Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes

Footnote

Derrick Peterson, Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: The Strange Tale of How the Conflict of Science and Christianity Was Written Into History (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2020)

Bibliography

Peterson, Derrick. Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: The Strange Tale of How the Conflict of Science and Christianity Was Written Into History. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2020

Publication life cycle / General notes

Cites TFT on medieval investigations of space and time (p. 34); Philoponos (p. 35). Bibliography includes Divine Meaning, Theological Science, and Transformation and Convergence.

Discussed in the Reading Group on May 13, 2021: Video (cf. handout).

Abstract

We are all haunted by histories. They shape our presuppositions and ballast our judgments. In terms of science and religion this means most of us walk about haunted by rumors of a long war. However, there is no such thing as the "history of the conflict of science and Christianity," and this is a book about it. In the last half of the twentieth century a sea change in the history of science and religion occurred, revealing not only that the perception of protracted warfare between religion and science was a curious set of mythologies that had been combined together into a sort of supermyth in need of debunking. It was also seen that this collective mythology arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by historians involved in many sides of the debates over Darwin's discoveries, and from there latched onto the public imagination at large. Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes takes the reader on a journey showing how these myths were constructed, collected together, and eventually debunked. Join us for a story of flat earths and fake footnotes, to uncover the strange tale of how the conflict of science and Christianity was written into history.

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