michael B. Foster's influential thesis about the relation between Christianity and early modern science. Using Galileo, René Descartes, and Robert Boyle as case studies, Davis writes that indeed theological presuppositions were allied with conceptions of scientific knowledge. And yet, the changes that occurred resulted not from theology alone but from the inextricable relationship among science, philosophy, and theology.	3
In part three, "Theological Engagements," coeditor Mark A. Noll describes theology and science in the United States from Cotton Mather to William Jennings Bryan. He argues that in America the evangelical engagement with science belongs more to social history than to intellectual history. American evangelicals emphasized the extrinsic connections between science and society more than intrinsic ones. David W. Bebbington deals with science and evangelical theology in Britain from John Wesley to the late nineteenth century. Unlike liberal Anglicans and Unitarians, British evangelicals were initially skeptical about science. But over time they accepted the Enlightenment as the road to knowledge and confronted the challenges posed by scientific advances, especially geology and evolution. On the whole, British evangelicals were not hostile to science. They revitalized the design argument. Jonathan R. Topham treats science and religion in Scotland with special reference to Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), who denied the centrality of natural theology while emphasizing the historical evidences of Christianity as the grounds for faith.	. . .