The “Conflict Thesis” forms a kind of underlying historial metamyth that informs and undergirds a substantial amount of historical assumptions 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).
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