Peter Harrison (historian) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Peter Harrison
FAHA
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Harrison in 2010
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| Born | 29 November 1955 |
| Nationality | Australian |
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| Thesis | "Religion" and the Religions in British Thought (1989) |
Peter D. Harrison (born in 1955) is an important Australian historian and professor. He studies the history of how science and religion have related to each other over time. He is a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia and a professor at the University of Queensland.
Contents
Peter Harrison's Career and Studies
Peter Harrison grew up in Queensland, Australia. He went to high school in Bundaberg. He studied at several famous universities, including the University of Oxford and Yale University. He earned different degrees, including a PhD and a DLitt.
He started his teaching career at Bond University in Australia. Later, he became a professor at the University of Oxford in England. There, he was the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion. He also directed the Ian Ramsey Centre, which studies science and religion.
In 2015, he became the first director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He retired from this role in 2023. He has also visited and taught at other universities around the world. These include Yale University and the University of Chicago.
Peter Harrison has received many awards for his work. He is a member of important groups like the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2003, he received a Centenary Medal. This medal honors Australians who have made a significant contribution to society. In 2014, he received an Australian Laureate Fellowship. This allowed him to research how science and society have changed over five years.
Ideas and Writings on Science and Religion
Peter Harrison is well-known for his ideas about how religion and modern science developed. He believes that the way people understood the Bible changed how science grew. He also thinks that the biblical story of the Fall (Adam and Eve) helped lead to experimental science. Experimental science is about testing ideas through experiments.
His early work looked at how the idea of "religion" itself changed in the Western world. He argues that people started thinking of religions as specific sets of beliefs and practices only in the 1600s. Before that, the idea of "religion" was different.
In his 2011 Gifford Lectures, he explained more about this. He said that the ideas of "science" and "religion" we use today are quite new. They were created in the Western world. He suggests that the way we think about science and religion today already shapes how we see them interacting. So, to understand their relationship better, we need to rethink what "science" and "religion" truly mean.
Harrison also argues that the idea of "Western values" is a new idea from the 1900s. Even though people often say these values come from ancient times, he shows this is not true. He also proved that a famous quote, Credo quia absurdum, was wrongly linked to an early Christian writer named Tertullian. This mistake happened in the early modern period.
His recent book, Some New World (2024), talks about how modern secular society developed. He suggests that the idea of a natural world separate from a supernatural world is unique to Western thought. He believes this separation is a key part of modern naturalism. However, it is not always needed for religious belief.
Selected Publications
- Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
- After Science and Religion: Fresh Perspectives from Theology and Philosophy. with John Milbank, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- New Directions in Theology and Science: Beyond Dialogue. with Paul Tyson, Routledge, 2022.
- Science Without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism. with Jon Roberts, Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Narratives of Secularization. Routledge 2018.
- The Territories of Science and Religion. University of Chicago Press, 2015. The Gifford Lectures.
- Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science. with Ronald Numbers and Michael Shank University of Chicago Press, 2011.
- The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- 'Religion' and the religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Images for kids
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Peter Harrison in 2010
See also
In Spanish: Peter Harrison para niños
