Episode Details

Almost everyone in the 21^st century Western world have bought into this unfounded myth (very possibly YOU too!?)

A few days ago, it was the 1^st of April …. April Fool’s Day!  Instead of playing some kind of prank on our listeners, we thought we’d look at a great book about a hoax — on the level of a conspiracy theory — that has hoodwinked the world for almost two centuries!  This con-job has most people today believing in “the Dark Ages,” and that the church in the past often tortured and even killed scientists, and burned down the ancient library of Alexandria (containing thousands of books, the collective knowledge of the world at that time). When you, the listener, hear about the whole “Galileo Affair,” does your mind immediately jump to religion vs science, or do you imagine two different groups of philosophers/scholars disputing cosmology using Greek philosophical arguments?

The book we’ll be bringing to our listeners this week is Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and how the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World, by David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu.  This week we’ll hear from James (a PhD historian), and next week from David (degree in physics; popular speaker and apologist).

James did his entire PhD thesis on the Conflict Thesis and who first proposed the idea.  He and David dug through historical archives, chasing down footnotes in textbooks, newspaper clippings, and letters between scholars, and the trail converged on two 19^th century American scholars: John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White.  And their idea — the Conflict Thesis — claims that “the church and science are at war … fundamentally at odds … always have been, always will be.”

Draper and White were both brilliant polymaths, energetic intellectuals, and recognized scholars in a scholar’s world.  Draper was a scientist, White a literary scholar who had been on a path toward preaching, but was enticed away by intellectual influences into more secular pursuits.  Both wrote books which became the foundation for the Conflict Thesis.  Draper’s (History of the Conflict between Religion and Science) was dense and only readable to professional egg-heads, while White’s (A history of the w