When Adam, Lord Gifford, penned the will that would soon bring the Gifford Lectures into existence, he carefully considered the scope of his bequests to the four Scottish universities. The lecturers appointed by his Trustees were, he instructed, to address ‘Natural Theology, in the widest sense of that term’. This extended sense was to include ‘The Knowledge of God, the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause… and the Knowledge of His Nature and Attributes, the Knowledge of the Relations which men and the whole universe bear to Him, the Knowledge of the Nature and Foundation of Ethics or Morals, and of all Obligations and Duties hence arising’.1

This impressive range of subjects not only reflects Gifford's breadth of scholarship but also the areas that he considered in need of further investigation and continuing debate. In the decades following the advent of German higher criticism and the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species there was no shortage of questions to be confronted about how to conceptualise God, how to understand ‘His’ relation to the universe, and how to frame a theologically-based ethic. Writing his will in 1885 Gifford conceived Natural Theology as the appropriate umbrella to cover these important and diverse topics. He also instructed that in their investigations prospective lectured were to deploy reason, not revelation. Indeed, he explicitly stated his intention that they should ‘treat their subject as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, indeed, in one sense, the only science, that of Infinite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special, exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation’. If the reader of Gifford's will is left in any doubt about his conception of Natural Theology, his very next sentence is impressively concise: ‘I wish it considered just as astronomy or chemistry is.’2

As Neil Spurway comments in his introduction to the Glasgow centenary series, professional scientists—even many among Gifford's contemporaries—might smile at this outdated conception of science and at the apparent implication that studies of ‘the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause’ should be conducted as a science, deploying the methods of experimental investigation.3 Yet, as Spurway notes, the term Natural Theology possesses a long and honourable history. Many earlier writers—particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—committed themselves to the project of illuminating theology by the ‘light of nature’ or, what we might call, the power of reason. Gifford's notion of Natural Theology appears somewhat anachronistic today, but that is itself a reminder that both science and theology (and also the interaction between them) change with time and have changed considerably over the intervening period. The document responsible for the Gifford Lectures was the product of a Scottish lawyer born into a highly religious Edinburgh household in 1820. Moreover, the subjects that Gifford directed lecturers to address have not been static but possess rich histories. Consequently many of the published Gifford Lectures have themselves become key texts in the histories of theology, philosophy, ethics and science.

In 1885 the ‘History of Science’ did not exist as an academic subject and, not surprisingly, it did not feature in Lord Gifford's will. Yet he was probably aware that Adam Smith, William Whewell, Auguste Comte, among others, had written books about the way science had developed over the centuries. However, only in the twentieth century, in the years between the First and Second World War—and, increasingly, during the post-war period—did the History of Science become an academic subject. One of the many topics that have continually exercised historians of science is the ‘interrelation of science and religion’ as it has been understood by different individuals and communities in different periods. Gifford himself called for consideration of ‘the Knowledge of the Relations which men and [particularly] the whole universe bear to Him’. Such phrases sound rather clumsy today, but they indicate a domain of enquiry that deserves serious historical analysis and that we intend in some measure to address. Although previous Gifford Lecturers, including Ian Barbour, Reijer Hooykaas and Stanley Jaki, have made impressive use of historical examples, the emphasis in the present volume is rather different. We are not seeking to support any particular theological position but rather to show how recent developments in the History of Science can contribute to the analysis and understanding of science-religion relationships and how they have been constructed. For those unfamiliar with the History of Science it should be emphasised that the field, already mediating between what C. P. Snow called the two Cultures,4 has been undergoing exciting developments largely due to further inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisation Increasingly it has been enriched by insights developed in philosophy, sociology, linguistics, anthropology and in other branches of history. In this series of Gifford Lectures our primary aim has been to show how new ways of understanding past science can be used to suggest fresh approaches to the science-religion domain.

This is not a history in a conventional sense; still less a chronological account of some notional ‘science-religion relationship’.5 We shall not be starting with conceptions of the Creation as expressed in Genesis and ending with the implications for theology of evidence, widely reported in the summer of 1996, for life having once existed on Mars. The scope of this volume is much more limited and its aims more modest. In each of the ensuing chapters a particular form of analysis will be developed and applied to historical material. Each chapter—which is an extended and revised version of the corresponding lecture delivered in Glasgow—thus provides an historical commentary on a specific area of debate within the science-religion domain. Although the chapters can be read separately, there are many recurrent themes, the most important being the rejection of any ‘master-narrative’. We use this term to refer to the widely-accepted assumption that there is a definitive historical account of how since and religion have been (and are) interrelated. Rejection of this assumption—which is explicitly challenged in chapters 2 and 3—also justifies the diversity of approaches we develop throughout this volume. It should also be stressed that we have not applied these form of analysis directly to the history of ‘sacred texts’ and their composition within particular religious traditions. We defer to others better acquainted with the respective bodies of scholarship.

The authors feel greatly honoured at having been invited to deliver the 1995–6 series of Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. We would like to express our appreciation to the Principal, Professor Graeme Davies, the Administrator, Mrs E. E. Reynolds, and to members of the Gifford Lectureship Committee who warmly received us and generously entertained us during our time in Glasgow. We are particularly appreciative of the generosity and congeniality of Dr Neil Spurway (the Committee's Convenor) who added to the intellectual vitality of the proceedings. All those who attended the lectures are thanked, particularly for their comments and criticism.

For helpful discussions relating to several of the topics encountered in the ensuing chapters we would like to express our sincere thanks to Janice Brooke, Barbara Cantor, Moti Feingold, Lynette Hunter, Chris Kenny, Edward Milligan, Jacqui Stewart, Jonathan Topham, Tomas Vanheste, and members of the Science/Theology Constitution held at the Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton (1993–6). We gratefully acknowledge the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the President and Council of the Royal Society of London for granting us permission to quote from manuscript material. Many of the illustrations were kindly supplied by the ‘Special Collections’ staff, Leeds University Library. For help in preparing illustrations we gratefully acknowledge the photographic units at the Universities of Lancaster and Leeds. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation to the staff of T & T Clark, for their help and support.