![]() ![]() ![]() Skipping vast periods and various places, the narrative focuses on discrete, well-known encounters between religion and individual scientists or persons involved with science (broadly defined so as to range from ancient natural philosophy to modern social sciences). His story mainly covers the Christian West but also touches on the Islamic world and the Asian context.Īny sweeping history, especially one emphasizing entanglement, necessarily moves in fits and starts over time and space. (Full disclosure: I’m listed as number six.) Spencer draws on this body of scholarship to compile a narrative history of science and religion since ancient times. Spencer begins his book by noting that, since the 1980s, historians have uncovered a complex relationship between science and religion, and he names ten leading scholars in this enterprise. ![]() In Magisteria, he argues from history that science and religion are (and have always been) deeply entangled. Nor does Spencer, a senior fellow at London’s Theos think tank, buy NOMA now. On the other hand, theists such as the noted geneticist Francis Collins denied that religion was cordoned off from the natural world-otherwise, why would believers pray for physical (or even mental or emotional) health? On the one hand, proponents of secular scientism like Richard Dawkins, who want science enthroned as the arbiter of all truth in the modern mind, rejected the notion that religion is magisterial anywhere. He thought NOMA could defuse the controversy while removing religion from science education. Gould, a popular science writer and avowed secularist, advanced this concept in 1997, at the height of America’s latest public dustup over teaching so-called creation science and intelligent design. Each is magisterial, or authoritative, in its own domain-but not beyond it. Nicholas Spencer’s latest book, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion, opens and closes with references to Stephen Jay Gould’s depiction of science and religion as nonoverlapping magisteria, or “NOMA.” By this, he meant that science is about the natural, religion the supernatural, and never the twain should meet. ![]()
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