The Flattening of the Earth: How Two Men Forged the Conflict between Science and Religion from Bad History

Four centuries later, the synthesis of religion and science found in Kepler's work is rare and marginalized. In the mainstream, scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett write polemics against religion, decrying it as obsolete and anti-intellectual, while religionists, especially conservative Christians, push back with attacks on many of modern science's leading theories. Extremists on both sides believe that religion and science are locked in a battle for the modern mind and that no acceptable compromise exists.

However, this conflict thesis is a relatively recent development. The writings of many whom we retrospectively call scientists, including Kepler, Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Faraday and many others, themselves believed that theology was relevant to their scientific investigations. Religion was not an external imposition but a key part of the mental landscape of early modern scientists. They would have reacted with puzzlement to the modern suggestion that they should have kept the science and religion separate.

Where, then, did the notion that religion and science are inherently opposed to one another originate? In Reconciling Religion and Science, Peter J. Bowler writes, "The claim that the advance of science necessarily brings it into conflict with established religious beliefs was advanced most energetically in the late nineteenth century by those who believed that science was the vehicle by which a new, secular view of the human situation would be established."iii Thus, the idea that religion and science are fundamentally opposed is not a product of scientific discovery, but rather of the naturalist philosophy that began to influence scientific theory in the early 19th century. The conflation of science with naturalism, that is, the philosophical outlook that matter is all that exists, resulted in the idea that science was the only way to know truth. The trajectory of history, therefore, began to be caricatured as one in which the theological and philosophical were gradually supplanted by the scientific. Bowler affirms, "The exponents of scientific naturalism believed the conflict was inevitable because religion was wedded to traditional dogma while science offered a new route to the truth that inevitably exposed the inadequacies of past ideas. This was a war that science was bound to win because it was the only reliable source of information."iv

Having presented the general philosophical outlook that promoted the conflict thesis, Bowler identifies its two primary representatives. He says, "The metaphor of a ‘war’ between the two areas was projected most explicitly by J.W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and A. D. White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896)."v So, how and why did Draper and White create the perceived dichotomy of religion and science? An examination of their works indicates that they rewrote history, popularizing many myths that persist even today, and in the process, they instigated the struggle that they claimed had begun hundreds of years before.

At the beginning of his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, Draper sets the tone for the stories he will narrate. He writes,

The history of Science 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.vi

Any serious reader of history should immediately be put on guard by these statements. The tidiness with which Draper intends to narrate the complex development of Western science and its interaction with the enormous, intricate fabric of Christian theology and religious practice seems unrealistically simplistic. Such a reductionist perspective must naturally ignore the political, economic, and social aspects of the historical events in question; since it promises that the said events are concerned only with the religious and the scientific. Draper intends to reduce approximately a millennium of human history with all its complexity to a chess game between hastily drawn caricatures of Religion and Science.

Furthermore, Draper admits that his approach is a novel one, as he says, “No one has hitherto treated the subject from this point of view.”vii Why, if the battle lines between science and religion had been drawn as clearly as Draper intends to draw them, had historians failed to notice for almost a millennium? If a war between religion and science had been raging, it was an invisible war. Christine Garwood recognizes Draper’s reductionist viewpoint. She writes,

Draper’s book… reshaped the history of science into a simple plot in which the evils and ignorance of religious dogma sidetracked the march of human knowledge and the natural progress of scientific truth…science had fought religious bigotry, like some David and Goliath, to come out shining in the cause of human knowledge and the final realization of glittering truth.viii

Of all of the myths that Draper and White helped to popularize, one of the most persistent is that of medieval belief in the flat earth. According to the myth, after all of the scientific achievements of the classical Greeks and Romans were lost in the Dark Ages, the inhabitants of Europe reverted to the archaic belief that the world was flat. This erroneous belief was supposedly founded upon the church’s insistence on literal interpretations of the Bible. Then, according to Draper and White, Christopher Columbus sets out to prove that the world is round by finding a westward passage to the East Indies, but he must first contend with the powerful church authorities who hurl accusations of heresy before his expedition is eventually funded, and he goes on to discover the New World. Some version of this narrative continues to be taught to school children today. Many of us can recite this traditional poem, a staple of elementary primers:

Draper premises his argument concerning medieval flat-earthism on the claim that “An uncritical observation of the aspect of Nature persuades us that the earth is an extended level surface.”ix He therefore concludes that the inhabitants of medieval Europe naturally believed that the earth was flat. Draper does not explain why he assumes that all observations of that period were uncritical or how the scientific knowledge of the classical past was so thoroughly obliterated despite the preservation of scientific texts in monasteries throughout Europe. Instead, Draper goes on to credit the Church with the reinforcement of the population’s natural ignorance. He writes, “As to the earth, [the Church Fathers] affirmed that it is a flat surface, over which the sky is spread like a dome, or, as St. Augustine tells us, is stretched like a skin.”x

Unfortunately, this account of the Church’s willful suppression of scientific inquiry and of the medieval belief in the flat earth is almost entirely fictional, a fact of which Draper and White should have been well aware. A comparison of their claims with the facts indicates that they were either particularly incompetent historians or willful deceivers of their readers. As Garwood makes clear,

All of the most widely renowned and distributed authors of the early medieval period were in firm agreement [that the world was spherical]...They included St. Augustine…who confirmed his belief in a spherical earth in a number of writings…His emphasis on an allegorical rather than literal reading of the scriptures naturally extended to the shape of the earth, and he argued that depictions of a flat earth with the sky spread over it like a tent were simply metaphors or figures of speech.xi

In this case, Draper brazenly abuses his historical source. By taking St. Augustine’s words regarding the shape of the earth out of context, Draper makes him appear to take a position of Biblical literalism which Augustine, an experienced rhetorician, opposed on the grounds that it distracted from Scripture’s intended meaning. The original context of St. Augustine’s words appears in the thirteenth chapter of his Confessions. His argument is concerned with reconciling the teachings of pagan philosophy with their apparent contradictions in Scripture. As he often does, Augustine demonstrates that if read allegorically, the Bible does not necessarily contradict facts attested by secular disciplines. This position is virtually the opposite of that credited to him by Draper.

White follows in Draper’s footsteps not only by adopting the conflict thesis but also by committing many of the same factual distortions as his predecessor. Concerning the flat earth myth, he retraces Draper’s argument and commits many of the same historical inaccuracies. However, he does acknowledge that some well educated medieval Christians were aware of the earth’s sphericity. Unfortunately,

The conflict model…led him seriously to overstate the extent of flat-earth belief, both in terms of the number of believers and the timescales involved. His set-piece concludes with the ill-judged statement: it is only ‘as we approach the modern period’ that ‘we find [the] truth [of the globular theory] acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men’, an estimate incorrect by twenty centuries or so.xii

Like Draper, White is guilty of a reductionist historical perspective that prevents him from providing an accurate or comprehensive discussion of his subject. Garwood observes that in White’s work “medieval flat-earth thinking again played a notable role as a prime example of scriptural literalism derailing ‘natural’ progress towards scientific truth.”xiii

The real inspiration for the flat earth myth as perpetuated by Draper and White, particularly the heroic exploits of Christopher Columbus against the bigoted religionists, was none other than “beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history.”xiv Jeffrey Burton Russell writes that, “No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat,”xv but with the publication of Irving’s Columbus: His Life and Voyages, the flat earth myth entered the American consciousness, where it persists to the present day. Russell exposes Irving’s counterfeit historical narrative, saying,

It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a “simple mariner,” appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca…“Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene,” created a fictitious account of this” nonexistent university council” and “let his imagination go completely...the whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense.”xvi

Nevertheless, Irving’s myth provided a valuable foundation on which Draper and White built their case for the conflict of religion and science.

According to modern scholars, the case of medieval belief in the flat earth is closed. Garwood writes that in the medieval period, “Culture was suffused with images of terra rotunda to such an extent that serious promulgation of flat-earth belief would become little more than a waste of time.”xvii Indeed, one may readily discover medieval representations of the globular earth preserved in both literary and visual sources. Two such examples are Dante’s Divine Comedy, which narrates a descent into hell and a reemergence on the other side of a spherical world, and the numerous representations of rulers holding globes, which symbolize their power over the earth. However, because it provides an irrefutable objection to their version of history, Draper and White ignore this evidence entirely and choose to present only those facts that support their claims.

Further examples of Draper and White’s distortion of history in order to substantiate the conflict thesis include the myth of Galileo as a martyr for science and the imprisonment of Roger Bacon. In the case of Galileo, his trial concerned his mocking and insulting portrayal of the Pope Urban VIII, his former patron, rather than his scientific discoveries.xviii In the case of Roger Bacon, one of the first proponents of the experimental method, he was not, as White alleged, imprisoned on account of his scientific ideas, but rather on account of his criticisms of the opulence of the church. As modern historian of science David Lindberg writes, “[Bacon’s] imprisonment, if it occurred at all (which I doubt) probably resulted with his sympathies for the radical ‘poverty’ wing of the Franciscans (a wholly theological matter) rather than from any scientific novelties which he may have proposed.”xix In regards to his scientific endeavors, the church was generally supportive: it was Pope Clement who commissioned Bacon’s three major works.

Considering its lack of basis in historical fact, the enduring popularity of the conflict thesis is somewhat surprising. Garwood notes, “The military metaphor employed by Draper and White was propaganda par excellence, and it seized the popular imagination at a time when Western culture was awash with the rhetoric and imagery of war.”xx Moreover, the conflict thesis is appealing for its simplicity, since it makes the complex reality of the historical events it reduces more easily digestible. Finally, it served its purpose as ammunition against the religious worldview well, and secularists have ensured that it remains fixed in the public consciousness.

Draper and White left to the world a legacy of bad history and a fallacious framework for understanding the relationship between science and religion. The internalization of the conflict thesis fomented animosity where cooperation between the two disciplines had once flourished. The long tradition of scientific achievement by thinkers equally interested in spiritual matters has been largely forgotten, leaving the modern student with only half the picture. While Newton’s Principia Mathematica remains the seminal work of classical mechanics, his biblical commentaries gather dust. Abbot Gregor Mendel’s pea plants flourishing in his monastery’s garden are revered for their contribution to the modern miracle of genetics but stripped of their spiritual setting. Acknowledging the lack of historical evidence for the conflict of science and religion is the first step in recasting the dialogue between the two in a more progressive mode.