The "warfare thesis" between science and Christianity is a 19th-century invention — chiefly by Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper — that historians of science have spent the last fifty years dismantling.
Christianity is the cradle, not the enemy, of modern science
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Pascal, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel, Lemaître — these were not exceptions; they were the rule. The conviction that the universe would be intelligible to human reason was a specifically Christian conviction — it would not have arisen from a cyclical-pagan or pantheist worldview. As C. S. Lewis put it: "Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator."
The Galileo story is mostly myth
The actual Galileo conflict was not science vs. religion — it was a complex political conflict involving Galileo's confrontational personality, Jesuit astronomers who agreed with much of his work, and a Pope who had been one of his patrons. No serious historian today treats it as the parable of secular schoolbooks.
Current scientific evidence points toward, not away from, theism
- Big Bang cosmology revived the question of the universe's beginning — to the discomfort of materialists who had counted on an eternal universe.
- The fine-tuning of physical constants strongly suggests purpose.
- The discovery of information-rich digital code in DNA fits a designer hypothesis far more naturally than a chance-and-necessity one (Meyer).
The real conflict is between Christianity and philosophical naturalism — not science
Methodological naturalism is a useful working assumption inside a laboratory. Philosophical naturalism is a metaphysical claim that goes far beyond what any experiment could show. Christians can do — and have always done — the former without committing to the latter.