Conflict? What Conflict?

Science and Christianity Have Never Been at War

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book.

Heroic atheists dragged the world out of the Dark Ages and kickstarted the scientific revolution, all while fighting obscurantist clerics who were busy burning Galileo at the stake and insisting that the earth is flat. Right? No. Almost everything you have been told about the “war” between Christianity and science is false.[i]

How many times have you heard that Columbus had to overcome the opposition of benighted flat-earther churchmen to gain funding for his voyage from the Spanish Crown? The story is pure nonsense. The ancients knew the earth was a sphere, and Eratosthenes even made a remarkably accurate estimate of its circumference as early as 230 BC.[ii] That knowledge was never lost, and the late atheist paleontologist Stephen J. Gould tells the real story in his essay “Columbus and the Flat Earth: An Example of the Fallacy of Warfare Between Science and Religion.”

Greek knowledge of the sphericity never faded, and all major medieval religious scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology. Ferdinand and Isabella did refer Columbus’s plans to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Isabell’s confessor and, following the defeat of the Moors, Archbishop of Granda. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisors, did meet at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but no one questioned the earth’s roundness. As a major critique, they argued that Columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth’s circumference was too great. Moreover, his critics were entirely right. Columbus had “cooked” his figures to favor a much smaller earth, and an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he did not and could not reach Asia. Americans are still called Indians as a legacy of his error.[iii]

Columbus seriously underestimated the length of the westward route to the Indies. If he and his crew had not accidentally discovered the Americas, they would have starved to death long before reaching their intended destination. Columbus was wrong, and the clerics were right. Yet, for generations, American students were taught the flat-earth myth as unimpeachable truth.

How did this happen? The source of the myth is a work of fiction funneled through an academic who was angry at Christian opposition to Darwin. In 1828, Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a work of historical fiction based on Columbus’s voyages. In his fictionalized account of the Council of Salamanca, Irving had the clerics attempting to rebut Columbus’s accurate geographic calculations with specious citations to the Bible and the church fathers.[iv] As Gould explained, that did not happen. Enter chemist-historian John William Draper. In 1860, Draper traveled to Oxford to speak about Darwinism at a meeting of the British Association. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley also attended the meeting, and after Draper’s talk, they had a legendary exchange in which Wilberforce attacked, and Huxley defended Darwin. The confrontation between Wilberforce and Huxley engendered in Draper the view that religion and science are at war,[v] and in 1875, he published a book entitled History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. In his book, Draper decided to smear Christianity with the flat earth myth. His source? Irving’s fictionalized account of Salamanca, which he lifted almost word for word from Irving’s book.[vi]

A few years later, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology. White, also a fervent defender of Darwin,[vii] further perpetuated the flat earth myth. He wrote:

Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance from Europe. This terror among sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus.[viii]

The Draper-White “warfare thesis” continues to be influential to this day, which is unfortunate because not only were they wrong about Columbus specifically, but they were also wrong about the supposed “war” between science and religion generally. Indeed, they were more than merely wrong; as we shall see, their warfare thesis is preposterous. Far from being at odds with Christianity, modern science was largely built on a Christian foundation, and many of the greatest scientists from the beginning of the scientific revolution until the present time have been Christians, who obviously saw no conflict between their science and their faith.

Let’s consider an example of such a scientist. Professor Henry F. Schaefer is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, where he is also the director of its Center for Computational Chemistry. He has written over 1,600 scientific papers and is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world. Professor Schaefer’s major awards include the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry (1979, “for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest”); the American Chemical Society Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award (1983, “for his contributions to computational quantum chemistry and for outstanding applications of this technique to a wide range of chemical problems”); the Schrödinger Medal (1990); the Centenary Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (London, 1992, as “the first theoretical chemist successfully to challenge the accepted conclusions of a distinguished experimental group for a polyatomic molecule, namely methylene”); the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (2003, “for his development of novel and powerful computational methods of electronic structure theory, and their innovative use to solve a host of important chemical problems”). In 2003, he also received the annual American Chemical Society Ira Remsen Award. The Remsen Award citation reads, “For work that resulted in more than one hundred distinct, critical theoretical predictions that were subsequently confirmed by experiment and for work that provided a watershed in the field of quantum chemistry, not by reproducing experiment, but using state-of-the-art theory to make new chemical discoveries and, when necessary, to challenge experiment.” Professor Schaefer has been nominated for a Nobel Prize five times.

Impressed? I know I am. Dr. Schaefer is one of the foremost scientists in the world. He is also a committed Christian. In his essay “How Have Christians Helped to Advance Science?”[ix] Schaefer notes that the scientific revolution occurred in Christian Europe and nowhere else.[x] One reason for this is the Christian belief that God created an intelligible universe. Schaefer quotes Dr. Keith Ward:

Thus appeal to the general intelligibility of nature, its structuring in accordance with mathematical principles which the human mind can understand, suggests the existence of a creative mind, a mind of vast wisdom and power. Science is not likely to get started if one thinks that the universe is just a chaos of arbitrary events, or if one thinks there are many competing gods, or perhaps a god who is not concerned with elegance or rational structure. If one believes those things, one will not expect to find general rational laws, and so one will probably not look for them. It is perhaps no accident that modern science really began with the clear realization that the Christian God was a rational creator, not an arbitrary personal agent…[xi]

Schaefer then discusses many of the Christians who created and sustained the scientific revolution over the centuries.[xii] These include Francis Bacon, the discoverer of the scientific method. Bacon believed there were two “books,” the book of nature and the book of God’s work, and the books were equally important. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, was a devout Lutheran who wrote that his purpose was to think God’s thoughts after him. Blaise Pascal, who made discoveries in both mathematics and physics, also contributed to theology in his Pensées. Robert Boyle was the first true chemist, and he also wrote a book entitled The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation.

Sir Isaac Newton deserves special mention, as many consider him to be the greatest scientist who ever lived. Newton wrote more words on theology than on physics. Michael Faraday discovered benzene and electromagnetic induction, invented the generator, and was a pioneer in the theory in electromagnetism. On his deathbed, Faraday praised Jesus and quoted the Bible. James Clerk Maxwell’s equations – which form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric and magnetic circuit theory – are one of the great achievements of the human intellect. On June 23, 1864, Maxwell wrote:

Think what God has determined to do to all those who submit themselves to his righteousness and are willing to receive his gift [the gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ]. They are to be conformed to the image of His Son, and when that is fulfilled, and God sees they are conformed to the image of Christ, there can be no more condemnation.[xiii]

Dozens more of the most famous scientists in history who were also Christians could be named, including Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of the Catholic Church who proposed heliocentric cosmology. In modern times, a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, discovered the Big Bang. Schaefer goes on to name many twenty-first-century scientists who are Christians, including Dr. James Tour, whose work on the origin of life issue we discussed above,[xiv] and Nobel Prize winner William Phillips, who sings in a gospel choir, teaches Sunday school, and leads Bible studies.[xv] Scientists who profess faith are the rule, not the exception. Schaefer cites a poll of 3,300 members of the scientific professional society Sigma Xi. Half of the scientists who were polled regularly participate in religious activities.[xvi]

All of that’s fine you might say, but what about all the guys the church burned at the stake because of their scientific views? There were none. That’s right. Despite what you may have heard, there were exactly zero scientists burned at the stake because the church disagreed with their scientific views.[xvii]

What about Galileo? Galileo’s main mistake was picking a fight with the Pope, openly ridiculing him, and making him look like an enemy of science. At a time when the Pope wielded great temporal power, that was unwise. Nevertheless, I will not deny that the Catholic Church treated Galileo shabbily when it placed him under house arrest and banned his books. But even if that is true, it does not come remotely close to proving the warfare thesis. The warfare thesis must be evaluated in light of the totality of the evidence, not an isolated incident involving a single man hundreds of years ago. The totality of evidence includes the fact that natural philosophy (later called “science”) was fostered in the universities, a Christian invention. The first university in the world opened in Bologna in 1088, and dozens more had opened by 1450. The totality of evidence includes the fact that Christianity provided the metaphysical foundation for science, as discussed above. The totality of evidence includes the fact that from medieval times through the present day, scientists, including arguably the greatest scientists of all time, were Christians. I could go on, but you get the point. Conflict thesis advocates have Galileo. Non-conflict advocates have practically the rest of history up to this present moment. The overwhelming evidence is that there is no war between science and Christianity. Christians have been doing great science – including much of the most important science of all time – for hundreds of years.[xviii]

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[i] For an encyclopedic resource exploring this issue in great detail, see William A. Dembski, Casey Luskin, and Joseph M. Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Harvest House Publishers, 2021.

[ii] Jacques Dutka, “Eratosthenes’ Measurement of the Earth Reconsidered,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1993), 55.

[iii] Gould, Rock of Ages,114.

[iv] Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 62.

[v] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 37.

[vi] Draper, History of the Conflict, 160.

[vii] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 42. White was more of a scholar than Draper and attempted to defend the flat earth myth more systematically. Russell utterly destroys White’s arguments. See id. at 44-47.

[viii] White, A History of the Warfare, 1:97.

[ix] In Dembski, Luskin, and Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, 507-534.

[x] Id. at 512.

[xi] Id. at 511.

[xii] The following discussion is based on id. at 512-518.

[xiii] Id. at 515, quoting Maxwell, as quoted in Matthew Stanley, “By design: James Clerk Maxwell and the evangelical unification of science,” The British Journal for the History of Science 45 (March 2012), 57-73.

[xiv] Id. at 519-23.

[xv] Id. at 523.

[xvi] Id. at 6543, citing Richard Seltzer, “Poll draws portrait of U.S. scientists’ views,” Chemical & Engineering News 66 (November 7, 1988), 6.

[xvii] Materialists sometimes say Giordano Bruno and/or Michael Servetus were burned at the stake because of their scientific views. This is not correct. It is true that they were burned at the stake, and that is inexcusable. But they were declared heretics because of their theological views, not their scientific views. David Haines discusses these cases at great length in David Haines, “Does Science Conflict with Biblical Faith?” in Dembski, Luskin, and Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, 68-69.

[xviii] Do you know where there is a true war between a belief system and science? When materialists insist that science conform to the precepts of materialism. In the early cold war Soviet Union, several areas of physics were suppressed for ideological reasons. Piergiorgio Pescali describes this suppression as follows:

Objective scientific laws had to toe the party line. This included disciplining the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. On June 24, 1947, Andrei Zhdanov extended his policy to astronomy and cosmology, claiming that these fields should be cleansed from bourgeois lies and illusions. Quantum theory was rejected as it does not describe the matter as a unique and real structure, apparently negating materialism. In the essays Against idealism in modern physics, released in 1948, the theory of relativity was labelled as “idealistic” and “Einsteinianism” denounced. The relativistic theory of a closed, expanding universe was defined a “cancerous tumour that corrodes modern astronomical theory and is the main ideological enemy of materialist science”.

The most controversial and discussed theory was the Big Bang’s, still rejected at the time by many scientists, including Western ones. However, if the Western scientific community was still skeptical because of the lack of clear evidence, in the Soviet Union the opposition was purely ideological. According to Stalinian cosmology, the universe was infinite (no space limit, no matter limit) and eternal (never began, never will end). Matter was only a material manifestation of motion and energy (no wave-particle duality contemplated). Galactic redshifts, discovered by Vesto Slipher in 1912, did not indicate that the space is expanding and all the theories had to fit in materialism and dialectical philosophy. The Big Bang was deemed to resemble the Bible’s Genesis and branded as a pseudo-scientific, idealistic theory.

Piergiorgio Pescali, “Stalin, the big bang and quantum physics,” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa (Feb. 2, 2017). Mao’s China experienced similar repression of quantum theory because it conflicted with materialism. See Quantum Study Simplified in Pei-Ching University – Another Victory for the Mao Tse-Tung Ideology (Sept.14, 1960), available at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA379963.pdf (accessed January 29, 2025).