Have science and Christianity always been at war?
No, and the historians settled this some time ago. The "war" story was invented in the 1870s by two authors with a point to make, and the two examples everyone quotes do not hold up: nobody educated in Columbus's day thought the earth was flat, and the Galileo affair was a fight about how to read evidence and who had authority — with churchmen and scientists on both sides.
Almost everyone has absorbed a version of this: the church held humanity back, science fought its way out, and the two have been enemies ever since.
It is worth knowing where that story came from, because it did not come from historians. It came from two books.
Two men, and a story that stuck
John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874). Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).
Both were written with a purpose, and both are now regarded by historians of science as unreliable. The consensus in the field has moved to what is called the complexity model, for a simple reason: in nearly every dispute you look at, religious people and scientists were on both sides, and nobody involved thought they were fighting a war between two categories.
That has been the scholarly position for decades. It has not reached the general public at all, which is why the two famous examples keep circulating.
The flat earth, which nobody believed
The story is that Columbus faced churchmen who insisted the earth was flat and that he would sail off the edge.
None of it happened. Educated Europeans had known the earth was a sphere since the Greeks, and the medieval church knew it too — you can find it in Bede, in Aquinas, in Dante. The disagreement Columbus actually had was about size: his opponents thought the distance to Asia was far greater than he claimed, and they were right. He was saved by a continent he did not know was there.
The flat-earth story was popularised in the nineteenth century, by Draper and White among others. It is not an exaggeration of something real. It was made up.
Galileo, which is more interesting than either side says
This one is not a myth — something did happen, and the church came out of it badly. But almost every detail people believe is wrong.
He was not tortured. He was not thrown in a dungeon. He spent his house arrest in an archbishop’s residence and then in his own villa, and went on working: his best book, Two New Sciences, was written during it.
And the argument was not science against religion. At the time, heliocentrism was a minority position among astronomers, because the evidence was genuinely incomplete — no one could detect the stellar parallax the theory predicted, and the instruments of the day were not good enough to see it. Galileo also overreached, insisting on certainty for a model he could not yet demonstrate, and made an enemy of a pope who had been his patron.
Churchmen supported him. Churchmen opposed him. Scientists did both. The real fault line, as one historian puts it, ran between established authority and independent thought — which is a fight that recurs in every institution, including scientific ones.
The part the story leaves out
If Christianity were hostile to science, the history would be hard to explain.
The universities where science grew up were founded by the church. Copernicus was a cleric. Mendel was a friar. Lemaître, who first proposed what became the Big Bang, was a Catholic priest — and was initially resisted by physicists who disliked a universe with a beginning.
There is also an argument that early modern science needed something like the Christian view of the world to get going: a universe that is real rather than illusory, orderly because it was made by a rational mind, and contingent — so that you have to go and look rather than deduce how things must be. Whether that is the whole explanation is debated. That the institution supposedly at war with science built its infrastructure is not.
Objections answered
Plenty of Christians today do reject science.
Some do, on some questions, and that is worth taking seriously rather than denying. What it does not support is the historical claim that the two have always been at war. A present-day dispute over one subject is not a two-thousand-year pattern.
Isn't the church only friendly to science when it can't win?
That would predict resistance whenever a finding was inconvenient. The actual record is patchier and more human: the Big Bang was resisted by atheist physicists who preferred an eternal universe, and welcomed by a priest. Neither side behaves the way the warfare story requires.
Galileo still shows the church silencing a scientist.
It does, and Christians should not spin it. The church punished a man for a position that turned out to be right, and John Paul II said as much in 1992. The point is not that nothing happened. It is that what happened was an argument about authority and evidence, not proof that faith and science cannot occupy the same room.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions hold that God is the author of both Scripture and the natural world, so a genuine conflict between them would mean one has been misread — and all of them have a long history of scientific work by their own members.
Roman Catholic
Runs an observatory and a pontifical academy of sciences, and teaches formally that faith and reason cannot finally contradict.
Protestant
Contains the widest range, from full acceptance of mainstream science to young earth creationism, which is a nineteenth and twentieth century development rather than the historic position.
Related questions
Inspired by American Scientific Affiliation — "The Myth of Galileo: Science vs Religion?". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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