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| November 3, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion
 Odds are you've heard of at least one of the following: Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution, or the Scopes Monkey Trial. Perhaps you've also heard of the theory of intelligent design, or seen a piece on the news regarding the latest lawsuit or school board decision about teaching evolution in schools. If you're really savvy (and Jewish), you might also have followed the controversy of Rabbi Natan Slifkin, who managed to get his books banned by ultra-Orthodox rabbis for talking about evolutionary theory.
Still you probably haven't heard of the Gifford Lectures. They're not exactly the Oscars, but they've quietly been passing the last century in vigorous discussion about God, science, and how the two can co-exist (or not, depending on who was giving the lecture). In 1887, a Scottish judge by the name of Adam Gifford bequeathed his money to endow a series of annual lectures on "all questions about man's conception of God or the Infinite."
Since then, the lectures have attracted eight Nobel Prize winners and the likes of Hannah Arendt, Carl Sagan, and Albert Schweizer. Niels Bohr, a physicist, even got to tell off Albert Einstein once. No matter the caliber or celebrity of the respective lecturer, each year has brought a robust discussion aimed at arguing whether or not God exists and how we know.
All of which is why a history of the lectures by Larry Witham, The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion, is about more than academic arguments that happen every year in Scotland. It serves as a history that unfolds not in chronological order, but through ideological strains, of the ongoing debate on the role of science in a world of religious belief. As a step beyond the polemical, political arguments over schoolrooms and evolution texts, Witham has provided an engaging public service that illuminates the larger issues we're all struggling with.
It also serves as a reminder that even our greatest minds in science and theology have struggled with it for longer than our politicians have been alive.
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