Religion and the Origins of Modern Science

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The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was famously described by Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield as an event that 'outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.' It was the emergence of science, Butterfield argued, that marked the real origin of the modern world and the modern mentality. While historians of science are now less enamoured of the idea of a scientific revolution, and somewhat less celebratory of its putative accomplishments than Butterfield, it is nonetheless clear that the seventeenth century witnessed a series of remarkable scientific developments and, equally importantly, saw the emergence of a set of values that placed a high priority on scientific achievement. One question that continues to exercise historians is how this all came about. When considering the origins of modern science, historians have long been interested in the question of why the West, and why the seventeenth century. Refining the question with contrast cases, we might ask why not China, or medieval Islam, or, for that matter, medieval Christianity? This project seeks answers to these questions in certain characteristics of the religious culture of early modern Europe. More specifically, it will explore various features of religious beliefs, values, practices and institutions with a view to determining whether these might be said to constitute necessary conditions for the rise of a scientific culture and, beyond this, how they might explain its persistence and dominance. In addition to the question of the influence of religion upon the development of science, the project will also seek to illuminate the issue of the influence of science upon religion - not so much in terms of how particular religious doctrines have been shaped by scientific discoveries, but in terms of the more fundamental question of how the success of science has altered our perception of what religion is, and how its central claims are justified.While the question of the religious origins of science is one that has been asked before, this project promises to shed new light on this old question in a number of ways. First, this work will go beyond standard accounts of the influence of religion on science, by building upon discussions of the identity of 'religion' and 'science' in this period, and demonstrating how the formation of these essentially modern ideas was shaped by interactions between natural philosophy and religion. Second, it will offer a critical analysis of existing work on science-religion relations in the early modern period. Third, this project will consider whether, in the light of these considerations, it is still possible to speak of 'the scientific revolution' as a founding event of Western modernity. To conclude, historian Richard Westfall has claimed that 'the relation of science to religion in the seventeenth century is the central problem in the history of modern Western thought'. While we have made considerable progress since Westfall's earlier work on these issues, the burden of this project is nonetheless to vindicate Westfall's claim by showing the importance of the mutual interactions of science and religion, and demonstrating how these differentiated institutions - which are distinctive features of Western modernity - began to assume their characteristic forms in the early modern period.