Books in the Cambridge Library Collection - Science and Religion series

Specialising in optics and the motion of fluids, physicist George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for over fifty years, President of the Royal Society, Master of Pembroke College and the most prominent religious scientist of his age. First published in 1893, Natural Theology contains the text of ten lectures he gave at Edinburgh. Stokes favoured the design argument for the existence of a Christian god, arguing against Darwinism. He believed the Bible to be true, though at times metaphorical. The lectures move from substantive observations on cosmology, electricity, gravity, ocular anatomy and evolution through to non sequiturs regarding providential design, human exceptionalism, the supernatural, spiritual immortality, and Christ's dual materiality and divinity. Fossilising a moment of impending shift in the history of ideas, these lectures highlight an intellectual dissonance in the Victorian scientific establishment.

Originally published in Dutch in 1715, and reissued here in its 1724 English translation, this two-volume work by the philosopher and theologian Bernard Nieuwentyt (1654-1718) argues that the scientific examination of the natural world is compatible with religious belief. The book notably influenced the natural theology of William Paley.

Charles Gore (1853-1932), the future Bishop of Oxford, edited this volume of essays published in 1891. The contributors believed that theology must engage with advances in scientific and historical knowledge (in this case evolutionary science and Biblical criticism), and use them to develop new and better interpretations of doctrine.