merefaith: salvation in the desert: The Conflict Thesis

As before, a lot of my free time has been taken up with reading and reflection. Also, I've spent some time engaging different conversations in various Internet fora. It may be easiest simply to pass along a bit of what I've written elsewhere. Here's an introduction I gave to a recent forum discussion on the science-religion "conflict thesis" and medieval Christianity:

During the late 19th century, two consequential works were published that set the rhetorical tone for public discussion about the so-called "war between since and religion." They were John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Although these publications have long since been thoroughly discredited, their pervasive influence remains in the form of the thesis of a historical conflict between science and Christianity that goes something like this:

Greco-Roman antiquity was an era of freethought and scientific innovation characterized by tolerance, empirical inquiry, and technical advancement. This first golden age of science came to an end once Constantine ascended to the purple in 312. As Christianity became the official religion of the empire, bishops and emperors promoted an intolerant rejection of all pagan learning. They burned down libraries, executed philosophers and scientists, and squelched investigation by promoting the unquestioned acceptance of dogma under the threat of hellfire. Only through the courageous exertions of independent thinkers such as Copernicus and Galileo was the original Greek vision restored and the second golden age of science began.

The historical conflict thesis is an attractive narrative that still commends respect among secular polemicists and amateur historians, such as Charles Freeman in his The Closing of the Western Mind(2001). In just about every particular, however, it is utterly wrong.

Historians of science have abandoned this thesis for several decades now. In its place has come the recognition that Greek "science" was a limited affair, hobbled by non-empirical axioms, and swallowed by commentarial degeneration as early as 200 BC, well before the birth of Christ or the onset of a supposedly antiscientific theocratic state. Christian Europe and Muslim Asia and North Africa inherited an already lengthy tradition in which Aristotle was the authoritative "Philosopher" to whom little could be added. However, scientific and technical advances in both domains planted the seeds of a fuller empirical science that would eventually bloom. Meanwhile, any fair reading of patristic sources reveals the devotion that many influential Christian leaders gave to logic and reason.

The "Dark Ages" of early Europe were brought about by economic, political and military factors, not the closed-minded insistence of Christian theology. As the Roman imperial system collapsed, learning and technical innovation took the back seat to the basic needs of survival. The history of the Middle Ages reveals repeated efforts to restore education, the arts, and technological development during periods of stability, such as the Carolingian Renaissance. Popes and Christian kings were often the patrons of the pre-modern "natural philosophers" and "mechanics" who continued to advance the state of human knowledge.

Various episodes such as the death of Hypatia and the trial of Galileo have been ripped from their context, their particulars distorted, and made to fit a biased narrative of Christian bigotry and ignorance. It behooves us to tell these tales rightly, free of the trappings of the old conflict thesis.

If you want to read what historians of science currently think of medieval Christendom, consider Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages or David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450.

Labels: Faith and Reason