Here are 100 books that Science and Religion fans have personally recommended if you like
Science and Religion.
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My love for ideas and their history was born when I was still in high school. It was my old English teacher who first opened up the power of ideas in literature to change the world. I’m pretty sure he loved Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Whether or not that’s true, my taste was further sharpened when I took a two-year course on the history of thought about nature and culture as an undergraduate student. I was captivated.
This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read. It’s a monumental history of ideas about nature and culture from ancient times up to the end of the eighteenth century. I have consulted it countless times, and it’s now beginning to fall apart. But I hate discarding it, and I’ll likely end up with two copies when I soon have to buy it again.
I also had the great privilege of having a brief correspondence with the author when I was still a graduate student. Amazingly, he took the time to respond to my questions. So, it holds a special place in my heart. It convinced me of the huge importance of ideas about the environment and its history.
In the history of Western thought, men have persistently asked three questions concerning the habitable earth and their relationships to it. Is the earth, which is obviously a fit environment for man and other organic life, a purposefully made creation? Have its climates, its relief, the configuration of its continents influenced the moral and social nature of individuals, and have they had an influence in molding the character and nature of human culture? In his long tenure of the earth, in what manner has man changed it from its hypothetical pristine condition? From the time of the Greeks to our…
My love for ideas and their history was born when I was still in high school. It was my old English teacher who first opened up the power of ideas in literature to change the world. I’m pretty sure he loved Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Whether or not that’s true, my taste was further sharpened when I took a two-year course on the history of thought about nature and culture as an undergraduate student. I was captivated.
My admiration for this book knows no limits. Initially, I was put off by the title, but the subtitle says it all: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. I know of no other book that tells the remarkable story of the very idea that there’s something called ‘the humanities’ and how it emerged as a suite of disciplines in modern education.
In a book of this scope and scale, I find it stunning that the author seems to have included a witticism on every other page!
Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts…
My love for ideas and their history was born when I was still in high school. It was my old English teacher who first opened up the power of ideas in literature to change the world. I’m pretty sure he loved Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Whether or not that’s true, my taste was further sharpened when I took a two-year course on the history of thought about nature and culture as an undergraduate student. I was captivated.
What I love about this book is the way it challenges the taken-for-granted thought that ‘truth’ is easily discovered. With compelling examples from the past, Shapin works through the ways in which scientific knowledge is made–the struggles that its practitioners have to engage in to construct and consolidate credibility.
What the author reveals is that trust is as fundamental in science as it is in everyday life. A revolutionary thought: who do we trust, and why?
How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another? This study engages these universal questions through a recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in 17th-century England. The author paints a picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honour, and integrity. These codes…
My love for ideas and their history was born when I was still in high school. It was my old English teacher who first opened up the power of ideas in literature to change the world. I’m pretty sure he loved Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Whether or not that’s true, my taste was further sharpened when I took a two-year course on the history of thought about nature and culture as an undergraduate student. I was captivated.
What struck me about this book was its enigmatic subtitle: A Metabiography. Here, I encountered not a biography of the great Prussian scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt but a host of different Humboldts: Humboldt the liberal democrat, Humboldt the Aryan supremacist, Humboldt the anti-slavery Marxist, and Humboldt the pioneer of globalization.
What I discovered is that biographers construct their subjects in the image of their own time and place. This impressed me with two thoughts: that all scientific reputations are fundamentally unstable and that all of us are composed of multiple selfhoods.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is one of the most celebrated figures of late-modern science, famous for his work in physical geography, botanical geography, and climatology, and his role as one of the first great popularizers of the sciences. His momentous accomplishments have intrigued German biographers from the Prussian era to the fall of the Berlin wall, all of whom configured and reconfigured Humboldt's life according to the sensibilities of the day.This volume, the first metabiography of the great scientist, traces Humboldt's biographical identities through Germany's collective past to shed light on the historical instability of our scientific heroes.
I have been intrigued by science since childhood, especially astronomy, and I became a university academic, teaching physics to students and researching in experiments with elementary particles. I was raised in a Christian family and have maintained my faith. I don’t find any real issues with science–it shows how clever God was in creating the universe! At the same time, I know many people have difficulties in this area. My book was written to help them, and I think the recommended books will help them, too.
Alister McGrath is one of the most readable authors on difficult areas. Here, he deals with some very general issues of religious faith in a scientific age and addresses the personal side of the equation.
Religion won’t go away, and McGrath tells us how and why this is so, bringing in some important philosophical questions that he explains in a very down-to-earth way. Whether we realize it or not, we all have a personal philosophy, and science and faith can help each other. I found it hard to put this book down.
We just can't stop talking about the big questions around science and faith. They haven't gone away, as some predicted they might; in fact, we seem to talk about them more than ever. Far from being a spent force, religion continues to grow around the world. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists argue that religion is at war with science - and that we have to choose between them.
It's time to consider a different way of looking at these two great cultural forces. What if science and faith might enrich each other? What if they can together give…
I have been intrigued by science since childhood, especially astronomy, and I became a university academic, teaching physics to students and researching in experiments with elementary particles. I was raised in a Christian family and have maintained my faith. I don’t find any real issues with science–it shows how clever God was in creating the universe! At the same time, I know many people have difficulties in this area. My book was written to help them, and I think the recommended books will help them, too.
I always feel that personal stories are the best recommendation for what people believe. Dan Graves gives us many prominent scientists who were at the same time sincere Christian believers.
They lived over many centuries and worked in various scientific fields, making some of the most important discoveries. Some were Catholics; some were protestants. I think this is a very readable book, and if anyone ever tries to say that a good scientist can’t be a Christian or the other way around, it provides complete proof that this is untrue.
I have been working on science and religion for 15 years now. While there are a number of books on Darwinism and religion (too many to count), the number on Darwin himself and his own (loss of) religion is far smaller. So, I wrote a short "spiritual biography" of the great man. Reading through the Darwin archives, it emerged that there was so much more to the story than “man finds evolution but loses God,” and the more I read around this topic and spoke to the leading academic scholars on the subject, the more I realized that that was the case for science and religion overall.
Simon Conway Morris is a Cambridge academic, and his book is published by Cambridge University Press–but don’t let that put non-academic readers off. This is one of the few books I think you can genuinely call important.
It takes on the now wearyingly familiar idea that evolution is pure random chance, with no direction, no purpose, no goal, and dismantles it–with page after page of detailed information.
This is absolutely no ill-informed, anti-evolutionary rant but the work of a great scholar with complete mastery of his subject. While it does not engage with religion directly, the implications for religion (and indeed for so many other vital human beliefs and activities) are left hanging in the air.
The assassin's bullet misses, the Archduke's carriage moves forward, and a catastrophic war is avoided. So too with the history of life. Re-run the tape of life, as Stephen J. Gould claimed, and the outcome must be entirely different: an alien world, without humans and maybe not even intelligence. The history of life is littered with accidents: any twist or turn may lead to a completely different world. Now this view is being challenged. Simon Conway Morris explores the evidence demonstrating life's almost eerie ability to navigate to a single solution, repeatedly. Eyes, brains, tools, even culture: all are very…
I'm a teacher, philosopher, writer, Professor of Philosophy, and holder of the Sullivan Chair in Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. I'm the author/editor of sixteen books on such topics as religion and science, religion and politics, contemporary European philosophy, and political philosophy. I'm particularly interested in how religion and science, especially evolution, can be shown to be compatible with each other, as well as in developing an argument that there is no chance operating in nature (including in biology). My book and the books below explore these fascinating topics from almost every possible angle, and should whet readers’ appetites for further thinking about these intriguing matters!
There are a group of leading thinkers in science and religion who simultaneously provoke fertile thought in their readers and irritate them at the same time! This group includes biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Weinberg, who have become public intellectuals, articulating a much larger vision for science and what role it should play in the modern worldview. The scientific prestige and literary eloquence of each of these thinkers combines to transform them into what can only be called oracles of science. Curiously, these thinkers create a very misleading and culturally damaging impression that science as a whole is incompatible with religion. Giberson and Artigas offer an informed analysis of their views, carefully distinguishing science from philosophy and religion in the writings of the oracles. Overall, the book is a great introduction to many of the fascinating questions…
Oracles of Science examines the popular writings of the six scientists who have been the most influential in shaping our perception of science, how it works, and how it relates to other fields of human endeavor, especially religion. Biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Weinberg, have become public intellectuals, articulating a much larger vision for science and what role it should play in the modern worldview. The scientific prestige and literary eloquence of each of these great thinkers combine to transform them into what can only be called…
I have been working on science and religion for 15 years now. While there are a number of books on Darwinism and religion (too many to count), the number on Darwin himself and his own (loss of) religion is far smaller. So, I wrote a short "spiritual biography" of the great man. Reading through the Darwin archives, it emerged that there was so much more to the story than “man finds evolution but loses God,” and the more I read around this topic and spoke to the leading academic scholars on the subject, the more I realized that that was the case for science and religion overall.
In the last decades of the 20th century, there emerged an increasingly acrimonious argument over what Darwinism meant, especially for humans. This wasn’t simply between creationists and Intelligent Design advocates on one side and Darwinians on the other. The Darwinists disagreed among themselves, something with as much fury as they disagreed with the other side.
Andrew Brown is a journalist who, unusually, has genuine expertise in both science and religion. More importantly, he is a cracking writer, and The Darwin Wars is not only intelligent and profound but also clever and witty.
This is an account of neo-Darwinist theories, including the influential Selfish Gene theory - and the misunderstandings they provoke. Divided between "Dawkinsians" and "Gouldians", these theories are explained and evaluated, showing the profound impact they have had on beliefs and culture.
I have been working on science and religion for 15 years now. While there are a number of books on Darwinism and religion (too many to count), the number on Darwin himself and his own (loss of) religion is far smaller. So, I wrote a short "spiritual biography" of the great man. Reading through the Darwin archives, it emerged that there was so much more to the story than “man finds evolution but loses God,” and the more I read around this topic and spoke to the leading academic scholars on the subject, the more I realized that that was the case for science and religion overall.
The academic world began to dismantle the idea that there had always been a conflict between science and history about 50 years ago, but this book was one of the first to try and tell that story more widely.
It isn’t all one-sided. The authors dismantle some other popular "harmony" myths too (e.g., that Einstein believed in a personal God or that Quantum Physics proves free will), but for the most part, the myths they take apart–that mediaeval world thought the world was flat, or that the Church denounced anaesthesia on biblical grounds–are the ones that have lodged the idea of warfare in our cultural mind without justification.
