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It would not be unreasonable to observe that the figure of Galileo Galilei has emerged as the emblematic example of the conflict between science and religion. Galileo was put on trial in 1633 by the Roman Catholic Inquisition for advancing a heliocentric cosmology, in contradiction to the sacred scriptures, found guilty, and placed under house arrest. No other eminent figure of science has suffered such a fate. Thus, it is easy to understand the appeal of the Galileo Affair to those who view the advancement of science as continuously being impeded by the persecution and suppression of religious authorities. However one feels about the applicability of that issue today, it is thus worth considering the historical merit of such an assessment.

The so-called “conflict thesis” of the relationship between science and religion arose to prominence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century largely by the efforts of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. The notion of a conflict between science and religion comes straight out of the title of Draper’s popular book, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). White, building off of the success of Draper’s thesis, elevated the status of the relationship from one of conflict to one of “warfare,” in his two volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).

John William Draper was an American scientist, specializing in Chemistry, and historian who held various posts at New York University. Draper was asked by Edward Youman in the early 1870s to contribute what became the History of the Conflict between Religion and Science to Youman’s International Scientific Series of popular works by prominent men of science (of which it is volume XIII). Yet it is not entirely coincidental that Draper’s book appeared only four years after the First Vatican Council had met before being suspended in 1870. The entire final chapter of his book, in fact, discusses these particular developments and what he viewed as the impending intellectual and religious crisis they were sure to cause.

Two significant outcomes of the council were the doctrine of papal infallibility and a confirmation of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864. Draper viewed this as the Catholic Church’s attempt to solidify its authority against the intrusive progress of science, which posed a significant threat to the Church’s power (Draper, 332). Papal infallibility, along with several of the propositions condemned by the Syllabus of Errors, seemed to be an attempt to elevate revealed religion above the sciences. The Syllabus is a long list of propositions that the Church declared to be erroneous. Proposition 8, for example, condemned as an error the statement that “As human reason is placed on a level with religion itself, so theological must be treated in the same manner as philosophical sciences.” Proposition 9 found erroneous the statement that “all the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason.” Church dogma, therefore, is not susceptible to scientific or philosophical inquiry. Even more significant, however, is proposition 12, which essentially declares the conflict thesis itself, as applied to the Catholic Church, to be erroneous. The proposition reads, “The decrees of the Apostolic See and of the Roman congregations impede the true progress of science.”

According to Draper, however, this was precisely the case. “The History of Science,” he wrote in his preface, “is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other” (Draper, vi) Draper did not, however, view religion or even Christianity in general as the second of the “contending powers” but focused instead almost exclusively on the Catholic Church. He exonerates Protestantism and the Greek Orthodox Churches for having a “reverential attitude to truth” and never aligning itself “in opposition to the advancement of knowledge” (Draper, x) The real problem, for Draper, lies with the pretentiousness of the Vatican, which has historically used its civic power to cruelly enforce its ideas and in his own day tried to use its influence to limit the freedoms of scientific and rational thought. The concluding paragraph of Draper’s book is an impassioned plea against the latter:

Religion must relinquish that imperious, that domineering position, which she has so long maintained against Science. There must be absolute freedom for thought. The ecclesiastic must learn to keep himself within the domain in which he has chosen, and cease to tyrannize over the philosopher, who…will bear such interference no longer. (Draper, 327)

Draper’s book outsold every other volume in Youman’s series, and in the preface Draper indicated that he considered his contribution to be merely the beginning of what would become a larger body of literature documenting the conflict between science and religion (Lindberg and Numbers, 2). Draper would not live long enough to see the next significant contribution to that body of literature. After nearly thirty years of research, Andrew Dickson White published his more influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. White was a historian and the co-founder and first president of Cornell University. Cornell, at its founding in 1865, was unusual in that it was a private university with no affiliation to any particular religious sect or church, and in its emphasis on the role of science in education. Opposition to the new university began at once, from claims of infidelity to claims that all professors should be in holy orders. In response to this experience White began to write on the role of conflict between science and religion. “Then it was that there was born in upon me a sense of the real difficulty—the antagonism between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to it” (White, viii). White differentiated his work from Draper’s by noting that, while Draper viewed the conflict as a struggle between science and religion, White viewed the conflict as a struggle between science and dogmatic theology (White, ix). It was dogmatism, not religion, which had erected a barrier to science and required “dissolving away” (White, vi).

In the next post I will look at Draper and White’s treatment of Copernicus (as a prelude to Galileo) in advancing their conflict theses.