Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.

Reconciling the Bible and Science acknowledges the Bible as the word of God, demonstrates why there is no conflict between the Bible and science, and shows readers how to accept both.

Elegant writings by a cutting-edge research scientist defending traditional theological and philosophical positions Both an accomplished theoretical physicist and a faithful Catholic, Stephen Barr in this book addresses a wide range of questions about the relationship between science and religion, providing a beautiful picture of how they can coexist in harmony. In his first essay, "Retelling the Story of Science," Barr challenges the widely held idea that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion. He goes on to analyze such topics as the quantum creation of universes from nothing, the multiverse, the Intelligent Design movement, and the implications of neuroscience for the reality of the soul. Including reviews of highly influential books by such figures as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Francis S. Collins, Michael Behe, and Thomas Nagel, The Believing Scientist helpfully engages pressing questions that often vex religious believers who wish to engage with the world of science.

“A superbly argued book.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion The New York Times bestselling author of Why Evolution is True explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail In this provocative book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Coyne is responding to a national climate in which more than half of Americans don’t believe in evolution, members of Congress deny global warming, and long-conquered childhood diseases are reappearing because of religious objections to inoculation, and he warns that religious prejudices in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable “truth” by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science. Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm—to individuals and to our planet—in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in. Praise for Faith Versus Fact: “A profound and lovely book . . . showing that the honest doubts of science are better . . . than the false certainties of religion.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

Physicist Richard Carlson and biblical scholar Tremper Longman address the long-standing problem of how to relate scientific description of the beginnings of the universe with the biblical creation passages found in Genesis. Experts in their respective fields, these two authors provide a way to resolve seeming conflicting descriptions.

Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?

In The Material Image, Donald H. Wacome sets out to reconcile the Christian faith and contemporary science by embracing, rather than evading, its naturalistic implications. The sciences are our best way to know ourselves and the world we inhabit, Wacome argues, but this does not make belief in miracles unreasonable. The sciences reveal that we are fully material beings, the product of unguided natural selection. God created human persons for the vocation of sharing in the everlasting Triune life and work, but this creation does not involve design. The mind is the embodied, socially situated brain. There is no immaterial soul; we are the material image of our transcendent Creator. This materialist conception does not preclude the resurrection of the body. The freedom that matters for the human creature is compatible with our being governed by the laws of nature. Morality and religion are natural, merely human, legacies of our evolutionary history, which God employs in pursuit of fellowship with us. Christians can faithfully and enthusiastically welcome the image of human beings given in contemporary science.

Taking Johannes Kepler as his guide, Gingerich argues that an individual can be both a creative scientist and a believer in divine design--that indeed the very motivation for scientific research can derive from a desire to trace God's handiwork.

Science, religion, philosophy: these three categories of thought have organized humankind’s search for meaning from time immemorial. Reality’s Fugue presents a compelling case that these ways of understanding, often seen as competing, are part of a larger puzzle that cannot be rendered by one account of reality alone. This book begins with an overview of the concept of reality and the philosophical difficulties associated with attempts to account for it through any single worldview. By clarifying the differences among first-person, third-person, and dualist understandings of reality, F. Samuel Brainard repurposes the three predominant ways of making sense of those differences: exclusionist (only one worldview can be right), inclusivist (viewing other worldviews through the lens of one in order to incorporate them all, and thus distorting them), and pluralist or relativist (holding that there are no universals, and truth is relative). His alternative mode of understanding uses Douglas Hofstadter’s metaphor of a musical fugue that allows different “voices” and “melodies” of worldviews to coexist in counterpoint and conversation, while each remains distinct, with none privileged above the others. Approaching reality in this way, Brainard argues, opens up the possibility for a multivoiced perspective that can overcome the skeptical challenges that metaphysical positions face. Engagingly argued by a lifelong scholar of philosophy and global religions, this edifying and accessible exploration of the nature of reality addresses deeply meaningful questions about belief, reconciliation, and being.