Religion and Science

Religion and Science

From Sconce and the Modern World (1925

After leaving Cambridge, Whitehead became professor at London's Imperial College of Science and Technology. Later, in 1924, Whitehead accepted a professorship in philosophy at Harvard University. The Lowell Lectures, which he delivered in 1925, were published as Science and the Modern Word, one of the most influential books of its time, it demonstrated that his interests and insights had successfully encompassed, not just science and mathematics, but religion and the humanities as well.

Much of Whitehead's work is highly technical and thus is available only to those with special training But most of his later philosophical work was written with an eye toward affecting a somewhat more general although still reasonably well educated reader.

Religion and Science discusses a controversy that was particularly apparent in society since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The issue was relevant in the 1920s because of  the celebrated Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which took place in 1925, testing whether or not a science teacher could teach the theory of evolution in a public school in that state. But, f course, the conflict between religion and science has a way of erupting age after age, and as whitehead points out, the disagreements became serious as early as the seventeenth century. In the book from which the following selection if taken, Whitehead seems to be making a genuine effort to find a means of putting the conflict into perspective and of softening the disagreements. While acknowledging that religion and science appear to be in conflict.