Debunking the flat earth theory

The mediaevals didn’t believe in a flat earth; the Galileo affair was a beat-up; and missionaries were great scientists. Any other questions about the conflict between religion and science?

Galileo’s trial for heresy four centuries ago remains the heavy artillery in a theory that religion and science are inevitably at war – with the good guys on the side of science and the villains in the church. But recent historical scholarship suggests that this thesis is largely based on myths promoted by individuals with agendas of their own.

The truth is much more complex—and hopeful—as historian John Stenhouse recently showed in a paper entitled, “Galileo’s Dilemma: Science and Religion”, delivered as one of series in New Zealand marking the centenary of Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

John Stenhouse is Senior Lecturer in the History Department, University of Otago. He teaches the history of science, religion and ideas in Europe and New Zealand. His recent publications include the volume of essays (edited, with Ronald Numbers) Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Building God's Own Country: Historical Essays on Religions in New Zealand (University of Otago Press 2004). He is currently writing a book on Missionary Science: Christian Missions and the Making and Spreading of Western Science.

In an interview with Carolyn Moynihan he talks about the new scholarly basis for understanding Galileo and much else.

MercatorNet: The Galileo case harks back nearly four centuries and yet there are still books being written about it and science magazines editorialising on it. When will it be laid to rest, do you think?

Stenhouse: I can’t see the Galileo case being laid to rest--not only because it is intrinsically fascinating, but because it serves as a powerful symbol in contests for intellectual authority and cultural power. Anti-religious writers have used it to bash the Catholic Church; religious apologists have used it to defend the church. Since neither secularists nor religious believers seem likely to disappear anytime soon it seems unlikely that the Galileo affair will disappear from our contemporary and future culture wars.

MercatorNet: Science today is often seen as something quite distinct from religion and even opposed to it. Has this always been the case?

Stenhouse: No. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century science and religion often overlapped and interpenetrated. Many of the greatest scientific minds of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe—Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Robert Boyle—did not sharply distinguish their science from their religion.

Take Isaac Newton, for example, the great English natural philosopher who revolutionised physics and cosmology during the late-seventeenth century. Newton’s religion profoundly affected the way he thought about nature. His most famous book, Principia Mathematica, described the workings of the solar system, with planets and satellites moving in the same direction in the same plane while comets coursed among them. “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets,” he wrote, “could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

Galileo himself, like everyone involved in the case, was a Christian. Every one of them acknowledged the authority of the Bible. Virtually all, including Galileo, were theologically informed and held informed, defensible cosmological beliefs. Conflict erupted as much within the church and within science as between the two. The best recent book on the affair (by Annibale Fantoli) sums up Galileo's position as For Copernicanism and For the Church.

Historians, philosophers and popular writers have seized on incidents like Galileo’s trial or the Scopes “monkey trial” to argue that organised religion is always at war with science, but this thesis has taken such a pounding in recent years that professional historians of science have largely abandoned it.

MercatorNet: Who were the key proponents of the “warfare theory” of science and religion?

Stenhouse: The warfare thesis first appeared during the 18th century with writers such as Voltaire and Condorcet, who hated powerful European state churches for moral and political reasons and set out to smash them with science, history, philosophy and wit.

In the 19th century two American historians gave the warfare thesis the appearance of sound scholarship. John W Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science was published in 1874 and was a best-seller, running through 50 printings in Britain, 21 in the United States, and 10 translations. Draper, a lapsed Methodist, argued that the Vatican's relentless persecution of scientists such as Galileo left its hands “steeped in blood”. Draper’s anti-Catholicism pleased many Protestant and secular readers, angry that the Vatican had during the 1860s refused to embrace modern liberal and progressive thinking.

Two decades later, in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Episcopalian historian Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University, extended Draper’s warfare thesis to the Protestant churches as well. White depicted history as a series of battles between narrow-minded, dogmatic Christian theologians, on one side, and truth-seeking, open-minded men of science, on the other. The background to this is his dispute with Protestant rivals over his founding of Cornell University as a secular institution. His book had a huge impact on modern Western thought, strongly influencing Bertrand Russell’s own book on Religion and Science (1935). White’s Warfare was still being reprinted and praised by historians as late as the 1960s.

MercatorNet: What does recent scholarship tell us about the history of the church and science?

Stenhouse: The idea that Christopher Columbus had to defy Catholic flat-earthers to embark on his voyage of discovery has had wide currency. But as historian Jeffrey Burton Russell has shown in his book Inventing the Flat Earth, the real error “is not the alleged medieval belief that the earth was flat, but rather the modern error that such a belief ever prevailed.” Virtually all educated Christians during the high Middle Ages knew that the earth was round. The ignorant medieval flat-earth Catholic is a modern myth, a product largely of Protestant and secular prejudice.

As for Galileo, a leading historian of science, David C. Lindberg, has concluded that, though shocking by our standards, by the standards prevailing in seventeenth century Europe, the “central bureaucracy of the church and the people who staffed it lived up to widely held norms, followed accepted procedure, and even on a number of occasions treated Galileo with generosity.” The Galileo affair “was a product not of dogmatism or intolerance beyond the norm, but of a combination of more or less standard (for the seventeenth century) bureaucratic procedure, plausible (if ultimately flawed) political judgement, and a familiar array of human foibles and failings.”

Nor did that episode stop talented Catholic scientists such as Rene Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Blaise Pascal from making important contributions to a range of disciplines. In a remarkable recent book, John Heilbron has shown that the Catholic church, cultivating astronomy in order to refine the church calendar, turned European cathedrals into gigantic solar observatories. According to Heilbron, the church “gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.” This conclusion has won wide assent from historians of science.

Outside Europe, Catholic missionary orders, with Jesuits leading the way, exported the latest European science and technology, minus Copernicanism, to the wider world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They brought back to Europe new knowledge of the places, plants, and peoples of Asia and the Americas. Global Catholic missionary networks constituted a kind of early modern world wide web of science.

During the nineteenth century Protestant missionaries took the lead from their Catholic counterparts. They sent back to Berlin, Paris, London, Oxford and Edinburgh information, maps and specimens of the plants, animals, languages, places and peoples they encountered. Many served as valued collectors and fieldworkers for metropolitan experts in Europe. The best won recognition as outstanding scientists and scholars.

MercatorNet: How do you assess the current state of dialogue between faith and science, and how should it ideally develop?

Stenhouse: Dialogue between science and faith seems to me to be in a promising state. Pope John Paul II made an important gesture in establishing a commission to review the Galileo case and acknowledging that the church made serious mistakes in condemning him. The US Templeton Foundation has poured millions into encouraging academic courses, research and publishing in this area over the last 15 years or so, and helped stimulate interest. There's a great deal of important work being done, particularly by historians and sociologists but also in bioethics and theology.

I think the crucial thing, for dialogue to be useful, is that those involved must really understand, and take seriously, the relevant scientific and religious traditions. Some historical and philosophical understanding also helps. There's still a tendency not only amongst scientific humanists but also amongst certain kinds of theologian, I think, to place science on a pedestal and to avoid subjecting scientific traditions to the same kind of critical scrutiny that religious traditions routinely receive nowadays.

Albert Einstein declared in 1940, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” He believed that respectful dialogue would enhance those traditions and the common good of humanity, and I believe his vision is as relevant today as ever.

Carolyn Moynihan is the Deputy Editor of MercatorNet.