The Christian Face of the Scientific Revolution Issue 76 | 2002 Purchase this issue

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Has Christianity always warred with science? Or, conversely, did Christianity create science? CH asked David Lindberg, Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and currently director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin.

And he should know. Lindberg specializes in the history of medieval and early modern science, especially the interaction between science and religion. His Beginnings of Western Science (University of Chicago Press, 1992) is an oft-translated standard in the field. He is also currently the general editor, jointly with Ronald Numbers, of the forthcoming eight-volume. Cambridge History of Science

Many people today have a sense that the church has always tried to quash science. Is this, indeed, the case?

This view is known as the "warfare thesis." It originated in the seventeenth century, but it came into its own with certain radical thinkers of the French Enlightenment. These people were eager to condemn the Catholic Church and went on the attack against it. So, for example, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), a mathematician and philosopher, assured his readers that Christianity's ascension during the Middle Ages resulted in "the complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences."

So how did this myth get from eighteenth-century France to twenty-first-century North America?

The men mostly responsible are John William Draper (1811-1882) and Andrew Dixon White (1832-1918). The more influential of the two was White, first president of Cornell University, who evoked strong opposition from religious critics for the secular curriculum (emphasizing the natural sciences) that he established at Cornell.

White responded with bitter attacks on his critics, culminating ...