📘 About This Series
This post is part of a daily response series to The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity by Mark Clark. The series critically engages with each chapter and section of the book, examining Clark’s arguments through the lens of reason, historical evidence, and The God Question’s core philosophy: what’s true doesn’t fear investigation.
Today’s post responds to content found in pages 26-28 of the book — the section titled “The Myth of the Church vs. Science”.
If you’re just joining us, you can view all prior entries in this series on The God Question blog at godordelusion.com\thegodquestion.
In this section of The Problem of God, Mark Clark argues that the supposed historical conflict between the church and science is a myth, fabricated by nineteenth-century skeptics and kept alive by modern atheists.
He claims:
“There was no warfare between science and the church.”
“The church did not persecute Copernicus or Bruno or Galileo for scientific theories.”
“The flat earth story is revisionist propaganda.”
“Christianity birthed modern science.”
It’s a bold attempt to rehabilitate the Church’s image as science’s ally — not its enemy. But how accurate is it?
Let’s examine the claims carefully.
🔍 Claim 1: The Church Never Persecuted Scientists for Their Ideas
Clark argues that Galileo, Bruno, and Copernicus were not persecuted for their science but for theological reasons, and that stories of their mistreatment are “exaggerated” or even “untrue.” He cites Thomas Kuhn, David Lindberg, and Alister McGrath to make this case.
📌 The Reality:
It’s true that some historical details have been dramatized. Bruno wasn’t burned only for heliocentrism — his theological views (e.g., pantheism and denial of the Trinity) were central. Galileo wasn’t tortured — he was sentenced to house arrest. And Copernicus died before the controversy took off.
But let’s not sanitize history:
- The Church did censor and suppress Galileo’s heliocentrism.
- He was forced to recant under threat.
- His writings were banned.
- Scientific work was stifled for decades in Catholic Europe.
So while Clark is right to point out oversimplifications, he goes too far in the other direction. The Church may not have burned people for astronomy, but it actively resisted scientific discoveries when they contradicted its theology.
This wasn’t a partnership. It was control and coercion.
🔍 Claim 2: The Flat Earth Myth Was Fabricated
Clark also claims that atheists falsely accuse the Church of believing in a flat earth — calling it a nineteenth-century invention to smear Christianity.
📌 The Reality:
Here, Clark is mostly correct.
Ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round. Educated medieval scholars also knew it. The idea that medieval Christians broadly believed in a flat earth is indeed an overblown myth — popularized by writers like Washington Irving and John Draper.
So yes, this accusation is historically unfair.
But it’s also a distraction.
Critics of the Church are far more concerned with how dogmatic theology has blocked scientific progress — not whether people thought the Earth was round. This point feels like a rhetorical sleight of hand: correct, but largely irrelevant to the deeper issue.
🔍 Claim 3: Christianity Birthed Modern Science
Clark argues that modern science was “conceived and born” within the matrix of Christian theism — that science grew out of a Christian worldview that saw order, design, and harmony in nature.
He cites Oxford theologian Alister McGrath and others who see Christianity as the “garden” from which modern science grew.
📌 The Reality:
It’s true that many early scientists were Christian. That’s because almost everyone in Europe was Christian at the time. The Church ran the universities. The Bible was the framework.
But correlation isn’t causation.
Here’s the core question:
Did Christianity give rise to science, or did science emerge despite it?
When we look at the broader historical pattern, it’s clear that science advanced most rapidly when it escaped the control of the Church. The Scientific Revolution exploded when natural philosophers began relying on observation and experiment, not revelation and doctrine.
While Christian thought emphasized divine order, it also enforced:
- Biblical literalism
- Heresy trials
- Bans on “forbidden” knowledge
In short: Christianity both nourished and choked the roots of science.
💬 Final Thoughts: Myth-Busting or Revisionism?
Clark’s goal in this chapter is to flip the script — to show that it’s not Christianity that opposed science, but modern secularism that has twisted history to make it look that way.
But in doing so, he replaces one distortion with another.
Yes, the “warfare” narrative is simplistic. But so is the claim that the Church and science have always been friends. The truth is more complex, more nuanced — and less flattering to religious authority.
It wasn’t a war — it was a long, uneasy negotiation.
And history shows that progress most often came when science was freed from theology’s grip, not when it stayed under its thumb.
God or Delusion? 