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.