Christians fought Galileo, deny evolution, and reject climate science — the whole tradition is anti-science and anti-intellectual at its core.

Why people find it persuasive

Well-known flashpoints (the Galileo affair, young-earth creationism's prominence in American evangelicalism, some Christian climate skepticism) are real and give the impression of a structural pattern of hostility to science.

Important distinctions

• • The Galileo affair's actual complicated history (papal politics, Galileo's own combative rhetoric, and unresolved physics of the day) vs. its popular caricature (church vs. science as such).
• • A specific American evangelical subculture's young-earth commitments vs. Christianity globally and historically.
• • Faith and reason as historically opposed vs. the historical role of Christian institutions in founding and sustaining the scientific enterprise itself.
• • Disagreement about the interpretation of Genesis 1-2 among Christians vs. rejection of science as such.

Christian response

• • The Galileo affair (1633) was considerably more entangled with politics, personal rivalry, and unsettled physics (the best available physical arguments at the time, including tides, did not yet decisively prove heliocentrism, and Galileo's polemical Dialogue mocked Pope Urban VIII personally) than the 'church versus reason' myth suggests; historians of science including non-Christian ones (such as Thomas Kuhn) treat it as a far more complicated episode than simple religious obscurantism versus enlightened science.
• • Modern experimental science arose specifically and substantially within a Christian European intellectual milieu, not against it: figures foundational to the scientific revolution — Copernicus (a cleric), Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Pascal, and later Mendel (an Augustinian friar whose monastery garden produced the founding data of genetics) and Georges Lemaître (a Catholic priest who first proposed what became Big Bang cosmology, 1927) — were devout Christians who frequently understood their scientific work as an outgrowth of, not opposed to, their theology of an orderly creation made by a rational God, a connection historians of science such as the agnostic Rodney Stark (in For the Glory of God) have argued was causally significant for science's emergence specifically in Christian Europe rather than elsewhere.
• • Young-earth creationism is a specific, historically recent (largely 20th-century, popularized by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood, 1961) minority position within American evangelicalism, not the historic or global Christian consensus — the Catholic Church (affirming evolution as compatible with faith since Pope Pius XII's 1950 Humani Generis and reaffirmed repeatedly since), Orthodoxy, and most mainline and a substantial share of evangelical Protestants accept evolutionary biology and an old universe, often explicitly reading Genesis as theological narrative rather than a scientific chronology (a reading defended by serious evangelical scholars like John Walton and, differently, by Augustine himself as early as the 5th century in his commentary on Genesis, which warned against reading scripture in ways that would embarrass it against demonstrated natural knowledge).
• • Christian climate skepticism is a specific, largely American political-cultural phenomenon rather than a theological implication of Christian doctrine — many major Christian bodies (the Catholic Church under Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato si', the Church of England, the Evangelical Environmental Network) actively affirm climate science and frame environmental stewardship as a direct theological obligation flowing from Genesis's creation mandate (Genesis 2:15).
• • Historically, the Catholic Church funded and staffed major astronomical research for centuries (the Vatican Observatory, continuously operating since 1582, with Jesuit astronomers making significant contributions to the calendar reform and stellar cataloging), and medieval cathedral schools and monasteries preserved, copied, and transmitted classical scientific and philosophical texts through the collapse of Western Roman infrastructure — hardly the profile of a tradition structurally hostile to inquiry.

Christian counterresponse

That specific contemporary sociological fact about American evangelical subculture is accurate and worth taking seriously as a live problem within one strand of the tradition, but it is a claim about one culturally specific movement's current views, not a claim about Christian doctrine's implications as such, which the broader and longer historical and global record does not support.