Edward Davis

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Messiah University

In response to William Jennings Bryan’s efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the early 1920s, several leading scientists, including two Nobel laureates and five AAAS presidents, joined forces with liberal Protestant clergy to popularize their “modernist” religious views about science by writing religious pamphlets. Published by a corresponde...

A complete, scholarly edition of Boyle's published works, including two volumes of hitherto unpublished writings.

Robert Boyle is an outstanding example of a Christian scientist whose faith interacted fundamentally with his science. His remarkable piety was the driving force behind his interest in science and his Christian character shaped the ways in which he conducted his scientific life. A deep love for scripture, coupled ironically with a lifelong struggle...

Boyle’s passion for apologetics was already evident in his early twenties, when he was profoundly impressed by reading defenses of Christianity by Philippe de Mornay and others. His primary motive was to persuade wayward Christians, including members of his immediate family, to live more piously and to devote themselves to charitable works. After h...

A critical edition of ten rare pamphlets on science and religion published from 1922–1931 by the University of Chicago Divinity School. In the years surrounding the Scopes trial in 1925, liberal Protestant scientists, theologians, and clergy sought to diminish opposition to evolution and to persuade American Christians to adopt more positive attit...

The great chemist Robert Boyle was also a serious student of the Bible and Christian theology, both of which profoundly influenced his natural philosophy. Christian beliefs and moral attitudes motivated him to extend human dominion over the creation by advancing scientific knowledge and giving medicines from his laboratory to the poor. His outspoke...

Robert Boyle, well known in scientific circles, has still not received the credit he deserves in philosophy. A leader in experimental philosophy, his interests range from morality and philosophy of religion to epistemology and the philosophy of science. The Bloomsbury Companion to Robert Boyle brings together the latest work on the lesser known asp...

American physicist Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962), who shared the Nobel Prize with C. T. R. Wilson in 1927, was a leading public intellectual in the decades surrounding World War II. A very active Presbyterian, Compton’s “modernist” Christian beliefs influenced his views on several important topics about which he wrote extensively: evolution and...

Since its origination in the late nineteenth century, the warfare metaphor has been used to characterize the relationship between science and religion, especially orthodox Christianity. Though thoroughly discredited by historians of science, the ideological descendants of Thomas Huxley, who spoke of science in quasi-religious terms, have kept the w...

Few American scientists have devoted as much attention to religion and science as Harvard geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather (1888–1978). Responding to antievolutionism during the 1920s, he taught Sunday School classes, assisted in defending John Scopes, and wrote Science in Search of God (1928). Over the next 40 years, Mather explored the place of...

The final part of this essay examines Compton’s views on immortality and the morality of atomic warfare. He affirmed life after death, basing this on his faith in the value that God places on the conscious persons produced by the divinely guided process of evolution; however he did not accept the bodily resurrection of Jesus. He also used a type of...

The second part of this essay discusses Arthur Holly Compton’s religious activities and beliefs, especially his concept of God. Compton gave a prominent role to natural theology, stressing the need to postulate “an intelligence working through nature” and using this to ground religious faith. At the same time, this founder of quantum mechanics used...

American physicist Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962), who shared the Nobel prize with C. T. R. Wilson in 1927, was a leading public intellectual in the decades surrounding World War Two. A very active Presbyterian, Compton’s “modernist” Christian beliefs influenced his views on several important topics: evolution and the design argument, human freed...

Eighty years ago Samuel Christian Schmucker was one of the most widely known science writers and lecturers in the United States. Born into the most important Lutheran family in American history, he wrote five books about evolution, eugenics, religion, and the environment for major publishing houses, including two titles that were used nationally as...

Robert Boyle (1627–91) was the most influential British scientist of the late seventeenth century. His huge archive, which has been at the Royal Society since 1769, has only recently been explored, leading to a new understanding of many aspects of Boyle's thought. This volume brings together the essential materials for understanding the Boyle Pap...

American thinking about religion and science in the nineteenth century was substantially informed by the powerful metaphor of God as the “author”of two “books,” nature and scripture, which ultimately must agree. American scientists and theologians followed Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, who had used this metaphor to elevate the status of scienc...

An eyewitness account of the Kitzmiller v Dover trial concerning intelligent design in public schools.

The book examines the various ways Christian scholars incorporate faith into their academic endeavors. Literature in this area has frequently assumed a Reformed and evangelical style that links Christianity and academic study under the rubric of “the integration of faith and learning.” In contrast, Scholarship and Christian Faith argues that there...

A work by Robert Boyle inspired Isaac Watts to write a text later set to music by William Billings, in his anthem, "Creation."

Perhaps the greatest irony about the contemporary religion-science dialogue is the fact that, despite their own strongly articulated denials, many thinkers implicitly accept the “warfare” thesis of A. D. White—that is, they agree with White that traditional theology has proved unable to engage science in fruitful conversation. More than most others...

The significance of Isaac Newton for the history of Christianity and science is undeniable: his professional work culminated the Scientific Revolution that saw the birth of modern science, while his private writings evidence a lifelong interest in the relationship between God and the world. Yet the typical picture of Newton as a paragon of Enlighte...

In this book, published in 1686, the scientist Robert Boyle (1627–91) attacked prevailing notions of the natural world which depicted 'Nature' as a wise, benevolent and purposeful being. Boyle, one of the leading mechanical philosophers of his day, believed that the world was best understood as a vast, impersonal machine, fashioned by an infinite,...

In the mid-1930s, British philosopher Michael Beresford Foster argued that Christian theology deeply influenced the content of early modern natural philosophy. Theological assumptions about God’s relation to created minds and created things, Foster claimed, affected philosophical assumptions about how created minds ought to try to attain knowledge...

This study throws new light on the composition of Boyle's Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (1686); it also draws more general conclusions about Boyle's methods as an author and his links with his context. Its basis is a careful study of the extant manuscript drafts for the work, and their relationship with the published edit...

Reports of the demise of the “warfare” school of writing the history of religion and science may yet be premature, but it seems safe to say that it has had a near-death experience. Much recent historiography has underscored the shallowness, futility, and wrongheadedness of treating controversies involving religion and science simply as skirmishes i...

This book presents a new view of Robert Boyle (1627–91), the leading British scientist in the generation before Newton. It comprises a series of essays by scholars from Europe and North America which scrutinise Boyle's writings on science, philosophy and theology in detail, bringing out the subtlety of his ideas and the complexity of his relationsh...

Robert Boyle was the author of several works that appeared without his name on the title page. It has long been assumed that one of these was Reasons Why a Protestant Should not Turn Papist (London 1687), but this has never been established. This essay reviews all the available evidence about Boyle's authorship, denies the attribution, and identifi...

According to a persistent story, exactly one hundred years ago a sailor named James Bartley was swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falkland Islands. About thirty-six hours later his fellow sailors found him, unconscious but alive, inside the belly of the animal. What follows is the result of my attempt to uncover the real story, as well as the stor...

The problem of creation, which has largely disappeared from contemporary scientific discourse, was central to the scientific revolution. What modern scientists recognise as the only relevant relation – that between the knower and the known, man and nature — was understood three centuries ago as secondary to God's relation to the created order and h...

O ne of the benefits of being a historian is that you get to encounter the past in the present, through the perceptions and experiences of our predecessors. I have yet to figure out how to encounter the future, yet historians are often asked to prognosticate: considering the history of this or that, what do you think will happen in the next quarter...