Summary
Yves Gingras: Science and religion: the impossibility of dialogue
Nowadays, we often hear calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relationship between science and religion returned to public discourse and what is the discussion about? To answer these questions, the historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras traces the long history of the problematic relationship between science and religion, from Galileo's conviction for heresy in 1633, to his rehabilitation by John Paul II. in 1992. The author reconstructs the process of gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the field of scientific activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Contrary to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras claims that science and religion are social institutions that lead to incompatible ways of knowing, that they are rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there has never been, nor can be, a true dialogue between them.
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