Essay Review

The Complicated History of Science

and Religion by James C. Ungureanu
Bernard Lightman (Editor). Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Ex-
ploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle. ix + 307 pp., notes, bibl.,
index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. $50 (cloth); ISBN
9780822945741.

D uring the early modern period, an opinion arose that would have lasting consequences.
Certain thinkers of that era began imputing the past with the appellation “middle ages,”
describing those centuries as a period of intellectual stagnation—if not desolation. Among the
earliest of such appraisals came from Francis Bacon, who set the tone when he wrote in his
Novum Organum (1620) that the ages between antiquity and his own were “unfortunate, both
in the quantity and richness of the sciences produced.” The French philosophes would follow
suit. Voltaire, for instance, described medieval Europe as mired in “general decay and degener-
acy.” His younger contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote of previous centuries as “relapsed
into the barbarism of the earliest ages.” And finally, Condorcet, in his 1795 Esquisse, argued that
the “triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the
sciences.” This view, which amounted to a narrative of “conflict” between science and religion,
would be further sharpened and more widely disseminated a century later—and, indeed, contin-
ues to enjoy widespread popularity even today.
But starting in the 1920s, when the nascent discipline of the history of science was first emerging,
scholars were beginning to question the “conflict” narrative. They were beginning to see that the his-
torical relationship between “science and religion” is far too complicated to categorize as simply “con-
flict.” The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, warned readers in 1925 that although
“conflict between religion and science is what naturally occurs to our minds,” the “true facts of the
case are very much more complex.” Interestingly, Whitehead also observed that the very foundations
of modern science were laid in the soil of medieval religious thought, a position that was further sup-
ported in the work of Pierre Duhem, Lynn Thorndike, Charles H. Haskins, Alexandre Koyré, E. A.
Burtt, Marshall Clagett, Amos Funkenstein, David C. Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Marcia L.
Colish, to name just a few. Rather than seeing religion as oppressive or obstructionist, scholars were
beginning to view it as important—if not essential—in the development of modern science.
If the work of early twentieth-century scholarship rejected the notion of “conflict” between
science and religion, by midcentury other scholars were beginning to argue that Christian

James C. Ungureanu is Historian in Residence in the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–
Madison. He is an intellectual historian with a particular interest in the history of religious ideas, from antiquity to the present.
His most recent book is Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, 2019).

Isis, volume 112, number 2. © 2021 by The History of Science Society.

All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2021/0112-0015$10.00.
382
Isis—Volume 112, Number 2, June 2021 383

theology, in particular, made science possible. Scholars such as Robert K. Merton, Michael B.
Foster, Paul. H. Kocher, Richard S. Westfall, Charles Webster, and others saw a specific connec-
tion between the rise of modern science and Protestantism. The “conflict” narrative was begin-
ning to unravel. Some scholars took a more apologetic approach; for example, Reijer Hooykaas,
Stanley L. Jaki, and, more recently, Rodney Stark have argued that, historically, science and
Christianity were essentially harmonious or in concord.
Other scholars, however, sought a more balanced view that avoided the triumphalist narrative
of either “conflict” or “concord” in the history of science and religion. By the mid-1970s, another
major historiographical shift occurred within the scholarship. It became clear that notions of “con-
flict” were now mostly confined to the nineteenth century, to the controversies that broke out in the
fields of geology and biology, and specifically to the religious response to the 1859 publication
of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But even here things were not so simple. Scholars
such as Charles E. Raven, Charles C. Gillispie, and particularly the church historian Owen Chad-
wick noted the distinction “between science when it was against religion and the scientists when
they were against religion.” By the end of the decade, such distinctions were made by Walter F.
Cannon, Robert M. Young, Frank M. Turner, and especially James R. Moore. Indeed, in his sem-
inal Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979), Moore demonstrated the complexity of religious re-
sponses to Darwin’s work.1 Moore’s work made a significant impact on later historians, including
David N. Livingstone, Jon H. Roberts, and Ronald L. Numbers.
The notion of a “complex” relationship between science and religion thus became the clar-
ion call of most historians of science in the later part of the twentieth century. Eschewing trium-
phalist narratives of either conflict or concord, historian of science John Hedley Brooke consol-
idated almost a century of scholarship on historical perspectives on science and religion in his
magisterial Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991). Brooke aimed to “reveal
something of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion as they have inter-
acted in the past.” He concluded that “serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed
so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that
general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.”2
That the real lesson turns out to be “complexity,” Brooke left no doubt. This was of lasting con-
sequence for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between science and religion. “One
consequence,” Brooke wrote with Geoffrey Cantor in their Reconstructing Nature (1998), is “that
it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the historian to sympathise with projects de-
signed to uncover the essence of ‘science,’ the essence of ‘religion’ and therefore some timeless,
inherent ‘relationship’ between them.” Focusing on context—which includes the historical, cul-
tural, social, political, economic, and so on—along with a renewed focus on biography, on seeing
people “whole” rather than as mere “ideas,” are just some of the new duties the historian must at-
tend to. Attending to context and the individual also encourages us, almost out of necessity, to de-
bunk familiar, conventional interpretations of the past. Historians are called to reject the “subser-
vience of history to partisan interests.” In short, when one takes history seriously, accounting for the
relationship between science and religion becomes more and more “complex and unruly.”3
Brooke’s emphasis on complexity can be jarring for some. In his Presidential Address to the
British Society for the History of Science in Leeds in 1997, Brooke attempted to address several
potential concerns his new revisionist historiography might cause. He discusses how this new and

1
James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great
Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
2
John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 321, 5.
3
John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh: Clark, 1998),
pp. 8, 17, 69.
384 James C. Ungureanu The Complicated History of Science and Religion

radically pluralistic historiography has encouraged a “proliferation of methodologies and practices,”

leaving some apparently with “a sense of fragmentation, even disintegration.” The history of science
has been transformed over the last century from a narrative of continuity and universality to a “history
of ‘science in context.’” “If the history of science becomes a history of the differentiation of context,”
he goes on to say, and “if we stress the permeability of the boundaries with which the word ‘science’
has been ringed, does the subject simply dissolve into fragments of socio-cultural history?” Such a
prospect would no doubt unsettle many. “But if the history of science has no future,” he went
on, “histories of different sciences in their different local contexts surely still have a bright one. As
scholars in the field we can map the multiple spaces in which the sciences have taken shape and
we can relish the differentiation.” Although revisionist historiographers of science are undoubtedly
“kill-joys,” dismissing legends, dissolving myths, and destroying exciting narratives of conflict, there
are still grounds for optimism, in that they also disclose an important “symbiosis,” revealing “the di-
versity in the methods and practices of scientific investigation,” demonstrating how scientific author-
ity has been “constituted in different societies,” and showing “how scientific knowledge has been
used time and again to legitimate social and political preferences.” Brooke would further clarify
his argument in a series of forums in the journal Historically Speaking. Serious historical research,
he writes, instills a “suspicion of metanarratives and an insistence on historical complexity.” Indeed,
historians cannot suppress references to complexity. But it is important to emphasize that Brooke
was not promoting a new “thesis,” in contrast to conflict or concord theses. Rather, he saw “com-
plexity” as simply reality. It is not a thesis, he wrote, and thus rather than “being placed alongside
other theses, it should be permitted, at least in the first instance, to function as a critique.” In
short, complexity is not a “hypothesis” about the historical relationship between science and re-
ligion; rather, it is a “description” of their entanglements.
The current volume under review, edited by historian of Victorian science Bernard Light-
man, is dedicated to Brooke and his “supreme omniscience and boundless generosity.” The aim
of the volume, as Lightman notes, is “to move the study of the history of modern science and
religion forward by evaluating the utility of the complexity principle since it was first proposed
in systematic form by John Brooke over twenty-five years ago” (p. 7). To this end, the volume
is divided into three parts. In Part I, contributors examine certain episodes in the relationship be-
tween science and religion in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Erika Lorraine Milam, for
instance, explores the research of anthropologist Irven DeVore and particularly his involvement
in Harvard’s MACOS (Man: A Course of Study) program. DeVore’s work, however, was attacked
by conservatives for its “secular humanism” and by liberals for its “biological essentialism,” which
seemed to reinforce gendered norms. This criticism served only to encourage DeVore’s “scien-
tism,” argues Milam (p. 21). Thus, in the case of DeVore, the science-religion debate was com-
plicated by political ideologies.
Miguel de Asúa then offers a wide-ranging account of Catholicism in Argentina, spanning
1750 to 1950. In this “long view,” de Asúa argues, distinctions can be observed with each suc-
cessive period. He, too, explores important political dimensions of the debate. In colonial times,
for instance, relations between science and religion were generally seen as harmonious (pp. 38–
40), when Jesuit missionaries and priests were devoted to God’s “Two Books,” the book of
God’s word and the book of God’s works. During the nineteenth century, however, certain po-
litical figures demanded a more “secularizing” civil policy, which led to numerous confronta-
tions between liberal and conservative public intellectuals, theologians, and politicians, partic-
ularly those who advocated some form of positivism (pp. 40–45). But as de Asúa is careful to
point out, “science was certainly not a cause of the secularizing policy implemented by the
liberals . . . but it was an important argumentative resource” (p. 42). By the second half of
the twentieth century, many Catholics were simply exhausted by religious and political infight-
ing, to the point of indifference (pp. 45–47).
Isis—Volume 112, Number 2, June 2021 385

In her chapter, Sarah A. Qidwai contends that we need a more “global” and “comparative
approach” to the historical relationship between science and religion. She argues that the bulk
of scholarship concentrates on European and Judeo-Christian narratives, and thus in order to
more properly assess the “complexity thesis,” it will require a wider historical perspective. To
this end, she explores the life and work of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a nineteenth-century In-
dian Muslim reformer. This forgotten figure in the debate is a welcome contribution to a more
global approach. But it should be noted that many such works do in fact exist, particularly those
by Pervez Hoodbhoy, Toby Huff, Muzaffar Iqbal, Daniel Stolz, and others—but which, admit-
tedly, stand outside the mainstream publication industry of the history of science and religion.
However, Brooke and Numbers do address this concern in their Science and Religion around
the World (2011), including some of the contributors to the very volume under review.4
Finally, John Stenhouse focuses on Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, who saw
the practice of spreading science as a legitimate part of their vocation (p. 66). However, Stenhouse
believes the evidence points to both conflict and harmony, and thus such master-narratives of either
are simply untenable. He writes, “science, Christianity, and other world religions remained pub-
licly as well as privately entangled” (p. 68). Stenhouse sees “mid-scale” harmonies in the work
of David Livingstone, William Carey, Suzanne Aubert, James Dana, and others. As is well known,
early anthropologists relied heavily on information supplied by missionaries. But there are plenty of
examples of “mid-scale” conflicts in the minds of individual missionaries as well. Thus conflict as
well as cooperation characterized relationships between missionaries and the sciences. Conflict
largely emerged, however, during midcentury, “as some metropolitan scientific leaders began
wielding science against the churches and for agnosticism, positivism, rationalism, pantheism,
or materialism,” as Stenhouse observes (p. 77). A new generation of anthropologists, while still re-
lying on missionary information, extended into the social sciences an antimissionary sentiment.
Part II draws from recent work on media studies, history of the book, and nineteenth-
century periodicals. It begins with Lightman’s own study of nineteenth-century English month-
lies, especially Macmillan’s Magazine. Lightman urges historians of science and religion to incor-
porate the insights of print culture in their attempts to access the relationship between science and
religion. Macmillan’s, for instance, published numerous articles by Thomas H. Huxley, Charles
Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Stanley, J. R. Seeley, and many others who debated the com-
plicated relationship between science and religion (p. 86). As Lightman puts it, “complexity now
has to include an understanding of the role of periodicals and their competing visions of the
ideal public space for discussion and debate” (p. 108).
This is followed by a piece by Sylvia Nickerson, who also investigates the study of print cul-
ture at the end of the nineteenth century. She pays particular attention to Darwin’s publisher,
John Murray III, and the careful relationship they negotiated in working together. She argues
that publishers reveal “a complex negotiation of religious belief, commerce, politics, and class”
(p. 110), which ultimately shaped the public debate on science and religion. Murray, an An-
glican who supported the practice of natural theology, was at odds with Darwin’s theory of evo-
lution (p. 113). Yet Murray, ever the methodical businessman, put his doubts aside and suc-
cessfully published Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. However, the commercial success of
Darwin’s work was not enough to sustain the relationship. In time both “Murray and Darwin
took steps to entrench themselves in their respective, opposing worldviews” (p. 122).
The following chapter by Mehmet Alper Yalçinkaya, who exemplifies a more global ap-
proach, examines what he calls the “harmony thesis” or “harmony narrative” in Turkish media
from 1950 to 1970. He contends that during the early Cold War, the Turkish conservative press

4
John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Science and Religion around the World (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).
386 James C. Ungureanu The Complicated History of Science and Religion

promoted a narrative of harmony between science and religion. Interestingly enough, the re-
ligiously liberal denied such concord. According to Yalçinkaya, all this attests to the intransi-
gent cultural-political struggles of the period. The debate between science and religion among
Turks of the Cold War era reveals its broader sociopolitical implications. Like other contribu-
tors to the volume, then, Yalçinkaya explores the cultural and political functions of the rela-
tionship between science and religion.
Charting new territory, Alexander Hall looks at the reception of Jacob Bronowski’s 1973 BBC
television series, The Ascent of Man, what he calls a “humanist blockbuster.” There has been very
little published on how such popular documentaries chart the relationship between science and
religion, so Hall’s important study is one of the highlights of this volume. Bronowski’s “humanist
and progressive vision of science” was one of the first big-budget documentaries that utilized grand
narratives centered on the progressive nature of scientific discovery (pp. 145–146). The response to
the series was surprisingly complex. “Overwhelmingly,” Hall writes, “the main criticism leveled at
the series were about the oversimplification of historical developments and the overstretch of what
science can, and does, tell us about our society and the physical world” (p. 156).
Thomas H. Aechtner concludes the section by building on research he has previously published
on classroom textbooks. Earlier he had examined introductory anthropology and sociology text-
books, but now he interrogates the contents of textbooks in astronomy, biology, physics, and other
similar pedagogical materials that offer students abridged chronicles of the “Renaissance,” “En-
lightenment,” and the “Scientific Revolution.” Aechtner is particularly concerned with conflict
narratives in textbook overviews of heliocentrism and the reception of Darwin’s theory of evolu-
tion. According to Aechtner, the “conflict thesis” persists in various academic disciplines (p. 161).
In Part III, the final section of the book, Ronald L. Numbers surveys the factors contributing
to the persistent popularity of the “conflict thesis” (p. 183). He begins with a historiographical
survey of scholars rejecting the conflict narrative, culminating with Brooke’s work. Thereafter,
virtually all historians of science and religion had given up on conflict for some version of com-
plexity (p. 185). But having said that, Numbers admits that the narrative persists because con-
flict really does occur, professionally, psychologically, and ideologically. He thus reprises an ear-
lier solution to the “conflict thesis” by seeking “mid-scale patterns” or generalizations—such as
naturalization, privatization, secularization, globalization, and radicalization—in order to explain
the historical relationship between science and religion. Numbers contends that the “conflict the-
sis” remains a particularly powerful weapon in the hands of both Christian fundamentalists and
the New Atheists.
This is followed by an engaging piece by Ian Hesketh, in which he examines Sigmund
Freud’s famous observation that the history of science is best understood as a “series of dethrone-
ments” of humanity’s anthropocentrism (p. 192). The first blow, according to Freud, occurred
when Copernicus proved that the Earth was not the physical center of the universe. The second
took place when Darwin questioned human superiority by arguing for our humble animal ori-
gins in the evolutionary process. The third blow was delivered by Freud himself. But according to
Hesketh, Freud was not the first to use this trope. This dethronement metaphor was largely in-
vented by Enlightenment thinkers, and by the end of the nineteenth century, thinkers were put-
ting Darwin and Copernicus side by side as decentering humanity. The trope had been used by
figures as diverse as John Tyndall, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Haeckel, and Grant Allen. But
as Hesketh observes, the trope also served as a valuable rhetorical strategy for “theistic” readings of
science, in the work of such thinkers as John Fiske, Henry Drummond, and Alfred Russel Wal-
lace. These examples show, according to Hesketh, how easy it was to “invert the dethronement
trope by arguing that the revolutions symbolized by Copernicus and Darwin provide evidence for
the uniqueness of human species in regard to the rest of nature” (p. 202). The dethronement
trope had thus turned into an elevation trope. Hesketh concludes by saying that “the meanings
Isis—Volume 112, Number 2, June 2021 387

of scientific theories are always debatable and open to multiple interpretations. They don’t speak
for themselves, as it were. They require interpreters” (p. 205). Also important, these interpreta-
tions are often embedded in “imagined pasts” that are constructed in order to present a particular
view about the development of science, including its relationship with religion.
In the following chapter, Diarmid A. Finnegan draws on the work of historical geography,
with their “paradigms,” “interactional spaces,” “heterotopia,” “situated knowledge,” and so on,
to emphasize the diverse narratives on science and religion. He speaks of the so-called spatial turn
in the social sciences and humanities, and particularly the work of David Livingstone, who ex-
plicitly outlined a historical geology of science (p. 207). This “spatialized historiography,” ac-
cording to Finnegan, reinforces “a pluralist account of science” that resists “prevailing notions
of a single scientific method or unitary scientific enterprise” (p. 207). This leads Finnegan to ar-
gue that historical geography shows the complicated “entanglements of science and religion.”
Finnegan pays particular attention to recent scholarship on “global” Darwinism (pp. 211–212).
He then transitions to a brief discussion of John Henry Newman and John Tyndall and how both
argued, for different motives and reasons, for the independence of physical science from theol-
ogy. Regarding territory, Finnegan, drawing from the work of Thomas Gieryn, John Agnew, Pe-
ter Harrison, and others, points to the various “boundaries” (intellectual and political, for exam-
ple) operating in variegated science-religion discussions (pp. 215–219).
Fittingly, Peter Harrison concludes the volume by arguing that there exists a sort of symbiotic
relationship between historians of conflict and historians of complexity. The “conflict thesis” has
“motivated and given shape to much historical research in science and religion,” he writes
(p. 234). He quips that the history of science and religion has often been divided by “lumpers”
and “splitters.” The lumpers are those who argue for either conflict or concord, both of which fail
or overlook historical nuance. Following Brooke, Harrison argues that the “complexity thesis” is not
a thesis, but rather a reaction against the lumpers. “Highlighting historical complexity,” he writes, “is
not to be confused with articulating a competing thesis; rather it amounts to asserting that no over-
arching narrative is possible” (p. 224). Moreover, while complexity is a good first step, there needs to
be more work done than simply “mythbusting.” To this end, Harrison wants to connect the science-
and-religion story to the larger “secularization thesis.” Indeed, according to Harrison, “the conflict
thesis was often embedded within some version of a secularization story” (p. 227). Looking toward
the future, Harrison suggests that recent treatments of secularization are directly relevant to an un-
derstanding of both the deficiencies of the conflict story and its remarkable persistence.
In the afterword, John Brooke repeats his emphasis that he never intended to put forward a
thesis. “I have insisted,” he writes, “that complexity is a historical reality, not a thesis” (p. 235).
He was simply doing good historical scholarship. Neither polemics nor apologetics is the task of
the historian. Ultimately, if the complexity thesis has any use, it serves best as a critique or cor-
rective to essentialist and reductionist narratives of conflict or concord. As a critique, then, the
complexity principle will serve its purpose as an antidote to persistent myths and anecdotes that
pervade popular understandings.
While this collection of essays is undoubtedly admirable, it is marred by one important—
indeed, crucial—qualification that affects the volume as a whole. In criticizing the conflict nar-
rative, most of the contributors to this volume trace its origins to two late nineteenth-century
works: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and
Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
(1896). Indeed, since the 1980s, Draper and White have become the official whipping boys of
the new revisionist historiography. A consensus emerged that Draper and White developed,
defined, and defended the “conflict thesis.” My own research, however, demonstrates that Draper
and White, contrary to conventional interpretations, did not in fact posit an endemic and irrev-
ocable conflict between “science and religion.” Indeed, if we examine more carefully their lives
388 James C. Ungureanu The Complicated History of Science and Religion

and writings, rather than perfunctorily repeating past scholarly assessments, a more nuanced
interpretation emerges. A more generous reading reveals that, unlike the New Atheists, who in-
tentionally write to advance unbelief, Draper and White hoped their narratives would actually
preserve religious belief. For Draper and White, science was a reforming agent of knowledge,
society, and religion. Indeed, for Draper and White, science was ultimately a tool for a much
larger and much more important argument, one that pitted two theological traditions against
each other—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, con-
servative, and orthodox Christianity. They thus conceived of conflict as occurring within a reli-
gious epistemology, between two distinct “modes” or “epochs” in human thought—one scientific
or progressive and the other theological or traditional. Conflict, in this sense, was positively ben-
eficial, as it would assist in the progress of religion. The titles of their most well- known works, then,
were only tangentially related to their content and aim.
This is an observation Brooke himself made, when he argued in his 1991 book that “con-
flicts allegedly between science and religion may turn out to be between rival scientific inter-
ests, or conversely between rival theological factions.”5 Draper and White considered them-
selves advanced “theists” of a liberal Protestant variety. Thus, while historians of science have
debunked many of the “myths” found in the narratives of Draper and White, their central thesis
remains, either rising again in smaller-scale struggles or internal, mental dissonance. Unfortu-
nately, this volume does not explore the potential for undermining the “conflict thesis” by show-
ing that Draper and White themselves did not adhere to it in its simplified form.
The authors in this volume have all taken the conventional view. But like the “conflict thesis”
itself, this conventional genealogy also turns out to be a “myth.” How could such a modern myth
occur in otherwise excellent historical scholarship? This oversight raises intriguing questions. Per-
haps the perfunctory repetition of the “Draper-White” thesis has prevented some scholars from tak-
ing more seriously their actual writings. The mere experience of careful reading is often enough to
temper the conventional image. Another explanation for such an oversight might be that revisionist
history of science takes its shape in response to essentially modern challenges or challengers. That is,
it is apparent that what historians of science are attacking in the “conflict thesis” is actually a view
largely promoted in the work of New Atheists, who undoubtedly display the most superficial under-
standing of the history of science and religion. Ironically, some New Atheists have also claimed to be
following in the footsteps of Draper and White. So it seems both the revisionist scholarship and the
New Atheists interpret the origins of the “conflict thesis” the same way. To me, that is a glaring prob-
lem, particularly for historians of science who claim to be advocates of the complexity principle. In
short, this volume is a great contribution to the ongoing emphasis on complexity. Yet to move for-
ward, such scholarship needs to ultimately reframe the issue and reorient to a broader range of con-
cerns. What we need, in short, is to uncover the “archaeology of mythmaking” in the history of sci-
ence, as David Livingstone has put it. We need to scrutinize “the central functions such legends
perform.” Like Brooke, we need to recognize that the origins, development, and popularization
of the “conflict thesis” itself is an extremely complex affair. This too is not based on any particular
“thesis” but simply good scholarship, carefully examining both public and private spheres. Other-
wise, we seem to be at a scholarly impasse, consistently denouncing a thesis that, in fact, never
has existed.

5
Brooke, Science and Religion (cit. n. 2), p. 5.