Popes, Unicorns, and Other Convenient Narratives

We are living through what some have called a Digital Revolution. For better or worse, more and more of our lives are spent online or mediated by digital devices. Even amid all this dramatic change, the societal upheavals of the Digital Revolution pale in comparison to the those of the Industrial Revolution—so far, at least. One might even argue that our Digital Revolution is but an addendum to the Industrial Revolution, as the energy demands of cryptocurrency mining and server farms ramp up the burning of fossil fuels that began in earnest during the nineteenth century.

From our vantage point, it is difficult to understand how profoundly disorienting the Industrial Revolution was for those who lived through it. One of the effects of this revolution in production was a rising faith in science. Science could explain how new technologies of industrialization worked. It could further explain the social and environmental changes wrought by these same technologies. Conversely, religion was increasingly viewed by industrialized societies as backwards, a relic of the past full of fairy tales and irrational propositions about the world. Even more damningly, some have presented religion as the historic enemy of science and progress. The view that science and religion are fundamentally in opposition is known as the “conflict thesis.” Like the burning of fossil fuels, this false dichotomy is still with us, polluting our ability to think clearly about both science and religion.

David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu aim to remedy this situation by exploring the origins and spread of the conflict thesis. In Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World (2021), they single out two nineteenth-century texts—John William Draper’s A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1875) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)—as the two works most responsible for popularizing the conflict thesis. Draper’s Conflict and White’s Warfare covered much of the same ground but deployed different lines of attack. While Conflict failed to include a single footnote, it summed up its points in an incisive manifesto. White’s Warfare, meanwhile, shimmered with copious citations and encyclopedic detail. The two works packed a one-two punch.

However, both Conflict and Warfare contained a litany of spurious assertions, lies that unfortunately continue to be echoed today by modern popularizers of science, from Neil DeGrasse Tyson to the late Sir Harold Kroto. The canards that Europeans believed the world to be flat up until the voyages of Christopher Columbus, that Christianity opposed the development of medicine by forbidding the examination of dead bodies and the use of chloroform, or that Hypatia and Giordano Bruno were both killed because the religious authorities of the day refused to accept their reliance on rational, scientific inquiry are repeated by the press and have become accepted as common knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Draper and White, we are able to look back at the rest of human history as an exercise in ignorance and feel a sense of unearned satisfaction about our own enlightened understanding of the world.   

Draper and White were polemicists, and it is regrettable that Hutchings and Ungureanu occasionally use a similar tone in their attempt to correct the record. Comparatively, however, the latter are far kinder to their antagonists. Hutchings and Ungureanu frequently cite top historians of science when making their points, a depth of scholarship they acknowledge Draper and White could not have had access to. Hutchings and Ungureanu also rightly observe that Draper and White, far from being firebrand atheists in the manner of Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne, in fact remained committed to their respective versions of Protestantism and to bringing science and religion back into conversation. For Draper, this rapprochement precluded a highly rational and detached version of Christianity friendlier to science. White, on the other hand, favored a more personal and emotional faith. In both Conflict and Warfare the main enemy was Christian dogma. Instead of bridging the gap between science and religion, however, Draper and White’s assault on dogma only deepened their perceived divisions. And while Draper and White’s conclusions suffered from a lack of scholarship on the history of science, those who continue today to repeat the same tired and disproven talking points are without excuse.

Although Draper and White’s specific examples of the conflict thesis are easily undone by the historical investigations of Hutchings and Ungureanu, the notion in Conflict and Warfare that science and religion are concerned with fundamentally different things still resonates. Might Draper and White simply be wrong in the details but still correct in their larger conclusions? Science seeks to solve problems through reason and experimentation; religion is about the nature of God and our place in the universe. Science can only tell us how; it cannot tell us why. It likewise cannot furnish an ethical framework for making decisions; it can only inform that framework with relevant data points. Science’s deficiency in solving ethical problems is made painfully apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific process helped create an effective vaccine against the virus but is not itself sufficient to convince people to get vaccinated. This last step requires a well-developed sense of moral duty that values life and understands how one’s decisions might affect other, more vulnerable members of the population. As Pope Francis pointed out, getting vaccinated is as much “an act of love” as it is a demonstration of faith in science. Although the mandates of science and faith are separate, the two still intersect at the meeting point between scientific work and policy.

This leads us back to the original concern of Draper and White. Can faith coexist with science? Or, to phrase the question differently, can science permit room for faith? Hutchings and Ungureanu end their book with a powerful defense of reason, arguing that belief in a monotheistic God who endorses (rather than suspends) the laws of nature allows for science to proceed alongside faith, without the two coming into unnecessary opposition. In their view, the primary legacy of the conflict thesis is ironically that of intellectual persecution and the erection of stumbling blocks to research, as some members of the scientific community isolate and exclude scientists who happen to be theists. On this front, there is again much evidence to support their assertions, including attempts by Kroto and Coyne to bar theists from research and publication.

The suppression of the scientific work of theists points to a larger question: who gets to call themselves a victim? One of the interesting themes of Draper’s Conflict, White’s Warfare, and Hutchings and Ungureanu’s Of Popes and Unicorns is the theme of victimhood. For Draper and White (as well as their modern-day disciples Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Steven Pinker, David Dennet, and the late Jeffrey Epstein), champions of scientific and rational inquiry are the victims of dogmatic Christianity, which serves as a stand-in for the irrationality of religion at large. For Hutchings and Ungureanu, the opposite is true: theists who also happen to be scientists are the victims of a campaign of intimidation premised on the (easily discredited) conflict thesis. This jockeying for the status of victim is perhaps, as the popular historian Tom Holland has argued, itself a legacy of Christianity, since it is only in the context of the cross that suffering is imbued with greater meaning. At the same time, claiming meritless victimhood can be used as pretext for shutting down debate entirely. Examples of this phenomenon include anti-vaccination advocates equating their exile from private establishments with Jews who suffered during the Holocaust, or the emerging alliance between the atheist “Intellectual Dark Web” and theists such as Mark Bauerlein and Eric Metaxas, all of whom predicate their resistance to social justice on their perceived status as “victims” of censorship. Paradoxically, this approach has the effect of short-circuiting real debate, as any disagreement is labeled as an attempt to censor or suppress the other.

Of Popes and Unicorns is a lively and accessible read which dismantles naïve assumptions about the historical relationship between science and religion. More importantly, this work invokes larger questions about the relationship between faith and science, questions which will only grow in importance as our planet faces problems which science alone cannot mediate. Climate change, pandemics, declining biodiversity, rampant plastic pollution—all these challenges will have to be solved not only scientifically but theologically and ethically, with the question of what we want our world to look like perhaps mattering more than our ability to understand how our world works. By demolishing the conflict thesis, the authors of Of Popes and Unicorns have reminded us that if we hope to make true progress, it will require disabusing ourselves of convenient narratives and embracing collaboration between faith and reason.

Zachary M. Stoltzfus recently completed his Doctorate in Modern European History at Florida State University, where he taught the History of Science, among other subjects.