Conflict thesis

Before the 19th century, no one had pitted "science" against "religion" or vice versa in writing. The relationship between religion and science became an actual formal topic of discourse in the 19th century. because before this time, the term science still included moral and metaphysical dimensions, was not inherently linked to the scientific method, and the term scientist did not emerge until 1834. The scientist John William Draper (1811–1882) and the writer Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) were the most influential exponents of the conflict thesis between religion and science. Draper had been the speaker in the British Association meeting of 1860 which led to the famous confrontation between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley over Darwinism, and in America "the religious controversy over biological evolution reached its most critical stages in the late 1870s". In the early 1870s, the American science-popularizer Edward Livingston Youmans invited Draper to write a History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), a book replying to contemporary issues in Roman Catholicism, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility, and mostly criticizing what he claimed to be anti-intellectualism in the Catholic tradition, but also making criticisms of Islam and of Protestantism. Draper's preface summarises the conflict thesis: In 1874 White published his thesis in Popular Science Monthly and in book form as The Warfare of Science: Such thesis was not to be intended, as many successively did, as a statement of complete and necessary enmity between science and Christianity at all times. On the contrary White asserted that numerous examples of support from Christianity to science can be observed: In 1896, White published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, the culmination of over thirty years of research and publication on the subject, criticizing what he saw as restrictive, dogmatic forms of Christianity. In the introduction, White emphasized that he arrived at his position after the difficulties of assisting Ezra Cornell in establishing a university without any official religious affiliation. The criticism of White is not entirely recent: historian of medicine James Joseph Walsh criticized White's perspective as anti-historical in The Popes and Science; the History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time (1908), which he dedicated to Pope Pius X: In God and Nature (1986), David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers report that "White's Warfare apparently did not sell as briskly as Draper's Conflict, but in the end it proved more influential, partly, it seems, because Draper's work was soon dated, and because White's impressive documentation gave the appearance of sound scholarship". During the 20th century, historians' acceptance of the conflict thesis declined until fully rejected in the 1970s. David B. Wilson notes: {{quotation|Despite the growing number of scholarly modifications and rejections of the conflict model from the 1950s[...] in the 1970s leading historians of the nineteenth century still felt required to attack it.[...] Whatever the reason for the continued survival of the conflict thesis, two other books on the nineteenth century that were published in the 1970s hastened its final demise among historians of science[...] 1974[...] Frank Turner[...] Between Science and Religion[...] Even more decisive was the penetrating critique "Historians and Historiography"[...] [by] James Moore[...] at the beginning of his Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979).|David B. Wilson, The Historiography of Science and Religion, in Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction, 2002 However, according to historian of science and religion James C. Ungureanu, Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief, not remove it. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much older argument that dated back to the Protestant Reformation, where progressive and liberal theologies had their conflict with traditional and orthodox theologies. This would place the notion of "conflict" within the history of theological ideas. == Modern views ==