The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691134871 ISBN 13: 9780691134871

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The Faith of Scientists is an anthology of writings by twenty-one legendary scientists, from the dawn of the Scientific Revolution to the frontiers of science today, about their faith, their views about God, and the place religion holds--or doesn't--in their lives in light of their commitment to science. This is the first book to bring together so many world-renowned figures of Western science and present them in their own words, offering an intimate window into their private and public reflections on science and faith.


Leading religion scholar Nancy Frankenberry draws from diaries, personal letters, speeches, essays, and interviews, and reveals that the faith of scientists can take many different forms, whether religious or secular, supernatural or naturalistic, conventional or unorthodox. These eloquent writings reflect a spectrum of views from diverse areas of scientific inquiry. Represented here are some of the most influential and colossal personalities in the history of science, from the founders of science such as Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, to modern-day scientists like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Jane Goodall, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, Edward O. Wilson, and Ursula Goodenough. Frankenberry provides a general introduction as well as concise introductions to each chapter that place these writings in context and suggest further reading from the latest scholarship.


As surprising as it is illuminating and inspiring, The Faith of Scientists is indispensable for students, scholars, and anyone seeking to immerse themselves in important questions about God, the universe, and science.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy K. Frankenberry is the John Phillips Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. Her books include Radical Interpretation in Religion and Religion and Radical Empiricism.

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"Nancy Frankenberry provides a rare glimpse into the interior lives of scientists as they talk about their faith, their views about God, and spirituality. From Galileo to Ursula Goodenough, she shows critical acumen in selecting the source material and authoritative scholarship in interpreting it. This book offers an unsurpassed treatment of a vital subject."--Max Jammer, author ofEinstein and Religion

"Frankenberry has given us a great gift, a groundbreaking collection of writings by preeminent scientists, past and present, on religion and its relation to mathematics and science. The breadth of sources dazzles as does the range of views, from Pascal's Catholicism to Goodenough's religious naturalism. One emerges from this heady mix with the firm conviction, as Einstein puts it, that 'science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.' This is a magnificent achievement, one of the most important books of the year."--Philip Zaleski, editor of The Best American Spiritual Writing series

"Nancy Frankenberry writes lucidly on the long interplay between scientific and religious ideas. With the eye of a professional philosopher of religion she has selected a fascinating parade of scientists and has illuminated their views on religion with particularly perceptive analyses."--Owen Gingerich, author of God's Universe

"An important contribution to the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. I know of no work that deals with a broader chronological and disciplinary range of scientists than does Frankenberry's collection. This book promises to be useful to general readers and members of the academic community. It constitutes an important addition to the burgeoning library of books on the relationship between science and religion."--Jon H. Roberts, coauthor ofDarwinism and the Divine in America

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"Nancy Frankenberry provides a rare glimpse into the interior lives of scientists as they talk about their faith, their views about God, and spirituality. From Galileo to Ursula Goodenough, she shows critical acumen in selecting the source material and authoritative scholarship in interpreting it. This book offers an unsurpassed treatment of a vital subject."--Max Jammer, author ofEinstein and Religion

"Frankenberry has given us a great gift, a groundbreaking collection of writings by preeminent scientists, past and present, on religion and its relation to mathematics and science. The breadth of sources dazzles as does the range of views, from Pascal's Catholicism to Goodenough's religious naturalism. One emerges from this heady mix with the firm conviction, as Einstein puts it, that 'science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.' This is a magnificent achievement, one of the most important books of the year."--Philip Zaleski, editor of The Best American Spiritual Writing series

"Nancy Frankenberry writes lucidly on the long interplay between scientific and religious ideas. With the eye of a professional philosopher of religion she has selected a fascinating parade of scientists and has illuminated their views on religion with particularly perceptive analyses."--Owen Gingerich, author of God's Universe

"An important contribution to the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. I know of no work that deals with a broader chronological and disciplinary range of scientists than does Frankenberry's collection. This book promises to be useful to general readers and members of the academic community. It constitutes an important addition to the burgeoning library of books on the relationship between science and religion."--Jon H. Roberts, coauthor ofDarwinism and the Divine in America

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The Faith of Scientists

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13487-1

Contents

Introduction.......................................................viiAcknowledgments....................................................xviiPART ONE: Founders of Modern Science...............................1Chapter 1 Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)............................3Chapter 2 Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)............................34Chapter 3 Francis Bacon (1561-1626)..............................59Chapter 4 Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)..............................79Chapter 5 Isaac Newton (1643-1727)...............................102Chapter 6 Charles Darwin (1809-1882).............................122Chapter 7 Albert Einstein (1879-1955)............................143Chapter 8 Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).....................177Chapter 9 Rachel Carson (1907-1964)..............................197Chapter 10 Carl Sagan (1934-1996).................................222Chapter 11 Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)..........................249Chapter 12 Richard Dawkins (1941-)................................268Chapter 13 Jane Goodall (1934-)...................................296Chapter 14 Steven Weinberg (1933-)................................317Chapter 15 John Polkinghorne (1930-)..............................340Chapter 16 Freeman Dyson (1923-)..................................365Chapter 17 Stephen Hawking (1942-)................................392Chapter 18 Paul Davies (1946-)....................................412Chapter 19 Edward O. Wilson (1929-)...............................437Chapter 20 Stuart A. Kauffman (1939-).............................452Chapter 21 Ursula Goodenough (1944-)..............................475Permission Acknowledgments.........................................505Index..............................................................513

Chapter One

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Introduction

The playwright Bertolt Brecht labored for two decades over his anti-Third Reich play Leben des Galilei. The seventh scene is set on March 5, 1616, just as the Inquisition has censured the Copernican texts positing the heliocentric model of the universe. Galileo learns of this event during a conversation with several cardinals at a dinner party in Rome. Brecht dramatically captures the heart of Galileo's religious faith:

Barberini: He's [i.e., Galileo is] really dreadful. In all innocence he accuses God of the juiciest boners in astronomy! I suppose God didn't work hard enough at His astronomy before He wrote Holy Scripture? My dear friend!

Bellarmine: Don't you think it likely that the Creator knows more about His creation than any of His creatures?

Galileo: But, gentlemen, after all we can misinterpret not only the movements of the heavenly bodies, but the Bible as well.

Bellarmine: But wouldn't you say that after all the interpretation of the Bible is the business of the Holy Church? (Galileo is silent.)

Galileo is silent because in fact he believes that the business of biblical interpretation, in the hands of fallible humans, can prove to be highly fallible. He is silent because he does not believe the Bible is meant to be read literally, and biblical literalism has been hardening into a new position within some circles of the Counter-reformation Catholic Church following the Council of Trent.

Far from being a biblical literalist, Galileo believed that the Bible was intentionally simplified by the Church so that lay people could access its meaning. In the letter excerpted to his student Benedetto Castelli, Galileo underscores the Brechtian point by clearly stating "though Holy Scripture cannot err, nevertheless some of its interpreters and expositors can sometimes err in various ways." As the other texts selected in this chapter show, however, Galileo's strong religious faith is rooted in a conviction that truth is always one and cannot be at odds with itself. Knowledge of the truth is available through two avenues, one scientific and one religious. Reason and mathematics produce the exciting and disturbing astronomical data that Galileo regarded as a true reflection of the craftsmanship of the divine work, and Holy Scripture presents a true reflection of the divine word. Fallible humans can misinterpret both of these, as Brecht's Galileo observes, but neither one can ever be fundamentally in conflict with the other. If truth cannot be at odds with itself, then scientific truth and religious truth will never contradict each other, Galileo believed. When they appear to conflict, it is because one or the other has been mistakenly interpreted.

Galileo makes it still clearer, in the second excerpt, which is taken from his unpublished writings, that he champions the autonomy of science with respect to faith. Science-then called "natural philosophy" -does not proceed from theology, Galileo declares, and in disputes about natural phenomena one must begin not with the authority of scriptural passages but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations. Here he advances the argument that two truths cannot contradict one another, so that in cases where a known scientific fact is available, the Bible, an inspired text, ought to be interpreted in such a way as to be compatible with the scientific truth. Augustine had argued along similar lines in the fourth century, and many contemporary theologians take much the same position today, but Galileo was warned a year later, in 1616, not to teach or to defend the Copernican view except as a possible hypothesis.

Had he been content only to differentiate two senses in which biblical texts could be interpreted, either as commonsense language or as scientific language, Galileo's position might have been as simple as that of Cardinal Cesare Baronio, the sixteenth-century Vatican librarian whose quip he quotes approvingly: the Bible is a book that tells us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go. If the sun were said to stand still during Joshua's surprisingly long day, this should be given an allegorical meaning, not a scientific sense that would present a challenge to Copernican astronomy. But Galileo went further and argued for the mutual relevance of science and religion. In his letter to the grand duchess Christina in 1615, Galileo argued that known scientific truths should help guide biblical exegesis. It was as though he expected the theologians to become astronomers first! Creatively theologizing himself, Galileo interpreted Joshua's command that the sun stand still in the middle of the heavens as referring to the sun's axial rotation. His conclusion was unmistakable: it is the Copernican framework that preserves and best understands the biblical record.

Recent scholarship on the so-called "Galilean affair" dispels two popular myths about Galileo and his conflict with the Catholic Church. Both have persisted despite the lack of historical evidence for them. We might call these the "Myth of Galileo the Religious Rebel" and the "Myth of the Catholic Church as Arch-Enemy of Science." The more complex picture that now emerges in the work of contemporary historians of science depicts a Galileo who was generally committed to the Church and a Church that was traditionally committed to natural philosophy as a rational, independent route to truth. In other words, Galileo was far more inclined to a conservative religious position and the Church much...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691134871
• ISBN 13: 9780691134871
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 523
• Herausgeber: Frankenberry Nancy K.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar