The view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict has increasingly lost favor among scholars who have sought more nuanced theoretical frameworks for evaluating the configurations of these two bodies of knowledge in modern life. This book situates, for the first time, the modern study of race into scholarly debates concerning whether the conflict thesis is a viable analytic framework for assessing the relations between religion and science. Arguing that the conflict model is thoroughly inadequate, this book shows that the formation of the race concept in the minds of Western Europe ... More

The view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict has increasingly lost favor among scholars who have sought more nuanced theoretical frameworks for evaluating the configurations of these two bodies of knowledge in modern life. This book situates, for the first time, the modern study of race into scholarly debates concerning whether the conflict thesis is a viable analytic framework for assessing the relations between religion and science. Arguing that the conflict model is thoroughly inadequate, this book shows that the formation of the race concept in the minds of Western European and American scientists grew out of and remained indebted to Christian intellectual history. Religion was not subtracted from nor did it stand in conflict with constructions of race developed across the modern life and health sciences. The argument made in this book is based on a reexamination of paratheological texts and biblical commentaries from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, works in early Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in German ethnology and early nineteenth-century American social science, debates among twentieth-century Progressive Era public health scientists, and contemporary genetic analysis of ancient human DNA. Divine Variations recovers the hidden history of how Euro-American scientists inherited from their Christian ancestors a series of ideas and reasoning strategies about race that profoundly shaped the modern biological construction of human difference.