Science and Religion (Creative Lives and Works)

Science and Religion: Edwin Salpeter, Owen Gingerich and John Polkinghorne is a collection of interviews being published as a book. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of 40 years, the five conversations in this volume, are part of Social Science Press’s series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions also form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences, the sciences and to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost physicists and historians of science.

Edwin Salpeter recounts rather dispassionately his departure from Austria to Australia to escape Nazi persecution. And in doing so broaches, not only, on the prevailing anti-Semitic sentiment of the time, but takes the debate forward into the one between science and religion. Though he only touches upon it, this debate finds resonance in the words of Owen Gingerich who belonged to the Mennonite dispensation and who has been rather vocal about the pro-Christian anti-creationist ideology. However, it is John Polkinghorne who provides a deep insight into the ongoing debate on science and religion.

Immensely riveting as conversations, this collection reveals how intrinsically related science and religion are, how pertinent it is to understand the workings of science in the context of religion. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in Astronomy and Cosmology as well as the History of Science, but also to those with an inquisitive mind.

Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master’s degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012.

Mark Turin is a British anthropologist, linguist and radio broadcaster who specializes in the Himalayas and the Pacific Northwest. From 2014–18, he served as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Acting Co-Director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology and director of the Digital Himalaya Project. Turin serves as founding editor of the World Oral Literature Series with the Cambridge-based Open Book Publishers, which aims to preserve and promote the oral literatures of Indigenous communities in innovative, responsive, ethical and culturally-appropriate ways. Turin's work has been recognized by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the Killam Trust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Turin