Sameer Yadav

Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes

Science & Faith

“Historians of modern science have time and again debunked the old saw that Christian faith and scientific reason have stood in deeply entrenched conflict with one another, and yet that myth remains etched into the popular imagination. In hopes of sanding away these fixed paths in our collective memory, Derrick Peterson offers us more than simply another genealogy debunking the warfare thesis. Rather, Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes offers us a deeply learned and absorbing meta-genealogy: a story of why and how the historiography that manufactured the myth of faith/science conflict came to be superseded by the alternative and debunking historiography that we find today. The result is among the clearest and most bracing articulations I’ve read on the complex historical interplay between religion and science. Peterson’s narrative corrects our retellings of that interplay in the past. But more than that, Flat Earths challenges us to make explicit our present interests in such retellings and encourages us to imagine what sort of future for science and religion we are projecting with our historiographies. A remarkable first book by a formidable young scholar.”