The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion

by Larry Witham

The Measure of God, now in paperback, is a lively historical narrativeoffering the reader a sense for what has taken place in the God and science debate over the past century. Modern science came of age at the cusp of the twentieth century. It was a period marked by discovery of radio waves and x rays, use of the first skyscraper, automobile, cinema, and vaccine, and rise of the quantum theory of the atom. This was the close of the Victorian age, and the beginning of the first great wave of scientific challenges to the religious beliefs of the Christian world. Religious thinkers were having to brace themselves. Some raced to show that science did not undermine religious belief. Others tried to reconcile science and faith, and even to show that the tools of science, facts and reason, could support knowledge of God. In the English speaking world, many had espoused such a project, but one figure stands out. Before his death in 1887, the Scottish judge Adam Gifford endowed the Gifford Lectures to keep this debate going, a science haunted debate on "all questions about man's conception of God or the Infinite." The list of Gifford lecturers is a veritable Who's Who of modern scientists, philosophers and from William James to Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer to Reinhold Niebuhr, Niels Bohr to Iris Murdoch, from John Dewey to Mary Douglas.

Genres: Science, Religion, Philosophy, Spirituality, Theology, History

Hardcover

First published August 23, 2005

About the author

Larry Witham is an author, editor, journalist, and artist. His new novel, The Haunted Artist (2025) is the fourth in the Julian Peale Art-Crime Investigator Series. Witham is the author of nineteen books (six of them novels), and was a finalist in the 2015 Pen Literary Awards for biography. He began his writing career as a daily newspaper reporter in Washington D.C. Witham has received several national awards for his newspaper work and books, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for a newspaper series he co-wrote. He was Project Editor for the ten-volume Templeton Press science-and-religion series. A painter by avocation, his new novel character, Julain Peale, investigates crime and intrigue in the artworld. Witham lives with his wife in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C.

Reviews

[Ishan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book that covers the question of god from various western scientific points of view. How do you prove that god exists? Where does the idea of god even come from? Historians, Psychologists, Sociologists,Physicists, Priests, etc. the top minds of the past 100 years set out to answer these questions in Scotland. The only negative I have is this book mainly covers western thought, and only sprinkles eastern philosophy here and there. That has more to do with the speakers the book covers than the author himself.

[Bjorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to pick up a good book by a religious author about science and religion. This isn't it. A summary is best put by William James’s view of the world. This book is a great booming, buzzing confusion. It seemed to just ramble on and on.

[Christopher Hurtado]

The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion by Larry Witham (2005)

[Eric Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you like the history of the Gifford Lectures in the great universities of Scotland, this is your book.