A review article of the Dan Brown novel on the alleged conflict between science and religion.

The idea of the conflict between science and religion is pervasive in our society, particularly in popular literature. This article examines the mythical origins of the conflict metaphor and its employment by the airport novelist of the moment, Dan Brown.

Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons is a page-turner mystery novel, and has proved a very successful one at that. But in some ways, it is more than just a novel. As in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown is painting a picture of the disturbing lengths that the Church will go to in order to protect its authority, this time against the inevitable progress of scientific knowledge. To this end, Brown relies on the pervasive view of the eternal conflict between science and religion. However, as this article will show, this view turns out to be a myth: useful for elevating science over religion, but with little basis in history.

The plotline of Angels and Demons bears remarkable similarity to its more famous sequel, The Da Vinci Code. Harvard professor Robert Langdon is summoned by Maximilian Kohler, the head of CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), to help solve the murder of a prominent physicist. The murder appears to be the work of the brotherhood of the Illuminati, a secret society seeking revenge on the Catholic Church for their treatment of scientists such as Galileo. At the same time, a bomb of terrifying power ticks away in the Vatican, where the College of Cardinals has assembled to elect a new pope. Teaming up with the beautiful Italian scientist Vittoria Vetra, Langdon races against the clock to decipher a trail of ancient symbols to save the Vatican before it’s too late.

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Files: johnson-angels-demons.pdf

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