6

Myths, Myths, Everywhere

Feelings of Loneliness and Emptiness • First of Those Who Should Be Mentioned • This Great Ecclesiastical Crime • The Wrong Guy • Thought Control on Astronomers • Illusions from the Devil • Scientific Folklore • The Myth Magnet • Three Myths, One Paragraph • An Antagonist Culture • Fides Quaerens Intellectum • Mythical Authority • Flatly Asserted Dogma • What Were They Up To?

Feelings of Loneliness and Emptiness

“As feelings of loneliness and emptiness slowly begin to surge upon me,” wrote Yusaku Maezawa, “there’s one thing I think about: Continuing to love one woman.”¹

Maezawa had recently broken up with his girlfriend. He was heartbroken. In desperation, he threw out a worldwide appeal for a special someone to come and heal his hurt: “I want to find a life partner,” he implored womankind everywhere. “Come to the moon with me?”²

This was no poetic exaggeration on the Japanese businessman’s part; he had the flight booked already. Thanks to fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX program, Maezawa and his lucky girl would fly around the moon in 2023. What the lovelorn adventurer had paid for this twin ticket was not disclosed—but Musk, one of the world’s three richest entrepreneurs, called it “a lot of money.”³

Yet why, if money is no object, stop at the moon? Why not aim further? Well, those are precisely the thoughts of Musk himself, and of his assorted competitors: the race to Mars is on.

Right now, various governmental agencies are either teaming up with or working against private companies to be the first to put people on the red planet. A one-way trip is likely to take the better part of a year, even though Mars, cosmologically speaking, is pretty close to us. A journey to the sun would take only a little longer—but would, of course, burn up the unfortunate tourists (even if they did go at night).

The far reaches of our one-sun-and-eight-planets solar system are also just about within reach, although the impracticalities of a decade-plus of travel would have to be overcome. It is only when we begin to think about getting to the next star system along, Alpha Centauri, that a real sense of universal size begins to dawn on us. For to travel there—to our nearest stellar neighbors—would take a thousand centuries.

Yet even that impossibly huge star trek is just “round the corner” as far as space is concerned. Our sun is one of more than one hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy alone. And the universe—or, at least, the bit of it that we can see—holds more than a hundred billion galaxies just like ours. This makes for a discombobulating estimate of there being somewhere around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars out there, and very possibly orders of magnitude more—many of which boast planets of their own. And, if we ask how much further space on goes beyond what we can see, the answer is a simple one: we don’t know.

All this is rather different from ancient Greek naturalist Aristotle’s picture of the cosmos. In his version, the Earth sat in the center with the sun and planets orbiting around it. Then, past those, lay the rotating sphere of the fixed stars. Pretty much everyone was happy with this for pretty much 2000 years, and most of the astronomical predictions that came from it were useful enough. So, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

But, of course, it was broke.

First of Those Who Should Be Mentioned

The unexpected discovery of the true vastness of space is the subject matter in episode one of the Tyson-fronted reboot of Sagan’s Cosmos. The writers of this 2014 series had quite a task on their hands: first, they needed to explain the mathematical and telescopic overturning of Aristotle’s model. Second, they had to communicate—somehow—the mind-blowing immensity of what we now know lies beyond the Grecian’s shattered spheres. Third, all of this had to be accessible to non-specialists, as well as to kids. In short, it was not an easy gig.

Wisely, they looked for a human face and a human story to carry the load—to bring these heavenly matters back down to earth, so to speak. Such a tactic, though, called for a careful choice of hero: a leader in logic; a master of mathematics; an expert in experiment; a scientific superstar. But whom, from all of history, should they pick?

Well, the good news is that someone else had already thought this difficult question through, and had come up with the perfect candidate:

First of those who should be mentioned with reverence as beginning to develop again that current of Greek thought which the system drawn from our sacred books by the fathers and doctors of the Church had interrupted for more than a thousand years, was Giordano Bruno.⁴

The bad news is that this someone else was none other than Andrew Dickson White—the passage above is from his notoriously inaccurate Warfare.

And Cosmos—probably unknowingly—followed its advice.

This Great Ecclesiastical Crime

In the Dark Ages, Cosmos tells us, space was pathetically parochial. The Earth was all that really mattered—"we were the center of a little universe,” its script says. Then Bruno (1548–1600) came along. “There was only one man on the whole planet,” trumpets Tyson, “who envisioned an infinitely grander cosmos.” Yet “this was a time when there was no freedom of thought in Italy,” we are warned.⁵

As the episode unfolds, we watch Bruno try to persuade his colleagues that the sun is just one of many stars, and that these other stars also have planets. We watch him exhorting his fellow intellectuals, lovingly and logically, to embrace a universe far greater than their small minds have so far imagined. We watch him be ignored, or laughed at, or attacked, or dismissed.

Unable to find acceptance anywhere across Europe, Bruno returns home—and is thrown into an Italian jail by the “thought police.”⁶ Then, in 1600, after nearly a decade of confinement, he is burned alive for his ideas. Tyson drives the key point home: “Why was the Church willing to go to such lengths to torment Bruno? What were they afraid of? If Bruno was right, then the sacred books and the authority of the Church would be open to question.”⁷

With the lengthy animated tale now over, Cosmos switches to a computerized sweep across our solar system and into the universe beyond it. “Bruno had been right all along,” Tyson confirms, with despair.⁸

A century and a half earlier, a certain John William Draper had been similarly outraged at Bruno’s eventual fate:

No accuser, no witness, no advocate is present, but the familiars of the Holy Office, clad in black, are stealthily moving about. The tormentors and the rack are in the vaults below. He is simply told that he has brought upon himself strong suspicions of heresy, since he has said that there are other worlds than ours . . . perhaps the day approaches when posterity will offer an expiation for this great ecclesiastical crime.⁹

Bruno, as portrayed in Cosmos, Conflict, and Warfare, is a conflict thesis martyr. His mortal sins were logic and science. His vision of millions of suns and millions of planets was unacceptable to the ever-dogmatic Catholics, who killed him for it. It was God versus science, plain and simple.

Except that it wasn’t. Because they—Draper, White, and Tyson, that is—got the wrong guy.

The Wrong Guy

The real Bruno, as it happens, was a wholehearted theist—he was deeply committed to the supernatural. In fact, one of his main arguments for a bigger universe was his belief in a bigger God. He wrote as much in his 1584 work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds:

So is the magnificence of God magnified, and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest: not merely glorified in one, but in innumerable suns; not in a single earth, one world, but in a thousand thousand, spoken in infinity.¹⁰

Indeed, it was not calculations based on observations that led Bruno to his apparently futuristic conclusion—it was his theology, philosophy, and mysticism. He believed that an infinite God was duty-bound to create an infinite universe—that He must do so by very definition. There was no divine choice in the matter; it was demanded by logic itself.

And yet, had Bruno done more homework, he might have known that earlier medieval thinkers had already analyzed this infinite-God-infinite-universe connection—and then rejected it. God, they had concluded, was entirely free to create whatever and however he wanted to. His universe, they said, might be infinite, and it might not.¹¹ Indeed, the only way to find out what he had actually done was to go out and make some observations—a notion which, as we shall see in Chapter 8, went on to give a significant boost to experimental science.

Bruno’s most celebrated idea, then—the one that got him the Cosmos gig—was not so much ahead of his time, as it was behind it.

It gets worse for the Bruno-was-a-modern-scientist-stuck-in-the-wrong-age crowd: for the philosopher also believed that the Earth, stars, and planets were somehow alive. This is, incidentally, why he liked Nicolaus Copernicus’s recent controversial ideas (published in 1543) about the Earth orbiting the sun—for a moving Earth fitted very nicely with his own conviction that it had some sort of life of its own.

Planets, he wrote, spun on their axes and orbited stars because they enjoyed the changes in temperature that came from doing so—they relished the variety of night and day, and of the seasons. Likewise, Bruno said, the sun and its inhabitants thrived on the Earth’s supposedly radiated coolness: “In that hottest and light-giving of bodies [the Sun], there also live creatures which grow due to the refrigeration of the surrounding cold.”¹²

None of these conclusions came, by the way, from looking through a telescope—for they did not exist in suitable form during Bruno’s lifetime. He was therefore limited, as were his peers, to the twin powers of the naked eye and mathematics. But his math, when he tried using it, wasn’t great; his published attempts often include basic geometrical errors, and are deeply flawed.¹³

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, a specialist on this period, comments on the “flimsiness of Bruno’s scientific credentials” and explains that:

His thinking contains a confusing mixture of metaphysical speculation, unorthodox theological criticism, and unconventional astronomy; an example is his animism, according to which natural bodies have souls, including the whole universe (whose soul is God) . . . . His manner of thinking is extremely obscure, exhibiting little reasoned argumentation.¹⁴

Bruno had strong words, however, for anyone who disagreed with his muddled thought: “Were we to ply such a man with further reasons and truths, it would be like . . . washing the head of an ass: if you wash him a hundred times . . . it is as if you’d never washed him at all.”¹⁵

So Bruno, then, was not the man that the writers of Cosmos have depicted. A hot-headed and inventive mystical philosopher who was fascinated by Copernican astronomy? Yes. A coolly logical and brilliantly inductive mathematical scientist better suited to the labs of today? No.

But why was he killed?

Thought Control on Astronomers

Bruno fell out with traditional doctrine early on in his career as a monk. He believed that Jesus was not God the Son, but a magician. The Trinity, he contended, was nonsense. The existence of the Church as an institution—the same Church he had once served—was, from his point of view, entirely unnecessary.

As he traveled, he continued to spread these ideas—and continued to insult anyone who questioned him along the way. In doing so, he built up quite the retinue of enemies. Finocchiaro says Bruno’s writings “are full of satire, iconoclasm, blasphemy, profanity, sexual innuendo, and the like.”¹⁶ He was hardly trying to win friends and influence people; nor was he the puppy-dog-eyed victim presented in the Cosmos cartoon. And, in the end, the controversial combination of his personality and his philosophical theology led him to his death.

To be sure, none of Bruno’s wild speculations or vicious attacks on his peers could ever merit the punishment he ended up receiving—it was both cruel in the extreme and wholly unjustifiable. And yet, the conflict thesis contention that he was murdered because of his scientific prescience is utterly false. While his ideas about infinite solar systems were indeed mentioned in the trial—which, contrary to Draper, had multiple witnesses present—it was not them which sent him to the stake.

We can know this last fact because many others before Bruno—including cardinals and other churchmen—had already suggested the possibilities of other worlds and of an infinite universe, and had faced no problems at all.¹⁷ Historian Jole Shackleford, writing on Bruno, puts it simply: “The Catholic church did not impose thought control on astronomers.”¹⁸

Interestingly, the Cosmos script actually seems to veer back toward the truth toward the end of its eleven-minute moral tale: “Bruno was no scientist,” explains Tyson. “His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess, because he had no evidence to support it.”¹⁹

By then, though, it is really too late. The jibes have already gone in at the small-minded and illogical Church. The God-versus-science motif has already been emblazoned across the screen. Bruno has already been drawn soaring into space like a rational Christ, arms out wide in a faux-crucifixion scene. Bullying bishops have already spat, snarled, and shouted at our intellectual hero, like the villains in a Disney movie. One can’t help but conclude that this is—like the exaggerated accounts of Hypatia in our last chapter—a piece of conflict thesis propaganda.

All of which prompts a question: aren’t there better candidates out there for this role than Bruno? If one really wants to bash Christianity and big up science, why pick a heretical theologian—one who believed in an infinite God, taught about planets having souls, and messed up his math—as a role model?

Why, for instance, did the Cosmos scriptwriters not go for the far more obvious target of Galileo Galilei? Unlike Bruno, Galileo looked through a telescope, he conducted recognizably modern experiments, he performed multiple clever calculations, he came up with some physical laws—and, of course, he was placed on trial by the Church specifically for his astronomical writings. Wouldn’t he have been a much better choice?

John Merriman, author of the definitive A History of Modern Europe, thinks so. When he was lecturing his history students at Yale on the dangers of “religious skepticism about any kind of rational belief,” Merriman knew, straight away, which direction to point them in: “Look what happens to Galileo, who was lucky enough to have been burned at the stake by his friend the pope.”²⁰

But then that’s not true, either.

Illusions from the Devil

Here are the bare facts: Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), like Bruno, was a Copernican—he thought the sun was at the center of the solar system. When he began announcing it in public, he was warned off by Catholic naysayers, and was eventually banned in 1616—by the Inquisition, no less—from ever teaching the position again. In 1632, however, the talented astronomer-mathematician strayed once more; he wrote a scientific text advocating heliocentrism, and promptly ended up on trial for it. Threatened with imprisonment and torture if he refused to recant, Galileo stood his ground. He was found guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy’, was placed under house arrest, and his book was banned. He was never freed.

Let’s be frank: it doesn’t read well for the Church.

This story is, of course, in both Draper and White. Here’s Warfare:

In vain did Galileo try to prove the existence of satellites by showing them to the doubters through his telescope: they either declared it impious to look, or, if they did look, denounced the satellites as illusions from the devil.²¹

And now Conflict:

On his knees, with his hand on the Bible, he was compelled to abjure and curse the doctrine of the movement of the earth. What a spectacle! This venerable man, the most illustrious of his age, forced by the threat of death to deny facts which his judges as well as himself knew to be true! He was then committed to prison, treated with remorseless severity during the remaining ten years of his life.²²

It would appear, then, that Galileo would indeed have been a much better choice than Bruno for anyone wanting to push the conflict thesis. After all, religion has been caught, here, standing over science’s body with dagger in hand.

But we have only heard half of the story.

Scientific Folklore

Thomas Lessl is very interested in the art of storytelling; indeed, he is a professor of it. When it comes to the account of Galileo, he is a bit of an expert—he has carefully read through no fewer than forty popular retellings of it, and analyzed them to within a subclause of their lives. What he found is really rather fascinating—for Galileo and the Church, he says, has become a modern-day fairy tale.

In his paper “The Galileo Legend as Scientific Folklore,” Lessl notes that important details are often skipped over lest they should spoil what can otherwise be a simple good-versus-evil storyline. Very rarely, for example, do books explain that Galileo was a devout Catholic. They don’t mention that he was fully convinced of the deity of Jesus, and the resurrection, and the virgin birth, and that Scripture came “through the very mouth of the Holy Spirit.”²³ They ignore that he argued forcefully for his faith on multiple occasions—often quoting Augustine, or Jerome, or Tertullian as allies. In fact, Galileo insisted, throughout his whole life, that: “The holy Bible can never speak untruth whenever its true meaning is understood.”²⁴

Other inconvenient truths are also jettisoned. Many cardinals and bishops, for instance, exalted the physicist, and backed his science publicly. On one occasion, when an angry sermon was preached against his heliocentrism, the offending minister was forced to apologize to Galileo, in print, by Catholic superiors.²⁵

This pattern of censorship continues: the stubborn folk who refused to look through his telescope (White’s “doubters”) were actually secular philosophers committed to Aristotle, not members of the clergy. Indeed, at no point in the entire debacle were Galileo’s scientific observations ever called into question by the Church—there was never any ecclesiastical doubt about his gathered data.

Two further comments are worth making (although many more could be added, including the awkward fact that Galileo had a Bruno-like tendency to mock other thinkers mercilessly, thus winning himself plenty of academic foes). The first is that Galileo did not have sufficient scientific evidence to verify his theory, for his results were incomplete and some of his deductions incorrect. As it happens, heliocentrism was not clearly supported by physical findings for another two centuries. The second is that Galileo was neither tortured nor jailed. Instead, he lived at a friend’s house and then his own, with full permission to work on his physics. His game-changing treatise on motion, Two New Sciences, was written post-trial, and was published in 1638.

In papal Rome—the heartland of Catholicism—it sold out immediately.

By leaving these details out—a Christian Galileo with clerical allies and secular enemies; his failure to offer conclusive proof at trial when asked to; his continued freedom to publish and sell science books—the storytellers are misleading their audience. Allan Chapman, our doughty Oxford historian of science, puts it this way:

Let us remember that Galileo lived and died an obedient if disputatious son of the church, and that to see him as a martyr striving to make the world a cosy place for secularist ideologists to live in is pure mythology.²⁶

Even though this has been pointed out again and again, Lessl doesn’t think that the God-versus-science parable of Galileo will ever really go away—for there is too much hanging on it:

To expect the scientific culture to offer a more balanced view of these events might be reasonable, but it would also be unrealistic. Those who promulgate scientific folklore are not only naive historians but also partisan political actors . . . the values that are championed in the Galileo legend are shared with the broader culture of modernism . . . a belief in binary oppositions between reason and faith, knowledge and authority, and between Scripture and the light of nature.²⁷

This is pessimistic, yes—but it may also be true. After all, if Yale’s future leaders are being told by an eminent authority like Merriman that religion was up against reason in the early modern period, and that Galileo was killed by the pope, then the conflict thesis can only gain ground in the long run. Indeed, to help it do so, many in the Draper–White camp like to add a third super-famous name to those of Galileo and Bruno.

Who’s that, then?

The Myth Magnet

“I still can’t see it,” says Mike Brown, who is the incumbent Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology:

I go outside at night and watch the stars spinning around the north star . . . . But from where I stand and watch, it’s all happening far over my head. I try to feel the earth spinning beneath my feet and to picture the globe rushing around the sun, but I just can’t.²⁸

This is some refreshing honesty. Brown, a professional astronomer who has known for all of his adult life that the Earth orbits the sun, admits he can neither “see” nor “feel” it happening. Imagining himself back in the sixteenth century, he says: “I like to think that I would have immediately recognized the simplicity and elegance of this idea and intuitively known it to be correct. But I suspect the opposite.”²⁹

Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University as well as a senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory—and he is in full agreement with Brown on how one would likely have responded to Copernicus’s new sun-centered system: “You would no doubt have told him to get lost and to take all that nonsense with him . . . think how much harder it would have been to walk west than walk east! Totally ridiculous!”³⁰

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), as it turns out, is quite the myth magnet. Brown and Gingerich have dealt with one example: that the Polish stargazer’s decision to stick the sun in the middle was somehow obvious. Anyone who failed to accept his move at once, the assorted mythmakers suggest, must have been dumb, or stubborn, or dogmatic, or all three. Draper, for instance, says Copernicus “incontestably established the heliocentric theory.”

In reality, though, his model was anything but obvious—it ran contrary to the physics of the day, and to human perception, and to common sense. In short, it seemed a bit daft. It wasn’t even needed, either, since the age-old Aristotelian–Ptolemaic model had served astronomers, navigators, and farmers pretty well for two millennia. And, of course, heliocentrism also appeared to conflict with the simplest reading of Scripture—which leads us to a second Copernican myth.

Copernicus, so the story goes, was terrified of the Inquisition—after all, he was going against their Bible. To avoid likely torture at their hands, therefore, he only published when already on his deathbed. Here’s Warfare, making the whole thing sound like quite the soap opera:

To publish his thought as it had now developed was evidently dangerous . . . for more than thirty years it lay slumbering in the mind of Copernicus. . . . He dared not send it to Rome, for there were the rulers of the older Church ready to seize it; he dared not send it to Wittenberg, for there were the leaders of Protestantism no less hostile.³¹

Wrong, again.

In truth, the deeply Christian Copernicus was far more worried about being openly mocked by other natural philosophers than he was about being hurled into dungeons by inquisitors.³² Why, for instance, didn’t the atmosphere simply blow away as the Earth hurtled through space? Why didn’t thrown objects get left behind as the planet moved on? At the time, his idea looked more than a little like madness—and Copernicus knew it.

Still, a few of his friends (including, incidentally, both a bishop and a cardinal), eventually managed to persuade him to publish, despite his fear of feeling foolish. One of the persuaders, the equally devout Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), added a placatory but not unreasonable preface claiming that the work was really only a mathematical one, and was best used for calculations only. (Bruno—ever the diplomat—later called Osiander an “ignorant and presumptuous jackass” for doing so.³³) Sadly, Copernicus fell ill during the publication process, and only received the first edition as he died. And, just to be clear, he did not get sick and die on purpose.

Which brings us to myth number three: that the book was immediately banned. It wasn’t. The initial response was mild interest from those in the know, a few raised eyebrows, and some understandable ridicule. Concerns were indeed raised by some in the Church, who felt uncomfortable with what seemed like a challenge to the Bible. Because of this, the work was “suspended until corrected.” But this move came a full seventy years after publication, and it was no ban. Copernicus expert Robert S. Westman explains: “Catholics could buy and read the books, but they were to know that the doctrines contained therein were false, and they were instructed on which lines to expurgate.”³⁴

So then: heliocentrism was not obvious; Copernicus was not frightened of religious persecution; he did not deliberately wait until he was nearly dead to publish; his book was not banned. Is our magnetic Pole now myth-free? Well, no, not quite.

Andrew Dickson White isn’t done yet.

Three Myths, One Paragraph

Here, then, is Warfare again—and this time, displaying remarkable efficiency, White manages to squeeze three further questionable Copernicanisms into a single paragraph:

Calvin took the lead, in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the center of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third Psalm, and asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”³⁵

Let’s take the Calvin myth first. A hugely influential theologian, John Calvin (1509–1564) was not afraid of a strong opinion or two—so Warfare’s dramatic assertion seems feasible. But Calvin never actually wrote the words White ascribes to him—in fact, in all of his pages and pages of writings, he never mentions Copernicus at all.³⁶

White’s footnote for the imagined “quote” credits English cleric Frederic W. Farrar (1831–1903); but then the trail runs dry, for Farrar does not say where he got it from.³⁷ Once it turned up in Warfare, however, it was elevated to conflict thesis Scripture. The line has been used hundreds of times since, including by the eminent philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)—bestselling author of Why I Am Not a Christian.³⁸

Secondly, White’s passage implies that Calvin the dogmatist thought science was at war with God himself. Yet here is Calvin, in one of his many books of sermons, on stargazing:

The study of astronomy not only gives pleasure but is also extremely useful. And no one can deny that it admirably reveals the wisdom of God. Therefore, clever men who expend their labor upon it are to be praised and those who have ability and leisure ought not to neglect work of that kind.³⁹

These are hardly the words of a science-denier. So far, then, White’s paragraph has erred badly on two counts. His third myth, however, is more subtle, and more deeply hidden—and it warrants some careful discussion.

Copernicus, White says, removed us from the “centre of the universe”—and, in doing so, it called dogmatic Christianity into question. How so? Well, because our eminent central position was supposed to be a sign of our special creation by God—and, in turn, that the Genesis account was true, and that mankind was the pinnacle of all of God’s handiwork. And yet here was brave science, following the actual evidence—only to discover that we are not all that special, after all.

This Copernicus-demoted-humanity riff does the rounds in almost all modern retellings of the revolution, and is often accompanied by the and-in-doing-so-contradicted-Christianity bassline. Here, for example, is the famous New York University mathematician Morris Kline repeating it (alongside some other old favorites):

A mathematician thinking only in terms of mathematics and unencumbered by non-mathematical principles would not hesitate to accept at once the Copernican simplification . . . those who were guided chiefly or entirely by religious or metaphysical principles would not . . . a heliocentric theory that downgraded humanity’s importance in the universe met severe condemnation . . . John Calvin thundered “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”⁴⁰

Kline’s full account of the events, as it happens, is one of the more balanced offerings available in the mainstream. The worst offenders—the most inaccurate, and the most partisan—often turn out to be school and university coursebooks, which is rather disturbing. American historian of science Michael Keas carried out a survey of a staggering 130 student guides, and found it in most of them: “Seventy-one percent of astronomy textbooks used in classrooms today perpetuate the Copernican demotion myth—sometimes laced with explicit (though unwarranted) philosophical lessons bashing theism.”⁴¹

The whole thing, though, is backward—for being at the center of the pre-Copernican universe had always been seen as a bad thing, not a good thing. Ever since the ancient Greeks—earlier, even—it had been the heavens that were considered to be perfect, and unspoiled, and aspirational. In other words, the further out one went from Earth, the more wonderful everything became. The center, by contrast, was where one found all the horrible stuff.

The fallen Earth of Christianity, at the hub of creation, was correspondingly considered to be corrupt and cursed. And, as if to emphasize the point, hell was even more central than that—for it was located in the middle of the Earth. When Galileo realized he could shift the Earth away from the center of the cosmos, he was thrilled—in fact, he saw it as a huge promotion for mankind. He rejoiced, writing that we were no longer living on “the sump where the universe’s filth and ephemera collect.”⁴² The heliocentric model, then, did not demote humanity—and it did not call into question how special we all are to God.

White, therefore, was mistaken on all three counts.

An Antagonist Culture

Conflict thesis myths and heliocentrism, it seems, go hand-in-hand. The trio of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo frequently find themselves caught up in Draper and White–inspired fables, carrying out the bidding of whichever author feels they can make use of them. Lessl, our story analyzer, sees this as entirely understandable:

Such narratives counterpoise the norms which scientific writers wish to attribute to their own culture against the attributes of an antagonist culture—which typically happens to be institutional religion. The presumed irrationality, credulity, and intellectual self-interest attributed to Galileo’s opponents in the Church appear in these folk narratives as inversions of the rationalism, skepticism, and disinterestedness of science.⁴³

In other words, the heliocentrism myths provide a simple “folk narrative”—one that helps to support a larger and grander idea: that science is rational, and religion is irrational.

Biologist Jerry Coyne, for instance, believes just that—in Chapter 1, we might remember, he questioned whether Christian physicist Tom McLeish should ever have been allowed to hold a Royal Society post.⁴⁴ Writing on the subject of the conflict thesis, he says:

The toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—is unreliable . . . religion and science are engaged in a kind of war: a war of understanding, a war about whether we should have good reasons for what we accept as true.⁴⁵

The name of his book gives his overall position: it is Faith vs. Fact.

But perhaps Coyne has missed something. Perhaps there is more to religion—and, for that matter, more to science—than he realizes.

Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Is Christendom guilty of the charges that Coyne and Draper and White have thrown at it? Is it inherently irrational? Has it rejected reason? Has it looked down on logic? Has it eschewed experiment? How have the most influential thinkers in the history of the Church tended to approach the multi-faceted world of knowledge?

Well, in our previous chapter on the not-so-Dark Ages, we have already seen how the early Church embraced and encouraged ancient philosophy and literature, and how medieval monks gloried in math and science. To properly address the concerns raised by Coyne and others, though, this is not enough—for their accusations are aimed not only at Christian attitudes toward these other matters, but also toward the faith itself. So, what we really want to know is this: did these assorted thinkers switch their brains back off again when it came to the topic of God?

St. Anselm (c. 1033–1109) can help us toward an answer—his motto was fides quaerens intellectum, or “faith seeking understanding.” Yes, Anselm says, Christianity is true—but, having assented to this, we should actively engage our minds to find out why it is true.

Dismissing any faith that “merely believes what it ought to believe” as “dead,”⁴⁶ he elaborates:

There may be someone who, as a result of not hearing or of not believing, is ignorant of the one Nature [God], highest of all existing things. . . . And he may also be ignorant of the many other things which we [Christians] necessarily believe about God and His creatures. If so, then I think that in great part he can persuade himself of these matters merely by reason alone—if he is of even average intelligence.⁴⁷

This is worth noting—Christianity can be shown to be true, Anselm believes, “by reason alone.” He therefore set out, in his Proslogion, to offer rational arguments for Christianity—including his world-famous ontological argument, which remains the topic of hot debate among the best philosophers of today.⁴⁸ Logic and reason, Anselm taught, were to be both celebrated and used—after all, they were tools given to us by our God.

Anselm’s approach, it is worth noting, was neither unique nor new. Cassiodorus (c. 485–585), a Christian scholar and educationalist of great repute, had championed active use of the intellect to meditate on Scripture five hundred years earlier—as historian Richard Raiswell explains:

As Cassiodorus pointed out, the understanding of sacred literature is greatly enhanced if the reader approaches the page with a sound knowledge of the rules of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (i.e. formal logic), arithmetic, geometry, and music . . . [and so] they came to form the backbone of the medieval educational system.⁴⁹

In fact, Christendom’s highest-profile authorities, throughout its entire history, consistently promoted a fusion of faith with reason. Raiswell goes so far as to describe the mindset as “hyper-rational”—and, if anything, Christian theologians were far more obsessed with logic than modern scientists like Coyne are today.

Take Sic et Non (Yes and No) by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), for example, which laid out no fewer than 158 yes-or-no questions about Christianity. Budding clerics were expected to answer each one carefully by analyzing excerpts from the Church Fathers. Abelard had deliberately chosen ambiguous passages for them to use—for the whole idea was that students would have to demonstrate the clear use of propositional logic in support of their solutions.

Sic et Non had no mark scheme—only questions. Potential priests were judged on the quality of their reasoning, no matter which side of an issue they eventually landed on. Abelard emphasized this: “by doubting we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth.” His book went on to become a mainstay of medieval schools across Europe for centuries. Its queries included “Must human faith be completed by reason, or not?”; “Is God the cause and initiator of evil, or not?”; “Is God a single unitary being, or not?”—and even such mindbenders as “Does God’s foreknowledge determine outcomes, or not?”⁵⁰

From the early and then medieval Church, we can jump to the post-Enlightenment period—and, just as before, we find Christians using their brains to work through their faith.

Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), for instance, is one of the greatest logical analysts of all time—his work on probability now dominates modern math and physics. He was also a Presbyterian minister. So, did his logic and faith occupy different parts of his head, staying well apart from one another, as per Coyne’s toolkits? Hardly. Instead, he made use of his discoveries to write a logic-driven paper entitled Divine Benevolence: Or, an Attempt to Prove that the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government Is the Happiness of His Creatures.⁵¹

Few in the mathematical sciences have ever surpassed Bayes in terms of either originality and influence—but one man who perhaps has done is the extraordinary Austrian Kurt Gödel (1906–1978). His early work essentially tore the heart out of math, and ushered in a new era for the subject altogether—his paper on “undecidability” remains one of the most important ever written, and spawns new research even today.⁵²

Gödel was a committed Christian and—like Cassiodorus, Anselm, Abelard, and Bayes—he applied his logic to his faith. At one point, he even wrote a formal symbolic proof for the existence of God. Its last line is: “Theorem 1. (A1), (A2), (A3) prove necessary actual existence of a godlike being, i.e. □ (ⱻ^Eu) G(u).”⁵³

Huh.

Religious academics, then, do not switch off their minds when “doing God.” They don’t throw down one set of tools to pick up another. In fact, a Philpapers survey in 2009 found that over 70% of professional philosophers of religion—people who, by definition, use logic and reasoning to analyze beliefs—are themselves theists.⁵⁴ If Coyne was right that believing folk do not subject their faith to any kind of formal, rational study, then we would expect this figure to be rather lower than it is. In fact, we would expect it to be zero.

And, far from being a woolly crowd, these philosophers of religion can pack a propositional punch. Philosopher Quentin Smith—himself a naturalistic atheist who has worked extensively on physics—reckons that:

If each naturalist [someone who rejects the supernatural] who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion . . . I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.⁵⁵

Huh.

Well then, there we have it: religion does do reason. To assert otherwise is to promulgate a myth. After all, the Bible itself says: “Get wisdom. Though it cost you all you have, get understanding” (Prov. 4:9).

Coyne, then, is wrong—or, at least, he is half wrong.

But is he also half right?

Mythical Authority

So, if the original story was that religion is irrational and science is rational, we now know that we can throw out the first bit. Surely, though, the second bit holds by very definition, does it not?

Physics, chemistry, and biology—according to the Draper–White motif—follow strict protocols: observation, hypothesis, experiment, result. They allow no room for personal convictions, burnings in the bosom, unobserved assumptions, unchallengeable higher authorities, belief-driven biases, or hand-me-down creeds. Here, for example, is Warfare, praising the empiricist Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1294):

It should be borne in mind that his method of investigation was even greater than its results. In an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he insisted on real reasoning and the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks. Few greater men have lived.⁵⁶

This is little short of an ode to the scientific method. Notice, in particular, that White contrasts “theological subtilizing” with “real reasoning”—just like Coyne.

Once again, however, Warfare has strayed into the mythological: White’s claim that experimenting “was likely to cost him his life” is pure moonshine. One wouldn’t have been able to move for empiricists (or, for that matter, alchemists) during Bacon’s time. What’s more, Ronald Numbers, writing on behalf of a host of the world’s top historians of science, maintains that there is no record, anywhere or anywhen, of anyone of a Baconian persuasion being executed by any recognized church for either their thinking or practice: “No scientist, to our knowledge, ever lost his life because of his scientific views.”⁵⁷

The second myth in White’s paragraph is harder to spot, but easy to feel: it is the notion that science is entirely dispassionate, and driven purely by fact and experiment; that it is unswayed, in any way, by human whimsy. In other words, he is helping to build the infamous myth of the scientific method.

Since Draper’s and White’s time, this myth has grown to be so ubiquitous and so inaccurate that many scientists have got thoroughly fed up with it. Here, for instance, is nuclear physicist Michael Brooks:

The brand identity of science is reinforced with adjectives such as logical, responsible, trustworthy, predictable, dependable, gentlemanly, straight, boring, unexciting, objective, rational. Not in thrall to passions or emotion. A safe pair of hands. In summary: inhuman. . . . We have been engaging with a caricature of science, not the real thing.⁵⁸

Brooks is right. Any idea that the physical sciences are somehow able to operate outside of our humanity is highly misleading. Scientists, it should never be forgotten, are people too.

At times, then, some follow unjustified gut instincts; some hold unproven truths dogmatically; some worship their (academic) ancestors; some chase beauty over pragmatism; some fake results; some bend under financial or peer pressure; some misrepresent their work; some get things right by pure chance; some block the progress of others they envy or fear; and all of them experience pain, joy, frustration, and excitement—sometimes during the same experiment. Because, above all else, they are human.

And this humanity of science—despite its occasional shortcomings—is something to be celebrated, not denied. It connects science to other activities, to other struggles, to the arts and the humanities, to the broader community. Talking about science as it really is can make it attractive to people who might be left unmoved by the false notion of robotic lab workers and coolly detached theorists. Honesty is surely the way forward, is it not?

The aforementioned Tom McLeish, for example, is a genuine pioneer in the gloopy world of soft matter physics. His description of scientific discovery is rather different from White’s:

A prevalent public view of the processes and methods of science sees cold logic, the application of a rulebook of experimental and theoretical practice and a disengaged, perhaps even dysfunctional, emotional approach by scientists to the subject . . . the real story is far more complex. . . . No scientific theory is born antelope fashion, fully formed in limb and energy, able to run for itself and keep out of harm’s way. Our ideas emerge far more frequently as a marsupial birth—inadequate, vulnerable and powerless . . . they need to be loved into being.⁵⁹

McLeish is not the only one trying to communicate to the non-scientist what science is really like from the inside. A plethora of works have arrived in recent years making the same point: that science—real science—is messy, and emotional, and much more like riding a rollercoaster than sitting on a train.⁶⁰ Yet still the fake painting-by-numbers view prevails—and many within science continue to push it. Why?

Historian of modern science Henry Cowles has written a whole book to answer this question. His answer is summed up in the following:

There is no such thing as the scientific method, and there never was. And yet, “the scientific method” is alive and well. The idea of a set of steps that justifies science’s authority has persisted in the face of constant denials of its existence. Why? Because “the scientific method” is a myth—and myths are powerful things. How we talk about science, how we account for its origins and argue for its results, instils mythical authority.⁶¹

Cowles, then, thinks a major motivation is the desire for “mythical authority.”

Which is effectively another way of saying that science would like its own dogma.

Flatly Asserted Dogma

Science utilizing or enforcing dogma? Is this really a thing?

It most certainly is.

Interestingly, Draper himself accidentally gives a brilliant example—for he preaches, with the full force of a fundamentalist, that “The day will never come when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied.”⁶²

One can almost picture him pronouncing this Ptolemaic psalm from a pulpit—with religious assent coming from the X Club choir. By “the propositions of Euclid,” Draper meant the five ancient axioms of geometry, which had stood firm for 2000 years and which Conflict takes as obviously and scientifically true—they are articles of the rational faith, never to be doubted.

But, unbeknown to Draper, his contemporary Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) did doubt them. A devout Christian and theologian, Riemann was prepared to stand against Draper’s doctrine, and deny Euclid. When he did so, a whole new universe of math appeared in his equations, one that had been hidden from view for millennia. Just a few decades after Draper’s death, Einstein would use Riemann’s heretical work to formulate his world-changing theories of relativity.

Draper, the dogmatist, could never have dreamt of it.

Religious creeds also dominate modern quantum mechanics. For, while there is little argument about the underlying mathematics, its physical meaning has been hotly debated for the last century or so—and, as a result, the discipline has formed its own denominations.

The quantum-mechanical equivalent of Catholicism is the original Copenhagen interpretation, with Niels Bohr (1885–1962) as its St. Peter. The assorted Protestant groups include the many worlds interpretation, the pilot wave interpretation, and the transactional interpretation—all of which paint radically different pictures of reality.

So, how has rational science dealt with this in-house disagreement? Has it approached it with the cool, calm logic of scientific folklore?

Nope.

Here is theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, himself an evangelist of the many worlds church, bemoaning the behavior of the cardinals of Copenhagen:

After a seminar in which another physicist explained Bohm’s [pilot wave] ideas, Oppenheimer [Copenhagen] scoffed out loud, “If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.” John Bell [a waverer] . . . purposely hid his work from his colleagues . . . Hans Dieter Zeh [heterodox many worlds] . . . was warned by his mentor that working on this subject would destroy his academic career.⁶³

Hugh Everett III, the first proposer of the many worlds doctrine, called the Copenhagen interpretation “flatly asserted dogma,” and eventually left the discipline because of it.⁶⁴ Bell once asked in frustration about scientific censorship: “why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks?”⁶⁵ The persecution got quite serious, as physicist and author Adam Becker points out: “When Zeh’s students went looking for academic work, they were denied job after job, since they had not done ‘real’ physics. ‘This’, said Zeh, ‘was something I will never be ready to forgive.’ ”⁶⁶

Avi Loeb, the decorated Harvard astrophysicist, also describes his experience of falling foul of what he calls the ‘scientific orthodoxy’. Having written a bestselling 2021 book that mooted the notion of alien visitation (in the form of a strange comet-like object called ‘Oumuamua), he was largely written off by the astrophysical priesthood as a heretic. His response is telling:

“I received numerous e-mails from astronomers, some tenured, who confessed that they agree with me but are afraid to speak out because of the potential repercussions to their careers.”⁶⁷

Becker, for his part, thinks that part of the problem here is actually a lack of logic among today’s scientists: “Physicists are rarely trained in philosophy at all . . . ‘Philosophy is dead’, declared [Stephen] Hawking . . . according to Neil deGrasse Tyson, studying philosophy ‘can really mess you up.’ ”⁶⁸

“These are breathtakingly ignorant claims,” Becker says.

And, even in the fast-paced, no-nonsense, engineering-on-the-edge world of Formula One motor-racing we find that Coyne’s characterization is just too simplistic. Here is an anonymous aerodynamicist describing his day-to-day life on the job:

You might believe there is no place in this world for dogma or blind faith. But you would be wrong . . . some aspects of car design are taken as articles of faith, and the rest built upon them. . . . We look to the demigods of aerodynamics for guidance, and uppermost in the current design pantheon is Adrian Newey . . . the benefits of high rake are simply taken as gospel.⁶⁹

So, then, there is indeed dogma and doctrine in science. And, perhaps more extraordinarily, there is even revelation, too.

The method for producing synthetic DNA, for instance, just popped into Kary Mullis’s mind, fully formed, during an LSD trip. August Kekulé (1829–1896) literally dreamt up the structural rules of chemistry. Einstein got the idea for special relativity from an out-of-body transcendental vision.⁷⁰ That’s three core principles in physics, chemistry, and biology, all coming from out of the blue—none of these folk were anywhere near a lab, and there was no hypothesis, experiment, or data in sight.

In the light of all this, it might be worth looking at Coyne’s assertion once more: “The toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—is unreliable.”⁷¹

Clearly, this statement is incomplete. For, as we have seen, science uses faith, dogma, and revelation. Religion uses reason and empirical study. Coyne needs to top up those toolkits.

What Were They Up To?

We have covered a fair few conflict thesis myths in this chapter—each of which seemed convincing at first, and each of which fell apart on closer inspection. We have dropped in on Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus, Anselm, Abelard, Bayes, Gödel, Bohr, Kekulé, and even a mysterious motor racing engineer. Story by story, Draper and White have been shown to be seriously wanting in their analysis. And yet still their narrative abounds.

And this, one must increasingly suspect, is because it is a convenient narrative for many. The likes of Cosmos and Coyne, and—from various preceding chapters—Dawkins, Freeman, Boorstin, Nixey, Sagan, Grayling, Tyndall, Huxley, Comte, and an assortment of modern textbooks are using mythology to either implicitly or explicitly call for science to somehow disarm, or dethrone, or dismiss, or displace, or defeat, or destroy religion.

The strange thing, though, is this: Draper and White themselves—the men who, for so many of the above, are spiritual leaders (even if they have never actually heard of them)—claimed to be faithful Christians, fighting on behalf of their faith. Both Conflict and Warfare, they said, were written to reconcile the hitherto estranged parties of science and religion—to save the marriage, so to speak.

Yet it would seem they have actually had precisely the opposite effect. Many of the commentators who insist on repeating Draper’s and White’s mistaken ideas are loudly advocating nothing short of a messy divorce.

So what on earth were these two men up to? And how did they get it so wrong?