In 1905, the discovery of the so-called Journal of Isaac Beeckman was a major event in the small community of historians of science in Europe. The manuscript not only contained precious information about Beeckman's meeting with René Descartes in 1618 and their collaboration in deriving the law of falling bodies, but also copies of some unknown letters by Descartes to Beeckman, and an abundance of notes concerning various topics that were of interest to historians of the early modern period, such as the invention of the telescope, the principle of the conservation of movement, the refraction of light, the concept of air pressure and the corpuscular theory of matter in general. Although Beeckman had not been completely unknown before, from this point on his name became firmly entrenched in the grand narrative of what was soon to be called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his famous book The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (first published in 1949), Herbert Butterfield refers to Beeckman as ‘a man who stimulated others to take an interest in important problems and initiated a number of ideas’, though without specifying what these ideas were. In The Mechanization of the World Picture (English translation 1961), E.J. Dijksterhuis devoted no less than five pages to Beeckman's work, focusing on his work, with Descartes, on the law of free-falling bodies. In the same vein, John Henry in his slim volume The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (second edition, 2002) pointed to Beeckman in the context of the mathematization of natural philosophy. Isaac Beeckman, he says, ‘set an impressive example of how to use mathematics in physics’. In his more recent The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (2015), David Wooton also mentions Beeckman regularly.

Nonetheless, even though it would be incorrect to say that Beeckman has been neglected since his notebook was discovered more than a century ago, it is true that to this day the enormous richness of the Journal has not been fully exploited. Like Butterfield, Dijksterhuis only hints at the wealth of interesting topics discussed in Beeckman's notes by saying that although he did not publish his findings, Beeckman's ideas in his Journal are to be valued because they give the reader ‘some notion of the scientific thought of a gifted man of the early seventeenth century’.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century science came to be seen as providing the model for seeking truth. This led to a reorganization of all of the disciplines, including theology. We have also come to see the nineteenth century as a period in which a new set of assumptions about science and religion was introduced that continues to shape how we currently view their relationship. The appearance of Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion in 1874, in which the conflict thesis is fully developed for the first time, is no coincidence. One of the things that historians can do is open up current discussions by showing the paths not taken that were live options at one point, before new assumptions constrained and narrowed thinking. This chapter examines how scientific naturalists like T. H. Huxley attempted to constrain thinking about science and religion, how those constraints began to shape debates, and how major Christian theologians of the period responded to this development, whether through resistance or conformity.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. However, modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature. This points to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention while avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. It is argued, however, that modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature, pointing to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention whilst avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

The chapter takes a historical perspective and asks us to consider the long and overlapping concerns of both scientists and religious believers with truth, beauty and creative ordering. Science is no enemy of religion but a casual reductive materialism, often presented in the media under the auspices of ‘science’, and fails to see the sophistication and glory of religious belief that God created all that is (creation ex nihilo), and that this conviction is fully compatible with robust modern science.

The estrangement and frequent mutual incomprehension existing between theology and the sciences today reflects chiefly cultural phenomena, arising from particular methodological determinations reached by both disciplines in early modernity that, over time, mutated into irreconcilable metaphysical visions. What had been distinct modes of inquiry within a unified intellectual pursuit of a single comprehensive transcendent truth now came to be understood as entirely unrelated bodies of factual knowledge pursuing separate ends. This change, however, involved several logically unsustainable revisions of previous categories: ‘revelation’, ‘science’, and ‘nature’, for instance, and ‘causality,‘ in particular. Yet these developments imposed limits upon both theology and the sciences that inhibited the power of either to understand many of its own claims. Lately, in physics and the life sciences especially, there has been a healthy movement away from purely mechanical models of causality. Whether theology can recover a dimension of scientifically informed natural philosophy is yet to be seen. But if the two cultures can be disencumbered of their early modern metaphysical prejudices, they might find that they naturally converge upon a shared horizon of ultimate explanation that provides each with its animating logic and reveals each to be only a limited mode of that final wisdom.

Scientific knowledge, like other forms of knowledge, is a ‘culture’; that is, it is embedded in practices, relations and histories. The stand-off between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ has a lot to do with the failure to recognize this and with the anxiety that any concessions here will damage the truth claims of science. It is argued that a view of truthfulness that sees it as a sustainable, corrigible set of practices in coping with an environment we do not control or possess allows us to maintain a form of realism while acknowledging that there may be diverse sets of practices which legitimately embody the same principle of sustainable engagement – including the practices of traditional religious faith.

This chapter investigates the conditions for dialogue between science and religion, and asks what makes dialogue possible or desirable. Sometimes, dialogue has simply amounted to theology and religion accommodating themselves to the sciences, and this can serve to reinforce unhelpful ways of categorising science and religion. Different models for dialogue are suggested by past relations between natural philosophy and religion, understood as formative practices (rather than proposition-generating activities). An alternative approach is also suggested by the problem of incommensurability, initially applied in different ways by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Alasdair MacIntyre to the relations between competing scientific frameworks, but which is also applicable also to science–religion relations. Thinking of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in terms of historical traditions, to use MacIntyre’s expression, leads to a different understanding of their possible relationships. Historical and sociological descriptions of scientific and religious practices, in short, should play a more prominent role in our understandings of sciences, religions, and their relations.