快猫短视频

Reconciling Science and Religion: The debate in early twentieth-century
Britain by Peter Bowler, University of Chicago Press, 拢24/$40,
ISBN 0226068587

THE conflict that set science against religion reached its height in
Victorian Britain. The celebrated tussle between Bishop Wilberforce (鈥淪oapy
Sam鈥�) and the righteously angry agnostic Thomas Huxley was just the most
colourful skirmish in a fight to the death between godly faith and the secular
creed of Darwinism. In Britain, religion has been in retreat ever since.

Or so the story goes. Peter Bowler鈥檚 weighty new history of post-Victorian
debates about science and religion tells a much more complex and interesting
tale. The early 20th century saw a whole range of efforts to reconcile the two
ways of making sense of the world. Religious modernists embraced a new theism. A
few biologists proclaimed the death of Darwinism.

A huge cast of philosophers, scientists, theologians and popularisers debated
the exact relation between science and religion in thousands of books, articles,
speeches and pamphlets. Bowler鈥檚 densely detailed survey revisits them all: the
naturalists, spiritualists and mystics; the Fabians, rationalists, Marxists and
eugenicists; the prophets of creative evolution and the believers in a cosmic
mathematician. All pitched in merrily for decades, until more traditional
positions gradually regained ascendancy in the wake of the social disruption of
the 1930s.