Recovering Evangelicals

#177 – The Conflict Thesis fooled the world for 150 years!

Apr 4, 2025

01:12:44

Almost everyone in the 21^st century Western world have bought into this unfounded myth (very possibly YOU too!?)

A few days ago, it was the 1^st of April …. April Fool’s Day! Instead of playing some kind of prank on our listeners, we thought we’d look at a great book about a hoax — on the level of a conspiracy theory — that has hoodwinked the world for almost two centuries! This con-job has most people today believing in “the Dark Ages,” and that the church in the past often tortured and even killed scientists, and burned down the ancient library of Alexandria (containing thousands of books, the collective knowledge of the world at that time). When you, the listener, hear about the whole “Galileo Affair,” does your mind immediately jump to religion vs science, or do you imagine two different groups of philosophers/scholars disputing cosmology using Greek philosophical arguments?

The book we’ll be bringing to our listeners this week is Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and how the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World, by David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu. This week we’ll hear from James (a PhD historian), and next week from David (degree in physics; popular speaker and apologist).

James did his entire PhD thesis on the Conflict Thesis and who first proposed the idea. He and David dug through historical archives, chasing down footnotes in textbooks, newspaper clippings, and letters between scholars, and the trail converged on two 19^th century American scholars: John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White. And their idea — the Conflict Thesis — claims that “the church and science are at war … fundamentally at odds … always have been, always will be.”

Draper and White were both brilliant polymaths, energetic intellectuals, and recognized scholars in a scholar’s world. Draper was a scientist, White a literary scholar who had been on a path toward preaching, but was enticed away by intellectual influences into more secular pursuits. Both wrote books which became the foundation for the Conflict Thesis. Draper’s (History of the Conflict between Religion and Science) was dense and only readable to professional egg-heads, while White’s (A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom) was aimed at a more popular level.

And both were Christians! In fact, Draper was not attacking religion itself, but advocating for a return to a pure, rational form of Christianity; he saw the Protestant Reformation as a turning point not just for religion but for science as well.

Nonetheless, both held, developed and passed on a distorted view of history of the relationship between church and science, which was then picked up and promoted by later scholars over the ensuing decades, and then more recently popularized by influencers like Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Joe Rogan, to name just a few. The Conflict thesis can be found in textbooks used in high schools, colleges, and universities … in the introductions to scholarly papers published in scientific and medical journals … in magazine articles and documentaries … popular TV shows (Family Guy) and movies like Dan Brown’s blockbuster the Da Vinci Code. It’s no wonder that anyone growing up in 21^st century Western society just absorbs this idea (the Conflict Thesis) by osmosis, takes it as a historical fact, and makes it a part of their worldview.

Luke was curious about how Draper and White got their grossly distorted understanding of history: “Were they just honestly stupid, or deceitfully biased, or perhaps misinformed?” We also talked about members of a mysterious “X Club” who met in lounges over cigars and drinks and discussed big ideas. About the Free Religious Association: radical Unitarians, Universalists, spiritualists, transcendentalists, and other religious minorities who promoted free thought and more philosophy without the constraints of institutional Christianity, and promoting a new religion of Humanity. About Stephen Jay Gould and “non-overlapping magisteria.”

And about why this Conflict Thesis just doesn’t want to go away. Luke asked if historians have given up debunking the distorted history. James replied historians are growing tired of trying; that the public just prefer to have a simple good guy / bad guy story, rather than the highly nuanced but much more accurate understanding.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Click here for more information about Dr. James Ungureanu and the book we discussed.

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