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At the risk of being repetitive, I’m going to explode a central doctrine of new atheism: that science and religion are separate and unrelated human activities in conflict with one another. I’m returning to this subject today with new material, so it’s no waste of time. Promise. My intention is to sink my teeth into the history of the issue. Where does this fundamental misconception come from?
The idea that science and religion are essentially at odds is borne of ignorance and a failure to read history. As science and religion historian Peter Harrison puts it:
According to this pervasive myth, these two enterprises are polar opposites that compete to occupy the same explanatory territory. The history of Western thought is understood in terms of a protracted struggle between these opposing forces, with religion gradually being forced to yield more and more ground to an advancing science that offers superior explanations. Wherever possible, religion has resisted this ceding of territory, thus hindering the advance of science.
. . .
In recent years, historians of science have conclusively shown that there is little historical basis for the myth.1
Moreover Harrison points out that “religion has been important for establishing the social legitimacy of science, owing to the identification of science as a means of redemption and a form of ‘priestly’ activity.”2
The origins of this misconception are various and include seventeenth century “Protestant polemics against Catholicism that sought to align papism with ignorance, superstition, and resistance to new knowledge.”3 Further development of this position took place among the French philosophes during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment when key popularisers of rationalism brought irreverence toward religion into vogue. French resentment of religion and the crown it underwrote led to attacks against churches during the French Revolution (1789). Thus religion came to represent an obstacle to reformation, republicanism and democratic aspirations.
The myth seems to have been culturally entrenched by the end of the nineteenth century with two books: History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) by John William Draper, and History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) by Andrew Dickson White.4 In short, the present day misconception of religion and science being separate and conflicting entities arose out of a fraught socio-political history as republican progressives fought for democratic freedom against a monarchical order that derived its legitimacy from the Catholic Church.
Another history is possibly even more relevant here and frankly fascinating enough to take some time to consider. It was March 1860, Britain. A collection of seven essays appeared under the unassuming title Essays and Reviews. Six of the authors were Oxford-educated clergymen, and the seventh was a Cambridge-educated layman. Between them, they proposed “that miracles were impossible, that some Christian doctrines were immoral, that doctrine changes over time, and that the Bible should be interpreted like any other ancient book.”5 The publication made quite a stir. According to historian of the X Club, Ruth Barton, “Essays and Reviews outsold the Origin [of Species]—22,000 copies compared with 4,000 in two years.” Most significantly for our tracing of the origins of the myth that religion is the enemy of science, “Two of the authors were formally charged with heresy.”6
Meanwhile, as the case was being examined in court a “more shocking assault” on the authority of scripture came from a bishop no less, one Bishop Colenso of Natal, who in October 1862, published the first volume of a book critical of the Old Testament from a mathematical perspective. He titled it Pentateuch, the Greek name for the Torah, or first five books of the Hebrew Bible. It sold 10,000 copies “instantly.”7 In Barton’s words, “he used arithmetic and common sense to demonstrate that the numbers of people and animals reported at different times and places could not be accurate.” Readers were thereby encouraged to “judge for themselves the moral authority of Old Testament texts.”8
Controversy raged. A review of Essays and Reviews by Bishop Wilberforce for the January 1861 edition of the Quarterly, propelled the magazine “into five editions.”9 Petitions circulated to collect signatures from influential persons on both sides. Orthodox members of the Church community argued that these reformers had no business holding holy offices, and that if they were being honest, should resign their positions. After all, the clergymen and the bishop were being financially sustained by and enjoying the privileges of the very institution they were undermining.
The trouble was that these folks wanted Church reform in light of advances in human understanding. Science advocates and future members of the X Club (a dinner club of London-based scientists that formed in 1864 largely due to this controversy) came to the defence of this effort of reformation. A number of them were Dissenters (of the Church of England), Unitarians, Catholics and free-thinkers who grew up in circles frustrated with the authority of the stuffy orthodoxy of the English elites, who were known to condescend and insult those who disagreed with them.
Since the Church would not reform to include science, then Science and Church had to split and become enemies in the same way the Protestants split from the Catholics when that church proved too corrupt, idolatrous and authoritarian. (Readers will recall here the analogical analysis of historian Tom Holland from “Science & Textbook Pedagogy”: there’s a distinctly Christian pattern of reform here whereby the world is progressively desacralised.)
The affair came to a head in 1864 when the two essayists charged with heresy were found guilty by the Church’s Court of Arches. They then appealed to the higher secular court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. “It’s judgment, given in February 1864, was that the opinions expressed by the two accused essayists were not inconsistent with the formularies of the Church of England, that is, with its Prayer Book and Thirty-Nine Articles.” In reaction “Eleven thousand clergy and 137,000 laypersons signed protesting memorials [i.e. petitions] on the side of orthodoxy.”10
The political activity surrounding these events cannot be underestimated in terms of how it galvanised those advocating the advance of scientific authority in the face of an oppressive and inflexible religious orthodoxy. Important to note as well that two of the essayists of Essays and Reviews were from Balliol College (Oxford) because Oxbridge colleges develop stroytelling traditions that breed a fraternal team spirit. In historical terms, 150 years is hardly any time at all. If one considers that several X Club members lived into the early twentieth century, one gets some perspective on the proximity and how a remaining intensity would persist through the century and even into the twenty-first century. There’s a sort of laying on of the hands going on—the churchly notion that ordination proceeded directly from Jesus, who lay his hands upon the Apostles, who lay their hands upon the priests and clergymen that followed. In this case, the spirit of those Victorian times when Balliol men attempted to reform the Church and faced charges of heresy is passed along like gospel. Notably, Richard Dawkins attended Balliol.
Essential to keep in mind that dissent in this case came from within the Church, and how Tom Holland’s observation about dissenting reform having roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition is further reinforced by this series of events from 1860 to 1864. The idea that Science is an entirely different phenomenon from religion is a myth that TheScience™ tells about itself. The more subtle truth is that science is an evolution of religion and shares the same sort of hierarchical trappings.
As an added cherry to this rich banana split, Peter Harrison informs us that according to the World Values Survey (2004) “distrust of science is greatest in those countries that are the most secularized, and least in those that are most religious.”11
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Numbers, Ronald L. and Kostas Kampourakis. Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015. pp. 195, 197.
Ibid. p. 198.
Ibid. p. 199.
See ibid.
Barton, Ruth. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 185.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 186.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 192.
Numbers op. cit. p. 201.
Another excellent essay. Once in a while I read something that gives me an idea for a course of the kind I used to be able to teach, and this "putative war," as you call it, would have made a great theme for a set of readings and discussions. Every time I see one of those "We believe . . . science is real" signs around, I smile to myself. These folks have no idea what they are saying. Thanks for your work.
Absolutely, an excellent account! Nietzsche saw this so clearly, which is why he has never been popular with the 'New Atheists' despite having that apparently ready-made polemic in the form of the much-misunderstood cry that "God is dead".
The Gay Science, Book V, section 343: "But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine."