The revival of the Boyle Lectures in recent years has focused attention, as Boyle would have wished, on the relations between a culture of science and the plausibility of religious claims. Much of course has changed since Boyle in his Will endowed the original lecture series, but there remain certain parallels between his own time and ours. In the Preface to his book The Christian Virtuoso, Boyle observed the 'great and deplorable growth of irreligion, especially among those that aspired to pass for wits and several of them too for philosophers.' On the other side were their opponents, who by virtue of 'well-meaning but ill-informed zeal, had brought many good men to think that religion and philosophy were incompatible.'
The consequence, in Boyle's words, was that libertines thought a scientific virtuoso ought not to be a Christian and the others that he could not be a true one. This lecture is an attempt to introduce and revisit Boyle himself, who sought to mend this situation. Known to many only as the originator of a 'law' governing the behavior of gases, Boyle repays closer study as one who thought deeply about the meaning of the word 'nature' and the reality of a spirit world.
The lecture suggests that while many of the assumptions underpinning his natural theology would have to be regarded as obsolete, some of his arguments for the compatibility of theism with the sciences had a depth that enabled them to survive in subsequent religious rhetoric. After noting the longevity and diversity of appeals to 'design' in nature, Professor Hedley Brooke considers what remains valuable in Boyle's legacy today.
Professor Geoffrey Cantor is professor of the History of Science at the University of Leeds. With a background in physics he moved first into the history of physics, with a focus on optics. His interest in the issues of science and religion first gelled in his research on Michael Faraday and Faraday's involvement with the Sandemanian church.
His research in this area has subsequently developed in several directions including the 1995-96 Gifford Lectures at Glasgow (with John Brooke) which explored the uses of history in our understanding science-religion interrelations. He has also researched the attitudes towards science of small religious communities - specifically the Quakers and Anglo-Jewish communities - in 18th- and 19th-century Britain. His other main research focus is the SciPer project, which examines the role of science in the general periodical press of the 19th century.
His main publications in the area of science and religion are:
Optics after Newton.Theories of Light in Britain and Ireland, 1704-1840 (1983); Michael Faraday: Scientist and Sandemanian - A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (1991).
Co-authored with John Hedley Brooke: Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion. The 1995-6 Gifford Lectures at Glasgow (1998). Quakers, Jews, and Science: Religious Responses to Modernity and the Sciences in Britain 1650-1900 (2005).
John Hedley Brooke
Professor John Hedley Brooke was educated at Cambridge University, obtaining a first class degree in the natural sciences (1965) and a doctorate for work on the history of chemistry (1969). For 30 years he taught at Lancaster University, becoming a member of the International Academy of the History of Science in 1993. In 1995, with Professor Geoffrey Cantor, he gave the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University. From 1999 to 2006, he was the first Andreas Idreos Professor of Science & Religion at Oxford University, Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre and Fellow of Harris Manchester College.
Following retirement, he has spent time as a 'Distinguished Fellow' at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Durham (2007). He has lectured worldwide on science & religion and in November 2001 gave the 'Distinguished Lecture' of the History of Science Society. From 2000 to 2003 he directed the European Science Foundation's Network on 'Science and Human Values'.
A former Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science, he has been President of the British Society for the History of Science, President of the Historical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and President of the UK Forum for Science & Religion. He is currently President of the International Society for Science and Religion.
Among his books are Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991), which won the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society and a Templeton prize for outstanding books on science & religion; Thinking About Matter (Ashgate, 1995); and (with Geoffrey Cantor) Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science & Religion (T & T Clark, 1998; Oxford University Press, 2000). He has also contributed to both The Cambridge Companion to Darwin and The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species.
(born Jan. 25, 1627, Lismore Castle, County Waterford, Ire.—died Dec. 31, 1691, London, Eng.) Irish-born English chemist and natural philosopher. The son of Richard Boyle, the “Great Earl of Cork” (1566–1643), he settled at Oxford in 1654 and, with his assistant Robert Hooke, began his pioneering experiments on the properties of gases, including those expressed in Boyle's law (seegas laws). He demonstrated the physical characteristics of air, showing that it is necessary in combustion, respiration, and sound transmission. In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) he attacked Aristotle's theory of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), espousing a corpuscular view of matter that presaged the modern theory of chemical elements. A founding member of the Royal Society of London, he achieved great renown in his lifetime. His brother Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery (1621–79), was a general under Oliver Cromwell but eventually helped secure Ireland for Charles II.
