John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) wrote the bestselling History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), respectively. Since then, they have been known in the scholarly literature as co-founders of the conflict thesis: the notion that science and religion are fundamentally and irrevocably at war.
The French Revolution sought to replace traditional Catholicism with new “religions”—the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being. The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was rededicated in 1793 to the Cult of Reason, and the goddess of liberty was worshipped where the altar had once stood.
Cosmas, a sixth-century convert to Christianity, tried to use Scripture to devise a correct picture of the Earth. His work was either ignored or ridiculed by his peers and had no impact on Christianity as a whole—despite claims to the contrary from both Draper and White.
Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) expertly dissected the human body, taking great care to document its inner workings. His work contained detailed woodcuts by a group of skilled artists and advanced anatomy significantly. Such study was legalized, enabled, and supported by the Church from the twelfth century onward—overturning the bans on the practice which had originated in the ancient world.
The popular image of the Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages”—a miserable and fearful period dominated by death, disease, irrationality, fecklessness, and stupidity—is far from accurate. In reality, much scientific thinking was present; and advances in technology, logic, and philosophy were quite considerable. Much of this was deeply integrated with the Church.
French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) included a novel engraving in his 1888 book L’atmosphère: Météorologie populaire, reminding his readers that previous generations had imagined the universe as a series of solid spheres. Thankfully, he implied, science had risen up to give us a new and reliable way of chasing down the truth—and the image soon became linked to myths about Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and more.
Far from being a hard-nosed atheist, Draper considered himself to be an enlightened Christian, following the faith as it had been in its original and pure form. When he began experimenting with photography, one of the very first images he took was of Raphael’s The Deposition of Christ (1507), in which Jesus is being mourned soon after his death.
Many of the key thinkers in the seventeenth-century world of science were heavily influenced by the biblical story of the Fall. The likes of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Robert Hooke (1635–1703) wrote that science was a gift from God to help humankind reverse the devastating effects of Adam’s sin. They also believed that the fallen human mind would need support from experimental work since it was unreliable on its own. As a result, this Christian dogma gave great energy to what we now call the “scientific method.”
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was convinced that God had made a mathematical world and had also gifted his people with mathematical minds. He believed that by investigating the heavens he might learn more of God and worship him more fully. The outcome of such an approach was his famed “three laws” of planetary motion—which, in turn, enabled the similarly minded Isaac Newton (1643–1727) to formulate the law of gravity. The picture above shows Kepler’s orbit of Mars.
A fictitious town invented to catch copyright frauds back in the 1930s, Agloe has since taken on a life of its own. Like the conflict thesis, it was birthed from the imaginations of its creators and went on to fool many into thinking that it was real. In 2014, it was removed from Google Maps. Will the conflict thesis last much longer?