Science, Technology, and the Religious Imagination in Modern Europe and America: An Inquiry

Abstract:This article points to the surprising role of secular scientific ideas in stimulating new metaphors and ways of thinking about religious concepts. It examines three cases during the last century in Europe and America—how religious people selectively used ideas about electricity, how they re-purposed ideas related to higher-dimensional space, and how they deployed uncanny ideas in quantum mechanics. It shows that many have used these scientific ideas to work themselves out of religious systems they no longer understood, get leverage against dominant ideologies that they found vexing, or develop new, enchanted views of the universe around them.