Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free, [1925] 2008.

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Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a British mathematician and philosophy.  Most famous for co-authoring Principia Matematica with Bertrand Russell while a professor at Cambridge, Whitehead began his philosophical corpus after leaving Cambridge for a position at Harvard in 1924.  Whitehead’s process metaphysics would grow to encompass his deeply original views on science, religion, history, and education.

Science and the Modern World is a philosophical reflection on the rise and decline of what Whitehead calls “scientific materialism.”  Scientific materialism is the “cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations.  In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless” (17).  Along the way, Whitehead unfolds his philosophy of organism, what later comes to be called process philosophy, which he describes as an “alternative philosophy of science in which organism takes the place of matter” (193-194).  As a part of his philosophy of organism, Whitehead rehabilitates the concept of God, and dwells at length on the relation between science and religion.  I find one of Whitehead’s remarks concerning the relationship between science and religion deeply resonant with what Shoghi Effendi, the leader of the Bahá’í Faith from 1921-1957, has said:

Whitehead: “When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.  We have here the two strongest general forces…which influence men, and they seem to be set one against he other –the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction” (181-192, my italics)

Shoghi Effendi: “In such a world society, science and religion, the two most potent forces in human life, will be reconciled, will cöoperate, and will harmoniously develop” (World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, 203-204).

Table of Contents

             Preface – vii

  1. The Origins of Modern Science – 1
  2. Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought – 19
  3. The Century of Genius – 39
  4. The Eighteenth Century – 57
  5. The Romantic Reaction – 75
  6. The Ninteenth Century – 95
  7. Relativity – 113
  8. The Quantum Theory – 129
  9. Science and Philosophy – 139
  10. Abstraction – 157
  11. God – 173
  12. Religion and Science – 181
  13. Requisites for Social Progress – 193

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