What "everyone knows" about science and religion turns out to be less than everyone thought. Ronald Numbers' plan in this expertly edited volume is straightforward. Each chapter begins with a statement expressing a well-known certainty (e.g., "The Christian party [in the early Middle Ages] … became a stumbling block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years"; "The antievolutionists … were defeated [at the Scopes trial], overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism"). Then come well-researched chapters by acknowledged experts in the history of science to show why this supposed "certainty" is a myth rather than the truth.

If you want to keep thinking that medieval Islam was unfriendly to science, that medieval Christians propounded a flat-earth theory, that the church once denounced anesthesia as unscriptural, that Huxley routed Wilberforce in a famous confrontation over Darwin's "monkey theory," that the Scopes Trial blew opposition to evolution out of the water, that creation science is a uniquely American phenomenon—then you'd better avoid this book. By contrast, if you want to read a nuanced account of why Galileo was imprisoned after tussling with representatives of the pope over cosmological issues, if you want to observe the ways in which Isaac Newton's mechanical philosophy relied on God as well as raised questions about traditional Christian beliefs, if you would like to follow the complex steps by which Charles Darwin gave up Christian faith (which had little to do with evolutionary theory), then this is the book for you. The deeper lesson that Numbers and these chapters teach is that helpful thinking on religion and science requires patience, historical preparation, and careful definition of terms. Such simple guidelines. Such difficulties when they are ignored.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (InterVarsity Press).

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