Great Myths #16: The Conflict Thesis

Summary

The “Conflict Thesis” forms a kind of underlying historial metamyth that informs and undergirds a substantial amount of historical assumptions by anti-theist polemicists. This is the assumed and unquestioned idea that Science and Religion have been perpetually at war down the ages. Also known as the Draper-White Thesis or Warfare Model, it is a conception of the history of science that presents religion as the perpetual and consistent enemy of science, technology and progress. It is a pervasive idea in popular culture, despite the fact actual historians of science have long since rejected it as simplistic, misleading, ill-founded and inadequate. Despite this, most anti-religion polemicists simply assume it as fact and some have tried to argue against historians about it, with dismal results. That religion and science have been in conflict down the ages, with the former suppressing, opposing and even persecuting the latter, is an almost unquestioned dictum among anti-religious polemicists. In a dialogue with Ben Shapiro in 2018, New Atheist luminary Sam Harris assumed this in several of his comments. For example, Harris stated: [F]or the most part Islam has been hostile to real intellectual life in the way that Christianity was hostile even when the scientific world view was struggling to be born in the sixteenth century … the fifteenth century. What we have historically is a real war of ideas … crystallised in the moment when Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and put under house arrest by people who refused to look through his telescope. So that was the genius of religion compared with the emerging genius of science in that room. (See Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories) This is a remarkable encapsulatation of this unquestioned idea in one sentence. Not only does Harris state the Conflict Thesis as a fact, he manages to wrangle in several of the historical myths that it depends on: that Islamic science was stifled by religion (it was not), that Galileo was imp...