The War That Wasn't

This is not to say that there haven't been power struggles. There have been plenty. It's just that the combatants -- even in the iconic ones surrounding the likes of Copernicus and Darwin -- typically don't sort neatly into science and religious camps.

When Steno proposed the geological investigation of the earth's strata, the loudest howls came from other scientists. One of the puzzles Steno addressed was that of fossilized seashells found high in mountains. Land and sea had shifted, he said. But there was already a "scientific" explanation: spontaneous growth within the rocks. So there was no need, as one contemporary put it, to "turn the world upside down for the sake of a shell." Ironically, the idea seemed to be more palatable among some theological conservatives than among rationalists: God could do whatever he wanted.

What about that most contentious of issues -- Genesis? Biblical scholars such as the 17th-century Anglican archbishop James Ussher had deduced from Scripture that the world was about 6,000 years old. Some observers at the time were indeed nervous that the earth's layers might reveal a much longer history. Young Earth creationists today refuse to countenance any deviation from Ussher's figure. But for mainstream 17th-century Christians, it was a non-issue. Allegorical interpretations of Genesis had been relatively uncontroversial at least since the time of Saint Augustine.

What was controversial was not the numerical date of creation, but whether there had been creation at all -- or if the earth and its inhabitants were eternal, as some radical philosophers asserted. For orthodox Christians, the eternalist heresy was scary indeed: No creation, no Creator; no Creator, no religion.

But geology, even if it stretched time, seemed to show a progression of fossils and rock types, not endless cycles of the same things. This meshed well enough with Christian doctrine to keep most believers from getting too upset as scientists rewrote the earth's history. Even fundamentalists in the early 20th century were unperturbed about the demise of biblical chronology. William Bell Riley, one of the fundamentalist movement's founders, declared that there was not "an intelligent fundamentalist who claims that the earth was made six thousand years ago, and the Bible never taught any such thing."

Of course, the story doesn't end here. Ultraconservative believers and scientists did not all live together happily ever after. Some on each side have declared war. Others, such as intelligent design advocates, use the misunderstandings and general confusion as a cover to push their own mishmash of science and religion. In 1925, the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the future course of civilization depended on the decision his generation in the 20th century made as to the relations between science and religion. We face the same decision, with even more urgency, in the 21st century.

The historical relationship between science and religion has been as complex as any human relationship. There is no reason to think that this will change. The warfare thesis suits the polemical purposes of partisans in certain social and political debates. But it harms religion by portraying it as overly dogmatic and reactionary. It also harms science by portraying it as hostile or at least indifferent to the average person's spiritual needs.

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Alan Cutler, a geologist who lives in Gaithersburg, is the author of a book about Nicolaus Steno and his era titled "The Seashell on the Mountaintop" (Dutton).