Publisher's Synopsis
In "The Book of Nature" Olaf Pedersen presents in three essays an overview of the history of science and its relationship to theology. He focuses on the overarching metaphor of "The book of Nature," a mythological discourse on nature that presents one of the most fertile and provocative symbolic pictures of the world.;Pedersen begins by discussing the emergence of science in the ancient world, in particular when the Greeks replaced their myths about nature with their insights into the immanent connections in a cosmos of law, order and beauty. Three distinct conceptions of science resulted from this occurrence: the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Archimedean traditions. The book then considers a few episodes in the long relationship between natural science and Christian theology to demonstrate that science and faith have been able not only to live together, but also to establish a relationship from which they both have profited.;In the final section of the book, Pedersen explores the "physico-theology" of the Enlightenment and then traces the progress of the interaction between science and theology from Newton to Paley, and up to Darwin and Newman. He concludes that the debate on evolution was marked by the fact that faith was represented by a weak theology that largely ignored precisely those trends of the faith that would have made a fruitful dialogue with evolutionary science.
