For the record, NSCE takes a very different approach than Dawkins. 
“For the record”, Joshua Swamidass, you entirely miss my point – which was that juxtaposing Flat Earth and Creationism is entirely innocent (and thus is also done by an organisation that “takes a very different approach than Dawkins”) and thus provides no basis whatsoever for his accusation.
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For whatever it’s worth I think one of the larger issues with supernaturalism (in no way exclusive to Christianity) is it’s influence on questions of health, both physical and mental.
Never mind views on the surface topology of Earth, there has been SO MUCH quackery through the ages, and still is, because people thought diseases and mental health problems were caused by things like sin, curses, witchcraft, or evil spirits, and that the mind was due to an immaterial soul, and that people could be possessed by demons, devils, or controlled by spells cast by wizards and witches.
That things like water, food, or your home could be “blessed” and “sanctified” (or alternatively, cursed or haunted), that speaking “holy” or “sacred” words or wearing useless trinkets had real world effects, that people with mental health problems, or epilepsy could be exorcised, or innumerable other fatuous supernaturalist sentiments.
To be accurate I don’t think this is uniquely a problem with religion only, and that the same sorts of supernaturalistic-type sentiments also exist on many types of “secular” or new-age religions who still engage in a sort of magical thinking.
I’m thinking of ideas like homeopathy, that water has some sort of magical memory properties. I think even something like the naturalistic fallacy is a sort of magical or supernaturalist thinking where “natural” things are somehow assumed to be much better or more appropriate for human consumption or whatever. This whole thing with natural versus artificial, or made by nature (or by God) versus things made by humans.
And then there’s all the astrological bullshit that has influenced people’s decision making. The relative positions of the stars and planets were taken to be signs, blessings, omens, or symbols put there by God and things like that.
We still find this kind of nonsense propagated today. There are still people who think natural disasters or even cultural and political events and phenomena are caused by sin. Women show their breasts on the beaches is why that Earthquake happened. Homosexuality caused 911. Plagues and pandemics is God’s punishment for whatever.
How many people really believed in a flat Earth? I don’t much care, but please don’t pretend there isn’t still and hasn’t been an inordinate amount of magical bs believed by religious people through the ages.
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I have no problem with true histories of incorrect and silly beliefs. The issue is with false histories of conflict.
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If we are talking “false histories of conflict”, then you really cannot avoid Patterson’s false claim that prominent atheist scientists “perpetuate the idea that Christians because of the flat earth, and now six-day creationism, have always opposed science in the majority”.
That it is false can be seen from the fact that:
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he has tacitly admitted in this post that he has no firmer basis for his claims than the quotes I provided, and
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to claim that these quotes provide an adequate basis for his claim would, for example, also require admission that the story in John 6:1-14 likewise provides an adequate basis for claiming that Jesus endorses the McDonalds’ ‘Filet o Fish’ burger, and for similar absurdities. The degree of overlap between the supposed ‘basis’ and the claim is just too meager for this to be remotely credible.
But I think there’s a wider point. We cannot dismiss the Conflict Thesis simply because arguments have been made for (some versions of) it, that have been based on falsehood and exaggeration. Just like we cannot dismiss the case against the Conflict Thesis, simply because of arguments that have been made against it have been made on the basis of falsehood and exaggeration.
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While it is, undoubtedly, a good idea to get history right, my own feelings about conflict are less about fretting over what happened in the 16th century and more over the fact that the most popular strains of American religion today are locked in a conflict with science that is harmful to us all. Sometimes I do not really understand why people are so very concerned with this historical question – creationists thump on it in some of their books, insisting that there’s no inherent conflict between science and religion, and then go on to wage war on science, apparently figuring nobody will notice the tension.
The result is that I tend to wonder, whenever this sort of thing comes up, if it is not, in effect, a mere distraction from the profound and horrifying problems of our own time. Who cares if the way things are is not, in principle, the way they must be? We still have to deal with the conflict we face.
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Yes, I would agree that the Conflict Thesis (and particularly the Draper and White forms of it) has become a convenient ‘whipping boy’ for apologetics purposes. Any suggestion that the relationship between science in religion is less than perfectly harmonious can then be tarred by association.
This makes me particularly wary of attempts to overstate the case against the Conflict Thesis, particularly when it comes from religiously-affiliated sources.
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To answer my own question, the main articulation of this viewpoint appears to be in John Hedley Brooke’s 1991 book Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Wikipedia describes it as:
The book identifies three traditional views of the relationship between science and religion found in historical analyses: conflict, complementarity, and commonality. The book portrays all three as oversimplifications. It offers up the alternative notion of complexity, which bases the relationship between science and religion on changing circumstances where it is defined upon each particular historical situation and the actual beliefs and ideas of the scientific and religious figures involved.
Brooke himself describes it thusly:
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. Members of the Christian churches have not all been obscurantists; many scientists of stature have professed a religious faith, even if their theology was sometimes suspect. Conflicts allegedly between science and religion may turn out to be between rival scientific interests, or conversely between rival theological factions. Issues of political power, social prestige, and intellectual authority have repeatedly been at stake. And the histories written by protagonists have reflected their own preoccupations. In his efforts to boost the profile of a rapidly professionalizing scientific community, at the expense of the cultural and educational leadership of the clergy, Darwin’s champion, T. H. Huxley, found a conflict model congenial. Extinguished theologians, he declared, lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.
The purpose of this book is not to recover the corpses. It is to display the diversity, the subtlety, and ingenuity of the methods employed, both by apologists for science and for religion, as they have wrestled with fundamental questions concerning their relationship with nature and with God. Such is the richness of the subject that it is well to set aside one’s preconceptions. There are surprises in store. The same Franklin who devised the lightning conductor was not ashamed to say that, as for the nature of electricity, he was still in the dark. He was ashamed about the confidence with which he had earlier thought the subject mastered. As he reflected on the succession of his theories, he observed that one use of electricity had been to make a vain man humble. Franklin had recognized, as Francis Bacon had before him, a congruence between the virtue of humility and the demands of an experimental method. He had recognized that the majestic towers of scientific theory could crumble as spectacularly as the towers of great cathedrals. (pp 6-7)
Addendum:
This passage seems relevant:
Despite the impossibility of an objective assessment, there are, however, considerations that suggest that the conflict has been exaggerated in the interests of scientism and secularism. Because it has also been underplayed in the interests of religious apologetics, a degree of critical detachment is required. (p45)
Whether you see a conflict seems to depend on how you look at it.
Back in my days as a Christian, roughly ages 11-23, I never found any conflict. Yes, there were apparent conflicts, but they all seemed resolvable. From a scientific perspective, Genesis 1 is wrong. But, as I understood it, Genesis 1 was never intended as a science text book. It was an account of how pre-scientific people viewed there world. And, looked at that way, there wasn’t any problem.
Similarly, when I first heard of evolution (as a teenager), I thought it very interesting in that it explained much of what we see about the biosphere. And I did not see any necessary conflict with Christianity. God could use evolution as His way of creating.
In later life, where I have occasionally debated creationists, there is very obvious conflict. The creationists are unwilling to look at their scriptures in the way that I did. So they say a sharp conflict.
I’m inclined to think that the real conflict is that of form vs. substance. If you emphasize form (such as the strict scriptural wording), you will see conflict. If you emphasize substance (the ideas behind the wording) you won’t see the same conflict.
The conflict of form vs. substance seems to affect many aspects of life, not just religion. Conservatives tend to emphasize form, while pragmatists seem to emphasize substance.
We have seen this play out during the pandemic. Anthony Fauci has been giving advice on what to do. And the formalists are accusing Fauci of telling lies, because his advice has changed over time. The pragmatists have understood that advice should change as more evidence becomes available.
Getting back to religion, the pragmatists emphasize the substance of Christianity, which they seen in the teachings of Jesus (such as "love thy neighbor). The formalists instead emphasize form, such as the rituals and the Levitical laws.
Similarly, we see a lot of criticism of “scientism”, because the conservatives see the form of science but fail to grasp its substance.
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