In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the chief impact of science on religion came from the revised picture of the cosmos that emerged from developments in astronomy and physics. In the nineteenth century the impact was from the changed view of the history of life on Earth that was presented by geology and evolutionary biology. In the twentieth century the social sciences had the greatest impact on religion, although of a different nature. Physics and biology worried theologians because they introduced theories about the cosmos, life, and man that were at variance with beliefs intimately bound up with the religious tradition, such as the special creation of man. The impact of the social sciences, on the other hand, comes not from theories that contradict basic religious doctrines but from explanations of religion itself that seem to rob it of its significance.

Since...