History of Science and Religion

The design argument, also known as the teleological argument, is one of the most commonly used evidences of the existence of a Creator God. Over the centuries, the argument has taken many forms, from the pre-Socratics to Jewish rabbis to Hindu philosophy and the modern debate over Intelligent Design (ID) and theistic evolution (TE). Present day controversies seem to show that disagreements over the apparent design of nature have roots in deep historical and metaphysical differences. We believe there is much to learn from how different religious traditions (here, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have engaged or are engaging with design discourse. So, we are arranging a two-day online closed-door workshop on the history and metaphysics of design arguments, to be hosted at the University of Helsinki.

It is hard to think of an area of Christian theology that provides more scope for interdisciplinary conversation than the doctrine of creation. This doctrine not only invites reflection on an intellectual concept: it calls for contemplation of the endlessly complex, dynamic, and fascinating world that human being inhabit. But the possibilities for wide-ranging discussion are such that scholars sometimes end up talking past one another. Productive conversation requires mutual understanding of insights across disciplinary boundaries. Knowing Creation offers an essential resource for helping scholars from a range of fields to appreciate one another's concerns and perspectives. In so doing, it offers an important step forward in establishing a mutually-enriching dialogue that addresses, amongst others, the following key questions:

- Who is the God who creates?
- Why does God create?
- What is "creation"?
- What does it mean to recognize that a theology of creation speaks of a natural world that is subject to the observation of the natural sciences? What does it mean to talk about both a "natural" order and a "created" order?
- What are the major tensions that have arisen between the natural sciences and Christian thinking historically, and why? How can we move beyond such tensions to a positive and constructive conversation, while also avoiding facile notions such as a "god of the gaps"?
- Is it feasible for a natural scientist to maintain a belief in God's continuing creative activity?
- In what ways might a naturalistic understanding of the natural world be said to be limited?
- How can biblical studies, theology, philosophy, history, and science talk better together about these questions?

At a time when the doctrine of creation - and even a mention of "creation" - has been disparaged due to its supposed associations with anti-scientific dogma, and theological offerings sometimes risk appearing a little more than reactionary exercises in naive apologetics, ill-informed by science or distinctly wary of engagement with it, it is more important than ever to offer a cross-disciplinary resource that can voice a positive account of a Christian theology of creation, and do so as a genuinely broad-ranging conversation about science and faith.

When popular physicist Stephen Hawking dreams at the end of his best-selling Brief History of Time of a Great Unifying Theory (GUT) which would be able to merge the major physical theories describing the laws of nature, he goes on to say: “However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God.”  John Polkinghorne, Hawking’s colleague at Cambridge University, is on the one hand critical of such an approach. “What is God doing in the book at all?”  On the other hand, he is himself searching for his own very particular version of a GUT. “There is indeed a Theory of Everything, but a theory that is much grander and more comprehensive and intellectually satisfying than any Grand Unified Theory of Particle Physics could ever be.”  For former particle physicist Polkinghorne, this theory is his new field of work: theology.  How does he come to this?

In order to map out the extent to which the interplay between professional creationist and anti-creationist organizations in the United States determines the state of the creation/evolution debates, I shall proceed in three steps. First, I will present an example that characterizes the way in which professional creationism works in the United States. Second, I will review some key aspects of the history of professional creationism and anti-creationism in America. Third, I will present a sociological model that helps explain why creationism in the United States has developed in the way it has. This model is based upon the theory of social fields as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Its main function is to make visible the way in which professional creationists and anti-creationists are attuned to each other with regard to their arguments, strategies, and the concepts they apply to Interpret their own actions and those of their opponents.

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, due 2016
Explores the relationship and dialogue between religion and atheism, focusing upon Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and other, e.g. Pagan, traditions in their encounter with secularism and atheism. It explores such issues as faith and reason, science and religion, gender and sexuality, 'texts of terror', and the use and abuse of arguments, evidence, and concepts.

W literaturze podkreśla się fakt, że Darwin sprzeciwiał się poglądom głoszącym nagłe stworzenie niezmiennych gatunków przez Boga. Wykazuję, że tworząc swoją teorię, odrzucał nie tylko koncepcję bezpośredniej Boskiej ingerencji, ale także wszelkie – oprócz deistycznego – teleologiczne wyjaśnienia procesów ewolucyjnych. Jako powody zmiany przez Darwina stanowiska dotyczącego rozwoju życia na Ziemi wskazuję zarówno przytaczane przez niego argumenty naukowe jak i jego filozoficzno-światopoglądwą ewolucję.

Dzięki sukcesowi teorii Darwina przyjmowany przez niego naturalizm metodologiczny stał się fundamentem współczesnej nauki. Postulat naturalizmu zakazuje wyjaśnień odwołujących się do łamiących porządek przyrodniczy bytów nadprzyrodzonych i do procesów celowościowych. Uwzględnienie czynników naukowych oraz światopoglądowych wpływających na Darwina daje pełniejszy obraz motywów, które przyczyniły się do utrwalenia wizji współczesnej nauki jako bazującej na naturalizmie.

Visuelle Strategien zur Konturierung eines jesuitischen Wissensreiches, in: Oy-Marra, Elisabeth/Remmert, Volker R. (eds.): „Le monde est une peinture“. Jesuitische Identität und die Rolle der Bilder, Berlin 2011 [Beiträge zu den Historischen Kulturwissenschaften 7], 85-108

Carlos Zimmermann SJ was an important pedagogue and one of the most influential naturalists working in Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was an active promoter of an experimental approach to the teaching of the natural sciences, and one of the founders of the leading Portuguese scientific journal, Brotéria. His main area of research was the identification and classification of novel species of diatoms (one of the largest groups of microscopic algae). In the aftermath of the expulsion of the religious orders in 1910, the newly-established Portuguese Republic confiscated Jesuit scientific books, instruments and collections, including those produced by Zimmermann. Exiled to Brazil from 1911, he remained there until his death in 1950. This article focuses on the main questions relating to the organisation, apprehension, and partial restitution of these collections. By analysing a set of sixteen unpublished documents, recently found in a private archive and now published as an appendix, the article reconstructs the trajectory and significance of Zimmermann’s  body of work. It elucidates, furthermore, the complex diplomatic and political circumstances, as well as the central role of  correspondence networks, that led to the retrieval of these  documents.

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Once esteemed as the highest form of knowledge, the legitimacy of metaphysics as a rational discipline has been severely challenged since the rise of modern science, particularly since it seemed that while the latter reached overall consensus, the disputes in the former seemed interminable. The question naturally arises whether metaphysics could ever achieve the status of a science. The following article presents the view that metaphysics is not nor could ever become a science in the sense of the modern "hard" sciences today because a) it seeks a different sort of knowledge, which b) cannot be acquired by the methods of modern science; and c) metaphysics serves a different cognitive purpose than the sort of knowledge that science can provide. It is, nevertheless, a rational subject, one in fact that supplies the necessary rational foundation for the positive sciences.

The modernist critique of religion is often presented in banal and prosaic terms by enthusiasts of contemporary techno-culture as war (mostly won) between science and religion with just a small group of conservative, if not militant religionists (like terrorists) still responding to the call to arms.  While historians have gone far in dispelling myths that the war discourse has generated and have traced many complexities that the warfare model has obscured, this paper will be mostly concerned with just one such complexity among many.  This paper will explore the Weberian hypothesis that modern empirical science developed in consequence of the Protestant Reformation in England, to find out what the complicated interaction between religion and science in seventeenth century England might reveal in the shadows of the warfare model of their historical interaction.  In particular Robert Merton’s “Pietism-Science” thesis, namely that Reformed Theology with its emphasis on providence, personal calling, salvation of the elect, utilitarianism, millenarianism, and transcendent rational theism produced modern science, will be examined with a view towards evaluating its explanatory value.  It will be argued here that the value of Merton’s hypothesis (after some qualifications and adjustments) depends largely on its deployment relative to grand(er) historical narratives, and that, though historians have commonly misunderstood Merton’s working model, his basic thesis, further developed by Charles Webster in his Great Instauration, remains an important historical model for understanding the relationship between science and religion.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/zygo.12149/full

Historians have long since rejected the dubious assertions of the conflict model, with its narratives of perennial religion versus science combat. Nonetheless, this theory persists in various academic disciplines, and it is still presented to university students as the authoritative historical account of religion–science interactions. Cases of this can be identified within modern anthropology textbooks and reference materials, which often recapitulate claims once made by John W. Draper and Andrew D. White. This article examines 21st-century introductory anthropology publications, demonstrating how such works perpetuate religion–science myths and the notion that history has been replete with inevitable religion versus science warfare. In particular, this study reveals how such introductory materials propagate discord narratives associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Affiliated with these anecdotes are oversimplified accounts of religious responses to heliocentrism and evolutionary theory , as well as claims that science has invariably led to the usurpation of religious belief and secularization from Galileo onwards. For scholars committed to examining the manifold interactions between science and religion, it has become somewhat banal to note that the conflict model is an outdated, academically rejected thesis. The acclaimed works of Brooke (1991) and Ferngren (2002), among others, have helped demonstrate to wide readerships how the historical associations between

""She is best known for her curve, the witch of Agnesi, which appears in almost all high school and undergraduate math books. She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages. She wrote one of the first vernacular textbooks on calculus and was appointed chair of mathematics at the university in Bologna. In later years, however, she became a prominent figure within the Catholic Enlightenment, gave up the academic world, and devoted herself to the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Indeed, the life of Maria Agnesi reveals a complex and enigmatic figure—one of the most fascinating characters in the history of mathematics.

Using newly discovered archival documents, Massimo Mazzotti reconstructs the wide spectrum of Agnesi's social experience and examines her relationships to various traditions—religious, political, social, and mathematical. This meticulous study shows how she and her fellow Enlightenment Catholics modified tradition in an effort to reconcile aspects of modern philosophy and science with traditional morality and theology.

Mazzotti's original and provocative investigation is also the first targeted study of the Catholic Enlightenment and its influence on modern science. He argues that Agnesi's life is the perfect lens through which we can gain a greater understanding of mid-eighteenth-century cultural trends in continental Europe.

Reviews:

The overall result is micro-history at its best, and a history of mathematics that is narrated, as it always should be, through the broader history of the people and places that made this particular science what it is.

(J.B. Shank The Mathematical Intelligencer)

Mazzotti's text is many things: well written, historically detailed, and descriptive. What stands out is his depiction of Maria Gaetana Agnesi as humble, kind, and mathematically talented.

(Kathleen A. Acker, Ph.D. Convergence)

A welcome contribution to both an understanding of Maria Agnesi and life in the 1700s.

(Choice)

A nuanced and well-documented historical narrative that restores to us a key personage in eighteenth-century science and spirituality, combining cultural and political history with the history of the family.

(Brendan Dooley Catholic Historical Review)

Mazzotti's book succeeds admirably in pushing beyond this summary judgment—the same that judges her curve 'insignificant'—to find in Agnesi's approach to mathematics a way to open a whole world of eighteenth- century life and thought that supported her choices.

(Joan L. Richards Isis)

Mazzotti’s account of the rise and fall of a relatively non-gendered intellectual environment in the early eighteenth century thus sheds light on a rare instance in which the Catholic Church actually advocated women’s equality. The strangeness of that phenomenon alone renders his work an interesting addition to the history of science.

(Josipa G. Petrunic British Journal for the History of Science)

This book is both a life and a times; it will have many readers.

(Dorinda Outram American Historical Review)

Mazzotti's treatment of her is by far the most sophisticated biography that we have of this fascinating woman... His book is a cultural history of mathematics at its best.

(Paula Findlen Historia Mathematica)""

Review of Simon Southerton. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004. 270 pp. Appendices, glossary, index. Paper $24.95. ISB 1-56085-181-3. While Southerton's honesty ultimately cost him his membership in the LDS Church, his book should make a lasting impact on the debates about the historicity of Latter-day scriptures within and beyond restoration communities.

Is the relationship between science and religion characterized by conflict or harmony? There are innumerable models for this relationship, but they basically fall into two camps. They either assert that science and religion are in unavoidable conflict, or that science and religion— understood correctly—are distinct but complementary aspects of human culture. For those who assert that science and religion must conflict, the most frequently cited proof of such conflict is the Galileo affair. In the popular interpretation of that unfortunate event, the famous physicist, inventor, and astronomer Galileo Galilei was sentenced to lifelong house arrest by the Catholic Church for asserting that the earth orbited the sun. The ecclesiastical authorities also forced him to recant his heliocentric (sun-centered) theory and promise not to advance it any longer. For conflict theorists, those who believe that science and religion are incompatible, this event provides one powerful example of the darkness of religion relative to the brilliance of science. The only solution, they propose, is to reject all religious belief and usher in a new age of unshackled reason, scientific investigation, and technological advance. Alas, the truth is not so simple.

Some pretty important people believe we will soon upload our minds into robots or virtual reality and then live forever. This is a book about that idea and, more importantly, about how it operates in our scientific, religious, and media cultures. There are chapters about the influence of Apocalyptic AI in academic robotics, the virtual world of Second Life, and political/moral life (including theology, law, robot rights, & empathy).

In the field of Science of Religion and associated fields of the Human Sciences revisions about the limits of reality have begun, in response both to intercultural encounters as well as to a rising awareness of research on the complexity of reality in the natural sciences. These have elicited proposals that the perspectives of the "religious" and the "para-normal" should be distinguished. This resonates with traditions of empirical and theoretical research often marginalized by the prevailing Positivist ideology and by Cognitivism. It also resonates with suppressed cultural traditions. A cautious movement towards a wider and differentiated assessment of reality and of phenomena, to be approached in these two perspectives, can however be observed in scholarship of religion, and even in the fold of Cognitivist Psychology.
This presentation, held at the conference of the German Association for Science of Religion / DVRW in Potsdam in 2018 explores the field and argues for the validity and heuristic power of this distinction.

Just a few decades ago, intuition was a dirty word in objective reductionist science every bit as much as mind and consciousness were absent from psychological studies. However, a crack began to appear in the stone façade of the scientific worldview by about 1970. Things began to slowly change in all of the sciences, but nowhere as much as in physics which had always been the stalwart and mainstay of the logic based disciplines of science. It is safe to say that mind was virtually lost after the first decade of the Second Scientific Revolution and science did not begin to regain consciousness until the 1970s. In other words, objective science and the non-scientific subjectivism of non-scientific disciplines seemed to be approaching a more common worldview if not merging together in the form of mystical thought and physics, just those two disciplines that claim the final word on our experiential interpretation of reality.  When this union of opposites finally happens, something new will appear - the MYSPHYT (pronounced misfit), literally a person who combines the conceptual methods of the MYStic and the PHYsicisT to further human knowledge. Although this article was written two decades ago and first published a few years later, it is more relevant today than ever before, which seems to verify the theory of the emerging MYSPHYT.

Author version. Please cite final published version available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/zygo.12766

As Alister McGrath has argued across a lifetime of work, we need to approach the binaries that have been handed down to us—personal/academic, emotional/intellectual, secular/religious—with a healthy skepticism toward the integrity of their boundaries, attending instead to the contact zones between them. This article connects McGrath's body of work to what I call “cogency theory,” an approach that rejects the thinking/feeling binary itself. It begins with a survey of how McGrath understands rationality—not only as multiple, but as defined, in meaningful ways, by feeling. This is illustrated by reexamining McGrath's controversy with Richard Dawkins, analyzing their debate in terms of how the argument itself comes to feel. This new paradigm allows us to supersede petty antagonisms built into contemporary culture—like the presumed science–religion conflict—and refocus on overarching concerns like the climate crisis. The article concludes with a question about the extent to which beliefs and “worldviews” define how we—either as groups or individuals—can make or unmake ecological disaster.

For nearly 10 years Russian Society for Experimental Psychology (1891-1900) conducted research of practices associated with the modern spiritualist movement. It's research program was deeply affected by a prominent russian spiritualist and scientist Nikolay Wagner, (1823-1907) who considered spiritualism being the only way for conquering social and moral disorder. The article, based on materials from N. Wagner's archive, sheds light on the motives, which encouraged Russian scientists to go for experiments in the field of modern spiritualism.

Quand des anthropologues, des historiennes et des psychologues investissent le thème des transgressions corporelles et symboliques cadrées par des rituels avec un nouveau regard, le résultat peut surprendre. C’est ce que fait ce livre qui se sert notamment des outils venant des approches queer. Le cadrage religieux, mythique ou cos- mologique qui organise l’expérience de l’ambiguïté́ (des pratiques, des catégories), permet de voir dans les transgressions de normes genrées des choix et non seulement des punitions ou des déviances tolérées. En traitant de cas éloignés du point de vue de leur contexte historique et culturel – des biberons antiques, des eunuques romains et indiens, des travestis urbains contemporains, un portrait médiéval, le culte d’une prostituée de la Rome antique, les images d’enfants dessinant Dieu – les différentes études rassemblées dans ce livre présentent la manière dont des pratiques sexuelles et corporelles transgressent l’ordre social et sont cadrées par des registres religieux, rituels ou queer qui se proposent comme cadre alternatif à l’ordre habituel.
Irene Becci est professeure à l’Institut des sciences sociales des religions (FTSR) de l’Université de Lausanne. Ses recherches portent sur la diversité religieuse et les nouvelles pratiques spirituelles dans des milieux particuliers comme les prisons, les espaces urbains ou l’activisme écologique, avec une attention particulière aux questions de genre.
Francesca Prescendi Morresi est directrice d’études à l’École Pra- tique des Hautes Études de Paris pour la chaire de Religions de Rome et du monde romain et chargée de cours à Genève en Histoire et anthropologie des religions. Elle étudie actuellement les rituels, leurs interprétations antiques ainsi que la hiérarchie et les relations des divinités dans le système polythéiste romain.

Technical images like charts, maps, and diagrams that saturated early modern visual culture provided fertile opportunities for cross-cultural communication. The Double Hemisphere Star Atlas 赤道南北両總星図 that Jesuit and Late Ming astronomers produced in Beijing, demonstrates how such imagery did more than simply transmit knowledge across borders. Through works like this celestial map, the Jesuits in China framed their brand of science as an empirical (and therefore trustworthy) practice. More specifically, the article considers how technical images functioned as a form of diplomacy, and how the idea of empiricism central to such epistemic images relate to Jesuit devotional art and spiritual practice at the Collegio Romano. Analyzing the rhetoric of empiricism that the early modern missionary scientists employed, this paper considers the agency of technical images in the making of a multicultural society.

A cosmologia é a ciência que investiga a origem, a estrutura e a dinâmica do universo. A cosmologia moderna surgiu como área da física no início do século XX. Em 1915, Einstein publicou sua Teoria da Relatividade Geral (TRG), de acordo com a qual o espaço-tempo é um
continuumquadridimensional não-euclidiano, isto é: o universo de Einstein é curvo ou possui curvaturas locais. Tais curvaturas são os campos gravitacionais que as concentrações de massa-energia criam em sua vizinhança. Em 1917, um novo trabalho de Einstein foi publicado
,defendendo a possibilidade de estudarmos o universo como um objeto” geométrico único, passível de ser abordado em sua totalidade. Nascia, então, a cosmologia enquanto ciência.

From amazon.com:
""Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time.

Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda.

In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again.

Ulrich Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading."

This thesis explores the discourses on the evolution of species in the first three decades of Francoism (1939-1967). Starting from the study of these discourses in the public sphere, it reaches the debates on this subject in elitist groups: ecclesiastical elites, scientists and the so-called ideologues of the regime. The thesis shows the concern of these elites for the circulation of evolutionary ideas among the general public. This preoccupation was manifested, first, in an evolutionary silence in the general press that lasted for the first ten years of Francoism and, subsequently, in the initiatives to build a version of evolutionism consistent with the ideological principles of the regime, and apt for its circulation in the public sphere. The thesis argues that the discourses on evolution played a key role in the Catholic culture -and science- project, which was one of the programmatic bases of the New State. Through them, not only the anti-materialist and transcendental rhetoric advocated by the regime, but also its anti-communist rhetoric, were legitimized.
At an international level, the ideal of science intended for the New Spain clashed with the principles on which the Modern Synthesis of Evolution, or Neo-Darwinism, was being built. Neo-Darwinism rejected any transcendental explanation of the evolutionary process. The new current was being promoted with strength and resources from the United Kingdom and the United States. This thesis reveals the involvement of Spanish scientists in the construction of a scientifically based “Traditional Synthesis of Evolution” able to compete with Neo-Darwinism. The implantation of a Catholic science depended on the success of this alternative synthesis. And the Catholic science was part of the Catholic culture in which the ideologues of the Francois state had based the implantation of the new regime. In this sense, this thesis proposes that the scientists were also converted into ideologues of the Franco regime. Their discourses on science helped to build its foundations, legitimize it and perpetuate it.
The study of the public discourses leads to the focus on the Generation of ’48. This group, who were heirs and continuers of the traditional Catholic and monarchist Spanish thought, competed with other factions of the regime for cultural hegemony. Imposing their cultural project was considered a key step in achieving their political goals. The culture they advocated was, like that of all groups, a Catholic and unitary culture, in which all branches of knowledge were linked and united to the trunk of theology.
The peculiarity of the Generation of ’48 was that it tried to liberate culture of all past and present “heterodoxy” and to base it solely in the most “orthodox” tradition. This group tried to establish and disseminate a version of evolution coherent with its principles, free of all “heterodox” seeds: an “Evolution without problem” for Franco's Spain. This faction of the regime dominated strategic positions in the management of information and culture in Spain for much of the period covered in this thesis. Therefore, its discourses on evolution are the focus of this thesis. Through the initiatives to create its discourse, in which renowned Spanish scientists participated, this thesis has discovered a network that brought together the Generation of ’48 in a common endeavour beyond what the historiography had brought to light.
The “Traditional Synthesis of Evolution”, which was attempted and spread in Spain, however, was not the autarchic fruit of an isolated Franco regime. The research shows the connections and international collaborations of the project, and shows how Spain not only sought to be “the spiritual reserve of the West” but also “the scientific reserve of the West”. The Generation of ’48 was especially excited about this project, in which several renowned Spanish scientists played a crucial role.

In this article, see pages 164, 166-168 for Stuart's discussion of the Grolier Codex.  It is highly significant that the Mexican State of Chiapas and the Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas chose to include the Grolier Codex as an authentic ancient Maya book in 1985 and make a fine color facsimile available along with the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid codices for further research. 

This review and essay of "Los Codices Mayas" is being posted as a personal tribute to my friend and colleague, the late George E. Stuart, Ph.D. (1935 - 2014) for his great generosity and many extraordinary contributions promoting world archaeology over several generations.

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

Ali Sedâd Bey Kavâʿidu’t-Tahavvülât fî Harekâti’z-Zerrât (Parçacıkların Hareketlerindeki Dönüşümün İlkeleri) adlı eseriyle 19. yüzyıl Avrupa’sındaki atomculuğu, ilk defa olarak da termodinamiği ve Darwin’in doğal seçilim kuramını Türkçe olarak ayrıntılı bir şekilde tanıtır, felsefi bir değerlendirmeye tâbi tutar ve bunların Eşʿari kelâmı perspektifinden nasıl yorumlanabileceğine dair önerilerde bulunur. Kitabı yazış amacını açıklarken Avrupa’da ortaya çıkan yeni (modern) bilimlerin (fünûn-ı cedîde) ülkemizde de tanınmasını sağlamanın yanı sıra bu bilimleri İslâm aleyhine kullanmak isteyenlere de cevap vermek istediğini belirtir. Ali Sedâd modern bilimin İslâm ile çelişmediğini, tam tersine İslâm’ı desteklediğini iddia eder. Bu tezini gerekçelendirmek için atomculuk ve termodinamiğin pek çok noktada Eşʿari kelâmıyla aynı tezlere sahip olduğunu göstermeye çalışır. Ayrıca bu bilimsel teorilerin materyalist bir metafiziğe değil de Eşʿari kelâmındaki vesilecilik (occasionalism) anlayışına sahip bir metafiziğe nasıl oturtulabileceğini enerji, kuvvet ve doğa kanunu gibi kavramları felsefi bir analize tabi tutarak göstermek ister. Kısaca Ali Sedâd bu eseriyle Batı’daki bilimsel gelişmeleri epeyce yakından takip ettiğini gösterir. Fakat daha önemlisi bu gelişmelerin sadece nakilciliğini yapmayıp onların felsefiarka planına dikkat çekerek onları kritik bir değerlendirmeye tâbi tutmakla çağını anlamaya ve onunla hesaplaşmaya çalışan zihni tavrı temsil eden bir örnek- model ortaya koyar.

While a generation of theorists assumed that secularization was a necessary outcome of modernization, a newer group of scholars have argued that Western Christendom constructed a normative binary opposition between the " religious " and the " secular, " which it then attempted to impose globally. This putative binary has been interrogated in a number of ways. This paper articulates a productive recent line of approach, I initially proposed in The Invention of Religion in Japan, 2012, which was to introduce a third term— " superstition " —into the model. Succinctly put, " superstition " was often seen as both the false double of " religion " and a crucial enemy of scientific truth and the secular state. Thus, I argue focusing on the excluded term in this trinary can provide insights into the way in which all three categories are mutually constituted. It also opens the door for the re-theorization of " secularism " and its historic ideological features.