Are science and Christianity enemies?
✓Fact-checked & reviewed for Nicene orthodoxyHow we review →No — and the “war” between them is the modern invention here, not the peace. The idea of an age-old conflict comes from two nineteenth-century books — John William Draper's (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's (1896) — which were hugely popular and, as history, largely inaccurate. Modern specialists, many of them secular, have retired the “conflict thesis” as bad history.
The men who founded modern science — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton — mostly believed they were studying nature because it was God's handiwork. The careful claim is that certain Christian convictions (a free Creator, an ordered and intelligible creation you must go and check) supplied fertile preconditions for science. That is not the slogan “no Christianity, no science,” which overreaches badly — Greek mathematics and the Islamic Golden Age were indispensable too.
What about Galileo? The Roman Catholic authorities of that moment were wrong to condemn him, and that should be conceded without excuse. But one real injustice is not a three-century war, and in 1616 the evidence still favoured the older astronomy.
None of this proves Christianity is true — a worldview can be fruitful and still be false. The case for the faith rests on the resurrection, argued elsewhere; this only clears away a barrier that was never really there.