Conflict thesis

The "conflict thesis" is a historiographical approach in the history of science which maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science and that the relationship between religion and science inevitably leads to public hostility. The thesis retains support among some scientists and in the public, while most historians of science do not support the original strict form of the thesis.

In the 1800s the relationship between science and religion became an actual formal topic of discourse, while before this no one had pitted science against religion or vice versa, though occasional interactions were expressed in the past. More specifically, it was around the mid-1800s that discussion of "science and religion" first emerged because before this time, "science" still included moral and metaphysical dimensions, was not inherently linked to the scientific method, and the term "scientist" did not emerge 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 of 1860 which led to the famous confrontation between Bishop Wilberforce and Huxley over Darwinism, and in America "the religious controversy over biological evolution reached its most critical stages in the late 1870s". In the early 1870s Draper was invited by American science popularizer Edward Livingston Youmans to write a History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), a book replying to contemporary issues in Roman Catholicism, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility, and mostly criticizing what he claimed to be anti-intellectualism in the Catholic tradition, but also making criticisms of Islam and of Protestantism. Draper's preface summarises the conflict thesis:

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