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I expect that some, or maybe even many of you, may be surprised at the title of my talk,

or even skeptical of it.

After all, isn't it clear from the news, from the Internet, from virtually any number of sources,

that there is an ongoing conflict or warfare between science and faith. Well, you would not be entirely wrong to think that

way, but there's a lot more to be said, which is sort of what I'm going to be saying for the next

40 minutes or so. As a historian, I'm interested in what I might call the long view of things.

And so my question is this.

If we believe that there is a war between science and faith, one, how did it come to be?

And two, what are its foundations and its origins? Well, the conflict is often presented to us today as something inevitable and eternal,

arising out of various incommensurabilities between science and faith.

But what I hope to show you this evening is that this state of affairs is, first of all,

a very recent development,

and two, its foundations rest not upon historical realities, but upon social, political, and

personal agendas on the one hand, and upon needless theological missteps on the other.

Well, the place to start is, for to say very clearly that the conflict or warfare model

for the historical interaction of science and religion has been rejected by every serious

historian of science, period. Every serious historian of science today. Yet, it remains not only

widespread, but naturalized as a fact in popular culture. I like to compare it, actually, to a pernicious

...