Science and Religion

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.033

32 - Science and Religion

from Part V - Ramifications and Impacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

John Brooke

Edited by

Roy Porter

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Roy Porter: Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London

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Summary

Commentaries on the Enlightenment often propose a highly schematic account of the changing relations between science and religion. Whereas the seventeenth century is credited with a notional “separation” of the sciences from religious control, the eighteenth is characterized by a more devastating form of secularization in which the methods and conclusions of the natural philosophers were turned against the authority of the established Churches. With carefully selected examples, this story can be attractive and plausible. Early in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had warned against the mixing of biblical exegesis with natural philosophy, and, in France, René Descartes (1596–1650) had mechanized a universe no longer anthropocentric. Both men had devised stringent criteria that truth claims had to meet and both had rejected final causes from the explanation of natural phenomena. During the second half of the seventeenth century, enduring scientific societies had come into existence in both London and Paris, and within them religious disputation was banned. By the end of the century, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had articulated his laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, laws that to later generations would symbolize a universe characterized by order and regularity rather than divine caprice.

Newton is brought within the schema in other ways. If his Principia was a towering monument to the power of mathematical reasoning, his Opticks displayed the power of a rigorous experimental method. Seemingly the stage was set for the displacement of theology, once the queen of the sciences, by more bracing sciences that promised an improvement of the world and a brighter destiny for humankind.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 739 - 761

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.033 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

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32 - Science and Religion

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