Quakers Jews And Science

How do science and religion interact? This study examines the ways in which two minorities in Britain - the Quaker and Anglo-Jewish communities - engaged with science. Drawing on a wealth of documentary material, much of which has not been analysed by previous historians, Geoffrey Cantor charts the participation of Quakers and Jews in many different aspects of science: scientific research, science education, science-related careers, and scientific institutions. The responses of both communities to the challenge of modernity posed by innovative scientific theories, such as the Newtonian worldview and Darwin's theory of evolution, are of central interest.

"This study examines how two minorities - the Quaker and Anglo-Jewish communities - engaged with the sciences. With their roots in the mid-seventeenth century, both communities maintained their religious and social norms throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while standing outside the hegemony of the Anglican Church and being subject to various forms of discrimination. Yet for both Quakers and Jews science offered educational and career opportunities and participation in the wider society. They adopted their own scientific interests, with Quakers being attracted principally to the observational sciences. Drawing on a wealth of documentary material, much of which has not been analysed by previous historians, Geoffrey Cantor charts the involvement of Quakers and Jews in many different aspects of science: scientific research, science education, science-related careers, and scientific institutions ranging from the Royal Society to the Great Exhibition."--BOOK JACKET.

How do science and religion interact? This study examines the ways in which two minorities in Britain - the Quaker and Anglo-Jewish communities - engaged with science. Drawing on a wealth of documentary material, Geoffrey Cantor charts the participation of Quakers and Jews in many different aspects of science.

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Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the life sciences and made profound claims about human origins and the human condition, topics often viewed as the prerogative of religion. As a result, evolution has provoked a wide variety of religious responses, ranging from angry rejection to enthusiastic acceptance. While Christian responses to evolution have been studied extensively, little scholarly attention has been paid to Jewish reactions. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism is the first extended meditation on the Jewish engagement with this crucial and controversial theory. The contributors to Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism—from several academic disciplines and two branches of the rabbinate—present case studies showing how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts. Furthermore, they examine how evolutionary theory has been deployed when characterizing Jews as a race, both by Zionists and by anti-Semites. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism addresses historical and contemporary, as well as progressive and Orthodox, responses to evolution in America, Europe, and Israel, ultimately extending the history of Darwinism into new religious domains.

Judaism and Science canvases three millennia of Jewish attitudes towards nature and its study. It answers many questions about the complex relationship of religion and science. How did religious attitudes and dogmas affect Jewish attitudes towards natural knowledge? How was Jewish interest in science reflected, and was facilitated by, links with other cultures - Egypt and Assyria and Babylon in ancient times, Moslem culture in medieval times, and Christian culture during the Renaissance and since? How did science serve as a bridge between religious communities that were otherwise estranged and embattled? How did science serve as a vehicle of assimilation into the wider intellectual culture in which Jews found themselves? The book considers the attitudes and work of particular Jews in different epochs. It takes an eagle's-eye view of its subject, considering broad themes from a high vantage, but also swooping down to consider particular individuals at high focus, and in detail. Judaism and Science encompasses the entire history of the interaction of Jews and natural knowledge. ; Part I: The Sages of Israel and Natural Wisdom describes the images of nature and natural philosophy in the two most important sets of books on the Jewish bookshelf: the Biblical corpus and the Talmudic/Early Rabbinic corpus ; Part II: Jews and Natural Philosophy shows how Jews explained nature, especially the nature of the heavens, or astronomy and astrology, in medieval times and early modern times. ; Part III: Jews and Science — describes the entry of Jews into modern science, beginning in 19th century Europe and 20th century United States, USSR and Israel, emphasizing the social background of the rapid entry of Jews into modern sciences, and of their remarkable successes. ; The volume includes annotated primary source documents, a timeline of important events, and an bibliography of essential primary and secondary sources for further research.

If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars. So wrote Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his epitaph for Francis Mercury van Helmont. With his friend Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont edited the Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), the largest collection of Lurianic Kabbalistic texts available to Christians up to that time. Because the subject matter of this work appears so difficult and arcane, it has never been appreciated as a significant text for understanding the emergence of modern thought. However, one can find in it the basis for the faith in science, the belief in progress, and the pluralism characteristic of later western thought. The Lurianic Kabbalah thus deserves a place it has never received in histories of western scientific and cultural developments.

Science and religion have long been thought incompatible. But nowhere has this apparent contradiction been more fully resolved than in the figure of A. S. Eddington (1882-1944), a pioneer in astrophysics, relativity, and the popularization of science, and a devout Quaker. Practical Mystic uses the figure of Eddington to shows how religious and scientific values can interact and overlap without compromising the integrity of either. Eddington was a world-class scientist who not only maintained his religious belief throughout his scientific career but also defended the interrelation of science and religion while drawing inspiration from both for his practices. For instance, at a time when a strict adherence to deductive principles of physics had proved fruitless for understanding the nature of stars, insights from Quaker mysticism led Eddington to argue that an outlook less concerned with certainty and more concerned with further exploration was necessary to overcome the obstacles of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. By examining this intersection between liberal religion and astrophysics, Practical Mystic questions many common assumptions about the relationship between science and spirituality. Matthew Stanley's analysis of Eddington's personal convictions also reveals much about the practice, production, and dissemination of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century.