Fundamentalism and Folk Science between the Wars
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 inv...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1995
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| In: |
Religion and American culture
Year: 1995, Volume: 5, Issue: 2, Pages: 217-248 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | 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.” |
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| ISSN: | 1533-8568 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion and American culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/rac.1995.5.2.03a00040 |