Theology and the Scientific Imagination

This dense book covers the transition period between the mediaeval world of theology to the modern world of science and the continuities maintained between the two in terms of secular theology relating particularly to God's omnipresence, Divine omnipotence and laws of nature, and Divine providence and the course of history. The author analyses the reworking of these themes where 'science, philosophy and theology are almost one and the same occupation' – an interesting connection was first made in the 1930s by the Catholic philosopher Etienne Gilson in tracing the origins of modern scientism to mediaeval nominalism, and one can see how scientism is in fact a modern form of secular theology. Protestantism contributed to this process of secularisation through the disenchantment of nature that accompanied the rise of mechanistic philosophy. In addition, we see the birth of 'the ideal of a system of our entire knowledge founded on one method' with its accompanying monocausality, which would have been a methodological sin for Aristotle. The sheer amount of detail in the book makes it more suitable for historians and philosophers of science, although general readers interested in the field will gain considerable insight from this classic work.