Putting Science in its Place: The Culture of Scientific Practice
Arie Leegwater, Professor of Chemistry
Minds in the Making

This presentation was given at Calvin College in March 2006. It was presented by the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship in collaboration with the offices of Seminars in Christian Scholarship, Christian Perspectives in Science Seminars, and the Association of Reformed Institutions of Higher Education.

This is the second of two lectures. The first appeared in a previous edition of Minds in the Making.

Science and especially the physical sciences are an international affair; scientific ideas are not limited to or compromised by national borders and political boundaries. A certain scientific theory may well have been accepted in one locality before another, but nowhere in the history of science do we find examples of "correct" or "accurate" thought patterns being restricted to a specific geographic location. Science and its laws are universal. Science travels well.

The dominant histories of science written in the late 19th and 20th centuries were certainly written from that point of view. Science’s history was inherently progressive, tending toward a history of ideas or concepts, the mind actively reading “the book of nature,” and entraining its discoveries in a factually-detailed narrative that led up, seemingly inevitably, to the science of today.

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