Debunking the War Between Science and Faith
Are Science and Faith Always at Odds?
Many of us grew up believing science and faith are at war. We absorbed this belief by cultural osmosis. We imagined theology and science on two ends of the spectrum, as enemies in mortal combat. The Joker versus Batman. Sherlock versus Moriarty. Science versus theology. The secular forces lined up on one side; the angels of light, on the other. This is a civil war, a battle to the death, and may the best man win.
We often think about Galileo’s life in terms of this battle narrative.1 Here was a great scientist surrounded by Biblethumping fundamentalists who believed in geocentrism, the idea that the sun revolves around the earth. Galileo (1564–1642) proved the opposite—heliocentrism—and wrote books defending this truth. His reward? He was captured by the Roman Inquisition, tortured, and then sent to jail, where he spent the rest of his life in disgrace.
If you believe this, I have an oceanfront property in Iowa to sell you! This picture of Galileo is largely a myth; the true story is far more complex. First, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) originally had the idea; they gave serious defenses of heliocentrism long before Galileo. Second, some church leaders, including the pope, were initially sympathetic to Galileo’s views. But we often forget that even in 1615 when Galileo went to Rome to defend his views to the Catholic Church, there was no definitive proof heliocentrism was correct (that came decades later with Isaac Newton). Many astronomers and physicists at the time disagreed with Galileo, because other models of the solar system made equally good sense of the data. Galileo’s view wasn’t the only available theory. At that point in history, it was perfectly rational for astronomers and church officials to disagree with Galileo.
Does Science Make God Irrelevant?
Hans Madueme
This concise booklet explains science from a biblical perspective, helping readers see how faith and science can coexist to glorify God and help us praise our Creator.
The main alternative position was the geocentrism of Aristotle’s cosmology, which the Catholic Church had fully embraced for centuries. Aristotle had become the foundation for Italy’s moral and social fabric. If Galileo was right, then beloved Aristotle was wrong. In the seventeenth century, those were fighting words. That’s probably why a Roman Catholic cardinal allowed Galileo to continue researching his theory so long as he never claimed it was a scientific fact. Galileo had to qualify that he was only speaking hypothetically. He initially agreed to these terms, but sixteen years later, Galileo published a book defending the Copernican view as scientific fact. That got him in hot water.
By now, I hope you have noticed how the warfare narrative oversimplifies and distorts history. Yes, the religious establishment saw Galileo as wrong and even dangerous, but it was not because they saw him as rejecting the Bible or Christianity. He was never tortured, and he did not spend a day in jail. Contrary to popular belief, Galileo was not an atheist, nor was he named a heretic. Galileo the scientist actually cited Scripture extensively to support his views, and he remained a Roman Catholic to the end of his days.
Our assumptions about the Scopes Monkey Trial misrepresent history in similar ways. We have formed impressions based on hearsay and movies like Inherit the Wind, which itself is based on the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. Here is how the film tells the story: John Scopes is the hero, the enlightened scientist from 1920s Dayton, Tennessee, surrounded by ignorant, Southern, Christian dimwits. These people are trapped in old, dogmatic ways of thinking. Scopes comes to the rescue by helping them see the light. He is a beloved teacher exposing his students to evolution.
The town leaders are the bad guys in this story, the religious rednecks. They start protesting that Scopes is teaching evolution in the classroom, and they eventually get him thrown into prison. The case goes to trial. On the side of the angels, we have the defense lawyer Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), an advocate for science, reason, and humanity, a man defending the underdog. On the other side, we have William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), an ignoramus young-earth creationist and an opponent of reason. Science versus religion, and the winner is . . .
Once again, this picture is more myth than history. The real situation in 1925 begins with Tennessee passing the Butler Act, which prohibits the teaching of evolution in public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) then places an ad in the Chattanooga Times, promising to give legal support to any teacher who will stand trial for teaching evolution. A few enterprising businessmen in Dayton see an opportunity to gain publicity for the town and boost the local economy. They find John Scopes, a math and physics teacher, who volunteers to teach evolution and be arrested for violating the Butler Act. Indeed, he is arrested, all his bills are paid, and he is immediately released on bail. All of this triggers a media frenzy and a high-profile legal battle. The businessmen have executed their plan to perfection. After all, their whole agenda has been to bring national attention and tourism to the small town of Dayton. Mission accomplished.
It is misleading to claim science and faith are perpetually at war.
As for William Jennings Bryan, he was not even a young-earth creationist! He saw the days of Genesis 1 as long periods of time. He accepted the scientific evidence for evolution but made an exception for human evolution; he thought humans were supernaturally created by God. He was especially anxious about how evolution had been used to support the eugenics movement. Eugenicists were trying to perfect the human race by removing mentally and physically defective humans from the gene pool. Bryan accepted the science of evolution but rejected its eugenics application.
In the Scopes Trial mythology, Bryan and his fellow fundamentalists lost. They were roundly defeated by the defenders of truth and science. But that certainly was not how people reacted at the time of the trial. Newspaper articles could not decide the case either way. And when Bryan died unexpectedly five days after the trial, he became a hero overnight. Millions of people adored him. According to one account,
Crowds lined the railroad track as a special train carried his body to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands filed by the open casket, first in Dayton, then in several major cities along the train route, and finally in the nation’s capital. America’s political elite attended the funeral, with senators and cabinet members serving as pallbearers. Country music ballads picked up the lament while fundamentalist leaders competed to carry on Bryan’s crusade against teaching evolution.2
It is striking how much popular mythology differs from history.
If you have read anything by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, then you know the conflict myth is alive and well. They have published books with notoriously feisty titles like God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Hitchens); The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Harris); and The God Delusion (Dawkins). These authors, dubbed the New Atheists, are relentless and often bombastic in their critique of religion. They hold up science as the shining path to truth, and they condemn Christianity as the worst thing since the Bubonic Plague. Dawkins, for example, is an evolutionary biologist and a retired professor of science at the University of Oxford. Listen to what he said about religious explanations during a 2013 debate at Cambridge with Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury at the time:
[Religion is a] cop-out: a betrayal of the intellect, a betrayal of all that’s best about what makes us human, a phony substitute for an explanation, which seems to answer the question until you examine it and realize that it does no such thing. Religion in science is not just redundant and irrelevant, it’s an active and pernicious charlatan. It peddles false explanations, or at least pseudo-explanations, where real explanations could have been offered, and will be offered. Pseudo explanations that get in the way of the enterprise of discovering real explanations. As the centuries go by religion has less and less room to exist and perform its obscurantist interference with the search for truth. In the 21st century it’s high time, finally, to send it packing.3
At this point, you may wonder who masterminded this warfare metaphor. Where did it come from? Historians blame two influential books from the nineteenth century: John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.4 (Again, the book titles are a dead giveaway.) These two books created the myth that science and religion are in endless conflict. John William Draper (1811–1882) was one of the founders of the New York University School of Medicine in 1841, when it was known as the University Medical College. He served as the faculty president from 1850 to 1873. Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) was one of the founders of Cornell University and served as its president from 1866 to 1885. Both Draper and White claimed science was in a war against religion, and science was winning. Religion was on the retreat; defeat was imminent. Surrender or die.
Based on what we have seen in the stories of Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial, I hope you are starting to question this warfare metaphor. There is still more to say, of course, but the picture of a persistent conflict between science and faith is bad history. When we revisit the past to look at actual scientists and actual theologians, when we observe what they thought and said about science and faith, we discover that science and Christianity have had a more complex relationship—diverse, subtle, surprising, tangled, and messy. Thus, it is misleading to claim science and faith are perpetually at war. Their interaction in history is not merely one of conflict and tension.5
Notes:
- For helpful details on Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, “Myth 8: That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism,” and Edward J. Larson, “Myth 20: That the Scopes Trial Ended in Defeat for Antievolutionism,” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press, 2009), 68–78, 178–86.
- Larson, “Myth 20,” 185.
- “This House Believes Religion Has No Place in the 21st Century,” Cambridge Union Society, February 3, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/.
- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, 8th ed. (Appleton, 1884); Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (Appleton, 1896).
- For the classic argument along these lines, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
This article is adapted from Does Science Make God Irrelevant? by Hans Madueme.
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