John William Draper, “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science” (1874)

Sources

• John William Draper, “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science” (full text) (opens in a new tab)

  John William Draper, “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science” (1874)

Objections & responses

Draper’s target was the Catholic Church’s reaction to modern science after 1870, Vatican I and the Syllabus of Errors. He was responding to real events, not inventing a conflict from nothing.

Fair. Draper wrote in the context of genuine nineteenth-century tensions, and his anti-Catholic polemic had contemporary causes. The historians’ criticism is not that he invented conflict but that he projected it backward onto the whole of history and got much of the history wrong, the flat-earth myth included. Draper generalized from real contemporary conflicts to a false universal thesis, and it is the universal thesis that historians have set aside.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• The idea that science and religion have always been at war was popularized by two writers in the late 1800s and has since been set aside by most historians of science.