Science and religion are natural enemies; history is the record of their war. The position of Draper and White, abandoned by historians and alive everywhere else.
The conflict model holds that science and religion are essentially at war: where one advances, the other must retreat. Its classic statements are Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), both written as polemics in live nineteenth-century fights — over Darwin, over the professionalization of universities, over Rome.
As historiography the model has been abandoned by specialists: its stock episodes (a flat-earth Middle Ages, a Church that banned dissection, Bruno martyred for cosmology) dissolve under the documents. As rhetoric it remains the most popular model in the world, held in mirror image by militant materialists and by religious controversialists who need an enemy. This site records the conflict model because it is historically influential, and declines to use it as a narrative, in favor of the complexity model.
References
- John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991)
- Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009)