The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion

A grand, sweeping, synthetic treatment of the evolution of our modern ideas on the two most important topics--religion and science, our attempt to understand our God and our world. The Measure of God is a lively historical narrative offering the reader a sense for what has taken place in the God and science debate over the past century. Modern science came of age at the cusp of the twentieth century. It was a period marked by discovery of radio waves and x rays, use of the first skyscraper, automobile, cinema, and vaccine, and rise of the quantum theory of the atom. This was the close of the Victorian age, and the beginning of the first great wave of scientific challenges to the religious beliefs of the Christian world. Religious thinkers were having to brace themselves. Some raced to show that science did not undermine religious belief. Others tried to reconcile science and faith, and even to show that the tools of science, facts and reason, could support knowledge of God. In the English speaking world, many had espoused such a project, but one figure stands out. Before his death in 1887, the Scottish judge Adam Gifford endowed the Gifford Lectures to keep this debate going, a science haunted debate on "all questions about man's conception of God or the Infinite." The list of Gifford lecturers is a veritable Who's Who of modern scientists, philosophers and theologians: from William James to Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer to Reinhold Niebuhr, Niels Bohr to Iris Murdoch, from John Dewey to Mary Douglas. Given that mandate, the Gifford project has become a window on a century when the natural sciences encountered the claims of biblical religion with full force. That is the story of this book.Witham, Larry is the author of 'The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion' with ISBN 9780060591915 and ISBN 0060591919.