100 Books Like Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion

The Scopes “Monkey” trial was a global media phenomenon and has passed into history as an epic battle, even more dramatic than the Galileo trial 300 years earlier. It certainly is a dramatic story, and Edward Larson retells it in this book with style and pace.

But, as is so often the case in the history of science and religion, the devil is in the detail, and the popular image of ignorant, demented fundamentalists taking on and being humiliated by the cool logic and evidence-based reasoning of secularists is only part of it. Eugenics, racism, politics, economics, biblical theology, and good old-fashioned commercial greed – all have their role to play in the entertaining story of this famous trial.

The popular view is that “mediaeval science” is a contradiction in terms, but this is… well, nonsense, really. The mediaeval world did not have “scientists” (the term was only invented in the 1830s), but it did have “natural philosophers” who studied the world about them with great care and interest.

True, they worked within a totally different framework from later scientists, and that made the kind of leaps forward that were made in the 17th century impossible. But nevertheless, they thought logically, examined carefully, reasoned well, and even sometimes experimented successfully.

James Hannam’s book is a great introduction to a world that seems very alien to us but is closer than we might think.

In the last decades of the 20th century, there emerged an increasingly acrimonious argument over what Darwinism meant, especially for humans. This wasn’t simply between creationists and Intelligent Design advocates on one side and Darwinians on the other. The Darwinists disagreed among themselves, something with as much fury as they disagreed with the other side.

Andrew Brown is a journalist who, unusually, has genuine expertise in both science and religion. More importantly, he is a cracking writer, and The Darwin Wars is not only intelligent and profound but also clever and witty.

Simon Conway Morris is a Cambridge academic, and his book is published by Cambridge University Press–but don’t let that put non-academic readers off. This is one of the few books I think you can genuinely call important.

It takes on the now wearyingly familiar idea that evolution is pure random chance, with no direction, no purpose, no goal, and dismantles it–with page after page of detailed information.

This is absolutely no ill-informed, anti-evolutionary rant but the work of a great scholar with complete mastery of his subject. While it does not engage with religion directly, the implications for religion (and indeed for so many other vital human beliefs and activities) are left hanging in the air.

Tom Segev is one of the once “new” Israeli historians who, in the 1980s, began writing a critical history of their young state. I particularly like this portrait he drew of early Israel, which fought for independence and statehood against external aggression and took in hundreds of thousands of new immigrants within a short period of time.

It is not an idealized account, and it talks, for instance, about the selective nature of early Israeli immigration policy–a topic I also touched upon in my book. Emblematic for the complex history of Israel, a country forged from migration, is the author’s dedication of the English translation, published in 1986, to his mother, an immigrant from Germany “who never learnt Hebrew properly and could not read this book until it came out in English.” 

Full disclosure: I spent two weeks studying with Professor Volf in a summer seminar on Faith and Globalization in 2010, which occurred after the publication of my book.

Along with Tony Blair, he taught a similar undergraduate seminar between 2008 and 2011 at Yale University, which became the basis for Flourishing. I admire Volf’s boldness in summarizing the vast debates between major world religions concisely here. But, characteristically, he defines his terms precisely and defends his thesis clearly.

Although he identifies with the Christian tradition, he is eager to foster an inclusive dialogue between that tradition and others. His consistently evenhanded tone models the very kind of dialogue our world needs if we are to begin making peace.

It can be hard to see how religion impacts the world, but this book opened a world of perspectives for me. Written by some of the biggest names in the academic world—and including recorded conversations between them—I found this book to be essential for understanding religion’s interactions with gender, race, power, and the shifting nature of secular societies.

I always like reading the most important modern thinkers, and what I appreciate about this book is it is manageable and digestible, so it serves as a great introduction to topics that fill numerous library shelves. It caps off with a brilliant discussion by Craig Calhoun, who rounds out an eye-opening set of discussions.

This book made me rethink how we consider the idea of the Middle Ages–full stop.

Pegg tracks the medieval period through the concept of holiness, and if you think that might be boring, then I have got news for you about how wild medieval (and Late Antique!) people were.

Whether it is being stoked to be sent to your death in the gladiatorial ring or writing transcendent fiction about how the girl you had a crush on as a teenager is waiting for you in heaven, Pegg shows that medieval people were constantly rethinking what it meant to be alive and how to square that in a Christian society. I guarantee it will make Trad Caths absolutely livid.  

I love reading books on the history of science in its social and cultural context if they are well-written and the author is truly knowledgeable. In my opinion, no one alive does this better than Stephen Gaukroger. This first of the four volumes Gaukroger has written on this subject covers the Medieval and Renaissance run-up to modern science and is my favorite, though the other three are equally excellent.

I like how Gaukroger traces the emergence of modern science from the philosophical ideas of St. Augustine through the creation of the universities and Renaissance magical philosophy to the creation of a materialistic, mathematics—and experiment-based science of nature. I cannot fault either the writing or the scholarship.

Alister McGrath is one of the most readable authors on difficult areas. Here, he deals with some very general issues of religious faith in a scientific age and addresses the personal side of the equation.

Religion won’t go away, and McGrath tells us how and why this is so, bringing in some important philosophical questions that he explains in a very down-to-earth way. Whether we realize it or not, we all have a personal philosophy, and science and faith can help each other. I found it hard to put this book down.