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When Science & Christianity Meet. Edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. su, 357. $29.00.)
More than twenty years ago, David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, both of them professors in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, edited an important work in which an international group of eighteen distinguished historians published essays on the relationship between Christianity and science from the time of the early church up to the twentieth century. That work, God and Nature (1986), explicitly rejected the commonly held thesis that science and Christianity have generally coexisted in a state of conflict or warfare. Building on the success of that earlier volume, the two men later edited the work here under review, this time offering twelve case histories covering some of what they call "the most notorious, most interesting, or most instructive instances of encounter between these two powerful cultural forces" (p. 4). Once the essays were drafted, the editors organized a conference that brought together the authors with a roughly equal number of teachers and college students for the sole purpose of ensuring that the essays had attained the desired level of accuracy and accessibility. The final product, which includes more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and eleven pages of annotated bibliography,...