Do Theology and Science Conflict?
For too long in the modern period, theology and the special sciences (that is, the natural and social sciences) were seen as being at war with one another. This perspective, called the conflict model by Ian Barbour, dominated the thinking of Enlightenment rationalists. These overconfident believers in the triumph of science accepted the general cult of progress found in Western culture from the early modern period until the world wars. A good example of one such true believer in scientific progress was Andrew D. White (1832-1918), the first president of Cornell University. Cornell was the first private university founded in this country on purely secular principles, the implicit judgment being that religious bias warps the quest for scientific truth. White helped make the conflict model popular through his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896). In the minds of “enlightened ” and truly “scientific” thinkers (as they thought of themselves), religion too often resulted
