Religious Studies
Key Stage: Any
Maximum number: See Planning a visit
Please contact the Education Officer to discuss facilitated visits tailored to meet the needs of your students.
WHAT THE MUSEUM HAS TO OFFER
Tower of Babel
The History of Science brings to light numerous instances of conflict between science and religion. Well-known examples include Galileo’s support for Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system and his disagreements with the Catholic Church, and controversies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries concerning the origins of human nature, belief in natural theology, and the theories of geology and evolution.
Less well-known examples include controversies over the idea of spontaneous generation stimulated by the realisation of a microscopic world in the seventeenth century, the theological implications of the revival of atomism, and even resistance to Benjamin Franklin’s heretical lightning rod.
But alongside these instances of conflict are also instances of congruity. Newton was a profoundly religious man whose cosmological theories became a foundation for the belief in a perfect clockwork, and thus divinely inspired, universe during the early eighteenth century.
These and many other ideas can be explored in a visit to the Museum. In particular, the museum has an extensive collection of objects relating to astronomy and relevant library and archive material.
You may wish to consider a combined visit to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to explore ideas about geology and evolution.
