Reconcilable Differences
The history of science,” John William Draper wrote in 1874, “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.” That science and religion are locked in a fight to the death, and that science will eventually be victorious, is the main message of Draper’s influential book, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. In 1896 Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University, published a two-volume work whose title makes explicit the same thesis. He called it A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom.
The “conflict” approach to science and religion fostered by these two 19th-century works has seeped into scientific journalism, newspaper reporting, popular presentations of science and most recently the “new atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. It is an idea that many academics and students still swallow whole.
But Ronald Numbers, the eminent historian of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of this enjoyable and informative collection of essays, will have none of it. A self-styled agnostic himself, he states bluntly that “White’s and Draper’s accounts are more propaganda than history.” The accomplished younger generation of historians of science and other experts Numbers has assembled here agree. Galileo Goes to Jail lays bare some of the many “myths” (in the sense of false claims) associated with the belief that science and religion are essentially irreconcilable ways of understanding the world.
One of these myths is that Galileo was physically tortured and thrown into a dark prison cell by the Inquisition. Not so. Although threatened with the typical instruments of torture, Galileo was not subjected to the rack, nor was he incarcerated in Rome (with the possible exception of three days in 1633). While awaiting his trial, he was put up in his prosecutor’s six-room apartment, attended all the while by a servant. Later he moved to the Villa Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany’s sumptuous Roman palace. On his way back to Tuscany after the trial he dallied for five months under house arrest at the comfortable residence of his good friend the archbishop of Siena. Thereafter he paid for his heliocentric heresy by becoming a permanent guest in his own villa in Arcetri overlooking Florence.
So writes the eminent Galileo scholar Maurice Finocchiaro, refuting Voltaire’s claim that Galileo “groaned away his days in the dungeons of the Inquisition,” and challenging Giuseppe Barretti’s equally influential assertion in 1757 that the great scientist “was put in the inquisition for six years, and put to torture, for saying that the earth moved.” Although the fragmentary records available to Voltaire and Barretti may have suggested torture and imprisonment, recent historical scholarship has put to rest the “myth” that Galileo suffered physical penalties and wasted away in prison.
This is only one of many false claims and rumors that still make religion seem inherently hostile to science in the minds of many scientists, scholars and students. Contrary to Draper and White, readers of this collection will learn from the historian David Livingstone that Christianity was not responsible for the demise of ancient science. For example, unlike the interpretation of history popularized by Carl Sagan and many others, the murder of the Alexandrian mathematician and philo-sopher Hypatia, supposedly by a mob of Christian zealots, “had everything to do with local politics and virtually nothing to do with science.” Nor, as many previous historians have assumed, were Augustine, Basil and Tertullian opposed to classical science, since they borrowed heavily from current views of nature in setting forth their own theological positions.
Livingstone also rejects Charles Freeman’s recent claim that Christianity is responsible for “the closing of the Western mind,” arguing that “no institution or cultural force of the classical period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church.”
The historian of science Michael Shank likewise disputes Draper’s claim that medieval Christianity’s theological worldview “became a stumbling block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years.” Medieval universities were not fixated on theology anyway, and only a few students were deemed qualified to study it. Instead most formal education focused on law, logic, natural philosophy and mathematics, disciplines that could hardly have impeded the rise of modern science.
Again, Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University rejects Draper’s blanket declaration that Roman Catholicism and science are “absolutely incompatible.” Questioning narrowly Anglocentric theories about the emergence of science, such as the “Merton thesis” that science is a product of Puritanism, Principe points out that the scientific revolution goes back to foundations laid long before the Reformation. Medieval theories of optics, kinematics and astronomy, along with the establishment of universities, the practice of intellectual disputation and the rigor of Scholastic thought in philosophy and theology—all of these contributed to a climate essential to the birth and shaping of modern science. Principe characterizes Draper’s book, therefore, as “little more than a thinly-disguised anti-Catholic rant.”
Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, on the other hand, disputes the equally one-sided myth that Christianity gave birth to modern science. Obviously Christianity was a contributor, but so also were ancient Greek philosophy, Islam and other historical, political, technological and economic influences.
Other myths fall hard at the hands of the highly qualified stable of authors Numbers has gathered here. A sampling of topics includes the beliefs that medieval Christians thought the earth was flat, that Islamic culture was inhospitable to science, that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for modern science, that Newton’s mechanics left no room for God or final causes, that Darwin destroyed natural theology, that quantum physics demonstrates freedom of the will, that creationism is a uniquely American phenomenon, that modern science has secularized Western culture and that Einstein believed in a personal God. Although there may be a fragment of truth in several of these myths, careful research is now making important corrections.
Galileo Goes to Jail is not a defense of theism, religion or Christianity. In fact, some of the authors are nonbelievers and have no stake in apologetics. The book is simply an honest attempt to set a distorted record straight. Its accessibility and frankness will make it a valuable text for students of intellectual history, religion, the history of science and those taking courses dealing with science and theology. It will also appeal to a wider range of readers. Let us hope these will include not only subscribers to America but also devotees of Scientific American.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Reconcilable Differences,” in the November 16, 2009, issue.
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