At some level of consciousness, Victorians understood that the real threat to the Abrahamic religious worldview was not Charles’s evolutionary perspective on the natural world. It was the skepticism of the increasingly secular world about the importance, even more the unique status, of the human species in the story of the universe and its creation.Read More

Charles Darwin wrote that The Origin of Species was “one long argument” marshalling evidence not only for his theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection but also against independent or special creation of each species by a creator. He showed over and over again that the facts are explicable “on my theory”...Read More

The marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin was an embodiment of the modern tension between science and religion. Though the Darwins had a famously successful marriage, they also famously disagreed about the existence of God and God’s role in the world. Barely a month after their wedding in 1839, Emma wrote Charles a letter expressing...Read More

Christianity played an enormously important role in Western European history, especially after 313, when Constantine officially allowed Christians to openly worship in the Roman Empire. Only a century later, the empire started to disintegrate under the pressure of wave after wave of invasion by “barbarians” from the north and the east of the Rhine and...Read More

Are science and religion incompatible? Intellectually? Or just socially and politically? Much of my book is an exploration of the origins of this “warfare” or “conflict” scenario that has become so widespread in modern thinking. Lawrence M. Principe, highly regarded historian of science and chemist at Johns Hopkins University, spoke for most present-day historians of...Read More