Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations

Abstract

Chapter 11, "The Shifting Role of the Biblical Account of Nature", impressively well.He explains the freedom of German scholars to embark on modern criticism by their working in state-rather than church-supported institutions.He then moves with flexible mind and sure step through British and American Protestantism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.In chapter 12, Constance Clark (Worcester, Massachusetts) tackles anthropology and its centuries-long struggle to escape from the doctrine of original sin.Setting against this an evolutionary but non-Darwinian picture of progressive advance, compassionate (often Quaker) Westerners strove towards the impossible ideal of objective accounts of less technically advanced societies.One concludes from Clark's generous and wide-ranging survey that, even in the late twentieth century, anthropology was still searching for its own identity, as it had done in the days of Tyler and Boas a century before.Finally, Bernard Lightman (Toronto) writes under the teasing title "The Theology of Victorian Scientific Naturalists".He principally discusses Spencer, the fundamentally optimistic evolutionist, Huxley, the ultimately pessimistic one, and Tyndall, contriving an optimistic account even of thermodynamics.These three men would all have claimed either 'agnostic' or 'atheist' labels, yet each was as influenced by his Christian upbringing as such superficially diametric opponents as Paley before them or Thomson (Lord Kelvin), their younger contemporary.The resultant essay is superb-clear-thinking and deeply sensitive, a fitting last chapter.However, I wonder whether several of the previous authors would have liked to (be allowed to?) concentrate on a similarly focused topic.Collections present much diversity of style, approach, thought level, and worldview, in addition to the obvious diversity of allocated topic, so that a cover-all judgement is never wholly satisfactory.Overall, nevertheless, Science without God?provides a fascinating, highly informative series of supplements to my knowledge and challenges to many long-held assumptions.