A distinguished scholar urges scientists and religious thinkers to become colleagues rather than adversaries in areas where their fields overlap

“Refreshingly modest and nondogmatic. . . . Brims with lively anecdotes.”—John Horgan, Wall Street Journal

Each age has its own crisis—our modern experience of science-religion conflict is not so very different from that experienced by our forebears, Keith Thomson proposes in this thoughtful book. He considers the ideas and writings of Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin, two men who struggled mightily to reconcile their religion and their science, then looks to more recent times when scientific challenges to religion (evolutionary theory, for example) have given rise to powerful political responses from religious believers.

Today as in the eighteenth century, there are pressing reasons for members on each side of the religion-science debates to find common ground, Thomson contends. No precedent exists for shaping a response to issues like cloning or stem cell research, unheard of fifty years ago, and thus the opportunity arises for all sides to cooperate in creating a new ethics for the common good.

Keith Stewart Thomson (1938–2025) was a distinguished evolutionary biologist, historian, and writer. He was emeritus professor of natural history at the University of Oxford and had served as director of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and the Peabody Museum at Yale University, where he was also a professor and dean. He wrote many books and essays on history, history of science, evolution, and paleontology, including The Common but Less Frequent Loon and Other Essays; Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature; The Young Charles Darwin; The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America; and Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of His Science.