The Harmony War: Revisiting the History of Science and Religion

The idea of a war of harmony, rather than a war of conflict between science and religion (or, in our case, science and Christianity) has shown up before on this blog. The idea? In short, I claim (and I am not the first) is that the relationships between science and Christianity has not been a history of warfare (no one will be surprised given how much I harp on this). However, if we are to use a general description, the true nature of the history is that of competing harmonies of science and theology trying to navigate constantly new information as well as competing ideas of how the synthesis should ultimately operate. When we see the history as a "harmony war" instead of the more usual "conflict thesis," a lot of odd facts begin to make more sense.

For example: one of the forgotten items of the Galileo affair (among many which I has spoken of) was the fact that many in the church--especially among the Dominicans (while the Jesuits were generally in favor of Galileo for a time) was furious about Galileo stating the harmony of "God's two books"--that of scripture, and that of nature. Why is this? What bizarre reality can account for this? The harmony war thesis brings our attention to the right idea: the two books had for a long time been seen as being written in the same "language"--that of analogy, metaphor, images, and the like. Galileo was one of the first to suggest--no, insist--that the language of the book of nature was pure mathematics. Not only did this enrage the Aristotelians (who thought mathematics was a subordinate science to physical speculation, therefore Galileo's math should in no way reveal the physical layout of the world. But beyond this, it meant that those in the church hierarchy with no training in math were declared illiterate in their ability to understand one half of God's communication to the world.

The thesis of a "harmony war," then, opens our eyes to the fact that the Galileo affair was not a competition between faith and science, but the arrival of a competing and powerful harmonization between the two that displaced the preferred harmony of the more Peripatetic (that is, Aristotelian) Dominican theologians as many scholars, such as Rivka Feldhay, have argued powerfully and at length.