The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science

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Cambridge University Press, Mar 5, 1998 - Religion - 328 pages
Peter Harrison examines the role played by the Bible in the emergence of natural science. He shows how both the contents of the Bible, and more particularly the way it was interpreted, had a profound influence on conceptions of nature from the third century to the seventeenth. The rise of modern science is linked to the Protestant approach to texts, an approach that spelled an end to the symbolic world of the Middle Ages, and established the conditions for the scientific investigation and technological exploitation of nature.

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About the author (1998)

Peter Harrison is Professor of Philosophy at Bond University in Australia. He has published widely in the area of the history of ideas and in particular on philosophy and religion in the early modern period. He is the author of Religion and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990).

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