Book review: “Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu.

 

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How the “Conflict Thesis” threatens both Christianity and Science.

 

 (The review is based on a purchased copy.)

The authors set out both the history of the Conflict Thesis and the historical reality behind the version of history behind that thesis (that Christianity is, and always has been, the regressive enemy of Science and all progress, enlightenment and freedom) and they do this by researching and publishing rather more actual facts than the authors of that thesis, Draper and White, ever did. In doing so, they find (and go a long way towards proving) that not only did Draper and White misrepresent Christianity to the modern world, they also sold the world’s intellectuals a version of history itself that is not only untrue, but ludicrous. To take just one example of this: the idea that when Christians ruled in the Middle Ages, the streets were all ankle or even knee-deep in human and animal excrement. As George Orwell (who kept a lot of farm animals and planted a lot of fruit-trees in his time) would probably observe: to believe that one you really do need to be an intellectual and not a farmer. Because not even Hutchings and Ungureanu seem to fully grasp just how idiotic that “factoid” which so many clever people believe and endlessly repeat, actually is:

Prior to the invention of super-phosphate fertilizers, human and animal excrement (and bones) were too important to agriculture to be wasted in this manner. Even in the 19^th century, there were dung-piles near the Glasgow tenements, so that the dung could be efficiently collected and removed to the fields outside the city where it was needed! And the great clean Victorian clean-up with all its undoubted health benefits, of the Glasgow dung-heaps and the river Thames in London, only happened AFTER the availability of industrial fertilizers allowed it. If it had happened prior, too many nutrients would have been lost and there would eventually have been crop failures. This is also why we do NOT find huge numbers of graves full of bodies from great historical battles before about 1840: the dead went into mass graves until they had rotted to bones and bones were dug up again and ground to fertilizer. (French local authorities sold licences to mine the battlefield of Waterloo for bonemeal.)

That factoid is just one of a whole barrage of non-truths which Draper and White (and, importantly, their supporters) laid down to sustain their thesis. Actually, they did this so systematically and consistently that it is hard to believe that they had very many actual truths at their disposal to support their case! Now, Draper and White were not actually working together as such and they had different motives for doing what they did. The consistency comes from those who chose to support them, to recommend and promote the books that they wrote and the talks that they gave.

The determining factor behind the consistency was (and still is) an agenda, which both philosophies and institutions were created to serve.

Of Popes and Unicorns is Published by Oxford University Press, 2021.