Gifford lectures,

Mary Midgley in this book discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather around the notion of science, and, in particular, some very odd recent expressions of them. When everyone viewed the world as God's creation, there was no problem about the element of worship involved in studying it, nor about science's function in mapping people's lives. But now these things have grown puzzling. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much vaster and grander from it--the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age. Even in the past, the myths surrounding science were often strange. This book discusses Francis Bacon's bizarre vision of a 'masculine birth of time', in which the seventeenth-century scientists saw themselves as sexual victors over a prostrate Mother Nature. Today, some scientists are again holding up the prize of the conquest of nature, this time through rocketry, genetic engineering and intelligent computers. These will dominate the entire universe and make our species effectively immortal. They claim, too, that human intelligence played an essential part in bringing the universe into existence in the first place. Science as Salvation discusses the function and meaning of such fantasies, which project onto a cosmic scale the biological drama considered in the author's earlier Evolution as a Religion. Taking them seriously as symptoms of a genuine myth-hunger, it suggests that the proper function of science may need to include wider perspectives which would make it plain that such desperate, compensatory dramas are unnecessary.

Chadwick discusses secularism as a social and intellectual problem in nineteenth-century European life. Issues such as liberalism, anticlericalism, and scientific principles take root in the European mind. Individuals such as Karl Marx and Voltaire influence the transformation.

These eleven lectures were originally presented by John Dewey at the University of Edinburgh in 1929, when he was seventy years old. They represent his most mature thinking on the theory of knowledge and how it relates to human behavior.

All these lectures converge to this conclusion: that the Middle Ages produced, besides a Christian literature and a Christian art as everyone admits, this very Christian philosophy which is a matter of dispute. No one, of course, maintains that this mediaeval philosophy was created out of nothing, nor yet that all mediaeval philosophy was Christian -- just as no one maintains that mediaeval literature and art were created out of nothing or were wholly Christian. - Preface.

"Roaming across topics as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, the history of science and mathematics, the ontology of Heidegger, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Steiner examines how the twentieth century has placed in doubt the rationale and credibility of a future tense - the existence of hope. Acknowledging that technology and science may have replaced art and literature as the driving forces in our culture, Steiner warns that this has not happened without a significant loss. The forces of technology and science alone fail to illuminate inevitable human questions regarding value, faith, and meaning. And yet it is difficult to believe that the story out of Genesis has ended, Steiner observes, and he concludes this volume of reflections with an evocation of the endlessness of beginnings."--BOOK JACKET.

viii, 286 p. ; 18 cm

"List of publications": p. xv.