Popular intellectual culture has often pictured science and religion as fundamental adversaries, battling for the intellectual allegiances of reflective people. That picture has been buttressed by the well-known story of the conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church at the turn of the seventeenth century and by the story of the religious conflicts surrounding the work of Charles Darwin since the middle of the nineteenth century (see Evans, this volume). The adversarial picture has been appealing both to religious people of an anti-scientific bent and to scientific people of an anti-religious bent. However, a careful study of the history of the relationship between religion and natural science does not bear out that adversarial picture.

Of course there have been episodes of conflict, such as those surrounding the ideas of Galileo and Darwin, but to view these episodes simply as battles in an ongoing “war between science and religion” would be to misread history. These famous conflicts are clearly situations in which new scientific ideas are in opposition with traditional religious ideas. A careful study of history shows, however, that those traditional religious ideas, at least in the most famous conflicts, had become accepted parts of intellectual tradition in large measure because they had been developed to fit coherently with ideas of the earlier traditional science. These stories of development will comprise the central theme of this chapter. One of the easiest things to forget about our modern distinctions among various areas of scholarly inquiry is how very modern they are.