b'and human dissection, or how the CatholicBut from where does the myth of the ages-Church burned at the stake the earlylong warfare between religion and science scientist Giordano Bruno (15481600) forderive? According to historian of science his scientifi c support of heliocentrism. 3 Thomas Dixon, the confl ict thesis was inventedStudents are oft en surprised to learnby anti-church rationalists of the European that these stories are false in a varietyEnlightenment in the late 1700s and then embellished and propagated by anti-Christian of ways. As a number of contemporarysecular free-thinkers in the late 1800s. 5historians of science have pointed out, theThe Enlightenment rationalists contrasted truth is that the church never did any of these things. In fact, the Catholic Churchtheir own Age of Reason with what encouraged the early practices of vaccinationthey called the Dark Ages of Christian and supported human dissection. Moreover,Europe, and they promoted the story of the there is not one clearly documentedwarfare between science and religion to instance of the church ever burning anyonemake a case for social revolution. Among at the stake for scientifi c opinions. 4 these Enlightenment rationalists were the French patriot Voltaire (16941778) and While professional historians of sciencethe American patriot Thomas Paine (1737try their best to set the record straight, a1809), both scientifi c thinkers who were good story dies hard, and the notion ofopposed to Christianity and who viewed the the perennial warfare between scienceinstitutional churches of France and England and religion is a persistent myth.as the oppressive tentacles of the established ARTICLE 31'