Download e-book for iPad: Dealing with Darwin (Medicine, Science, and Religion in by David N. Livingstone

Using position, politics, and rhetoric as analytical instruments, historic geographer David N. Livingstone investigates how non secular groups sharing a Scots Presbyterian history engaged with Darwin and Darwinism on the flip of the 20 th century. His findings, offered because the prestigious Gifford Lectures, remodel our understandings of the connection among technology and religion.

The details of place—whether in Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Princeton, or Columbia, South Carolina—shaped the reaction to Darwin’s theories. have been they tolerated, repudiated, or welcomed? Livingstone exhibits how Darwin was once learn in numerous methods, with that means distilled from Darwin's texts counting on readers' personal histories—their literary genealogies and cultural preoccupations. That the idea of evolution fared otherwise somewhere else, Livingstone writes, is "exactly what Darwin may have expected. because the idea subtle, it diverged."

Dealing with Darwin indicates the profound quantity to which theological debates approximately evolution have been rooted in such issues as anxieties over keep an eye on of schooling, the politics of race relatives, the character of neighborhood medical traditions, and demanding situations to conventional cultural identification. In a few settings, conciliation with the recent conception, even endorsement, was once possible—demonstrating that getting to the explicit nature of person groups subverts a bent to imagine a unmarried courting among technology and faith usually, evolution and Christianity specifically.

Livingstone concludes with modern examples to remind us that what scientists can say and what others can listen in several venues vary this present day simply up to they did within the past.