Imagining Progress: Science, Faith, and Child Mortality in America

Explores the intellectual history of Americans' divergent assumptions about God, nature, and science.



Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imaginin...