Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Library Collection - Science and Religion

Volume II of Evolution and Religion by Henry Ward Beecher applies the principles of evolution to religious thought. Beecher, a charismatic reformer and preacher of the mid-nineteenth century, embraced the theory of evolution and urged his listeners to adapt their interpretation of Christianity in the light of progress.

Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, devoted much research to the historical conflict between science and religion. His work culminated in this two-volume history which argues that religion was historically opposed to scientific progress. Volume one discusses topics including creation, evolution, geography, ethnology and astronomy.

This illustrated two-volume treatise, published in 1835, emerged from the debates between science and religion in the decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species. Kirby, a country parson and respected entomologist considers the major animal groups in the light of scripture. Volume 1 covers molluscs, cephalopods and worms.

This two-volume book by the theologian and philosopher William Paley, published in 1794, is a classic work of Christian apologetics. The text is divided into three parts in which Paley discusses the historical evidence for Christianity and the contemporary popular objections to its truth.

This is a condensed English translation, first published in 1853, of the French philosopher Auguste Comte's controversial work. It presents Comte's influential 'doctrine' of positivism, which promoted personal and public ethics based no longer on metaphysics but on strict scientific method. Volume 1 covers mathematics and the natural sciences.

Charles Gore (1853-1932), the future Bishop of Oxford, edited this volume of essays published in 1891. The contributors believed that theology must engage with advances in scientific and historical knowledge (in this case evolutionary science and Biblical criticism), and use them to develop new and better interpretations of doctrine.

Drawing upon the writings of the sixteenth-century physician Jean Fernel, Sherrington assesses the usefulness of scientific progress as a frame for the development of natural theology. Fernel's views provide a historical perspective on more modern theories of life and mind, showing how radically views have changed over time.

Originally published in Dutch in 1715, and reissued here in its 1724 English translation, this two-volume work by the philosopher and theologian Bernard Nieuwentyt (1654-1718) argues that the scientific examination of the natural world is compatible with religious belief. The book notably influenced the natural theology of William Paley.

Specialising in optics and the motion of fluids, physicist George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for over fifty years, President of the Royal Society, Master of Pembroke College and the most prominent religious scientist of his age. First published in 1893, Natural Theology contains the text of ten lectures he gave at Edinburgh. Stokes favoured the design argument for the existence of a Christian god, arguing against Darwinism. He believed the Bible to be true, though at times metaphorical. The lectures move from substantive observations on cosmology, electricity, gravity, ocular anatomy and evolution through to non sequiturs regarding providential design, human exceptionalism, the supernatural, spiritual immortality, and Christ's dual materiality and divinity. Fossilising a moment of impending shift in the history of ideas, these lectures highlight an intellectual dissonance in the Victorian scientific establishment.