Christianity and the Leaders of Modern Science is a work that would have done justice to a professional historian of science when it was first published in 1903. Its author, Father Karl A. Kneller (1857-1942), was a Jesuit Church historian, but one fully alive to the needs of Catholics and Christians in his day, the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Those decades were reverberating with the claim that science had discredited the Christian Creed and that scientists, by and large, had abandoned religious convictions as the final obstacles to a human culture steeped in science.
As befitted a conscientious and accomplished historian, Father Kneller tracked down the record which fully disclosed the falsity of that claim.
Even after almost a hundred years, his book bursts with information, not easily available elsewhere and certainly not in a similarly impressive synthesis. The book is a paramount proof that, during the nineteenth century, believing scientists of stature far outnumbered their counterparts with materialistic convictions.
In the Introductory Essay, Stanley L. Jaki, a world-renowned author on the relation of science and religion, and winner of the Templeton Prize for 1987, puts Father Kneller's book in the context of the time and in the framework of the main issues between science and Christian faith.
(xxviii + 403 pp. 1995.) 21.00 USD + S+H