Mark A Kalthoff

According to Shores of Knowledge, Columbus issued in "the most significant unintended consequences of all: the breaking open of the closed world of Christianity" (14). Hers is the old story of Enlightenment empiricism's victory over the text-bound and closed-minded religiosity of "Christians whose Bible was presumed to describe all that humans needed to know" (18). [...]it belongs on that list of dispensable titles that every library should ignore.

Ultimately, fewer and fewer interested parties found reason to affirm either a new natural theology that affirmed a divine hand in the evolutionary course of nature or an idea of Progress that seemed so much at odds with the world situation. Because the proposed reconciliation had been founded upon these notions, the enterprise miscarried. A highly regarded historian of science at the Queen's University of Belfast, Bowler has produced many books on the history of evolution that have rightly become staples of the Darwin industry and contributed mightily to our understanding of the idea of evolution. Were the same terrain to be plowed by a historian with a Christian commitment, there is reason to suspect that a different tale would emerge. [...]some such historian rises to the challenge, however, Bowler's copious, and in places cumbersomely written, rendition will suffice very well as the best starting place for a look at science and religion in early-twentieth-century Britain.