This past month was the second ever Richard Johnson Lecture put on by the Australia-based Centre for Public Christianity. This year’s speaker was historian Peter Harrison of the University of Queensland and former Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. I’ve followed (and bought)[ref]The books I own by him include The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His most recent book The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015) seems to draw on his 2011 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.[/ref] Harrison’s work ever since I listened to his interviews with CPX years ago and include him among great historians of science and religion like Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg. This lecture is divided into four parts:
- Science and Religion as Competing Belief Systems
- Modern Science and Patterns of Belief: Sociology
- The Rise of Science and the Decline of Religion: History
- Origins of the Conflict Thesis
For those interested in the history of science and religion, I strongly recommend giving the lecture and Q&A a listen.