Modern historians of science on the conflict thesis

Sources

• “The Draper-White Conflict Thesis,” AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, with L. Principe and E. Davis. (opens in a new tab)

  Ronald L. Numbers, ed., “Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion,” Harvard University Press, 2009. - “The Draper-White Conflict Thesis,” AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, with L. Principe and E. Davis.

Objections & responses

Ronald Numbers is also the leading historian of American creationism, and his work documents a very real, ongoing conflict between a large segment of Christianity and evolutionary biology. Isn’t citing him for “no war” selective?

Numbers’s The Creationists documents exactly that conflict, and it is the honest complement to Galileo Goes to Jail. His position is that the always at war thesis is false and that particular conflicts, including the one over evolution, are real and have specific causes. Historians call this the complexity thesis: the relationship has included conflict, cooperation, and indifference depending on time and place. Some contemporary Christian communities are in real conflict with mainstream science, which is a fact about those communities rather than about Christianity’s relationship to science as such. Both halves belong in the picture.

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.