A CRACK IN THE COSMOS:
Lessons in Science and Science-bashing from Periclean Athens

Colin Wells

Author! Author! Winter Lyceum Series
Tuesday, March 12 at 7:00
$5 suggested donation

The early Greek scientist Anaxagoras figured out how eclipses work, but his discovery infringed on territory previously held by the gods. The Athenians tried him for impiety, and he barely escaped with his life. Decades later, tarred with the same brush of secular inquiry, Socrates would not be so lucky. Classical Athens, the cradle of science, was thus also home to the first recorded backlash against it. Colin Wells’ book-in-progress is about the origins of religious faith and this talk will explore how Anaxagoras’s story fits into those origins, and how it still resonates with our own culture wars.

Colin Wells, a graduate of UCLA and Oxford, has been a writer and teacher since 1990 and is the author ofA Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past and Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World. He says that the “overarching theme that connects my books and articles is the so-called ‘clash of faith and reason’ and how it has played out in history. I find that issues around faith and reason have been widely misunderstood by believers and non-believers alike, and that ideas like God and faith—even belief itself—need to be rebuilt from the ground up.” He lives in Westport.