MYTH 24
THAT RELIGION HAS TYPICALLY IMPEDED THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
Peter Harrison
Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth.… And any progress—not just scientific progress—is easier when we’re not yoked to religious dogma.
—Jerry A. Coyne, “Science and Religion Aren’t Friends” (2010)
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
—Sam Harris, “Science Must Destroy Religion” (2006)
One of the most widespread misconceptions about science concerns its historical relationship to religion. According to this pervasive myth, these two enterprises are polar opposites that compete to occupy the same explanatory territory. The history of Western thought is understood in terms of a protracted struggle between these opposing forces, with religion gradually being forced to yield more and more ground to an advancing science that offers superior explanations. Wherever possible, religion has resisted this ceding of territory, thus hindering the advance of science. While historians of science have long ago abandoned this simplistic narrative, the “conflict myth” has proven to be remarkably resistant to their demythologizing efforts and remains a central feature of common understandings of the identity of modern science.
Public rehearsals of this myth are typically prompted by contemporary instances of religiously motivated rejections of science—most often episodes of antievolutionary sentiment. In these discussions, the myth is deployed to explain why we should not be surprised at present outbreaks of science–religion conflict, since these are simply the contemporary manifestation of a long-standing historical pattern in which science has always been resisted by religion. It is assumed that these two entities, “science” and “religion,” will inevitably clash, owing to their inherent nature. Religion is said to be based on authority, ancient religious texts, blind faith, or simply irrational prejudice; science, on reason and common sense. Conflict arises out of the fact that these two enterprises seek to offer explanations for the same things but from these incompatible starting points.
Crucial to the argument are the historical events thought to be emblematic of this antagonistic relationship. The favored examples are the 1633 condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and the reception of Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) Origin of Species (1859), but there is also a long list of supporting characters and episodes: the hostility of Tertullian (ca. 160–225), the father of Latin Christianity, to Greek philosophy; the murder of mathematician and philosopher Hypatia (ca. 350–415) at the hands of a Christian mob; Pope Callixtus III’s (1378–1458) excommunication of a comet in 1475; medieval belief in a flat earth (see Myth 2); the church’s banning of dissection; resistance to Copernicanism because it would “demote” human beings from the center of the cosmos (see Myth 3); Giordano Bruno’s (1548–1600) execution in 1600 as a martyr to science; and religious opposition to medical advances, such as inoculation and anesthesia. These historical examples serve the purpose of not merely illustrating the general likelihood of religious resistance to science but also implying that such resistance really belongs to some dim and distant “dark ages”(see Myth 1). In recent years, historians of science have conclusively shown that there is little historical basis for the myth. Much of the adduced evidence is simply false—including the excommunication of the comet, belief in the flat earth, the banning of dissection, resistance to Copernicanism because of its assault on human dignity, Bruno’s execution on scientific grounds, and resistance to inoculation and anesthesia.1
Other episodes have a firm historical basis but are far more complicated than simple instances of a science–religion conflict. In the case of Galileo, it is indisputable that he was condemned by the Inquisition in 1633 for holding and teaching Copernican views—that is, that the earth was in motion around the sun. However, this was by no means a typical response of the Catholic Church to “science” in general. At the time, the church was the major sponsor of astronomical research.2 Moreover, the relevant science was by no means clear-cut, with scientific authorities divided on the relative merits of competing cosmological systems. Thus, Galileo enjoyed support from within the church as well as opposition from the scientific establishment. Neither was he tortured or imprisoned. So while the facts of Galileo’s condemnation are not in dispute, that they were typical of a Catholic attitude toward science, or that the episode was primarily about “science vs. religion,” is highly questionable. In the case of Darwin, similar considerations apply. Although there was, undoubtedly, religious resistance to the idea of evolution by natural selection, Darwinism had both significant religious supporters and influential scientific detractors.3 As for the phenomenon of “scientific creationism,” which is now the most conspicuous manifestation of religiously motivated resistance to evolution, this is essentially a twentieth-century development and was not a feature of initial reactions to Darwin’s theories.4
On the other side of the ledger, historians have also drawn attention to the ways in which religious considerations have played a positive role in the content and conduct of the sciences. The medieval universities, which were the chief sites of scientific activity in the later middle ages, were founded and supported by the Catholic Church.5 Key seventeenth-century figures—such as Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and John Ray (1627–1705)—were clearly motivated by religious considerations and said as much. The idea of laws of nature, fundamental to the conduct of modern physics, was originally a theological conception. Arguably, experimental method, too, owes much to theological conceptions of human nature that stress the fallibility of our cognitive and sensory capacities. More generally, it has been argued that Protestantism promoted a desacralization of nature, providing a hospitable environment for the development of modern science. Lastly, religion has been important for establishing the social legitimacy of science, owing to the identification of science as a means of redemption and a form of “priestly” activity, and to the strong partnership between natural theology and the natural sciences that characterized science in England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.6 It follows that even if the Galileo affair or the religious reception of Darwinism could be regarded as clear-cut examples of religion impeding science, they could not be said to exemplify any general pattern or essential relationship.
A further difficulty with the myth is its tendency to regard science and religion as monolithic and unchanging historical forces, or successive epochs. In fact, for long periods of Western history, scientific and religious concerns overlapped considerably and in ways that make it difficult to distinguish between science and religion as we now understand them. Indeed, in English-speaking countries, no one spoke about science and religion until the nineteenth century. So the idea of any ongoing historical relationship between science and religion calls for the imposition of modern categories onto past actors for whom the distinction would have been essentially meaningless.7
Given the flimsy historical and conceptual foundations of the conflict myth, it is natural to ask where it originated and why—in spite of the best efforts of historians—it persists. Historians of science have typically traced the origins of the myth to two nineteenth-century works—John William Draper’s (1811–1882) History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s (1832–1918) History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). But the myth well predates them. Versions of it can already be found in seventeenth-century Protestant polemics against Catholicism that sought to align papism with ignorance, superstition, and resistance to new knowledge. The influential Puritan minister and fellow of the Royal Society, Cotton Mather (1663–1728), contended that Europe had been plunged into darkness during the Catholic Middle Ages and that the revival of letters and reformation of religion had together paved the way for “the advances of the sciences.”8 The treatment of Galileo at the hands of the Inquisition was a special gift to Protestant apologists, who pioneered the use of the Galileo affair for propaganda purposes. In 1638, the poet John Milton (1608–1674) visited Galileo, then under house imprisonment in Florence, and used the occasion to reflect on the contrast between the philosophical freedom of Protestant England and the scientific censorship of Catholic Italy.9
This “Protestant position” would subsequently be adopted and applied more generally by French philosophes and key Enlightenment figures. Voltaire (1694–1778) observed that had Isaac Newton been born in a Catholic country and not Protestant England, rather than becoming a scientific celebrity he might well have found himself clothed in the robes of a penitent and burnt at an auto-da-fé.10 Jean d’Alembert (1717–1783) wrote of Galileo’s troubles in that great monument of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, concluding that poorly informed theologians had habitually waged “open war” against philosophy (that is, science).11 The Enlightenment idea of progress was thus difficult to disentangle from an accompanying narrative about the stultifying effects of religion on the advance of knowledge. Summing up this view of history, Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) announced in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1795) that “the triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences.”12
This version of events came to be incorporated, in turn, into the grand progressive models of history that were common in the nineteenth century. Best known, perhaps, is Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) simplistic but appealing idea that history flows through three successive stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive (scientific). The idea that religion represents a backward phase of human development, destined to be overtaken by a scientific one, became commonplace in social-scientific understandings of human development, as well as in general histories. In England, historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) spread the message that the process of civilization was hastened by scientific skepticism and impeded by the credulous conservatism that characterized religion. Meanwhile, in Germany, Friedrich Lange (1828–1875), in his influential History of Materialism (1866), wrote of how “every system of philosophy entered upon an inevitable struggle with the theology of its time.”13
Given this background of progressive understandings of history that had already attributed a special, inhibitory role to religion, by the time Draper and White took up their pens, all that remained was to fill in the blanks. This they managed with considerable alacrity, combining ingenuity and imagination to compile the now-standard catalog of historical episodes illustrative of an enduring conflict.14 Ironically, then, what began as a single-purpose weapon in the arsenal of Protestant apologists—a role still evident in Draper’s largely anti-Catholic tome—became a blunderbuss to be deployed indiscriminately against all forms of religion.
Why, given its fragile foundation in reality, does this somewhat old-fashioned myth persist? There are a number of reasons. For a start, there are conspicuous contemporary instances of religious resistance to science—most obviously, the rejection of evolutionary theory by scientific creationists. This apparently indisputable instance of science–religion conflict continues to fuel the myth on the assumption that the present must resemble the past. It should be pointed out in this context that antievolutionists actually tend to be pro-science in general terms and, for this reason, couch their religious beliefs in scientific language; it is just that they oppose one particular scientific theory and have routinely challenged its scientific standing. Indeed, one of the more interesting findings of the World Values Survey is that distrust of science is greatest in those countries that are the most secularized, and least in those that are most religious.15 That notwithstanding, it is clear that the conflict myth most often gets an airing in responses to the activities of antievolutionists.
Related to this is a more general fear associated with the so-called return of religion. In the middle of the twentieth century, the prevailing vision of history predicted a largely religion-free future in which a secular, scientific worldview would become the default position. For reasons well known, this failed to obtain. Present concerns about religious fundamentalism, and militant Islam in particular, give new normative force to the conflict myth. Science is perceived by some to be the vehicle of a form of secular enlightenment. The conflict between science and religion is thus more than an abstract description of a distant past: it has become the founding myth of a crusade to secure a threatened secular future. This sentiment clearly informs the views of Jerry Coyne (b. 1949) and Sam Harris (b. 1967), noted at the outset. As Harris plainly expresses it: there is an ongoing conflict between science and religion, and science must win it.
But at the most general level, the conflict myth has something for everybody. Its irresistible appeal lies in the various plotlines that pit the lone genius against the faceless men or expose the apparent idiocies of inflexible institutions. Ultimately, it suggests the triumph of reason over superstition, of good over evil. This is a comforting and congenial myth that also assures us of our cultural and intellectual superiority. In spite of the evidence against it, while it continues to fulfill these functions, it is difficult to see it disappearing any time soon.