Galileo, Mendel and a Belgian priest, the myth of faith at war with science

Pop quiz. Who proposed that the universe is expanding, and who gave the world the founding rules of heredity? Answer: a Catholic priest in Belgium and an Augustinian friar in Moravia. Neither was a freethinker. Both wore the collar to work.

That does not fit the story we are all handed, in which Science is a brave young knight and Religion is a dragon that has been sitting on the village since the Dark Ages. It makes a good movie. It makes a poor history. And the most interesting thing about the story is not that it is wrong but where it came from, because it was written, on purpose, with a purpose, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Let us take the claims one at a time, state each, test it against the record, and give the verdict. Along the way we will concede what deserves conceding. There were real conflicts. They were fewer, narrower and odder than the legend says.

Where the legend came from

Two books built the myth. John William Draper, an American chemist and physician, published History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874. Andrew Dickson White, who helped Ezra Cornell found Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896, after an earlier pamphlet. White had a stake of his own: he had helped found a university with no official religious affiliation. Both authors told a tale of unbroken warfare between enlightened inquiry and clerical darkness.

Historians of science have spent the past several decades picking the story apart. Their consensus, put plainly, is that the sweeping thesis does not survive contact with the evidence. Specific disputes happened, and some were serious. But a general war between faith and science is an invention of the Victorian period, and it served the interests of its inventors. That is the first verdict, and everything below is the evidence for it.

Myth one: religion and science have always been at war

The claim. Throughout history, the church fought every scientific advance.

The test. Look at who did the science. The great figures of the scientific revolution were, to a remarkable degree, believers who saw their work as a form of devotion. Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry, provided in his will for lectures defending Christianity. Isaac Newton wrote extensively on theology as well as on physics. Nicolaus Copernicus was a cleric, a canon of the cathedral at Frombork, and he dedicated his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) to Pope Paul III.

There is also an argument about why science arose where it did. A belief that the universe was made by a rational God, and is therefore orderly and open to inquiry, is a good foundation for the idea that nature obeys laws. I would not claim that this proves anything about the truth of the faith. I do claim that it is hard to square with the notion that the faith was an obstacle. A culture that thought the world was chaos, or an illusion, or ruled by capricious spirits, had less reason to look for laws.

Verdict. False as a general claim. True of specific episodes.

Myth two: medieval scholars thought the earth was flat

The claim. Before Columbus, Europeans believed the earth was flat, and the church taught it.

The test. The Greeks had settled the question long before. Eratosthenes, working in Egypt around 240 BC, estimated the circumference of the earth by comparing the angle of the sun's shadow at two cities. Medieval scholars inherited that knowledge. The Venerable Bede, an English monk of the eighth century, wrote of the earth as a globe. The standard university textbook on astronomy in the thirteenth century, the Sphere of Johannes de Sacrobosco, taught that the earth is round. Thomas Aquinas used the sphericity of the earth as a familiar example. Dante's Divine Comedy, written in the early fourteenth century, assumes a spherical earth.

So where does the flat-earth story come from? Largely from Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus, a romantic work that invented a scene of ignorant churchmen at Salamanca insisting the earth was flat. The real argument was about size. Columbus's critics thought Asia was much farther west than he claimed, and they were right. He was saved from disaster only because two continents he did not know about were in the way.

Verdict. A myth, and a surprisingly modern one.

Myth three: the Galileo affair proves the church hates science

The claim. Galileo was tortured and imprisoned for saying the earth moves, because the church preferred superstition to evidence.

The test. Here the record is real, and it should be told straight. Galileo Galilei, a Catholic and a brilliant astronomer, had used the telescope from 1609 on to observe the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the moon. He became a public advocate of the Copernican system. In 1616 the Roman authorities, advised by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, warned him not to hold or defend the Copernican view as established truth, and Copernicus's book was suspended until corrected. Galileo continued, with the protection of a friendly pope, Urban VIII, who allowed him to write about the competing systems on condition that he treat the matter as a hypothesis.

Then came the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632. It was a brilliant book. It also placed the pope's favored argument in the mouth of a character named Simplicio, whose name suggests what Galileo thought of him. Urban took offense. In 1633 the Inquisition tried Galileo, found him "vehemently suspected of heresy," and made him abjure. He spent the rest of his life, until 1642, under house arrest in his villa near Florence. By most accounts he was threatened with torture but not tortured, and his sentence was house arrest, not a dungeon. He kept working, and his last great book, on the science of motion, was published in 1638.

That is bad enough, and nobody should defend it. But three facts complicate the legend. First, the scientific case was not as settled as we assume. Galileo had no direct proof that the earth moves around the sun. The decisive observation of stellar parallax, which is what a moving earth predicts, was not made until the 1830s, when Friedrich Bessel, Thomas Henderson and Friedrich Struve measured it for the first time. Many astronomers of Galileo's own time preferred the system of Tycho Brahe, in which the planets circle the sun and the sun circles a stationary earth, and that system fit the observations of the day. Second, the quarrel was about authority and personality as much as astronomy: who had the right to interpret Scripture, and a famous man who had made a fool of a pope. Third, Galileo's friends and supporters included churchmen, and Jesuit astronomers did excellent work. Christopher Clavius, a Jesuit, directed the mathematics behind the reform of the calendar under Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, the calendar we still use.

In 1992 Pope John Paul II acknowledged that errors had been made in the handling of the case.

Verdict. A real injustice, and a real failure of judgment, but a conflict about one man and one cosmology, not a war on science. The legend that the church opposed observation as such is false.

Myth four: the church kept Europe in the dark

The claim. Medieval Christianity smothered learning for a thousand years.

The test. The university, an institution we take for granted, is a medieval and church-linked invention. Bologna, Paris and Oxford grew up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and their curriculum included logic, natural philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. Fourteenth-century scholars at Paris such as Jean Buridan, a cleric who developed the theory of impetus, and Nicole Oresme, who weighed the evidence for and against a rotating earth, worked out ideas about motion. Monasteries copied and preserved texts. The cathedral schools trained the people who ran Europe.

The word "dark" in "Dark Ages" is a judgment that serious medievalists avoid. I am not claiming the Middle Ages were a paradise of free inquiry; there were limits, and there was repression. I am claiming that the picture of a thousand years of ignorance is propaganda, and that the institutions of learning on which later science depended were built by the church's people.

Verdict. A myth. The record shows a church that, for all its faults, founded much of what made science possible.

Myth five: genetics had nothing to do with the church

The claim. Modern biology is a secular achievement, built over religious objection.

The test. Meet Gregor Mendel. Born Johann Mendel in 1822 in what is now the Czech Republic, he joined the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Brno in 1843 and took the name Gregor. The abbey was a center of learning, with a library, a garden and a community that encouraged scientific study. Sent to study at the University of Vienna, he returned and from about 1856 to 1863 carried out careful breeding experiments on pea plants in the monastery garden, tracking traits such as seed shape and flower color across generations, with thousands of plants. From the numbers he drew the principles we now call Mendel's laws: heredity works through discrete units, which are passed on in predictable ratios, and some traits are dominant over others.

He read the results to the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1865 and published them in 1866. Almost nobody noticed. His work was rediscovered in 1900 by three botanists working separately, and it became the foundation of genetics. In 1868 the friar was elected abbot of his monastery. The church did not suppress his science. It housed it in an abbey garden.

Verdict. A myth. The founder of genetics was a friar working in an abbey.

Myth six: a priest could not have given us the Big Bang

The claim. The idea that the universe had a beginning is either a religious slip into science or a scientific idea imposed by theologians.

The test. Georges Lemaître, born in Belgium in 1894, served in the First World War, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1923, and trained in physics and astronomy, including time with Arthur Eddington at Cambridge. In 1927 he published a paper deriving, from Einstein's equations of general relativity, a universe that expands, and he pointed out a relation between the distance of galaxies and the speed at which they recede. Two years later Edwin Hubble's observations gave powerful support. In 1931 Lemaître proposed that an expanding universe implied a hot, dense beginning, the "primeval atom."

The theory was not welcomed at first. Einstein resisted the idea of an expanding universe. The phrase "Big Bang" was coined in a 1949 BBC radio talk by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who favored a rival "steady state" model. The theory won on evidence, with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in the mid-1960s supplying the decisive confirmation.

What makes the Lemaître story instructive is how carefully he kept the two spheres apart. He did not want science used to prove religion. When Pope Pius XII in 1951 spoke as though the physics of a beginning confirmed the doctrine of creation, Lemaître was uneasy, and he is reported to have worked to discourage the pope from doing so. He held that the scientist and the believer should each do his own work properly. That is a more sophisticated position than either the Victorian warriors or the modern popularizers allow.

Verdict. A myth. The expanding universe has a priest's name on it, and the priest declined to turn his physics into apologetics.

Where real conflicts did occur

Honesty requires the other side of the ledger. The legend is false, but history has genuine clashes, and a conservative argument that denied them would be as shabby as the legend.

• Galileo, 1633. Discussed above. A genuine act of suppression, even if its causes were tangled.
• Giordano Bruno, 1600. The Italian friar and philosopher was burned in Rome. His cosmological speculations were part of the picture, but the charges were largely theological, and he is a poor martyr for experimental science. Still, the fact that the state could burn a man for his opinions is not a thing to minimize.
• The Scopes trial, 1925. Tennessee passed the Butler Act forbidding the teaching of human evolution in public schools. A teacher, John Scopes, was prosecuted in Dayton, convicted and fined $100, though the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. Whatever one thinks of the law, it was a case of a statute telling teachers what the science could say, and it did damage to the reputation of believers.
• The Soviet Union and genetics. Here is the irony that the legend never mentions. The regime that declared itself officially atheist, and tried to stamp out the churches, also did the worst damage to science in the twentieth century. Under Trofim Lysenko, backed by Stalin, Soviet authorities denounced Mendelian genetics as bourgeois, and a conference in 1948 effectively banned it. The geneticist Nikolai Vavilov died in a prison in 1943. A state that claimed to represent science put the science of heredity on trial because it clashed with ideology. Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident covers the way such regimes treat every competing authority.

The lesson of the Soviet episode is not that atheists are enemies of science. It is that any institution with power, whether church, party or state, will be tempted to rule on the truth, and that science is safest where no authority can enforce a verdict. That is a principle with a Founding pedigree, and it is why a free society protects both the freedom of conscience and the freedom of inquiry.

The strongest objection

The best objection to this whole post is that conflicts, even if few, were serious, and that the modern disagreements over evolution, the age of the earth and the like are alive today. That is fair. Some believers hold positions that most scientists reject, and some scientists treat the faith with contempt, which is its own kind of dogmatism. A conservative has no reason to defend every position taken in the name of religion, and no reason to be embarrassed by a good argument, whichever side makes it.

But notice what the objection concedes. It concedes that the question is specific: which claim, by which people, on what evidence. That is the way adults discuss any dispute. The legend of perpetual war replaces that conversation with a team sport. And the team sport costs us. A student who is taught that faith and reason are enemies will assume he must choose, and the great tradition of the West, of Jerusalem and Athens at once, says he need not. Jerusalem and Athens, the two cities every free society still lives in develops that theme, and From Cicero to Aquinas to Jefferson, the Long Road of Natural Law shows how reason and revelation met in the tradition our founders inherited. The Founders themselves, as Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause shows, wrote religion, morality and knowledge into the same sentence about schools. And Can a conservative who doesn't believe still defend the faith of the West? takes up the question from the other side.

The case in brief

1. The story that religion and science have always been at war comes largely from two books, Draper's of 1874 and White's of 1896, and historians of science have rejected its sweeping form.
2. Medieval scholars knew the earth was round; the flat-earth legend owes much to Washington Irving's 1828 book on Columbus.
3. The Galileo affair of 1633 was a real injustice, but it involved an unproven theory, a personal quarrel and a Church that included many astronomers.
4. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, founded genetics in an abbey garden, and Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, proposed the expanding universe in 1927.
5. The worst modern suppression of science was carried out by an officially atheist state, which banned Mendelian genetics, and the lesson is to distrust any authority that claims to rule on truth.

What you can do: pick one claim in this post that surprised you, such as the Mendel or Lemaître story, and read a reliable biography or the original papers' summaries before you repeat it; the next time you hear that faith and science are at war, ask which episode the speaker means.