As the battle between creationism and evolution heats up, some atheists, like Jerry Coyne, have been insisting that it is really a battle between religion and science. Coyne resists any accommodation between religious and non-religious scientists to defend Darwinism. He doesn’t want to see them joining forces against the creationist common enemy in case that legitimises religion. In order for his position to make sense, he needs to show that there is some sort of existential conflict between religion and science. So it is unfortunate for him that the historical record clearly shows that accommodation and even cooperation have been the default positions in the relationship.

It’s true that the popular perception of a historical conflict remains strong. That hasn’t stopped all serious historians from queuing up to condemn it. John Hedley Brooke and Peter Harrison at Oxford; David Lindberg and Ron Numbers at Wisconsin-Madison; and Simon Shapin in California have all tried to put the record straight. But as Numbers ruefully admits, “Despite a developing consensus among scholars that science and Christianity have not been at war, the notion of conflict has refused to die.” He has edited a new collection of essays, published by Harvard University Press, called Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion which tries to chip away some more from the edifice of popular opinion.

A strange thing about the conflict myth is that much of the evidence for it is bogus. Not only are most people ignorant of the real history, but what they think they know about it is actually untrue. Let me give some examples.

The old chestnut that the church encouraged the view that the earth is flat has been debunked so many times that it seems pointless to do so again. But despite a hundred years of effort from historians of science, the legend refuses to die. Only this year it has been repeated in The House of Wisdom, a history of Islamic science by Jonathan Lyons.

The myth that the Catholic church tried to ban zero has grown more popular in recent years. The journalist Charles Seife managed to write an entire book (Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea) about how zero was banned without ever realising his central argument has no foundation in fact. The same myth was passed on in Peter Atkin’s Newton’s Finger and Charles Mann’s 1492.

The church also never tried to ban human dissection. I was amused to hear this story promulgated on the BBC show QI which usually prides itself in puncturing the conventional wisdom. The related myth that Vesalius, author of a famous book on anatomy published in 1543, had a run-in with the Spanish Inquisition, is also discounted by historians.

The celebrated astronomer Carl Sagan passed on the nugget that Pope Callistus III excommunicated Halley’s Comet in 1456. This would have been a silly thing to do, but thankfully it never happened. The story appears to be based on misreading a contemporary chronicle.

Finally, various martyrs for science have been canonised. It is a sad fact that both Catholics and Protestants were engaged in the despicable practice of burning heretics. But no one was ever executed for their scientific views. For a long time it was supposed that the Renaissance thinker Giordano Bruno had died for his science. But we now know he was an occultist whose support for Copernicus was not based on scientific grounds and neither was it a reason for his execution. Pretty much all his cosmological thought can be found in a book by the 15th-century cardinal Nicolas of Cusa. Not even the Catholic church would burn you at the stake for repeating the published thoughts of a cardinal.

Only with the trial of Galileo, put under house arrest for life for teaching that the earth goes around the sun, does popular perception have much basis on fact. But even this case was more about the pope’s self-esteem than science.

The conflict between science and creationism is real enough, but it is the exception, not the rule. For most of history, science and religion have rubbed along just fine. So, if Jerry Coyne really wants to promote evolution, he should be joining hands with the religious scientists who want to help.

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