science, religion, metaphor, and history 119mutable category “physicist” into which individuals in history may be loaded,
especially when they do not understand the term themselves.
Whatever the intent of Galileo or his opponents, the affair had unbounded
effect upon subsequent thought. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
produced a real revolution in thought that amounted to the replacement of a
coherent, organic world by “a mechanical world of lifeless matter, incessant
local motion, and random collision.”^15 The assumption that we live in an en-
tirely physical universe rather than in a more diverse universe became more
and more frequently the common opinion of philosophers and eventually of
the general population. Although many philosophers from Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) through the eighteenth-century Enlightenment believed that reli-
gion and science were incompatible, religion has usually supported rather than
resisted science, and the very idea of a warfare between science and religion
was invented in the mid-nineteenth century.^16 The declaration of war came
from John W. Draper (1811–1882), who wrote inHistory of the Conflict between
Religion and Science:
The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is
the continuation of the struggle that commenced when Christianity
began to attain political power....Thehistory of Science is not a
mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of
two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect
on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary [sic] faith
and human interests on the other....[The fall of Rome] left reli-
gious affairs to take their place, and accordingly those affairs fell
into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites,
eunuchs, and slaves.^17
The myth of the flat Earth is an example of the preposterous caricatures
employed by Draper and his followers. One of the platitudes that “everybody
knows” about the Middle Ages is that medieval people thought the Earth was
flat. But in fact no educated person in the Middle Ages thought so. The myth
would have faded if Draper and his allies had not used it to bludgeon their
opponents by claiming that they were just as stupid as the medieval people
who allegedly thought the Earth was flat.^18 The alleged war between science
and religion is real only insofar as people construct it as such.
Biological evolution became the focus of the “war.” No story in science,
even the Galileo affair, is more fixed in the contemporary public conscious-
ness—at least in America—than the Scopes trial. In the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century the idea that the geological and biological features of
Earth today are the products of change through vast eons of time had gained
strength. This geological and biological succession of life through time is com-
patible with traditional Christian theology, and it was so accepted by most