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11 - Christianity and the sciences

from PART I - CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Nicolaas Rupke
Edited by
Sheridan Gilley  and
Brian Stanley
Sheridan Gilley
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Brian Stanley
Affiliation:
Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge
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Summary

Cognitive dissonance about cosmogony

Among the different possible approaches to Christianity and the sciences is that of the Christian conduct of science, involving a study of Christian scientists, their scientific accomplishments, and the importance of religious upbringing and beliefs for the character of scientific subjects and theories. This approach was followed as early as the closing decades of the period 1815–1914, when a Lutheran theologian at the Universityof Greifswald, Otto Zöckler (1833–1906), produced his two-volume Gottes Zeugenim Reich der Natur (1881), and when from the Catholic side Das Christentum und die Vertreter der neueren Naturwissenschaft (1903; English trans. 1911; new edition 1995), by the Jesuit church historian Karl Alois Kneller (1857–1942), was published. Yet apart from a number of biographical studies of individual Christian scientists, ‘few attempts to pursue this link between religion and science’ have been made since. The majority of studies of ‘Christianity and the sciences’ have focused on the converse, namely the impact of scientific discoveries and theories on Christian beliefs, in particular on biblical hermeneutics and the question of the historicity, inerrancy and literal-versus-symbolic meaning of Genesis. Nearly all the primary sources of the period of this chapter as well as the secondary ones, up to the present day, have been preoccupied with what James Moore – following Leon Festinger – has called the ‘cognitive dissonance’ that developed between the ‘Mosaic cosmogony’ and the scientific study of origins – of the universe, of life and of humankind.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 164 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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