Science and Religion, Origins of the Conflict Thesis

I. Introduction

Few ideas about the relationship between science and religion are as culturally durable, or as historically misleading, as the notion that the two have always been at war. The proposition that scientific progress advances only by defeating religious resistance circulates in popular journalism, classroom textbooks, and public debate as though it were a settled fact rather than an interpretation. Yet since the beginning of the 20th century, scholars from many disciplines have demonstrated that no matter how visceral such conflicts appear to be, there is little if any historical basis for the view that science and religion are irrevocably at odds.

The terms require definition. The expression conflict thesis—sometimes called the warfare thesis or the military metaphor—names the historiographical claim that the relationship between science and religion is essentially and necessarily antagonistic, such that the gains of one are the losses of the other. It should be distinguished from the weaker and uncontroversial observation that particular disputes have occurred, over Copernican astronomy, geological time, or biological evolution, for example. The conflict thesis is not the claim that conflicts have happened; it is the claim that conflict is the defining and inevitable structure of the relationship as such. The phrase itself has become standard as a category of historical analysis since its early formulations in revisionist scholarship (Russell, Hooykaas and Goodman, 1974; Moore, 1979).

The thesis received its classic statements in two works. The American chemist John William Draper (1811-1882) argued in History of the Conflict between Religion and Science that science embodies progress, universality, and rationality, whereas religion stands for immobility, division, and emotion; humanity, he insisted, must ultimately choose between the dogmas of faith and the benefits of science, since no lasting accord between them was possible (Draper, 1874, pp. 327-367). The American historian and educator Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), first president of Cornell University, advanced a parallel narrative across several decades, culminating in the two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (A.D. White, 1896), which catalogued, discipline by discipline, the supposed obstruction of inquiry by theological authority. White first advanced the theme in a lecture delivered at the Cooper Union in New York in 1869 and expanded it in serial form in the Popular Science Monthly through the 1880s and 1890s.

The state of the question may be summarized as follows. Across the second half of the 20th century a wide scholarly consensus rejected the warfare picture as historically crude, replacing it with the so-called complexity thesis, which holds that the relations between the natural sciences and religious traditions have been variable, context-dependent, and frequently collaborative. That negative verdict is now secure. What remains genuinely open, and what has become the most productive line of inquiry in the field, is the further and different question of origins: not merely whether the conflict thesis is false, but where it came from, what made it plausible, and why it continues to persuade. A close reading of Draper and White reveals that they did not in fact posit an endemic and irrevocable conflict between science and religion. They were codifiers and inheritors of a narrative with deep Protestant roots, hoping to preserve religion by pitting a progressive, liberal Christianity against a traditional, orthodox one. The conflict they envisioned was, in the first instance, a conflict within theology.

This entry accordingly moves in three stages. It first surveys the historiographical reversal that dismantled the warfare model. It then traces the theological genealogy of the conflict narrative: a rationalizing, anti-dogmatic strand of liberal Protestantism that, from the 17th century onward, sought to purify faith of “superstition,” subordinate revelation to reason, and reconcile Christianity with the new science, and whose representatives—the Victorian scientific naturalists, a circle of dissident men of letters, and the liberal Anglican Broad Church—framed their projects as a continuation of the Reformation, a “New Reformation.” It closes by setting this Protestant genealogy against an alternative Catholic inheritance, in which the doctrines of creation and providence underwrite a non-dualistic vision of knowledge, and by noting the principal points on which the genealogical interpretation remains contested. The genealogical interpretation offered here draws on the present author’s research (Ungureanu, 2019) and connects to a larger body of scholarship on the relationship between Protestantism and secularization. It is offered as a well-developed position within a live scholarly conversation, not as a closed verdict.

II. The Shifting Historiography

1. A Century of Revision. Starting in the 1920s, when the nascent discipline of the history of science was first emerging, a number of scholars were already arguing that the historical relationship between science and religion was far too complicated to categorize as one of “conflict.” The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) warned readers of the difficulty in approaching the subject. Although “conflict between religion and science is what naturally occurs to our minds when we think of its subject,” the true facts of the case were, he wrote, “very much more complex, and refuse to be summarised in these simple terms” (Whitehead, 1925, pp. 260-261). The terms “religion” and “science,” Whitehead observed, have always been in a state of continual development. He also observed that the very foundations of modern science were laid in the soil of medieval religious thought, which had insisted on the rationality of God and on a rational, orderly creation. Modern scientific theory, he argued, was “an unconscious derivative from medieval theology” (Ibidem, p. 13).

Whitehead’s caution about the medieval period was reinforced by a number of independent scholarly inquiries. The French physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) discovered massive medieval precedents to modern physics and became convinced that, far from being a period of scientific stagnation, the medieval world had actively laid the foundations of modern science and that the entire concept of the “dark ages” had to be reassessed. Duhem’s rehabilitation of medieval science was joined by Charles H. Haskins (1870-1937), Lynn Thorndike (1882-1965), Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964), and Marshall Clagett (1916-2005), and this remains a fertile area of historical inquiry, surveyed in Lindberg (2007, pp. 1-17). At roughly the same time, Edwin Arthur Burtt (1892-1989) found the foundations of modern physical science in the metaphysical assumptions of 17th-century thinkers: Copernicus and Kepler, who were convinced for religious reasons of the uniformity of motion; Galileo’s conception of God as a “geometrician”; Boyle’s confidence that God’s workmanship was displayed throughout the universe; Newton’s absolute space and time as the divine “sensorium.” No great mind, Burtt argued, could wholly avoid playing with ultimate questions (Burtt, 1925, p. 303).

By the 1930s the focus of scholars had shifted from the medieval world to Protestant forerunners of experimental science. Dorothy Stimson, Michael B. Foster, and Robert K. Merton all argued that English Protestantism in particular had shaped, nurtured, and encouraged science as a noble pursuit in the early modern period. Merton famously argued that the “Puritan ethic” was an important element in the “cultivation of science” (Merton, 1970); on Foster and Stimson, see the discussion in Moore (1979, pp. 19-22). Subsequent studies by Paul H. Kocher (1953), Richard S. Westfall (1958), John Dillenberger (1961), and Reijer Hooykaas defended the claim that Protestant theology in 17th- and 18th-century England inspired a new empirical and experimental approach to nature. Westfall, examining the “English virtuosi,” concluded that they were deeply religious men who regarded natural phenomena as revelatory of God’s glory and power. Hooykaas argued that the rise of modern science was “more a consequence than a cause of certain religious views,” particularly a biblical worldview, and that Christianity had taught that nature was a work of God to be admired, studied, and managed, not a deity to be feared (Hooykaas, 1972, p. 162).

Other scholars sought to avoid the triumphalist narratives of both “conflict” and “concord.” A young Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) published his essay The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931, which objected to the habit of taking the present as the standard of progress and reading history as a series of stepping-stones leading toward one’s own point of view (Butterfield, 1965, pp. 1-32). Though not a professional historian of science, Butterfield called upon historians to study the past for its own sake rather than as a prelude to the present. As C.T. McIntire has put it, the historiography of science is “riddled with Whiggish history” (McIntire, 2004, p. 205). Butterfield himself later contributed to the history of science in The Origins of Modern Science, arguing that scientific change occurred not through the discovery of new facts but through transpositions taking place inside the minds of scientists themselves, through the adoption of new conceptual frameworks rather than the accumulation of new data (Butterfield, 1949, pp. vii-viii).

By the mid-1970s, another major historiographical shift had occurred. It became clear that the notion of “conflict” between science and religion had been mostly confined to the 19th century, to controversies in geology and biology, and specifically to religious reactions to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). But even here things were not straightforward. The theologian Charles E. Raven (1885-1964) contended that the controversies amounted to little more than a “storm in a Victorian tea-cup,” a clash of personalities between old and new worldviews rather than between some reified “science and religion” (Raven, 1943, p. 29). The historian Charles C. Gillispie (1918-2015) similarly argued that controversy arose not between science and religion but from religion in science, from religious attitudes within the new science of geology (Gillispie, 1951, pp. 1-17). The church historian Owen Chadwick (1916-2015) observed that one of the most conspicuous features of Victorian England was, in fact, its religiosity, and insisted on the important distinction between “science when it was against religion and the scientists when they were against religion” (Chadwick, 1975, p. 162).

Working within this revised framework, Walter F. Cannon (1925-1981) argued that science and religion had developed a firm alliance in England, and that it was not until the collapse of what he called the “truth complex” in the second half of the 19th century that they first came into genuine conflict (Cannon, 1960). Robert M. Young urged the importance of a “common intellectual context” in which science and religion were integrated within the ideology of the Victorian social and religious middle class, largely defined by the enterprise of natural theology (Young, 1985, pp. 126-163). Frank M. Turner located the apparent hostility between science and religion in a shift of authority and prestige from one part of the intellectual nation to another, namely the rising power of a new professional scientific class vying for cultural hegemony (F.M. Turner, 1993, pp. 171-200). James R. Moore’s seminal The Post-Darwinian Controversies argued that the “baneful” effects of the conflict notion had made historians “prisoners of war,” blinding them to how easily many Christian thinkers accepted Darwin; Moore provocatively argued that Calvinists were in fact more willing to accept Darwinism than liberal Protestants (Moore, 1979, p. 99).

2. The Complexity Thesis and the “Founders” of Conflict. The notion of a “complex” relationship became the central theme of most historical scholarship by the later 20th century. An international conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 issued in the landmark volume God and Nature, which collectively dismantled the conflict historiography across a range of topics, finding, as its editors observed, that “almost every chapter portrays a complex and diverse interaction that defies reduction to simple ‘conflict’ or ‘harmony’” (Lindberg and Numbers, 1986a, p. 10; see also Lindberg and Numbers, 1986b). John Hedley Brooke’s magisterial Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives consolidated nearly a century of revisionist scholarship. Brooke emphatically rejected generalizations and maintained that the shifting boundaries between science and religion over time make it impossible to analyze their relationship according to any single conceptual model. He concluded that “serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity” (Brooke, 1991, p. 321). Brooke’s revisionist historiography and his call to “relish in the differentiation” has since issued numerous dividends (Ibidem, p. ix): the celebrated episodes of conflict, such as the Galileo affair or the religious response to Darwin, have been reinterpreted to reveal a host of variables—political, philosophical, theological, and scientific—complicating any simple narrative (Numbers, 2009; N. Spencer, 2023).

Peter Harrison, who succeeded Brooke as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford, has continued and extended this revisionist program. In The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, Harrison located the hermeneutical preconditions of modern science in the Protestant, literal understanding of Scripture: when Protestants stripped the book of Scripture of its symbolic or emblematic meaning, the book of nature too became open to new interpretation (Harrison, 1998). In The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, he argued that for many 17th-century natural philosophers the accumulation of natural knowledge was seen as restoring the prelapsarian world of Adam (Harrison, 2007). And in The Territories of Science and Religion, Harrison offered a philological critique of conflict historiography, arguing that both scientia and religio are historically unstable concepts whose modern contours are themselves contingent: modern conceptions of the relationship between science and religion, whether in terms of conflict or concord, are “a distorting projection of our present conceptual maps back onto the intellectual territories of the past,” and contemporary debates between science and religion are best understood as “proxies for more deep-seated ideological or, in the broadest sense, ‘theological’ battles” (Harrison, 2015, pp. 4, 19, 9).

In criticizing conflict historiography, most historians of science traced the origins of the narrative to Draper and White. As early as 1970, Merton accused them of propagating the belief that the prime historical relation between religion and science is bound to be one of conflict (Merton, 1973, p. 235). Moore’s study led historians to designate them as the “co-founders” of the conflict thesis who set the terms of the debate (Moore, 1979, p. 19). By the 1980s it had become almost obligatory, when introducing the subject, to begin with Draper and White as its principal instigators. Ronald L. Numbers would put it most succinctly: “no one bears more responsibility for promoting this notion [of conflict] than two nineteenth-century American polemicists: Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper” (Numbers, 2009, p. 2).

3. Demythologizing the “Founders”: A Reflexive Irony. Recent scholarship has challenged this consensus at its core. A close and generous reading of Draper and White, one that examines their lives and writings rather than perfunctorily repeating past scholarly assessments, yields a more nuanced interpretation (Ungureanu, 2019, pp. 12-13). Contrary to conventional characterizations, Draper and White did not in fact posit an endemic and irrevocable conflict between “science and religion.” Unlike the new atheists of the early 21st century, who write explicitly to advance unbelief, Draper and White hoped their narratives would actually preserve religious belief. For both, science was a reforming agent of knowledge, society, and religion. Their conflict narratives were ultimately a vehicle for a much larger argument, one in which they pitted two theological traditions against each other: a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. They thus conceived of conflict as occurring within a religious epistemology, between two distinct modes of thought, and held that such conflict would ultimately assist the progress of religion. The titles of their best-known works were only tangentially related to their content and aim.

There is, moreover, a remarkable reflexive irony in the standard revisionist verdict. The actual conflict Draper and White envisioned is not so different from the way revisionist historians themselves have sought to redefine “warfare” as occurring within religion. Moore’s “cognitive dissonance” theory, Numbers’s identification of small-scale patterns of conflict, Geoffrey Cantor’s vision of conflict as the necessary catalyst for change, and even Whitehead’s belief that religion continually develops and must be modified as scientific knowledge advances all reproduce the essential structure of the Draper-White position. Even Whitehead, who first warned historians against the trope, followed Draper and White in arguing that religion “will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science” and that it “requires continual development” (Whitehead, 1926, p. 57; Ungureanu, 2019, pp. 12-14). How revisionist historians could make this error is itself an intriguing question, and whether a scholar’s own religious biography plays some role in obscuring the origins of the conflict thesis is a question the literature has begun to raise.

What this implies for the genealogy of the conflict thesis is addressed at length in the chapters that follow. The 19th century, it turns out, is in fact too late a date for the origins of the conflict narrative. Draper and White should not be regarded as its embattled founders but as its inheritors and codifiers, representatives of a much longer intra-Protestant self-critique, which can be traced to as early as the 16th and 17th centuries. The conflict thesis, in other words, was a received narrative.

III. The Long Genealogy: Rational Protestantism from the Cambridge Platonists to Paley

The liberal Protestant redefinition of religion that crystallized in the 19th century did not arise without precedent. It was the culmination of a far longer development, stretching back at least to 17th-century England, when a succession of theologians and natural philosophers began to recast Christianity as a fundamentally rational religion. Set against both Roman Catholicism, with its sacramental and hierarchical apparatus, and the “enthusiasm” of radical Puritan sectaries, these thinkers envisioned a moderate and reasonable faith, one that could keep step with the emerging sciences and defend itself against the charge of superstition.

1. The Cambridge Platonists. The earliest clear expression of this tendency appears among the Cambridge Platonists, a loosely affiliated group of Anglican divines active in the mid-17th century: Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683), Henry More (1614-1687), Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), John Smith (1618-1652), and Nathaniel Culverwell (1619-1651). For these writers, reason and revelation were not opposed but harmonious; in Whichcote’s often-quoted aphorism, to go against reason is to go against God (Whichcote, 1703). Revelation, on this view, was less an interruption of natural understanding than its fulfillment: Scripture confirmed what reason already disclosed, and the “two lights” of reason and revelation illuminated the same moral and metaphysical order built into creation. Theology accordingly became less the exposition of mysteries than the recovery of a rational order inscribed in the soul and the cosmos (Patrides, 1969; Gascoigne, 1989, pp. 40-51).

Two features of this outlook would prove consequential. First, it prized spiritual interiority and moral character over doctrinal precision, placing confidence in the innate capacity of the soul to apprehend divine truth. Second, it imagined a faith purified of institutional authority and liturgical “excess,” centered instead on universal truths of the human spirit. The Cambridge Platonists were not rationalists in the later, reductive sense; their Platonism was deeply devotional. But by making reasonableness the test of authentic religion, they bequeathed a criterion that later generations would apply with increasing severity.

2. The Latitudinarians. In the following generation the Latitudinarians—the “latitude-men,” so called for their willingness to tolerate breadth on matters of doctrine and ceremony—carried these themes into the mainstream of English religious life. Clergymen such as John Wilkins (1614-1672), John Tillotson (1630-1694), and Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699) sought to reduce doctrinal conflict by appealing to the shared ground of reason. For them, natural theology—the attempt to establish truths about God from the evidence of nature and unaided reason—was not a rival to orthodoxy but a bulwark against atheism: the study of creation, they urged, led naturally to knowledge of the Creator (Shapiro, 1968; Spurr, 1988; Spellman, 1993).

3. Physico-Theology and the Boyle Lectures. The Latitudinarian conviction that nature testifies to its Creator found expression in several distinct enterprises, which are easily and often conflated. Because the differences among them matter for the genealogy traced here, they are best distinguished before their common tendency is assessed.

Physico-theology in the strict sense was a definite literary genre with a traceable history. The term entered English with Walter Charleton (1619-1707), whose The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theological Treatise appeared in 1652, and it was fixed as a title and a program by William Derham (1657-1735), whose Boyle Lectures were published as Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1715). Its greatest exemplar in natural history was John Ray (1627-1705), whose The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) read the attributes of God from the observed contrivance of plants, animals, and the human body. The method of these writers was empirical and cumulative: divine wisdom was to be inferred from the massed particulars of anatomy, entomology, meteorology, and astronomy. Far from undermining belief, the mechanization of nature in the 17th and 18th centuries was here enlisted as evidence of divine design, for as the world was increasingly described in terms of structure, law, and order, it appeared to furnish fresh proof of providence. Nature, rightly interpreted, was a second Scripture: the “book of nature” set alongside the book of revelation (Westfall, 1958; Dillenberger, 1961; Jacob, 1976).

The Boyle Lectures, endowed by Robert Boyle (1627-1691) in his will and inaugurated in 1692, supplied an institutional vehicle for this apologetic but drew on resources of a different order. Richard Bentley (1662-1742), the first lecturer, was a classical scholar rather than a naturalist, and his A Confutation of Atheism (1692) deployed the new Newtonian physics—with Newton’s own assistance in a celebrated series of letters—against a precisely identified adversary, the Epicurean and Hobbesian materialism of his day. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), who delivered the lectures in 1704 and 1705, proceeded differently again. His A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705) was an a priori metaphysical argument modeled on mathematical demonstration, not an inductive reading of natural contrivance, and it belongs to a rationalist tradition in natural theology quite distinct from the descriptive piety of Ray and Derham. Clarke is significant for the present genealogy chiefly for what followed: his The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), and the censure it drew from Convocation, mark the point at which demonstrative rationalism in natural theology passes over into doctrinal minimalism in revealed theology.

Boyle himself, finally, should be distinguished from the movement he funded, and his case complicates any straightforward account of that movement as rationalizing. He defended final causes against Descartes in A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688) and commended in The Christian Virtuoso (1690) the study of nature as a devotional discipline proper to a Christian natural philosopher. But his theological voluntarism, and his insistence in A Discourse of Things above Reason (1681) that there are truths genuinely exceeding the competence of reason, cut directly against the tendency that this chapter traces. The rationalizing trajectory was thus one option within the culture of the English virtuosi, not its inevitable logic.

Yet the very success of the design program subtly altered the structure of religious thought. In stressing the intelligibility and harmony of the natural world, its practitioners gradually redefined the language of providence. Where theology had spoken of incarnation, grace, and sacrament, it increasingly spoke of design, utility, and coherence. Religion threatened to become an inference drawn from the order of nature rather than a revelation received in faith. What had begun as a defense of the rationality of Christianity risked reducing it to a moral philosophy underwritten by cosmic engineering. It is a drift essential to the genealogy that follows, and it can be located with some precision: it runs through Clarke’s demonstrative rationalism and Derham’s evidentialism toward Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, rather than through Boyle’s virtuoso piety.

4. Locke, the Deists, and Paley. The appeal to reason reached a philosophical summit in John Locke (1632-1704). Locke’s principle—that whatever God reveals is certainly true, but that reason must judge whether a purported revelation is in fact divine—was intended as a safeguard against fanaticism (Locke, 1824, bk. 4; Nuovo, 2017). Its longer-term effect was to shift the center of theological authority away from Scripture and tradition and toward the private judgment of the reasonable individual. In the following century the English deists, among them John Toland (1670-1722), Matthew Tindal (1656-1733), and Thomas Chubb (1679-1747), pressed this logic toward a critique of revealed religion itself, dismissing miracles, creeds, and mysteries as irrational accretions (Champion, 1992; Wigelsworth, 2009). Crucially, deism was less a rejection of the Protestant project than its radical extension: the deists inherited and redeployed the anti-Catholic and anti-clerical polemics of earlier Protestant theologians, now turning them against the whole of dogmatic Christianity (Gay, 1966, p. 327).

This rational trajectory culminated at the threshold of the 19th century in William Paley (1743-1805). Paley’s celebrated watchmaker analogy in Natural Theology argued that the intricate order of the world pointed to a wise and benevolent Creator, making nature a textbook of divine intention (Paley, 1802; LeMahieu, 1976). Yet Paley’s theology functioned more as an apologetic for the moral usefulness of Christianity than as a confession of revealed mystery, framing divine providence in terms congenial to Enlightenment sensibilities. By the Victorian period this manner of thought had become deeply embedded in British religious culture. Many came to believe that science would not merely confirm belief in God but purify religion itself, completing the Reformation through microscope and monograph rather than council and creed.

IV. The 19th-Century Narrative of Progress

The 19th century inherited not only a body of scientific achievement but a story about science: a tale of steady triumph, intellectual emancipation, and the inevitable forward march of reason. This narrative was shaped by what Butterfield later named the Whig interpretation of history, the habit of reading the past as a rising staircase toward the enlightened present, dividing its actors into the progressive good and the reactionary bad (Butterfield, 1965, pp. 5-30; McIntire, 2004, p. 205). As noted above, the historiography of science is riddled with such Whiggish assumptions: in these histories the Church became a stock villain and science the suffering hero.

Such accounts often transformed scientists into secular saints. Isaac Newton was canonized less for his physics than as an emblem of the scientific spirit, Victorian biographers fashioning him into a patron of a modernity supposedly freed from religion, a striking irony, since the historical Newton was an intensely theological thinker (Higgitt, 2007). The same triumphalism shaped grander syntheses. Stadial theories of human development arranged history into successive stages, and the most influential was the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the doctrine that genuine knowledge is confined to what the empirical sciences can establish, and that humanity had passed through theological and metaphysical stages to arrive at the final “positive” or scientific age (Nisbet, 1980, pp. 251-258; Bowler, 1989, p. 31). Comte offered not merely a theory of knowledge but a social gospel of progress, dovetailing with liberal political economy and secularized Protestant confidence in improvement. A new genre, the “evolutionary epic,” wove cosmos, life, and civilization into a single grand narrative of ascent, from John Pringle Nichol’s Views of the Architecture of the Heavens (1837) to Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man (1872), offering not merely science but gospels of human potential (Lightman, 2007, pp. 219-294; Amigoni and Elwick, 2011).

What united these narratives was their moral structure: history populated by heroes such as Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, and villains such as inquisitors, bishops, and theologians, the scientific mind cast as inherently liberating and the religious as inherently oppressive. This was not simply a historiographical error. It was a theological repositioning, in which truth was held to flow no longer from revelation or tradition but from nature and the rational self. The conflict between science and religion, in other words, was embedded within a larger myth of progress, a secularized eschatology in which science played redeemer and religion, more often than not, the betrayer.

V. Defining Science: Herschel, Lyell, and Whewell

In the early decades of the 19th century, British thinkers began to ask a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, is science? The answer proved inseparable from the way they narrated the past. Three figures were decisive in codifying that conception: the astronomer and philosopher John F.W. Herschel (1792-1871), the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875), and the polymath William Whewell (1794-1866). Their writings were not merely technical; they were philosophical manifestos and polemical histories, and each operated within an implicit logic in which science had advanced by overcoming theological and traditionalist constraint. All subsequent noteworthy English-speaking historians of science in the 19th century were informed, either directly or indirectly, by their narratives (Cannon, 1961; Yeo, 1993; Numbers, 2003).

Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1830, supplied much of the intellectual scaffolding for what followed. For Herschel the history of science was the tale of reason’s emergence from error, its decisive turn coming with the empirical method of Bacon and Galileo after centuries in which inquiry had been captive to abstraction and religious prejudice (Herschel, 1851, pp. 7-8, 72, 105). Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833, reshaped both its discipline and its historical self-understanding. Lyell regarded reverence for tradition, especially religious tradition, as the chief obstacle to scientific advance (Lyell, 1837, 1:44, 111-112). As Martin Rudwick has shown, Lyell’s ostensible history of geology was in fact a polemical tract designed to weaken the grip of scriptural literalism; a Unitarian theist himself, Lyell blamed “orthodoxy” rather than religion as such, and openly intended his historical sketches to discredit “Mosaic geology” (Rudwick, 1970, p. 9; Porter, 1976). Whewell, who coined the very word scientist, traced the progress of science in his History of the Inductive Sciences through the refinement of “fundamental ideas,” attributing stagnation to the influence of ecclesiastical authority. Like Lyell, he portrayed the Middle Ages as an era of mysticism and dogmatism; he repeated the flat-earth legend as evidence of an age governed by theology rather than rational method (Whewell, 1837, 1:215, 233, 404; J.B. Russell, 1991, pp. 31-32).

What united Herschel, Lyell, and Whewell was not a rejection of religion, for each affirmed some form of natural theology, but the conviction that science had advanced despite, not because of, religious tradition. In this they inherited and reshaped a Protestant impulse: to purify knowledge from the corruptions of institutional authority. Through their work the basic trope was cemented that would dominate the century to come, that the advancement of science required the reformation of theology.

VI. Scientific Naturalism and the “New Reformation”

By the middle of the 19th century the story of science had hardened into a moral narrative, and a new generation set out to complete it. The scientific naturalists—those who sought to redefine science as a professional, empirical enterprise committed to excluding supernatural reference from the explanation of nature—are usually represented by Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895), John Tyndall (1820-1893), and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Standard accounts credit these men, alongside Draper and White, with constructing the conflict thesis (F.M. Turner, 1993; Lightman, 2014). The reality is more complicated: the scientific naturalists did not simply defend science against theology. They imagined themselves as heirs of the Reformation, engaged in a new ecclesial upheaval. Their rhetoric was not secularist in the modern sense but post-theological, suffused with religious tropes, moral urgency, and the promise of purification. What they envisioned was not unbelief but a “New Reformation.”

Huxley coined the term agnostic in 1869 to name the principled refusal to claim knowledge beyond the reach of evidence (Lightman, 2002). Yet the roots of his outlook lay deep in a Protestant genealogy. Raised in a low-church, dissenting environment, he presented himself, privately and publicly, as a religious rebel continuing the work of the Reformers. In a celebrated confession of faith to the Broad Churchman Charles Kingsley, he described the man of science sitting before fact like a little child, prepared to surrender every preconceived notion, language explicitly assimilating scientific method to the Christian ideal of submission to the will of God. He reached his position, he said, like the heroes of the Reformation, by the exercise of private judgment, quoting Luther’s defiant words at Worms, that he could do no other, as the motto of his own conscience (L. Huxley, 1902, 1:233-239; T.H. Huxley, 1894b, pp. 239, 267). Steeped in the anti-Catholicism that pervaded Victorian culture, he was vehemently hostile to the Roman Church, and inveighed against every attempt to subordinate science to what he called the “ecclesiastical spirit” (T.H. Huxley, 1864, p. 821). His agnosticism, far from denying metaphysics, drew on the philosophy of William Hamilton and Henry Longueville Mansel concerning the limits of human knowledge of the Absolute, giving it the moral tone of humility before the Unknowable (Lightman, 1987). His enemy was not faith but any attempt to subordinate inquiry to theological authority.

Tyndall likewise played the part of a Protestant prophet for the scientific age. Raised in an evangelical and fiercely anti-Catholic Irish home, he came to regard theological doctrine as myth, yet his private diaries and letters reveal a soul still stirred by religious longing; he meditated on Luther’s cry at Worms and found in it the emotional core of modern scientific independence, seeking to preserve what he called the “Protestant principle” of liberty of conscience and freedom from ecclesiastical control (J. Tyndall to T.A. Hirst, June 10, 1849, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, vol. 2, ed. M.C. Baldwin Fulford and J. Browne [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016]). In his widely read Fragments of Science, he maintained that religion was an affair of the heart, ineradicably ingrained in human nature and destined to be reconstructed, as it had been many times before, through periods of conflict and suffering (Tyndall, 1879, 1:385, 2:191-223; Tyndall, 1872). Like Huxley, Tyndall believed that science would purify religion of its dogmatic distortions.

Spencer gave the reformist posture its most systematic form. Casting his philosophy of evolution as a quasi-religious worldview, he placed at its center reverence for the “Unknowable,” an inscrutable infinite power occupying the position of God while being stripped of personality and content (H. Spencer, 1862, pp. 11, 21-22, 46). Having rejected evangelical Christianity in youth, he offered in its place a cosmic evolution governed by an “Infinite and Eternal Energy” that proved especially attractive to liberal Protestants who believed he had succeeded in spiritualizing science (Lightman, 2015). Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), who had once embraced his system, came to reject it as too abstract and too thin to nourish the soul, recognizing in the “Religion of Science” not liberation but a new orthodoxy with its own creed and prophets (Webb, 1926, pp. 44-153). Webb also saw clearly what later observers have emphasized: that Victorian scientific naturalism was not so much the enemy of religion as its competitor and heir, perpetuating the Protestant suspicion of tradition, exalting the autonomy of reason, and reimagining salvation as truth and honesty.

That the naturalists worked in close proximity to liberal theology is confirmed by their alliances. In 1861, several men of science organized a “Scientists’ Testimonial” in support of the embattled authors of the Broad Church manifesto Essays and Reviews, welcoming the attempt to set religious teaching on a broader foundation. Among its signatories were George Busk, William B. Carpenter, Charles Darwin, John Lubbock, Charles Lyell, and William Spottiswoode (P. White, 2003, p. 104; Shea and Whitla, 2000, pp. 657-659). The boundary between the scientific reformers and the liberal churchmen was, in short, porous.

VII. Liberal Protestantism: Dissident Intellectuals and the Broad Church

The scientific naturalists were far from the only Victorians vying to define the future of religion. A parallel chorus of dissident intellectuals—radical Dissenters, literary humanists, and liberal Protestants—sought not to discard religion but to reimagine it. Many found a platform in periodicals such as The Leader and the Westminster Review, where the cry for a “New Reformation” signaled a desire to retain moral seriousness while shedding dogmatic constraint. The pattern they exhibit is consistent enough to be stated once and illustrated by representatives: a rejection of orthodox doctrine combined with a retention, and repurposing, of Protestant vocabulary, in the service of a post-dogmatic religion of conscience, moral sentiment, and rational inquiry.

1. The Dissident Intellectuals. Among the self-described pioneers of the New Reformation, the Unitarian layman William Rathbone Greg (1809-1881) was a leading voice. His The Creed of Christendom mounted a sustained critique of biblical authority, while disclaiming hostility to Jesus himself; the recovery of Christ’s moral genius, Greg argued, required clearing away theological “rubbish” to reach the buried ore beneath (Greg, 1851, pp. viii-xvii; Helmstadter, 1990). Francis W. Newman (1805-1897), younger brother of the future cardinal, traveled a parallel road, chronicling his departure from orthodoxy in Phases of Faith and retaining a longing for a religion of “primitive faith, love and disinterestedness,” conceiving religion as a state of sentiment toward God that did not stand or fall on doctrine (F.W. Newman, 1850, pp. 44, 76, 188; Hempton, 2008, pp. 41-69).

Many of these figures gathered around the publisher John Chapman (1821-1894), editor of the Westminster Review, whose salon included George Combe, Harriet and James Martineau, John Stuart Mill, and Marian Evans, better known as the novelist George Eliot (1819-1880). The phrenologist George Combe (1788-1858), in The Constitution of Man and On the Relation between Science and Religion, argued that true revelation and true science can never conflict, and that the Reformation remained to be completed (Combe, 1829, pp. 19, 23-32, 395-396; Combe, 1857, pp. v-xxxi). Eliot came to regard the Bible as a composite of mingled truth and fiction and contemporary Protestantism as imprisoned by obsolete conceptual “spells,” endorsing a vision of religion’s evolution from mythos to logos in which Christianity would give way to a faith answerable to science and moral sentiment (Eliot, 1851).

W.E.H. Lecky (1838-1903) exemplifies how thoroughly Protestant idioms could be repurposed. Identifying the soul of Protestantism with liberty of conscience, he held that Protestantism and dogmatism were logically incompatible and that Christianity was destined to become ever more “spiritualized” as human understanding matured (Lecky, 1860, pp. 27, 148, 192-197; Lecky, 1872, 1:200-201). James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), perhaps the most widely influential of the group, insisted that he remained a Protestant even as he repudiated contemporary Protestantism’s lifeless doctrinalism; for Froude the Reformation was less a historical artifact than a moral principle, a perpetual reforming spirit, and religion itself a living organism that grows with the life of a people rather than a fixed series of propositions (Froude, 1888, 2:165; Brady, 2013). In all of these writers one finds what might be called a Protestant heresy: a revolt conducted in the name of the Reformation itself.

2. The Broad Church and Essays and Reviews. These dissident voices found sympathetic echoes within the established Church among the liberal Anglicans usually called the Broad Church, not a coherent party but a loose constellation of clergy and theologians united by a willingness to subject Christian doctrine to historical and scientific criticism (Jones, 2003). Their aim, as they understood it, was not to discard the faith but to preserve its moral vitality by loosening its doctrinal boundaries and freeing it from the encrustations of a premodern worldview.

Historians often distinguish two generations. The first included Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), and Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). Maurice rejected substitutionary atonement and eternal punishment, and later welcomed scientific inquiry as a catalyst for theological reform (Maurice, 1853; Maurice, 1863, p. 117); Kingsley concluded after reading On the Origin of Species that all natural theology would have to be rewritten (C. Kingsley to F.D. Maurice, 1863, in Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, 2 vols. [London, 1894], 2:155). The second generation was more radical still—Baden Powell (1796-1860), Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), Rowland Williams (1817-1870), Frederick Temple (1821-1902), and others—who held that a second Reformation, marked by the ascendancy of private judgment over ecclesiastical control, was already under way (Abbott and Campbell, 1897, 1:160, 362).

These currents culminated in Essays and Reviews (1860), a Broad Church manifesto whose seven contributors advocated a freer approach to religious truth informed by historical and scientific inquiry. Bringing German higher criticism to a wide British readership, the volume ignited one of the most explosive religious controversies of the Victorian era; critics branded its authors the septem contra Christum, the seven against Christ (Ellis, 1980; Altholz, 1994). Jowett’s “On the Interpretation of Scripture” urged that the Bible be read “like any other book,” treating divergent interpretations as evidence of the growth of the human mind and calling for theology to conform to well-ascertained fact (Jowett, 1860). Arthur Penrhyn Stanley publicly argued that science, history, and conscience were formidable antagonists to a theology that set itself against them (Stanley, 1865). The deep affinities between liberal Anglicans and radical Protestant groups such as the Unitarians, documented by Dennis Wigmore-Beddoes and others, extended to the dissident intellectuals as well (Wigmore-Beddoes, 1971; Woodhead, 2001); together these overlapping circles forged a post-dogmatic religious vision shaped more by the progress of human reason than by the authority of revelation. Yet, as Ieuan Ellis observed, the biblical criticism championed by the Broad Church ultimately did more to encourage than to dispel the perception of a conflict between science and religion (Ellis, 1980, pp. 99-101).

VIII. Unintended Consequences: From Reform to Rupture

Across these otherwise disparate movements—the scientific naturalists, the dissident men of letters, the Broad Church clergy—the Protestant Reformation served as a unifying metaphor. The cry for a “New Reformation” signaled, for each, the birth of a purified religion that would recover what was believed to have been lost when Christianity abandoned the ideals of its founder. Each drew from the same lesson: that personal conscience is the surest path to religious truth.

The call for a New Reformation was the result of a slow erosion of theological boundaries. Doctrines once central to the faith came to seem optional, even objectionable; Christianity became less creedal and more diffuse. And it was often Christian theologians themselves who dismantled the foundations. Facing the combined pressures of natural science, biblical criticism, and shifting moral sensibilities, liberal Protestants increasingly modified or abandoned traditional teachings, a theological flexibility that proved a prelude to secular substitution.

A contemporary witness to the danger was the Roman Catholic bishop William Clifford (1823-1893), whose critique of the New Reformation appeared in the Fortnightly Review. The new reformers, Clifford charged, undermined Christianity under the guise of honoring it, offering in place of the historic faith only subjective projections of human longing. When private judgment becomes the sole standard, he warned, theological coherence dissolves, it being easier to unite people in rejecting a doctrine than in adopting one, so that the result is not reform but a kind of religious entropy leading not to a purified faith but to unbelief (Clifford, 1887). The warning proved prescient. While liberal churchmen continued to believe that a purified Protestantism could still serve as moral and spiritual guide, many scientific naturalists and dissident intellectuals embraced what might be called Protestantism-minus-Christianity, retaining the historiographical assumptions and rhetorical strategies of liberal Protestantism while discarding its supernatural frame.

There is, to be sure, no straight line from the Reformation to modern unbelief, and the genealogy should not be read as asserting one. But John Henry Newman’s anxious observation that Protestantism tends toward infidelity cannot be dismissed out of hand (J.H. Newman to F. Rogers, November 25, 1840, in Mozley, 1891, 2:319). In their recurring campaigns to strip Christianity of its “superstitious” excrescences, many reformers of the era may have excised the very substance they intended to preserve, rendering faith private, optional, and at length indistinct from a generalized modern moralism. The wider claim that modern unbelief has Christian and specifically Reformation roots has been developed in several major studies (Buckley, 1987; J. Turner, 1985; Taylor, 2007; Gregory, 2012), and its contested status is considered in the closing chapter.

IX. Draper, White, and the Codification of Conflict

Both Draper and White, and the narratives of conflict they advanced, must be situated within the broader theological developments sketched in the preceding chapters. A fuller treatment of their intellectual biographies, religious development, and reception may be found in Ungureanu (2019, chs. 1-2 and 5-6); what follows addresses the key points necessary to the genealogical argument.

1. Draper: Codifier, Not Founder. As professor of chemistry at the University of the City of New York, Draper assured his students that scientific inquiry need not threaten faith, speaking of the “peculiarity of the works of God” and of a deity who governs not by expedients but through inexhaustible resources and self-imposed law (cited in Ungureanu, 2019, pp. 30-31). His early lectures carry unmistakable echoes of natural theology, even as he distanced himself from Christian orthodoxy, praising the chemist and Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley for passing, in pursuit of truth, through many phases of religious belief. His History of the Conflict was, as is often noted but rarely examined, largely a synthesis of his earlier writings, above all A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. In that earlier work Draper drew a crucial distinction, between Christianity as “a gift of God” and its institutional forms as “the product of human exigencies and human invention,” open to criticism and, where necessary, condemnation (Draper, 1863, pp. 198, 382-402). The so-called paganization of Christianity, its entanglement with Greco-Roman philosophy and ecclesiastical power, had in his view produced a “tyranny of theology over thought” that the simple, spiritual Christianity of the apostles would scarcely recognize.

The same distinction survives in the Conflict itself. Draper explicitly announced that his analysis would target not moderate believers but “extremist” or “orthodox” positions, on the ground that it was the extremists who had consistently suppressed inquiry and distorted religion. When he declared science progressive by nature and faith unchangeable and stationary, and warned that religions necessarily undergo transformation with the intellectual development of humanity, he was not so much renouncing religion as redefining it: the enemy was a “materialized” Christianity that, fused with political power, had strangled both inquiry and spiritual vitality (Draper, 1874, pp. vii, xi, 33, 328). As his biographer Donald Fleming remarked, the Conflict reads almost like the first draft of a new scripture for the faithful disillusioned with clerical despotism, though Fleming missed the deeper theological continuity that bound Draper to the Protestant tradition he was extending rather than escaping (Fleming, 1950, p. 129). Draper’s vision of conflict was, paradoxically, the vehicle through which he hoped religion might be renewed.

2. Youmans and the Loss of Control. The dissemination and popularization of the narratives of Draper and White are inseparable from the role of Edward Livingston Youmans (1821-1887), science editor of D. Appleton and Company, one of America’s most influential publishing houses in the second half of the 19th century, and a central figure in the diffusion of scientific ideas through his Popular Science Monthly and “International Scientific Series.” It was Youmans who commissioned Draper to write the History of the Conflict for that series; the book went through fifty printings in the United States alone, twenty-four in England, and was translated into ten languages. Youmans also published White’s articles on the “New Chapters in the Warfare of Science” in the Popular Science Monthly across the decade 1885-1895, from which White later expanded his A History of the Warfare (Ungureanu, 2019, pp. 15-16).

Like Draper and White, Youmans believed there was no intrinsic conflict between science and religion. But he did not share their hopes of a final reconciliation between modern thought and Christianity. Rather, as one of the leaders of the Free Religious Association, founded in 1867 to call for the emancipation of religion from all “dogmatic traditions,” and as an advocate of the scientific naturalism of Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer, Youmans appropriated the narratives of Draper and White in support of his own vision of the religion of the future. The reconciliation Youmans described was the end of “orthodoxy,” a term by which he meant Protestant as well as historic Christianity broadly defined. While he retained the language of Protestantism, it was bereft of any doctrinal beliefs of traditional Christianity. Youmans’s new religion, in short, was a Protestantism-minus-Christianity (Ungureanu, 2019, pp. 15-17).

How Draper and White envisioned their reformed, minimal religion was deeply contested by readers. More religiously conservative and orthodox reviewers did not accept their attempted reconciliation, for they could not accept their redefinitions of religion. They warned that any such attempt would only lead to a greater perception that science and religion were indeed at war. This was a prescient warning: by the end of the 19th century, freethinkers, secularists, and atheists appropriated their narratives as a weapon against all religion, taking up the histories of Draper and White without any of their nuances. More remarkable still, it was this simplistic version of their relationship that provided the very foundations of the incipient discipline of the history of science as it emerged in the early decades of the 20th century. Draper and White, in other words, lost control of their own narratives (Ungureanu, 2019, pp. 16-17, 21).

Read in this way, the warfare narrative appears less as a struggle between science and religion than as a struggle between rival versions of Christianity, one rooted in orthodoxy, sacrament, and tradition, the other in rationalism, moralism, and individual conscience, at a moment when the rapid advance of the natural sciences served as catalyst and justification for theological revision. What Draper and White provided was a synthesis and codification of ideas about nature, humanity, and God that can be traced all the way back to 16th-century debates between Protestants and Catholics. The conflict thesis, in other words, was a received narrative, and the more precise claim of the genealogy traced here is that it was not Protestantism as such, but a particular rationalizing, experiential, and anti-dogmatic trajectory within it, that helped sow its seeds.

X. The Catholic Alternative: Unity of Truth, Sacramentality, and the Refusal of Dualism

If a particular Protestant lineage helped create the conceptual space in which “science” and “religion” could be imagined as antagonists, the 19th-century Catholic tradition responded along a markedly different path, one that the warfare narrative, framed largely by and for an Anglophone Protestant culture, tends to render invisible. Reconstructing that alternative is essential to a balanced account, both because it shows that the conflict was never a universal Christian experience and because the resources it preserved remain pertinent to contemporary reflection on faith and reason.

The governing principle of the Catholic response is the unity of truth: the conviction that, because all truth has its source in the one God who is at once author of nature and giver of revelation, the findings of the sciences and the teachings of theology cannot, when each is rightly understood, ultimately contradict one another. On this view the proper relationship between the disciplines is not negotiated truce but ordered participation in a single truth.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) gave the position one of its most influential modern statements. In The Idea of a University, composed between 1852 and 1858, Newman rejected any ultimate “contrariety” between the declarations of religion and the results of physical inquiry, and articulated a profoundly anti-dualistic vision of knowledge in which theology functions not as an optional confessional addendum but as an integrating discipline, an intellectual habitus, within the circle of knowledge. Excluded from the university, theology does not simply fall silent; its place is usurped by other sciences, which then overreach their competence and become reductive (J.H. Newman, 1996, pp. 218-233). Newman’s defense of theology was thus simultaneously a defense of the autonomy and integrity of the empirical sciences within their own spheres, and a diagnosis of the disorder that follows when one discipline claims the whole field (Gilson, 1999; MacIntyre, 2009).

The magisterial counterpart to Newman’s vision is the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, promulgated by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Dei Filius charts a deliberate course between two errors the genealogy has tracked from opposite directions. Against rationalism, the reduction of the content of faith to what unaided reason can establish, the very tendency animating the deists and the liberal reformers, it affirms the reality and gratuity of supernatural revelation, which exceeds though does not contradict reason. Against fideism and traditionalism, the denial that reason can attain genuine knowledge of God, it affirms that the existence of God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from created things. The Council thus teaches a twofold order of knowledge, distinct in principle and source, yet harmonious: faith and reason render mutual assistance, and there can be no real disagreement between them (Vatican Council I, 1870, chs. 3-4). In this formal refusal of both rationalism and fideism, Dei Filius names and rejects the precise dichotomy that the conflict thesis presupposes.

Underlying these positions is what may be called the Catholic sacramental imagination, a vision of the created order as charged with meaning, governed by intelligible law, and open to scientific investigation precisely because it is created and sustained by God. On this understanding, matter can bear and mediate the divine without being reduced to it. This metaphysical and sacramental sensibility, nourished by the revival of Thomistic philosophy and later by the ressourcement, the mid-20th-century return to the sources of Scripture and the Fathers associated with theologians such as Henri de Lubac, supplied an account of the relation between nature and grace that did not require the desacralizing of the world (de Lubac, 1988, pp. 165-216; Tracy, 1981, pp. 405-445). Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between God as primary cause and creatures as genuine secondary causes, Catholic thinkers have argued that natural laws and natural explanations, far from competing with divine providence, are themselves the means through which providence ordinarily operates, dissolving, at the metaphysical level, the zero-sum logic that the conflict thesis takes for granted (Dodds, 2012, pp. 160-204).

This trajectory extends into the magisterium of the late 20th century, notably the encyclical Fides et Ratio of John Paul II, which reaffirmed that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth, and warned against both a rationalism that would absolutize science and a fideism that would sever faith from reason (John Paul II, 1998, nn. 1, 45-48). Set alongside the Protestant genealogy, then, the Catholic inheritance represents an alternate path through the same modernity: one in which doctrine, mystery, and the intelligibility of nature are not adversaries but mutually implicating dimensions of a single theological vision.

XI. Open Questions and Contested Interpretations

The genealogical interpretation summarized in this entry commands considerable support, but it is situated within ongoing debate, and a responsible survey must register the principal points of contention.

First, the relationship between the genealogy and the broader secularization-from-the-Reformation thesis is disputed. The claim that modern unbelief has Christian and specifically Reformation roots has been criticized by historians wary of mono-causal declension narratives that understate the contingency of historical change, the role of social and political factors, and the agency of avowedly secular and materialist currents that owed little to Protestant theology. Proponents respond that the genealogy claims influence and affinity, not inevitability, and explicitly denies any straight line from the Reformation to modern unbelief; where the line is drawn, and how much causal weight the theological factors can bear, remains open.

Second, scholars differ over how far the conflict thesis should be deflated. A minority maintain that, while the global warfare narrative is indefensible, certain genuine and substantive conflicts have occurred, over particular empirical claims, over the scope of methodological naturalism, or over specific doctrines, and that an exclusive emphasis on complexity risks obscuring real tensions. The figure of Galileo, the reception of Darwin, and 20th-century disputes over cosmology and human origins are recurrently cited test cases. Defenders of the complexity thesis reply that even these episodes, examined closely, involve a dense mixture of factors that the warfare model distorts.

Third, the geographic and confessional scope of the genealogy invites scrutiny. The narrative reconstructed here is largely British and Protestant; its applicability to Continental, Catholic, and Orthodox contexts, and to non-Christian traditions, is a matter for further inquiry. The contrast with the Catholic tradition drawn above is itself an interpretive construction: Catholic episodes of resistance to particular sciences exist, and the anti-modernist reaction of the early 20th century complicates any simple opposition between a serene Catholic synthesis and a self-undermining Protestant one.

Fourth, the persistence of the conflict thesis in popular culture, despite its scholarly demise, raises questions that are sociological as much as historical. Why a narrative so thoroughly criticized by specialists should retain such public force is itself an object of study, variously explained by its usefulness to competing ideological projects, its narrative simplicity, and the institutional interests it continues to serve (Larsen, 2006; N. Spencer, 2023). The proposal that the warfare model functions as a quasi-religious myth, a secularized eschatology of progress, is one influential answer, but not the only one.

What is no longer seriously contested is the central negative claim: that the relationship between science and religion is not, as a matter of historical record, one of inevitable and perpetual war. The deeper questions, about why the warfare narrative arose, what theological developments made it possible, who its proximate codifiers were, and what alternative inheritances were available, remain fertile ground for the interdisciplinary study of religion and science.