The “Conflict Thesis” forms a kind of underlying historical metamyth that informs and undergirds a substantial number of assumptions about history by anti-theist polemicists. This is the assumed and unquestioned idea that Science and Religion have been perpetually at war down the ages. Also known as the Draper-White Thesis or Warfare Model, it is a conception of the history of science that presents religion as the perpetual and consistent enemy of science, technology and progress. It is a pervasive idea in popular culture, despite the fact actual historians of science have long since rejected it as simplistic, misleading, ill-founded and inadequate. Despite this, most anti-religion polemicists simply assume it as fact and some have tried to argue against historians about it, with dismal results.

That religion and science have been in conflict down the ages, with the former suppressing, opposing and even persecuting the latter, is an almost unquestioned dictum among anti-religious polemicists. In a dialogue with Ben Shapiro in 2018, New Atheist luminary Sam Harris assumed this in several of his comments. For example, Harris stated:

[F]or the most part Islam has been hostile to real intellectual life in the way that Christianity was hostile even when the scientific world view was struggling to be born in the sixteenth century … the fifteenth century. What we have historically is a real war of ideas … crystallised in the moment when Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and put under house arrest by people who refused to look through his telescope. So that was the genius of religion compared with the emerging genius of science in that room. (See Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories)

This is a remarkable encapsulatation of this unquestioned idea in one sentence. Not only does Harris state the Conflict Thesis as a fact, he manages to wrangle in several of the historical myths that it depends on: that Islamic science was stifled by religion (it was not), that Galileo was imprisoned by people who refused to look through his telescope (not true) and that Galileo was “shown the instruments of torture” (a lurid detail completely invented by the playwright Bertolt Brecht in 1947). Harris clearly did not think to actually fact-check any of these claims because he takes their underlying idea on faith: historically, science has been persecuted and repressed by religion.

Most anti-religion polemicists do not even bother to make a detailed case for this idea; they simply assume it and assume their audiences will do so also. This is a fair assumption, since the Conflict Thesis has completely permeated popular culture and is generally considered to be historical fact. In the animated comedy series Family Guy one gag has Stewie and Brian travel to a futuristic verison of their town, but Stewie explains this is not the future but actually an alternative present. “[I]n this universe Christianity never existed,” he explains to Brian, “Which means the Dark Ages of scientific repression never occured and thus humanity is a thousand years more advanced.” The joke works because the idea that Christianity repressed science for the one thousand years of “the Dark Ages” is widely understood and largely accepted by the audience. It is something “everyone knows”.

And if anyone questions this idea they are usually met with bafflement and by a barrage of historical examples that “prove” this supression and repression. Christians burned down the Great Library, we are told. They murdered Hypatia and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake because of their scientific learning. They destroyed almost all ancient scientific learning. They suppressed the knowledge that the earth is spherical and taught it was flat. They caused poor Copernicus to keep his heliocentrism secret for fear of persecution. And, the ultimate trump card, “Galileo! Galileo! Galileo!”. Unfortuately, as the links just given show, these examples either wildly misconstrue the relevant history or are complete historical myths. Yet the belief in the Conflict Thesis and its assumption in anti-religious polemic persist. It is, as one recent collection of essays on it by leading historians of science says in its subtitle, “the idea that would not die”. Historians continue to be exasperated by its persistence, despite it having been rejected as a valid historical thesis for over half a century.

So where did this idea come from and why is it so pervasive?

Draper and White

This idea carries the alternative name of the Draper-White Thesis because it was popularised in the late nineteenth century primarily by two American writers: John William Draper (1811-1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918). In 1874 Draper published a fairly short work titled History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Twenty-two years later White published a very similar but far more substantial work, the two volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). While both were writing on an established theme and in a tradition set by earlier sceptical critics such as Voltaire and Auguste Comte, it was Draper and White’s books which popularised the Conflict Thesis and fixed it so firmly in the popular imagination. So they are the primary source of this idea for today’s atheist polemicists and the ultimate origin point of many of the common examples used to support it. This is somewhat ironic, given that both Draper and White were religious believers, neither were atheists and both were trying to save religion, not undermine it.

Draper was the son of an itinerant Wesleyan preacher. He received a good education and studied chemistry at University College London, before he and his family emigrated to the US on his father’s death in 1831. There he settled in Virginia and he attained a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and then held professorships in chemisty, botany and medicine at the New York University Medical School. Draper was a remarkable polymath. He made advances in photography, became an early astrophotographer, discovered the eponymous Draper point in heated solids, assisted the development of the telegraph and wrote several books of history, including his best-selling three volume History of the American Civil War (1867–1870).

His History of the Conflict between Religion and Science drew on ideas he had begun to develop in his earlier work The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1862). Fundamentally, Draper saw proper religious belief and science as wholly compatible and even complementary, however he regarded dogmatic, institutionalised and bureaucratic religious structures – institutions such as the Catholic Church or the Church of England – as the enemies of scientific progress. These represented the “theology” in his title, not religion per se. It was this kind of “traditionary faith” that was the villain of his story. Writing in an article the same year as the publication of Warfare, Draper declared:

[Science] has never subjected any one to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican—we have only to recall the Inquisition—the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood! (Draper, “The Great Conflict”, Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 6, 1874)

For Draper, all such “traditionary faith” was guilty here, but it was the Catholic Church that was the particular focus of his ire. In the final chapter of Conflict itself Draper declares:

Then has it in truth come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both. (Draper, Warfare, Ch. 12)

For Draper, the alternative to “Roman Christianity” was a return to a simpler and more original form of the Christian faith, before it was hijacked by Rome and adulterated. This thesis is as much that of Draper the Methodist preacher’s son as Draper the scientist. And his book was well-received by a reading audience as passionate for the benefits of science as they were for the virulent anti-Catholicism of late nineteenth century America. Unsurprisingly, Warfare became a bestseller.

White had a very different background and motivation to those of Draper, though they led him to similar arguments and conclusions. Unlike Draper, he was born into wealth in New York, the son of a rich banker and the grandson of a state representative. His family were Episcopalians and the young White was initially educated in preparation for entering the ministry, but ran away from school and eventually studied history and literature at Yale instead. He was a brilliant student and, after travelling extensively in Europe, he took up a professorship in those subjects at the University of Michigan, where he taught until 1863, when he was elected to the US Senate.

It was while he was served in the Senate that he met fellow senator, Ezra Cornell; a wealthy and idealistic Quaker who wanted to support higher education philanthropically. Together White and Cornell founded Cornell University, with the avowed charter of never “to favour any sect or promote any creed”. In his 1866 principles presented to the university’s trustees, he declared “no one can be accepted or rejected as a trustee, professor or student because of any opinions or theories which he may or may not hold”. But in an age where most such institutions had at least a nominal religious religious principle at its foundation, this seemed too radical to some and the proposal was criticised as dangerously irreligious. Cornell University opened in 1868 and was a huge success, but White never forgot the religious opposition to his project.

White still considered himself a religious man, but his beliefs had moved well beyond his parents’ respectable church. He believed in a kind of natural religion that united and underlay all creeds, with various great spiritual teachers arising periodically to advance humanity’s religious development. He hoped eventually all people would recognise the unitng principles beneath all religions and embrace this one true human religion. So – like Draper, though for markedly different reasons – he saw hidebound theology and dogmatic church institutions as the enemies of true religion, which was in turn in harmony with the advances of science.

So, still stung by the opposition to Cornell’s areligious principles, in 1869 he began a series of public lectures on the history of theology and science that would eventually form the basis of his 1896 opus A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. As with Draper’s shorter book, his took consistent aim at the Catholic Church as the primary agent of the “theology” that was the enemy of both science and natural religion. And his book too became a bestseller.

So the two books were very similar in content but also substantially different in key respects. Draper’s looked backwards, to an idealised early Christianity before it was contaminated by “traditionary faith”. White’s, by contrast, looked forward to a ideal world of natural religion founded on reason and in step with science. They were different in style and argument as well. Draper’s was relatively short and in the style of a free-flowing lecture, without footnotes or scholarly apparatus to distract the reader from a sweeping historical narrative with repeated themes. White’s was massive: two volumes with up to 900 pages in printed editions, with copious footnotes and an extensive bibliography.

But these differences lent combined strength to their shared thesis. Draper’s book appealed to a more casual reader, given it could be read and absorbed in an afternoon of reading. White’s was more suited to an audience who wanted detail and sources over simple narrative, and it gave at least an illusion of solid and unimpeachable scholarship. Together they had a profound impact. Mark Twain was a fan of White’s Warfare: his copy was heavily annotated and he once commented “When you read it you see how those old theologians never reasoned at all.”

Others, particularly those from the religious institutions Draper and White were attacking as enemies of reason and science, were predictably rather less impressed. And at least one was prescient about the likely effect of Draper’s Conflict. The Catholic convert and essayist Orestes A. Brownson is hardly expected to have found Draper’s virulently anti-Catholic work convincing, but his 1868 review of it in Catholic World (vol. 7, no. 38, pp. 155–74) argues it would not achieve its aim of reviving a pure Christian faith. Instead, Brownson argued, its result would more likely be the undermining of religion and lead to “pure materialism and atheism”.

It was not too long before Brownson’s prediction of the impact of Draper and White’s arguments began to come true. While most of their readers revelled in their smiting of Catholicism and others were inclined to White’s religious liberalism, many more were like Twain: seeing the books as vindication of a militantly anti-religious freethought position. But the writer who probably did the most to take Draper and White’s thesis and weaponise it for anti-theism was Joseph McCabe (1867-1955).

McCabe was a former Catholic priest who rejected religion and became a prolific Rationalist writer, producing over 200 books on Catholicism, Christianity generally, as well as evolution and scepticism. In many respects he was the prototype for later rationalist anti-religious sceptics and many of the arguments of twenty-first century New Atheists can actually be traced back to his work. In 1927 McCabe wrote The Conflict Between Science and Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1211, Haldeman-Julius Publishing,1927), which was essentially a distillation of the Draper-White thesis, minus the pious religious intentions of those two writers. McCabe unabashedly turned Draper and White’s arguments and examples squarely against religion per se, declaring it the ‘most deadly opponent” of scientific progress” (p. 1). He predicted that historians of the twenty-first century would be bemused at the “priests” and “professors” of McCabe’s time “plaintively chanting that there is no conflict between science and true religion” and prophesied that these future historians will recognise “science has, ever since its birth, been in conflict with religion.”

McCabe had a particular animus against “progressive religion” that sought to reconcile religious belief with scientific understanding. For McCabe, there could be no such reconciliation: “The land which lies between straight Fundamentalism and straight Modernism,” he declared, “is the Land of Bunk.” McCabe’s book was one of many he wrote for Emanuel Haldeman-Julius’ “Little Blue Book” series: an extremely popular series of small, cheap, pocket paperbacks aimed at educating the “working man”. The series introduced Clarence Darrow, Bertrand Russell and Will Durant to a wide audience and many of its slim volumes reflected the sceptical and atheistic ideas of its publisher. Through it, McCabe’s The Conflict Between Science and Religion and other works he wrote for the series went a long way to further popularising the Draper-White Thesis and fixing it as a key element of anti-religious polemic.

The Tide Turns Against Draper-White

Unfortunately for McCabe, his confident predictions about how twenty-first century historians would view the Conflict Thesis have proved wrong. Far from accepting Draper and White’s claims, modern historians have come to reject them as simplistic, largely wrong-headed and often completely baseless. Draper and White were writing in a period in which the discipline of history itself was still transforming from a tool for polemical and moral argument into a far more objective and structured process of analysis. The field of the history of science had not yet really developed at all. While this field had several early twentieth century founders, the work of George Sarton (1884-1956) substantially established the subject within the modern discipline of history, particularly thanks to his influential three volume Introduction to the History of Science (1927-58). Sarton himself was a firm believer in the Draper-White Thesis and he secured his first academic appointment at the Carnegie Institution of Washington thanks to the sponsorship of Andrew Dickson White. But as the field of the history of science matured, the Draper-White Thesis came under increasing scrutiny and criticism.

The initial primary problems with it were that most of its supporting examples were found to be misrepresentations, oversimplifications, pseudo historical myths or flat out inventions. Multiple examples could be provided here, since both Draper and White’s books are riddled with these flaws. To examine one in detail, the idea that the Catholic Church set back medicine by centuries by banning human dissection is presented with some vigour by White.

In his Warfare, White notes that taboos against meddling with the bodies of the dead was something Christian Europe had “inherited from the old pagan civilizations”, and goes on to say:

… hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic ideas–the recognition of the human body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in similar terms. (Warfare, Ch. XIII)

So White claims the Church effectively banned dissection on mostly religious grounds:

[I]n 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery to monks. Many other councils did the same, and at the end of the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all; for then it was that Pope Boniface VIII, without any of that foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains it was desired to carry back to their own country.

In White’s telling, this crippled the study of anatomy for centuries, resulting in “the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the Middle Ages and giving up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic charlatans”. It was only through the work of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who was according to White “braving the fires of the Inquisition”, that dissection was revived and anatomy was saved from the Church’s anti-scientific superstitions.

As with most of Draper and White’s stories, this is a compelling narrative. And, as a result, it gets repeated to this day on social media, in atheist polemic and even in academic journals and textbooks by modern anatomists. And this is despite the fact that it is demonstrable nonsense. Far from mindlessly inheriting ancient Greek and Roman taboos about dissection, medieval Christians questioned them. Far from reinforcing these ancient pagan superstitions about dead bodies, the medieval Christian disdain for the material and the body helped break them down. And far from discouraging dissection, the Church supported and sponsored the medieval institutions that practiced it and made it the basis for anatomy. Vesalius was in no danger from “the fires of the Inquisition” for dissecting corpses because by his time this had became a common practice. And he was not some radical for undertaking this practice but was actually following in the footsteps and working in the tradition of medieval anatomists before him, like  William of Saliceto (1275), Mondino of Luzzi (c. 1275-1326) and Guy de Chauliac (ca. 1290-ca. 1367/70). Vesalius went far further than his medieval predescessors in his questioning of ancient authorities like Galen, certainly, but this had solid medieval precedents as well. Contra White, Vesalius was not a radical who defied Church prohibitions, but a successor to an established medieval tradition. And those Church prohibitions so decried by White were not what he claims and did not have the effect he declares so emphatically (see “The Church and Dissection” for full details and citations regarding how White manufactured this myth out of scraps and distortions of fact).

As the twentieth century proceeded and a better, more detailed and more objective study of the history of science progressed, it became abundantly clear that virtually all of Draper and White’s examples were this kind of weird pastiche of misrepresented history, distorted facts and outright invention. In their (literally) religious zeal to condemn what they saw as “theology” and promote their “true religion”, Draper and White had created a series of fictions and nonsense. And this in turn had been taken and weaponised by anti-religious polemicists like McCabe and then inherited by current popular culture and modern anti-theists, despite it being rejected by actual historians.

But it was not just the distorted episodes and anecdotes that underpinned the Draper-White Thesis that collapsed under scrutiny. The whole premise of their books has been examined by modern scholars and found to be simplistic and distorted. From the later twentieth century onward historians of science have fundamentally questioned and largely jettisoned the idea that the historical relationship between science and religion can be reduced to merely “conflict” and have shown that it has been far more complex and multidimensional than this. Probably the strongest and most influential articulation of this “Complexity Thesis” is found in John Hedley Brooke’s Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991). Brooke argues for a more rounded and nuanced view on the inter-relation between the two spheres, criticising not just the old Conflict Thesis of Draper, White, McCabe and their successors, but also the more simplistic or even apologetic attempts at harmonisation by a variety of writers including paleontologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould and Christian apologists Stanley Jaki and Rodney Stark.

Gould, in response to the vexed religio-political issue of so-called “Creation Science” in the US in the last decades of the twentieth century, proposed a kind of philosophical solution to the perceived “conflict” between science and religion by proposing what he called “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). In his book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), Gould argues there is no conflict between science and religion, so long as the two are kept separate; with science having jurisdiction over facts and theories and religion kept to values and morals. This was a latter day articulation of the old dictum that “the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” – a quip usually attributed to Galileo but actually originating with Cardinal Caesar Baronius. The problem with Gould’s proposal is, apart from any practical application today, it is far too neat and one dimensional as a historical description of the relationship between religion and science.

Similarly, the attempts by apologists like the Catholic physicist Jaki and the sociologist turned popular Christian apologist Stark to claim, contrary to the Conflict Thesis, science was not only always compatible with religion but also it arose primarily because of Christianity goes too far in the opposite direction to Draper and White and is also simplistic and founded on weak premises.

Brooke’s more careful and nuanced analysis argues, as he has written more recently, “against all meta-narratives that streamlined a rich, diverse and complex history for polemical and apologetic purposes.” He writes:

To capture the many different levels on which there could be mutual relevance, it was imperative to be thinking in three dimensions. Accordingly, [in his Science and Religion] I offered a conceptual analysis, using historical examples to show how religious and metaphysical beliefs had penetrated the study of nature as presuppositions, motives and sanctions, regulating methodology and playing a selective role when deciding between competing scientific theories. …. [This] allowed one to say that there could be simultaneously conflict on certain levels and harmony or separation on others. (Brooke, “Historians” in Hardin, Numbers et. al. The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die, pp. 258-75, pp 264 ff.)

Modern historians of science like Brooke not only recognise that depicting the complex historical relationship between what we can call “religion” and what we now call “science” merely to “conflict” is reductionist and simplistic. Episodes of actual conflict, such as the creation versus evolution clash in the US that vexed Gould, exist alongside harmony – after all, the modern Creationists are the noisy exception in a context of a modern Christianity that has long since reconciled itself with evolution. Similarly, great pioneers of early modern science did not compartmentalise their devout faith from their scientific work. On the contrary, the former inspired and motivated the latter. As Newton wrote in a letter in 1692 “When I wrote my [Principia], I had my eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.” We find similar sentiments in the writings of most other leading early scientists, including Kepler and Galileo. They saw no “conflict” at all and also saw no need for “non-overlapping magisteria”.

Furthermore, religious institions could be conservative and slow to embrace new ideas, of course. But they could also be at the forefront of innovation and exploration. When Galileo announced his telescopic discoveries of craters and mountains on the Moon in 1610, it was the Jesuit astronomer, Christopher Clavius, at the invitation of the Inquisitor, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who got Jesuit scientists Christoph Grienberger, Paolo Lembo and Odo van Malecote to confirm the reports. When they did so, Galileo was invited to Rome, feted by the Cardinal Francesco del Monte and Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (the future Pope Urban VIII), and feasted by the Collegium Romanum, who bestowed an honarary degree on the Florentine. Over 35 craters on the Moon are named after Catholic scientists from this period. Contrary to the myth of eternal conflict, John Helibron has been able to famously state in summary of his work on the role of the Catholic Church in early science:

[T]he Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries . . . than any other, and probably all, other institutions. (The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, Harvard, 1999, p. 3)

Similarly, as Brooke shows, the apologetic metanarrative of Jaki and Stark that takes all this and runs too far in the other direction is just as much a distortion of history.

The incoherence of such metanarratives is highlighted still further by the sophisticated historical and philosophical critique of Peter Harrison in his superb work The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015). Many have noted that the meanings of the words “science” and “religion” have changed significantly over time, which means any historical argument founded on the current, modern meaning of these words has serious problems of artificiality and anachronism. Harrison examines this problem in exacting detail, showing how for almost all history up until well into the nineteenth century it barely makes any real sense to impose these two categories on the conceptually and practically intertwined enterprises of natural philosophy, philosophy and theology. This means that the whole historical question of “Science versus Religion” is conceptually incoherent at a foundational level.

All this means that, at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the Conflict Thesis is effectively dead as a historical perspective. It is, for historians, both a quaint cultural artefact of a bygone age and an ongoing annoyance, given its persistence in popular culture and historical understanding. Part of this persistence is the fact it is propped up by polemicists not because of their deep understanding of history (or even of its history), but because it remains a useful myth.

The Persistent Myth

The graph above (also seen here) originally came from the now defunct site NoBeliefs.com and was created by that site’s author, Jim West, for an article titled “The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine (And the Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages)”. Most people could see some problems with West’s graph immediately. To begin with, it seems to refer purely to Europe in general and western Europe in particular, taking no account of China, India or even the Byzantine Empire. That Eurocentrism aside, precisely how its y axis measures “Science Advance” and how this is plotted is not clear and seems a work of West’s imagination, making the whole “graph” a highly dubious instrument even if we accept its basic premises.

Despite this, West’s pseudo graph has taken on a kind of zombie life on the internet, and it appears it will long outlive its original website’s demise. It makes regular appearances on Reddit and various social media sites; often derided when it does, but equally regularly defended as an accuarate depiction of the history of science. It is something of a weird online avatar of the Conflict Thesis and is so ubiquitous as such that it has its own dedicated page on the /r/badhistory subreddit, where it is referred to simply as “The Chart” and is mercilessly mocked and satirised.

The continued life of “The Chart” as it lumbers around the internet is testament to how much the Conflict Thesis is still accepted, long after it, its assumptions and its alleged supporting evidence have all been debunked and rejected by historians. The idea of “the Dark Ages” itself has serious historiographical problems, even when it is restricted to western Europe and only applied to the centuries immediately following the fall of the Western Roman Empire when many things, including the Greco-Roman natural philosophical tradition we could (with one eye on Peter Harrison’s work, noted above) cautiously call “science”, did decline significantly (on this see “The Great Myths 15: What About the Dark Ages?”). The fact that this tradition actually not only revived but actually flourished in the second half of the Medieval Period is slowly beginning to penetrate the popular sphere, thanks to recent books like James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon, 2010) and Seb Falk’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton, 2021). The work of several generations of twentieth century historians of science which has corrected the nineteenth century cliches and myths on this front are finally, slowly, beginning to creep into the mainstream.

But some are having none of this. For them, the Conflict Thesis is an eternal truth and almost an article of faith. Based on their narrow and almost entirely unquestioned grasp of history, it is reasonably and sufficiently clear and obvious and so they find the historians’ rejection of it both baffling and suspicious. Among them is American biologist Jerry Coyne, formerly of the University of Chicago, author of Why Evolution is True (Penguin, 2010) and the writer of the blog by the same name. Like Richard Dawkins, Coyne’s hostility to religion in general and Christianity in particular comes from his battles with Creationism and its militant proponents in the United States and fundamentalist churches beyond. And, as with Dawkins, this gives his understanding of religion and religious history a decidedly strange and warped perspective. Coming as he does, therefore, from the field of a very real conflict between science and religion, Coyne seems somewhat baffled as to how anyone could not see that the Conflict Thesis makes a broad degree of sense.

He is clear enough on the issue to protest that he does not actually hold “the ‘simplistic’ conflict hypothesis, characterized as arguing that science is continuously at war with religion“. He insists that he merely argues that

[S]cience and religion both claim that they involve “ways of knowing about the universe”, but while the methods of science really do enable us to understand the universe, the “ways of knowing” of religion (faith, authority, scripture, revelation, etc.) are not reliable guides to truth. (“What did the Galileo affair say about science vs. religion?”, Dec 26, 2021)

Indeed, Coyne has written a whole book making this argument: Faith Versus Fact: Why Religion and Science are Incompatible (Penguin, 2016). The problem here is that this is an epistemological argument, not actually a historical one. Philosophers and theologians would actually have all kinds of problems with Coyne’s argument in that book, but – that aside – Coyne is making a category error when he invokes his book in defence of the historical claims of the Conflict Thesis. As noted above, religion and science certainly can come into conflict, but the Conflict Thesis claims this is their natural state. And history shows this is not actually the case.

Coyne’s muddling of epistemology and historiography means he also gets into muddles about history. In the blog post above he gets very annoyed at Patrick J. Casey of the private Catholic institution the Holy Family University. Casey invoked Coyne’s ire by mentioning him as a proponet of the Conflict Thesis in an article on the Galileo Affair (“How Simplistic Narratives Can Mislead Us: A Case Study of the Galileo Affair”, Dec 16, 2021). Casey’s article is actually a fairly unremarkable summary of why the Galileo Affair was not the simplistic example of “science versus religion” that is often assumed; explaining that the Church was well-informed on the scientific issues with heliocentrism, that the overwhelming consensus of science was actually against Galileo in 1633, that Galileo did not actually prove his thesis and that the trial was more of a political matter, given the way Galileo argued and published his book deceived his patron, Pope Urban VIII. For anyone who has actually studied the Galileo Affair, this is all basic, well-established and wholly uncontroversial stuff.

But Coyne does not seem very conversant with the history of this complex matter. So he stumbles into several myths and misconceptions as he insists that this was, in fact, a straight forward case of conflict between religion and science. He insists that Galileo “was threatened with torture if he didn’t recant”. This is simply not true. The one and only mention of torture in the records of Galileo’s 1633 trial comes in the notes on his Third Deposition (21 June) and is after he has clearly stated that he once held the Copernican position “a long time ago” and before the 1616 injunction against it, but that he does not hold it anymore. He states “I do not hold this opinion of Copernicus and I have not held it after being ordered by injunction to abandon it” (Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989, p. 287). Given his 1632 book fairly clearly argued for the Copernican model, the inquisitors suspected, legitimately, that this was a lie. So they gave Galileo a formulaic warning: “he was told to tell the truth, otherwise one would have recourse to torture”. Galileo then insists he is telling the truth. The Inquisition gave its verdict the next day, indicating that they did not believe Galileo and finding him guilty of breaking his 1616 injunction.

Finocharrio has written a whole essay on this brief warning about torture, finding it was very inlikely to have been anything other than a courtroom formula and that, for a variety of reasons, Galileo was never in genuine danger of actually being tortured (see “Myth 8 – That Galileo was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. R. Numbers, Harvard, 2009, pp. 68-79). But the key point here is that Galileo was not threatened with torture unless he recanted. He had already denied Copernicanism in that deposition and several times in the previous days of the trial. Coyne simply does not know the relevant history here. Similarly, Coyne blithely assures his readers that “of course, Galileo insulted the pope by putting the geocentric arguments in the mouth of a character called Simplicio, which surely pissed off the Pope.” This too is nonsense. This is a story that only appeared as a piece of court gossip in 1635, so two years after the trial. It is nowhere to be found in any of the detailed correspondence and other material we have about what actually annoyed the prickly and paranoid Urban VIII and led to him throwing the book at his former court favourite. Coyne confidently bases his understanding of the “facts” here on pure myths.

So it is not surprising that his dismissal of Casey’s summary of modern historians’ understanding of the Galileo Affair is flimsy and simplistic to the point of absurdity: “Galileo argued for a physical truth that the Pope didn’t want to hear, ergo he was found guilty.” As a summary of this complex historical event, that is ludicrous.

More recently, Coyne has been at it again. He reheats his arguments about the Conflict Thesis in a post titled “How Religion Impedes Science: A New Historical Study” Dec 17, 2024). Here he notes a pre-print (so not peer reviewed) paper by a doctorate candidate at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Matías Cabello, titled “Science and Religious Dogmatism”. That Cabello is not a historian but an economist and the fact this paper has not been published should ring initial alarm bells and even Coyne notes some cautions. He points out that “the data [presented by Cabello] are correlative without any indication of causation, and the data have some problems”, says “readers who scrutinize the paper will probably find a lot to beef about” and admits he “read it only twice, and not very carefully” and so says “I’m not going to come out in strong support of its results”. But he also admits “I wanted to like this paper because its thesis—that the prevalence and dogmatism of religion impedes scientific progress—is one on which I’ve written a book.”

This is another reference to his 2016 book Fact versus Faith, so once again he is sliding between his epistemological claims about incompatibility between science and religion and a historical claim about fundamental conflicts between the two. So he gets in a kick at the late Ronald Numbers (1942-2023), the eminent and esteemed historian of science, former head of the History of Science Society and winner of the prestigious Sarton Medal for his contributions to the history of science. But Coyne, a biologist, is not impressed with Numbers:

For a long time historians of science, the most prominent of which was the late Ronald Numbers, maintained that the “conflict hypothesis” – that religion and science were in historical conflict – was dead wrong. I never found their arguments convincing, one reason being that they would weasel and wiggle around clear cases of conflict, like that of Galileo versus the Catholic Church.

We have already seen how Coyne’s grasp of Galileo is cartoonish, but how does he counter the accepted consensus of Numbers and other historians on the historical question of Conflict? By reference, yet again, to his book on epistemology. For Coyne if, as he supposes, religion is fundamentally epistemologically incompatible with science, it surely follows that they must have been in a high degree of conflict down the ages. He cannot see how, even if he is right about the epistemology, this is a tangled non sequitur.

So after his caveats about possible problems with the student economist Cabello’s paper, he summarises it with a fair degree of enthusiasm. As a piece of historical argument, however, Cabello’s paper is laughably bad. In shades of “The Chart”, he presents very authoritative-looking graphs of things like “Religion and science in the long term” or “The rise of science” and “Per capita scientists & discoverers in Wikipedia”. What data is all this based on? He uses the Google Books N-gram viewer to look for the frequency of “God-referring words” (“Jesus”, “God” “Christ”) and the comparitive frequency of words “strongly associated with (proto)science” and finds, though this “data”, that the former rise and then peak from c. 1520 to 1720 while the latter then rise and keep rising from 1720 to the present:

Cabello further supports this with further graphs that he purports to show data regarding “the pace of science”, using Wikipedia entries on “scientists and discoverers” and indicating that this too rose after his 1520-1720 “religious revival” period:

There is so much that is methodologically and historiographically wrong with this naive nonsense it is hard to know what to highlight first. The invention of printing c. 1450 meant those who were literate could afford books at a level not seen before. This literate class was dominated by the clergy and so, logically, most of the books printed for this audience were religious in content. So they included plenty of “God-referring words”. At the same time, early print shops struggled to turn a profit since, while printed books were far quicker and somewhat cheaper to produce than manuscripts, they were still expensive luxury items. The religious controversies of the Reformation proved a saving grace at a critical juncture, as cheaper booklets and pamphlets proved immensely popular and produced the revenue publishers needed to be successful and to support other, more expensive, publications. This is the more logical explanation for the higher prevalence of “God-referring words” in publications between 1500 and 1700, not some imaginary “religious revival”.

The successful revolution in publication in this period then helped drive a rise in literacy generally, assisted by a plethora of other factors such as the rise of mercantilism, the importance of the written word in Protestantism, the establishment of nation states and their attendant bureaucracies and many more. This in turn drove a far greater diversity of subjects published on, including those with words “strongly associated with (proto)science”. So this is the broad explanation for the relative increase in such words in the period after 1700, not the victory of science and reason over some earlier “religious revival”. Similarly, plotting Wikipedia’s “words on scientists and discoverers” (a rubbery and subjective category if there ever was one) is childishly simplistic. To present these word frequencies as “data” and then draw such a broad and unnuanced set of conclusions from them is a complete joke. We can only wish Cabello the very best of luck getting this high school project past peer review. Perhaps economics journals take this kind of simplistic garbage seriously.

But, despite his caveats, Coyne genuinely thinks Cabello is “onto something”. He also partly endorses Cabello’s very strange assessment of why those silly old historians oppose the Conflict Thesis in the face of this kind of compelling data, saying “his theory is that academics see a lot of religious scientists, and from that conclude that there can be no conflict.” But Coyne has further thoughts here:

Instead, I’d say that people like Numbers and Ruse adopt the “no conflict” hypothesis because it is more or less a “woke” point of view: it goes along with the virtue-flaunting idea that you can have your Jesus and Darwin, too.  You don’t get popular by touting a conflict, as I’ve learned, but people love to hear that you can be religious and also embrace modern science. 

So those stupid historians are just being … “woke”. Luckily we have biologists and student economists to set us all straight and show that decades of careful historical work is all wrong. Praise Dawkins!

Conclusion

Historians have long since dispatched Draper and White’s thesis. Their assumptions were wrong, their examples were distorted or even imaginary and their arguments were tendentious. But, despite their originally religious motivations, their thesis was taken up by anti-religious polemicists in the early twentiteth century and their versions of Draper-White arguments continue to be repeated by anti-theists and anti-religious zealots to this day. While modern historians’ debunking of most of the examples of conflict the thesis is based on is, very slowly, starting to penetrate the popular sphere, the Conflict Thesis itself shows no sign of being dislodged from the average person’s conception of “what everyone knows”. A recent book by David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu, Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World (Oxford, 2022) tells the story of the Conflict Thesis and how it was debunked in an engaging and entertaining way for a popular audience. But while it is simply assumed in public discourse by, for example, Neil deGrasse Tyson and his ilk, it is likely to persist.

This is why true rationalists and sceptics need to be careful to question “what everyone knows”, even – or especially – when it fits and confirms prior ideas.

Further Reading

John Hedley Brooke Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991)

Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton, 2021)

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, (University of California Press,1989)

Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999)

James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon, 2010)

Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, Ronald A. Binzley (ed.s), The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die (Johns Hopkins, 2018)

Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015)

John Helibron,The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, (Harvard, 1999)

David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu, Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World (Oxford, 2022)

Ronald Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, (Harvard, 2009)

James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict, (University of Pittsburgh, 2019)