Up in the mornin’

Out on the job

Work like the devil for my pay

But that lucky old sun has nothin’ to do

But roll ‘round heaven all day

-Bob Dylan, 2015[i]

Full Moons rise at sunset & set at sunrise. New moons rise at sunrise & set at sunset, but the lit side faces the Sun and not us.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson[ii]

Indignation.

That’s the word that perfectly summed up the feeling of my fellow biochemistry students after a particularly tense lecture.

The young professor had asked us to think about how different cultures and religions had viewed the natural world in the past. Are there perhaps other ways to think of nature? she urged us. At this point, the professor and the students were still simpatico.

And then she mentioned, in a sympathetic sense, the Book of Genesis.

The mood changed swiftly. There were groans. Students shifting nervously in their seats. “Why should we care what the Bible said?” one student asked. “Science already proved it wrong!”

That was basically the mood of everyone in the classroom. The angered students weren’t interested in learning anything about the lexical elasticity of the word yom, literary genres, or theological frameworks. They already knew: the word Genesis mentioned in a secular school’s science lecture hall is a fightin’ word.

I wish this was an exaggerated tale but it isn’t. The professor’s superiors were notified and, if memory serves, she sent the students an explanation of her actions, which served as a “sorry-not sorry” apology. University is where I went to expand my mind. But every subculture has rules to what constitutes orthodoxy and what constitutes heresy. The professor had crossed the line.

The Conflict

Why the indignation? The discussion that took place in my biochemistry class was, on the face of it, simply a discussion, the invitation to think outside of the barriers of the discipline. But what do you think? she was asking. However, this discussion took place inside of a longer context: the conflict between religion and science that began with Nicolaus Copernicus and, eventually, his punished disciples Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno.

The story is often told that the Western world was under the sway of the Catholic Church and its teachings from the Christian Bible. The Bible was the main science book in the medieval and early modern world. The earth was at the center of the universe, the apple in God’s eyes, and God swirled the planets and the sun around the immovable earth for our delight. Except for once when God stopped the encircling heavenly bodies—the sun and moon—as detailed in Joshua 10:12-13. All was well in the world.

And then Nicholas Copernicus showed up in the 16th century and ruined everything!

Copernicus whispered devilish nightmares into the ears of self-important humans: the earth is not the center of the world, the Bible is a book of fairy tales, and human beings are nothing special, mere cosmic accidents.

Well, that would have really angered the religious zealots around him—which pretty much everyone was back then—so he lived in fear of his ideas being made public. He was so afraid that he waited until he was nearly dead to have his book published.

The story as told above is, conservatively, about 98% false. It was invented in the 19th century by Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper, creators of the Draper-White Thesis, known more popularly as the Conflict Thesis.

The Conflict Thesis was the idea that religion and science had always been in conflict and would inevitably collide in irreconcilable differences. The long-since debunked tale has been told far and wide since then, from pop-level atheist blogs to otherwise well-informed scientists … and Christians! And so it still demands attention today.

What gives the Conflict Thesis venom is the re-imagining of the past. As such, the antidote is to look back behind the fog of confusion of the last century and a half. “Neither Draper nor White even bothered to distort the evidence to support his case,” writes theologian David Bentley Hart. “Both discovered that, where evidence was lacking, literary invention proved a happy expedient.”[iii] By looking at the case of Copernicus, we can discern that things are not quite what we’ve been told.

[i] Bob Dylan, “That Lucky Old Sun,” track 10 on Shadows in the Night, Columbia Records, 2015, compact disc.

[ii] Neil deGrasse Tyson, Twitter Post, October 2, 2012, 1:52 PM https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/253190782054453249.

[iii] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 56.