Science and religion have always been at each other’s throats right? Most things you ‘know’
about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the
nineteenth century and remain widespread today. ‘A deeply researched history of the
interplay between the two ways of understanding the world.’ ECONOMIST BEST BOOKS OF 2023
The true history of science and religion is a human one. It’s about the role of religion in
inspiring and strangling science before the scientific revolution. It’s about the sincere but
eccentric faith and the quiet creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history –
Galileo Newton Faraday Darwin Maxwell Einstein. Above all it’s about the question of what
it means to be human and who gets to say – a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first
century than ever before. From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today via
medieval Europe nineteenth-century India and Soviet Russia Magisteria sheds new light on this
complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at
war Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively
shaped human history.
