Conflict Thesis

The Conflict Thesis is a historiographical approach in the history of science that originated in the 19th century which maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science and that it inevitably leads to hostility. Most examples and interpretations of events in support of the thesis have been drawn from Western history. Historians of science have long ago rejected the thesis. Nonetheless, the thesis "remain strong elsewhere, not least in the popular mind."

In the 1800s, the relationship between science and religion became an actual formal topic of discourse, while before this no one has pitted science against religion or vice versa, though occasional interactions had occured in the past. More specifically, it was around mid-1800s that the discussion about "science and religion" first emerged because before time, science still included moral and metaphysical dimensions, was not inherently linked to the scientific method, and the term scientist did not emerged until 1834. The scientist John William Draper and the writer Andrew Dickson White, were the most influential exponents of the conflict thesis between religion and science. 

Draper had been the speaker in the British Association meeting in 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 1870s the American science-popularizer Edward Livingston Youmans invited Draper to write a History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874), a book replying to contemporary issues in Roman Catholicism, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility, and most recently criticizing what he claimed to be anti-intellectualism in the Catholic tradition but also criticizing Islam and of protestantism.

Draper's preface summarizes the conflict thesis:

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of the two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

 In 1896, White published A History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, the culmination of over thirty years of research and publication on the subject, criticizing what he saw as restrictive, dogmatic forms of Christianity. In the introduction, White emphasized that he arrived at his position after the difficulties of assisting Ezra Cornell in establishing a university without any official religious affiliation.

The criticism of White isn't exactly recent: historian of medicine James Joseph Walsh criticized White's perspective as anti-historical in The Popes and Science; the History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Time (1908), which he dedicated to Pope Pius X:

the story of the supposed opposition of the Church and the popes and ecclesiastical authorities to science in any of its branches, is founded entirely on mistaken notions. Most of it is quite imaginary. Much of it is due to exaggeration of the significance of the Galileo incident. Only those who know nothing about the history of medicine and of science continue to harbor it. That Dr. Whote's book, contradicted as it is so directly by all serious histories of medicine and of science, should have been read by so many thousands in this country, and should have been taken seriously by educated men, physicians, teachers, and even professors of science who want to know the history of their own sciences, only shows how easily even supposedly educated men may be led to follow their prejudices rather than their mental faculties, and emphasizes the fact that the tradition that there is no good that can possibly come out of the Nazareth of our times before the reformation, still dominates the intellects of many educated people who think that they are far from prejudice and have minds perfectly open to conviction.

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