The Myths in our Midst: On the Teaching of the History of Science and Religion in K–12
How would you feel if you discovered that a teacher at your public school was teaching students that girls are not as smart as boys and belong at home? Outraged? Would it surprise you to learn that a similar prejudice probably exists in your local school? I wish I could say that I was surprised when my third-grade niece came home relaying a history lesson that exemplified substantial prejudice, not against girls but against religious believers. Unfortunately, my fifteen years as a college professor have desensitized me to the historical inaccuracies students absorb about science and religion.
When I survey my undergraduate students, more than half report being taught that before Columbus, everyone in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. This is a myth. It’s been known since ancient times that the Earth was round. Many students were taught other fictions, like that heliocentrism (the idea that the sun, not the earth, is at the center of the solar system) amounted to a demotion of the status of the earth (it did not), that the Church executed scientists for their scientific beliefs (it did not), and that Christianity stifled science during the Middle Ages (it did not).
These popular myths are part of what is known as the conflict thesis: the idea that science and religion are locked in perpetual war against one another. The conflict thesis is almost universally rejected by historians of science, who lament their inability to unseat it from the public’s imagination. Thus, I was disappointed, but not surprised, to hear my niece had come home from school repeating errors about the Galileo Affair. A handout records that my niece learned that Galileo was imprisoned and had to stop studying the heavens because it went against the Bible. The assigned book, Peter Sís’s Starry Messenger, suggests that Galileo proved heliocentrism is true and claims that medieval Christians didn’t wonder about the cosmos, instead deferring to tradition and authority.
None of this is true. The Middle Ages were not characterized by slavish obedience to the ancients or tradition. As the medieval historian David Lindberg put it, “there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university.” And science was by no means thought of as anathema to the Bible. Nearly all the key figures of the Scientific Revolution were devout Christians, and many of them (a) understood their scientific work as a form of worship or religious vocation and (b) integrated their theology and science, often explicitly grounding their scientific research on theological premises.
To take but a sampling, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote: “behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.” Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, thought that by studying the natural world, people would be brought to acknowledge, admire, and thank God. Both Kepler and Boyle thought of scientists as priests of nature. Sir Isaac Newton claimed that “the main Business” of science is to move from observation of the natural world to knowledge of the existence of God. René Descartes conceived of “laws of nature” as God’s divine imposition of order onto matter. The 1663 charter of the Royal Society, the first national scientific society, claims its work will be “to the glory of God the Creator, and the advantage of the human race.” Galileo himself thought that in using mathematics to study the natural world, one was reading the language God had used to create it. From a historically informed vantage point, the supposed conflict between science and religion is unintelligible.
But the drama and pathos of Sís’s book leaves a clear impression: the intrepid scientist Galileo was persecuted for having the audacity to stand up for truth and reason against the regressive forces of religion embodied by the Catholic Church. My niece had obviously absorbed the implicit lesson: the Church (and by proxy, religion generally) is backward and anti-science.
Galileo was not imprisoned or tortured, nor was he forced to stop studying the heavens. He was, however, put under house arrest and forced to recant his belief that heliocentrism was a physical fact. Was this because the Church was anti-science? There aren’t good reasons to think so. In rejecting heliocentrism, the Church was actually endorsing the consensus of the astronomical community at the time who had strong objections to it.
To take but one of these objections, it was well known that if heliocentrism is true, it should be possible to observe stellar parallax, the relative motion of closer stars against the background of farther away stars as the Earth orbits the Sun. However, careful observation at the time showed no stellar parallax. This provided strong evidence that heliocentrism was untenable as a physical fact. Moreover, if there had been compelling reasons to think that heliocentrism was physically true, the Catholic Church could have used standard interpretive methods for reconciling the words of the Bible to this fact (as Galileo himself knew). So, the Galileo Affair is by no means a straightforward instance of conflict between science and religion.
Then why was Galileo punished? The story is complex. But if one were to insist on a simple framing of the Galileo Affair, the best candidate is how people at the time seem to have understood it: as a political scuffle. Galileo’s friend and longtime supporter, Pope Urban VIII, gave Galileo permission to publish a work examining arguments for and against heliocentrism. He was instructed not to take sides himself, however. Galileo proceeded to “clearly, though not explicitly” argue for heliocentrism. He was punished for his disobedience and betrayal: a terrible decision, to be sure, but not one driven by anti-science animus.
What can be done about the propagation of such myths about the history of science and religion in K–12 education? In the short term, teachers themselves, especially chairs of departments in history and science, need to take responsibility. If they are unfamiliar with contemporary research in the history of science, they need to rectify this. Galileo Goes to Jail and Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science are collections of short, accessible essays on a wide variety of myths. Those wanting something more substantial might try John Hedley Brooke’s Science and Religion or Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion.
In the long term, schools of education should consider changing their degree requirements to ensure that their undergraduates spend more time on their relevant content areas. Teaching is difficult and studying educational theory and practice is important. But there’s simply no substitute for content mastery. Colleges might consider requiring history and philosophy of science classes for education majors studying to teach history or science (and for all their history and science majors). School districts should prioritize history of science in teachers’ professional development, at least until colleges have caught up.
I have no desire to publicly shame teachers who I trust are doing the best that they can. At the same time, I want to be clear that the conflict thesis is about as out of step with our current historical knowledge as scientific creationism is with contemporary biology. Continuing to teach its myths as fact is educational malpractice. It needs to stop.
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