Galileo Goes to Jail
And Other Myths about
Science and Religion
Edited by Ronald L. Numbers
Harvard, 320 pp., $27.95
The past few years have brought a revival of a largely 19th-century phenomenon: the attempt to deploy science to discredit religion. We've seen Richard Dawkins use evolutionary biology to explain away our God Delusion while Victor Stenger co-opted physics to explain that God is The Failed Hypothesis and Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Daniel Dennett went to work Breaking the Spell to show Religion as a Natural [not supernatural] Phenomenon, while Sam Harris wrote A Letter to a Christian Nation noting The End of Faith. We've been warned about The Theocons and the Christianists, today's theocrats attempting to set up an American Theocracy.
The story is always the same: a battle between irrational faith and rational science, in which the latter defeats the former. Of course, the real force behind these books is politics, especially where it intersects with morality. The new atheists aren't really concerned about baptisms or bar mitzvahs; they simply deplore the moral, political, and cultural values advanced by traditional Jews and Christians, and readily denounce all religious believers in an effort to discredit them. And of course, science is manipulated as the weapon of choice.
None of this is new, really. As the editor of this volume, Ronald Numbers, points out, "the greatest myth in the history of science and religion holds that they have been in a state of constant conflict." Numbers knows this territory well; he's a distinguished scholar
who has served as president of both the History of Science Society and the American Society of Church History. He points readers to 19th-century polemics--such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew D. White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)--to explain how most Americans came to believe so many tall tales about the history of science and religion. Of these myths, the collection of essays in Galileo Goes to Jail aims to debunk 25 of the most prominent.
Though it is written by academics from Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and the like, the book is intended for nonspecialists. In about 10 pages per myth, the contributors explain the myth's content, how so many people have come to believe it, and what the historical evidence shows to the contrary. The authors necessarily spend the bulk of their time debunking attacks on religion in the name of science, but they also clear the muddy waters left behind when pro-religion forces try to obscure the scientific record.
So, for example, readers discover that Galileo never really was imprisoned (nor was he tortured), that Giordano Bruno was not a martyr on behalf of science (though he was persecuted for his heretical theological views as a defrocked monk who denied the doctrine of the Trinity), that "every important medieval thinker" rejected the flat-earth theory and held fast to a spherical-earth theory, and that "no evidence supports the notion" that Christianity opposed the use of anesthesia in childbirth.
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