Fooling the World

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
David Hutchings

This chapter recounts how two nineteenth-century gentlemen, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, managed to fool much of the world by insisting in two landmark books that science and religion have always been opposed to one another, and that humanity must therefore make its choice between the two. Their books are History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1876) and A History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom (1896), respectively. These texts are largely responsible for launching the conflict thesis: the now commonplace idea usually characterized as “God versus science.” And yet bizarrely, both men had intended to do precisely the opposite: they sought to reconcile their own Christian faith with science. This chapter tells the men’s stories, and asks how on earth they ended up getting things so wrong.

Author(s):  
David Hutchings ◽  
James C. Ungureanu

This book is a popular-level study of the conflict thesis: the notion that science and religion have been at war with each other throughout history, and that humanity must ultimately make its choice between the two. The origins of the conflict thesis are usually given as two works by nineteenth-century Americans, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, who wrote History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1876) and A History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom (1896), respectively. In these volumes, Draper and White relate stories such as the Church’s suppression of the sphericity of the Earth and of heliocentrism; its banning of dissection, anesthetic, and inoculation; its persecution of scientists; its dedication to irrationality in the face of reason; and much more. Yet their thesis has been thoroughly debunked in the literature, and their tales largely found to be myths. Despite this, they still circulate today, and many still believe that we must pick a side: God or science. This book uses accessible stories and anecdotes to analyze Draper, White, their true motivations, their books, their thorough debunking, the modern persistence of their flawed views, and the possibility of moving beyond them—toward true reconciliation. It is a history of science and religion, and of how, despite the common acceptance of the contrary, the latter has actually been of great benefit to the former. Rumors of a centuries-old war between God and science, it turns out, have been greatly exaggerated.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-315
Author(s):  
Geert Lernout

According to the traditional (or ‘whig’) interpretation of history, sometime in the seventeenth century science was born in the form that we know today, in a new spirit that can best be summed up by the motto of the Royal Society: nullius in verba, take nobody's word for it. In the next few centuries this new critical way of looking at reality was instrumental in the creation of a coherent view of the world, and of that world's history, which was found to be increasingly at odds with traditional claims, most famously in the case of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. By the end of the nineteenth century, the divide between science and religion was described by means of words such as ‘conflict’ and ‘warfare,’ the terms used by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White in the titles of their respective books: History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).


Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

Despite the early loss of his Christian faith, Renan held onto a lifelong belief in the incommensurability of Christianity with Judaism and Islam. This entailed his perception of an unbridgeable chasm between Christianity and the two “Semitic religions.” Such insistence originated in his understanding of Jesus as a unique figure, one who stood at the very core of the world history of religions. It is in his Life of Jesus that he expressed most clearly his views on the founder of Christianity. First published in 1863, Renan’s Vie de Jésus would swiftly become, in the original as well as in its multiple translations, a nineteenth-century international best seller. The chapter reassess the roots of Renan’s project, as well as its impact. Finally, we compare Renan and the Jewish historian Joseph Salvador on the figure of Jesus.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-248
Author(s):  
Edward B. Davis

Reports of the demise of the “warfare” school of writing the history of religion and science may yet be premature, but it seems safe to say that it has had a near-death experience. Much recent historiography has underscored the shallowness, futility, and wrongheadedness of treating controversies involving religion and science simply as skirmishes in an ongoing, inevitable conflict between contradictory ways of viewing the world. We have been urged, as historians, to probe beneath the surface of apparent conflicts in search of the underlying reasons why people with different beliefs have come to disagree so deeply about matters involving science and to accept the realities of an historically complex situation. After showing the inadequacy of the warfare thesis, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers note sadly that “we will never find a satisfactory alternative of equal simplicity.” John Hedley Brooke, the author of a recent comprehensive study, concludes that “Serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.”


Margaret Mead ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Elesha J. Coffman

When challenged by a magazine editor in 1971 to cite any spiritually significant work she had done, Mead gave a fulsome response. “The list of my writings with spiritual significance is too long to burden your journal,” she wrote, offering just three sample citations: the essay “Cultural Man,” which she wrote for the World Council of Churches collection Man in Community; her introduction to the National Council of Churches volume Christians in a Technological Era; and “Christian Faith and Technical Assistance,” published in Christianity and Crisis in 1955. She continued, “I am at present, as I have been for many years actively engaged in various enterprises which seek to combine religion and science and religion and psychiatry, at various levels from the Committee on the Future of Earl Hall at Columbia University, to the activities of the Episcopal Church, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.” She was, by the early 1970s, an established authority on religion. Why did so many people who knew her name not know this aspect of her life?


Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney J. Shep

Emoticons are usually associated with the digital age, but they have numerous precursors in both manuscript and print. This article examines the circulation of emotional icons in nineteenth-century typographical journals as a springboard to understanding the relationship between emotion, materiality, and anthropomorphism as well the pre-digital networks of the “typographical press system.” It draws on literature from textual and typographical analysis, including the history of punctuation. It also demonstrates the ubiquity of emoticons in contemporary society and culture outside the world of computers, text messaging, and chat rooms.


Ta dib ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Syamsul Kurniawan

<p class="Normal1"><span class="normalchar"><em><span lang="EN-US">This research is aimed to reconcile science and religion, and to seek its relevance in the management of non-dichotomous Islamic education.</span></em></span><span class="normalchar"><em><span lang="EN-US">In addition, this research departs from the researcher’s anxiety in response to the dichotomous thought between religion and science which in turn manifests in the separation of science and religion in the history of Islamic education management.</span></em></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span class="normalchar"><em><span lang="EN-US">This results in the current Islamic education that suffers a setback in the development of science.</span></em></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span class="normalchar"><em><span lang="EN-US">Therefore, in the management of Islamic education, reintegration needs to be done without any dichotomy between religion and science.</span></em></span></p>


Author(s):  
James Haire

United and uniting churches have made a very significant contribution to the ecumenical movement. In seeking to assess that contribution, the chapter first defines what these churches are, considers the different types of union that have been created, examines the characteristics of these churches, and looks at the theological rationale for them. It goes on to trace the history of their formation from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the years leading up to and following the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches at New Delhi in 1961, under the influence of Lesslie Newbigin. Giving a theological assessment, it emphasizes that the existence of these churches, despite difficulties, provides places where the final unity of Christ’s one body is most clearly foreshadowed. They will always present proleptic visions of that goal.


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