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Peter Harrison

Historian Peter Harrison’s five best science and religion books

Harrison: If you look at the frequency of the word “religion”, no one talks about it much until the 17th century—this is true for English, originally Latin, and also the European vernacular languages, too. So, “religion” as a category is not really important to anyone until the modern period. With science, the practices that we regard as science went under a range of different labels. Read More ›

What difference did Protestantism make to modern science?

In reality, it is mixed. For example, consider eugenics. The Catholic Church always opposed that dreadful scourge of people armed with strong opinions passing laws compelling some of their neighbors to be sterilized. When they did so, these eugenicists were acting explicitly as the priests of science. That was their idea of a vocation and Protestant churches largely supported it. Read More ›