Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World

by David Hutchings

The greatest myth in the history of science and religion holds that they have been in a state of constant conflict. No one bears more responsibility for promoting this notion than two nineteenth-century American polemicists: Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper. . . . Historians of science have known for years that White’s and Draper’s accounts are more propaganda than history. . . . Yet the message has rarely escaped the ivory tower. The secular public knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress. . . . The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role in corroding faith.

Very rarely, for example, do books explain that Galileo was a devout Catholic. They don’t mention that he was fully convinced of the deity of Jesus, and the resurrection, and the virgin birth, and that Scripture came “through the very mouth of the Holy Spirit.”

“The holy Bible can never speak untruth whenever its true meaning is understood.”

the deeply Christian Copernicus was far more worried about being openly mocked by other natural philosophers than he was about being hurled into dungeons by inquisitors.

Copernicus, White says, removed us from the “centre of the universe”—and, in doing so, it called dogmatic Christianity into question.

The whole thing, though, is backward—for being at the center of the pre-Copernican universe had always been seen as a bad thing, not a good thing. Ever since the ancient Greeks—earlier, even—it had been the heavens that were considered to be perfect, and unspoiled, and aspirational. In other words, the further out one went from Earth, the more wonderful everything became. The center, by contrast, was where one found all the horrible stuff.

The heliocentric model, then, did not demote humanity—and it did not call into question how special we all are to God.