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The peace between science and religion
Everyone knows that Columbus proved that the earth was not flat, as the church held.
Everyone knows that Copernicus was persecuted for theorizing that the earth revolves around the Sun, contrary to the Bible.
Everyone knows that Galileo valiantly defended scientific truth against the oppressive obscurantism of a despotic Catholic Church.
Everyone knows that Darwin’s theory of evolution was condemned by Christians, who fought it tooth and nail.
Right?
Wrong.
In an important new book, Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: The Strange Tale of How the Conflict Between Science and Christianity Was Written into History (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021; xii-359pp), Derrick Peterson demythologizes the “warfare” between science and religion that supposedly exists (and certainly sells popular books!), as a story that never happened. He relies on massive efforts by historians of science over the past half-century, as well as his own research, to tell a radically different story:
“While deconstructing many of the historical misunderstand[ings] that have gone into the thesis and continue to linger in our consciousness does not solve all our problems, or prove Christianity true, or that God is real, it does help us precisely by clearing the decks. While the rhetoric of ‘everything you know is wrong’ can be quite trying when used as marketing, often in the areas of the history of science and religion one does truly wish we could all start over.” p. 316
Flat earths
This is not a work of apologetic or evangelism. Peterson is clear-eyed about the fact that, if there is no good science-bad Christianity history other than that invented in the 19th century, there is also no substituting some bad science-good Christianity for that myth either. He begins by telling the story of the rediscovery of the work of the French physicist and mathematician Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). He had set out in 1903 to study the medieval origin of physics only to discover that there seemed to be none in the histories of the day. With Copernicus, light seemingly dawned suddenly upon a world darkened since the fall of Rome, growing stronger with Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others. As…
