Myths of Science and Christianity (We All Believe): A New Blog Series.

When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.

                                                                        Alfred North Whitehead

George Steiner once wrote in his beautiful book Real Presences that "method is metaphor made instrumental" (100).  So to say: our method depends upon the metaphors we use to see, understand, and so categorize and interact with the world. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note much the same in their own fascinating book Metaphors We Live By: "The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of intellect," but rather "they also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details.  Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual systems...play a central role in defining our everyday realities."  Nor is this some heady, purely theoretical or intellectual domain.  Rather our very "gut feelings," of how we are "attuned" to the social, natural, and historical universes we inhabit, are themselves colored by metaphors and myths we use to collate and organize our universe.  These are our "social imaginaries" as Charles Taylor calls them, where "social imaginary" encompasses not just ideas, but a constellation of culture, belief, practice, habit, speech, daily life, etc... which corporately shape our pre-thematic (or I suppose we could call it "unconscious") relationship and envisioning of the world with others.  In Taylor's words: "how ordinary people 'imagine' their social surroundings...often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends..."  That is, "the social imaginary is that common understanding [of society] which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense" of what is and is not legitimate, or given initial plausibility or implausibility (Taylor, A Secular Age, 172).

Here, in this upcoming series of blog posts, we take aim at a series of specific myths, namely regarding the relationship between Science and Christianity.

Writes Ronald Numbers, a famed historian and philosopher of science: The greatest myth in the history of science and religion holds that they have been in a state of perpetual conflict. (Galileo Goes to Jail, 1).

Whether perpetuated by the so-called New Atheists, wielded in dark corners by internet trolls, or even in casual conversation at the local coffee shop, that the history of Christianity's relation to science is one more often than not of bigotry, backwardness, oppression, and downright hostility to progress, is more or less assumed.  It is a venerable iteration of this "truth" that Christianity was especially irrational, hostile to appeals of logic, purging Western culture of its rightful inheritance to Greek science, inducing the Dark Ages by anesthetizing the achievements of Roman culture, shunning the full orbed and infinite sky to cling to its Ptolemaic cosmos and homely, flat earth.  These canards are not held by any serious historian any longer, yet it is sad to say that academic historians do not usually have much pull on popular consciousness.  These are, as David Bentley Hart puts it, "attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty...rationales ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors." (Atheist Delusions, 19) Yet since the history channel is apparently now more interested in Ancient Aliens and the latest theories on the so-called "historical Jesus" than actual history, mass popularization of more recent research is often left in the niches of used book stores.  And anyway, we evangelicals all know that the historical Jesus wore blue jeans and played guitar.

In our own, very small way, we hope to begin a journey towards correcting these mythologies.

Perhaps no two men have done more to perpetuate this myth than the original publications of Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper.  With similar titles, Draper's  History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (published 1874) and White's two volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (published 1896), though widely discredited in the majority of their claims, are still cited to this day.  And even where they are not, the metaphor of warfare, conflict, or religious oppression of scientific truth, stuck as the major lens to view history.  Though they say (often quite rightly) that Academia is closed away in its ivory tower, like many academic theories, over the decades they bleed down and take root in the general public.

"The secular public," writes Ronald Numbers, "if it thinks about such issue at all, knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress (witness the attacks on Galileo, Darwin, and Scopes).  The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role in corroding faith (through naturalism and antibiblicism)."

Without wanting to gloss over the uncountable stupidities and atrocities that have actually been perpetuated by the Church, these almost conspiratorial tales of systematic, or even widespread, systemic distrust of science on behalf of Christianity are untrue.  Not just untrue; but in fact as we shall see for the last 2000 years Christianity has often been one of the, if not the largest contributor to science.  And if those like Rodney Stark, or T.F. Torrance, and in his own way Amos Funkenstein are to be believed, it was precisely Christian theology that often underlay the systematic impulse to scientific research.

Yet if so false, why do these things persist?  Here is the key to the use of the term "myth."  These tales of Christianity vs. science persist because they are useful.  Here the mythic is also, much like Steiner's quote with which we opened, "metaphor made instrumental."  It is one of the creation myths of the Modern, civilized, secular age:

Hence modernity's first great attempt to define itself: an 'age of reason' emerging from and overthrowing an 'age of faith.'  Behind this definition lay a simple but thoroughly enchanting tale.  Once upon a time, it went, Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church: during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state.  Withering blasts of fanaticism and fideism had long since scorched away the last remnants of classical learning; inquiry was stifled; the literary remains of classical antiquity had long been consigned to the fires of faith, and even the great achievements of 'Greek science' were forgotten till Islamic civilization restored them to the West.  All was darkness.  Then, in the wake of the 'wars of religion' that had torn Christendom apart, came the full flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress, the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity.  The secular nation-state arose, reduced religion to an establishment of the state or, in the course of time, to something altogether separate from the state, and thereby rescued Western humanity from the blood-steeped intolerance of religion.  Now, at last, Western humanity has left its nonage and attained to its majority, in science, politics, and ethics.  The story of the travails of Galileo almost invariably occupies an honored place in this narrative, as exemplary of the natural relation between 'fath' and 'reason. and as an exquisite epitome of scientific reason's mighty struggle during the early modern period to free itself from the tyranny of religion. (Hart, Atheist Delusions, 34).

 We tell the tale to remind us who we are: rational, scientific, secular.  But much like the Bellman in Lewis Carol's The Hunting of the Snark, anything we say three times is true.  We write the story, as Umberto Eco says, so that it becomes fact.  As Charles Taylor writes: "Of course there could be a society without any sense of that they do not believe in the God of Abraham. There are many such today. But the intervening issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated...If so it would be different from our present world in one crucial respect. Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition that cannot be only described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief [in a specifically defined God]... (A Secular Age, 269).  That Christians destroyed Greek science, that there was something called 'the Dark Ages,' that Christians believed in a flat earth, whose faith demanded its fixity as the center of the universe, a universe created sometime in October of 4004 B.C., are but some of the many pearls strung together and thumbed-through unthinking like so many rosary-beads, spoken again and again in the secular quiet so as to become route, unthought.  "It is, as I say" Hart writes, adding a droll battle cry which our series of blog posts intend to rally under, "a simple and enchanting tale, easily followed and utterly captivating in its explanatory tidiness; its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail."

As a first step towards correction, however small, we must attack these gilded myths that lay so poised on the tips of our tongues.

I hope in the upcoming series we can all learn together, or unlearn together, aspects of our miseducation.