Harrison P. The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science

Cambridge University Press, 2007. - 300 pp.
Peter Harrison provides a new account of the religious foundations of scientific knowledge. He shows how the new approaches to the study of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were directly informed by theological discussions about the Fall of Man and the extent to which the mind and the senses had been damaged by that primeval event. Scientific methods, he suggests, were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin. At its inception, modern science was conceptualised as a means of recapturing the knowledge of nature that Adam had once possessed. Contrary to a widespread view which sees science emerging in conflict with religion, Harrison argues that theological considerations were of vital importance in the framing of the new scientific method.
Peter Harrison is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford. He is author of ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (1990, 2002) and The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (1998, 2001).