When science & Christianity meet

de David C. Lindberg, Ronald L. Numbers

Have science and Christianity been locked in mortal combat for the past 2000 years? Or has their relationship been one of peaceful coexistence, encouragement, and support? Both opinions have been vigorously defended, widely disseminated, and hotly debated. And both have been rejected by knowledgeable historians as unacceptable oversimplifications of the historical reality. This book steps back from those debates, abandoning, for the present, the attempt to formulate or defend generalizations of such breadth and scope. Its authors believe that every encounter had its own peculiar shape and that each must be examined uniquely before broader attempts at generalization are likely to succeed. This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive cases, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity.