What was the role of religious belief in the rise of modern science? Was it always as negative as the Galileo affair might suggest? This volume talks about the independent thinkers in early modern Europe - Galileo, Hobbes, and Newton - and the ways in which their heterodoxy in science or religion affected their understanding of nature and of God.

The separation of science and religion in modern secular culture can easily obscure the fact that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe ideas about nature were intimately related to ideas about God. Readers of this book will find fresh and exciting accounts of a phenomenon common to both science and religion: deviation from orthodox belief. How is heterodoxy to be measured? How might the scientific heterodoxy of particular thinkers impinge on their religious views? Would heterodoxy in religion create a predisposition towards heterodoxy in science? Might there be a homology between heterodox views in both domains? Such major protagonists as Galileo and Newton are re-examined together with less familiar figures in order to bring out the extraordinary richness of scientific and religious thought in the pre-modern world.

a fascinating selection of material...