The Role of Religion in the Lutheran Response to Copernicus

Abstract

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs not only shifted the boundaries of Newton scholarship, she changed its center. Her first book The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy shifted the boundaries of inquiry by insisting on the importance of disciplines outside the canonical sciences in understanding the scientific tradition. In The Janus Faces of Genius she took the further step of arguing that religion, not science, was the real center of Newton's thought. Although Dobbs's main work focused on Newton, it would be a great loss to historical scholarship if we failed to draw the wider historiographical consequences of her work – consequences she herself made plain in her 1993 History of Science Society Lecture “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover.” In the present chapter I support Dobbs's contention that these historiographical shifts and recenterings are important in understanding the history of science well before Newton and his time. The period I consider begins with the Reformation and concludes with the career of Johann Kepler. My main concern involves Lutheran natural philosophers and astronomers, and especially those trained at Wittenberg after its reform by Philip Melanchthon. After briefly reviewing earlier opinions on the relation between science and religion in this period, I go on to document the role of Lutherans in spreading Copernicus's ideas, and the pervasive positive effect of their religion on Lutheran scientific thought. I suggest that Kepler's early work, in particular, should be read as centrally religious.

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