Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes

“Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes offers a comprehensive and compelling demolition of the tired myth of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Peterson not only exposes the historical bankruptcy of this familiar story, but also shows how it became a foundational narrative for modern Western modernity and why it persists. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, this book deserves a wide readership.”


—Peter Harrison, author of The Territories of Science and Religion





“Derrick Peterson combines painstakingly detailed historical research with a delightful writing style to tell the story of a famous war that never actually happened. Through primary source after primary source Peterson uncovers the neglected truth that the supposedly eternal conflict between religion and science is a myth, not only in the technical sense of a symbolic story that people tell to express their worldview, but also in the popular sense. Despite being something that everyone knows, it never happened. Perhaps because the story of something that didn’t happen is hard to tell compellingly, this truth that is known to many historians, scientists, and theologians is little known to the wider public, and is even unfamiliar to some who ought to know the truth. Peterson shows himself a gifted storyteller as well as scholar, combining true accounts of famous events (which prove no less interesting than the legends that have grown up around them and in some cases have replaced them) with the story of how those events were overlaid and refashioned into the myth so many treat as common knowledge today: the untrue history of the war between religion and science. In an era full of so much untruth, Peterson’s book is a breath of fresh air.”


—James F. McGrath, Butler University





“‘What if everything you ever believed about the obvious conflict between science and Christianity was wrong?’ This is how Peterson’s book could have begun. By the end of the book one is treated to an exceptional, lively, humorous, informative, and compelling account of how the fictitious idea that there ever was an all-out war between science and Christianity became fact, largely by means of the fun game many of us played in our youth known variously as whisper down the lane, broken telephone, grapevine, or gossip. This work on the historiography of science and Christianity is must-reading for high schoolers and college students, along with their parents and professors, and will, if heeded, change the way future generations will see the world. It is not easy to debunk a history that never happened, but Peterson has done precisely that, and achieved it admirably. The history of science is littered with stellar figures of immense importance, erudite thinking, and deeply Christian convictions. A new generation of Christians needs to be reacquainted with these scientific saints and Peterson’s work is a sure guide to this task.”


—Myk Habets, Laidlaw College, New Zealand





“Derrick Peterson is seeking to wake us from our dogmatic slumbers. Historians of science, scholars of religion, and theologians often plough separate furrows, paying little attention to each other’s work. But in Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes, Peterson has brought them all into conversation, condensing a truly vast amount of scholarship. He has shown, moreover, that scholars ignore each other at their own peril. Despite over a hundred years of scholarship debunking the so-called ‘conflict thesis,’ the idea that science and religion are at war, perceptions of conflict persist. The only way forward from our scholarly impasse is to combine these fields of scholarship to paint a more comprehensive picture of what is going on. Impeccably researched and thoroughly readable, Peterson offers the reader a tour de force of the best research in the history of science, religion, and theology.”


—James C. Ungureanu, author of Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict





“Those who set the historiographical terms of debate frame the narrative involving the alleged conflict of Christian faith and science. Derrick Peterson’s learned interdisciplinary study tracing the formation and deconstruction of the erroneous though ever-popular warfare thesis carefully sets the stage for future constructive work recounting the complex developments of scientific history involving Christianity. Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes provides the kind of critical analysis and creative catalyst so greatly needed today if we are to build nuanced understanding and trust between the scientific and faith communities for the sake of human flourishing.”


—Paul Louis Metzger, Multnomah University & Seminary





“Is the Christian faith locked in inevitable conflict with modern science? Historians of science repeat their answer with a resounding ‘No!’ There was, however, a grand mythology of conflict woven, from Da Vinci to Darwin, through Galileo, Columbus, and the Scopes Trial. A false history was fabricated, a grand myth of conflict. Historians are frustrated. Why won’t this stubborn pseudohistory die? To the rescue comes Peterson, a historian extraordinaire with many stories to tell. Exuding a palpable glee, he quests to debunk the grand pseudohistorical myths of conflict. His book about books leads the reader in an adventure across centuries. Hacking through the webs of false references and out-right fabrications, the payoff is a glimpse of what really happened. The truth is far more hopeful than the fiction. Rather than inevitable conflict, the true arc of science and religion might be dialogue, maybe even friendship. May this book get the wide readership it deserves. Maybe then, finally, historians of science might no longer need to debunk, yet again, the stubborn myths of the warfare thesis.”


—S. Joshua Swamidass, author of The Genealogical Adam and Eve





“Historians of modern science have time and again debunked the old saw that Christian faith and scientific reason have stood in deeply entrenched conflict with one another, and yet that myth remains etched into the popular imagination. In hopes of sanding away these fixed paths in our collective memory, Derrick Peterson offers us more than simply another genealogy debunking the warfare thesis. Rather, Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes offers us a deeply learned and absorbing meta-genealogy: a story of why and how the historiography that manufactured the myth of faith/science conflict came to be superseded by the alternative and debunking historiography that we find today. The result is among the clearest and most bracing articulations I’ve read on the complex historical interplay between religion and science. Peterson’s narrative corrects our retellings of that interplay in the past. But more than that, Flat Earths challenges us to make explicit our present interests in such retellings and encourages us to imagine what sort of future for science and religion we are projecting with our historiographies. A remarkable first book by a formidable young scholar.”


—Sameer Yadav, The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God: Toward a Theological Empiricism





“In this remarkable volume, Peterson collates and contributes to a quiet revolution in the world of scholarship that is just now being disseminated to the masses. In your hands lies not just a book but the intersection of more scholarly threads than I thought possible in a single volume. Like a relentless detective, Peterson removes the dramatic curtain that has been put over our collective consciousness for so very long, and what remains is a tale of mere mortals, behaving very much as they do today. None will leave without enduring the slow dissipation of myths that we didn’t know we believed. The cosmos that remains is, of course, so much more interesting and grand. This should serve as the definitive nail in the coffin of the warfare thesis for a generation to come. Even more than that, and especially delightful, it is a model of intellectual curiosity—of what scholarship ought to be.”


—Joseph Minich, The Davenant Institute





“Peterson’s detailed and well-researched description and argument ought to dispel any notion that the earliest ‘scientists’ were hindered by religion in their pursuit of understanding the natural world. A must read.”


—Mike L. Gurney, Multnomah University