John William Draper

Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science appeared in 1874 in a popular series aimed at general readers, and it did what publishers dream of. It went through printing after printing, was translated into a dozen languages, and put a single memorable image into circulation: two powers, knowledge and faith, in a struggle running the length of recorded history, with the outcome not yet decided.

The image is broader than the argument in the book. Draper's real subject is the Roman Catholic Church, and the timing is not accidental. The First Vatican Council had declared papal infallibility in 1870, and the Syllabus of Errors of 1864 had condemned the proposition that the Roman pontiff ought to reconcile himself with progress and modern civilisation. Draper treats these as declarations of hostility and answers them. Protestantism, by contrast, he treats gently, and Islamic scholarship of the medieval period he treats with open admiration, crediting Muslim astronomers and physicians with keeping the sciences alive while Latin Europe did not.

Rome obliged him by placing the book on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1876, which confirmed his thesis for every reader who already agreed with it and did nothing measurable to sales. The lasting effect was linguistic. After 1874 the relation of science and religion had a default metaphor, and it was war.

Professional history of science has spent the last century taking the conflict thesis apart, and the demolition is not a minority view. The objections are of several kinds and they compound.

The first is that the categories are anachronistic. Before the nineteenth century there was no profession called science standing over against something called religion; there were natural philosophers, most of them clergy or funded by the church, working inside institutions that saw no boundary to defend. The second is that the standard episodes do not behave as the thesis needs them to. The Galileo affair turns out on the documents to involve patronage, personal insult, Aristotelian university faculties defending their turf and a pope who had been an admirer, rather than a straightforward collision between observation and dogma. The third is that several of the thesis's best known illustrations are simply untrue, and were untrue when they were published.

Historians who reject the warfare model do not replace it with harmony. The preferred term is complexity: the relation has been one of conflict, of independence, of dialogue and of active sponsorship at different times and in different places, sometimes simultaneously in one person. That is a harder story to tell in a sentence, which is a large part of why the warfare version survives in popular argument long after the field that studies it abandoned the model.