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Concept
Conflict thesis
Summary
The conflict thesis is a historiographical approach in the history of science that originated in the 19th century with John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. It maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science, and that it inevitably leads to hostility. The consensus among historians of science is that the thesis has long been discredited, which explains the rejection of the thesis by contemporary scholars. Into the 21st century, historians of science widely accept a complexity thesis.
Studies on scientists and the general public show that the conflict perspective is not prevalent.
Before the 19th century, no one had pitted "science" against "religion" or vice versa in writing. The relationship between religion and science became an actual formal topic of discourse in the 19th century. More specifically, it was around the mid-19th century that discussion of "science and religion" first emerged because before this time, science still included moral and metaphysical dimensions, was not inherently linked to the scientific method, and the term scientist did not emerge until 1834. The scientist John William Draper (1811–1882) and the writer Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) were the most influential exponents of the conflict thesis between religion and science. Draper had been the speaker in the British Association meeting of 1860 which led to the famous confrontation between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley over Darwinism, and in America "the religious controversy over biological evolution reached its most critical stages in the late 1870s". In the early 1870s, the American science-popularizer Edward Livingston Youmans invited Draper to write a History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), a book replying to contemporary issues in Roman Catholicism, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility, and mostly criticizing what he claimed to be anti-intellectualism in the Catholic tradition, but also making criticisms of Islam and of Protestantism.
Official source
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