The Phony War Between Science and Religion

You have doubtless heard that ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment science and religion have been at loggerheads - Galileo, and all that. The claim, however, is historical horsepucky as almost all scholars agree and as an article a few months ago by Dr. Justin Taylor adumbrates.

Taylor begins by noting that scholars as diverse as Ronald Numbers (an agnostic) and Timothy Larsen (a Christian theist) agree that the alleged warfare between science and religion was a myth perpetrated for propaganda purposes in the 19th century primarily by two men. He goes on to explain who these two very influential characters were.

The first was Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and the second was John William Draper (1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York.

Taylor writes:

In December 1869, Andrew White--the young and beleaguered Cornell president--delivered a lecture at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “The Battle-Fields of Science.” He melodramatically painted a picture of a longstanding warfare between religion and science:

I propose, then, to present to you this evening an outline of the great sacred struggle for the liberty of Science--a struggle which has been going on for so many centuries. A tough contest this has been! A war continued longer--with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon . . .

In all modern history, interference with Science in the supposed interest of religion—no matter how conscientious such interference may have been--has resulted in the direst evils both to Religion and Science, and invariably.

His lecture was published in book form seven years later as The Warfare of Science.

Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918)

In 1874, Professor Draper published his History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. His thesis was as follows:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. . . . The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

Draper’s work was enormously popular, going through 50 editions in the next half century.

John William Draper (1811-1882)

The conflict these men envisioned existed wholly in their own minds, but the theme was nevertheless popular among secular folk, and their work gained a currency unmerited by it's accuracy. Thanks largely to these two writers the notion of a warfare between science and religion became something of an urban legend and has persisted up to the present day despite having been debunked by numerous historians and other scholars.

Taylor provides a sample of the claims that Draper and White promoted and which have subsequently been shown to be utterly false. They wrote, for instance, that:

1.The church believed for centuries that the earth is flat.

2.The church opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth since Genesis promised that childbirth would be painful.

On the first myth, Lesley B. Cormack, chair of the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, writes that “there is virtually no historical evidence to support the myth of a medieval flat earth. Christian clerics neither suppressed the truth nor stifled debate on the subject.”

On the second myth, Larsen states that:

No church has ever pronounced against anesthetics in childbirth. Moreover, there was no vocal group of ministers who opposed it. In fact, the inventor of chloroform received fan mail from ministers of the major denominations thanking him for helping to alleviate the suffering of women in labor.

Rather, the opposition to anesthetics during childbirth came from medical professionals, not from ministers, and for scientific, not religious, reasons.

So why, Taylor asks, did men like White and Draper--along with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who championed Darwinism and coined the term “agnostic”--manufacture these historical myths and this overall legend of perpetual conflict?

He cites Larsen's answer:

The purpose of the war was to discredit clergymen as suitable figures to undertake scientific work in order that the new breed of professionals would have an opportunity to fill in the gap for such work created by eliminating the current men of science. It was thus tendentiously asserted that the religious convictions of clergymen disqualified them from pursuing their scientific inquiries objectively.

More to the point, however, was the fact that clergymen were undertaking this work for the sheer love of science and thus hindering the expectation that it would be done for money by paid full-time scientists. Clergymen were branded amateurs in order to facilitate the creation of a new category of professionals.

This may be true as far as it goes, but I think there's a more fundamental reason for the conflict thesis. To wit, it has been an effective weapon in the arsenal of those atheists who wish to discredit religious belief altogether. If students and others who know that science has been enormously successful are convinced that science and religion are incompatible, then obviously there's not only no need for religion, but it's also positively pernicious to the extent that it impedes the progress of science.

As we've pointed out on Viewpoint numerous times over the years, and as Alvin Plantinga masterfully explains in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, there's no conflict between religion and science, but there is a conflict between religion, particularly theistic religion, and metaphysical naturalism. Opponents of religion sometimes blur the distinction between naturalism and science to make it appear as if there's an incompatibility between science and religion, but this is a bit of polemical sleight-of-hand that simply obscures the truth.

It is naturalism, the belief that physical nature is all there is, which is at war with theism which is, of course, based on the belief that nature is not all there is. There is a supernature as well.

This belief and science are, contrary to those who wish to perpetuate the warfare thesis, perfectly sympatico.