7 - Science and religion

Summary

Science versus Religion – the antithesis conjures two hypostatized entities of the later nineteenth century: Huxley St George slaying Samuel smoothest of dragons; a mysterious undefined ghost called Science against a mysterious indefinable ghost called Religion; until by 1900 schoolboys decided not to have faith because Science, whatever that was, disproved Religion, whatever that was.

The twentieth century strips legends, and among the legends started stripping this. The healthy action of historical investigation, like any other scientific enquiry, refused to be content with inherited ideas received uncritically, and asked how far those axioms were invented, how far they depended on a real antithesis of minds, how far they were devised or made rhetorical by propaganda, and how far they expressed deeper currents of antagonism than the intellectual.

Without in any way subscribing to the doctrine that the famous Conflict was a myth created by special conditions of the nineteenth century, we find it easy at this range to discern an element of the legendary. Pause for a moment to consider the author who published in English the first of all the books called by the symbolic title: John William Draper, who in 1874 published at New York the book called History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. If you read it now, you might not think it important. I mention therefore that it was translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, and Serbian, and got into the Index of prohibited books (4 September 1876).