American school children often learn a story about Christopher Columbus that goes something like this: In 1492, Columbus pioneered the idea that Earth was a sphere. He proposed to prove this by sailing westward around the globe to the East Indies. Scholars of the day, believing the planet to be flat, ridiculed him, contending that he would fall of the edge of the world. When he did not, they were all put to silence.

What's wrong with this picture? What is wrong is that it is based on a work of fiction published by Washington Irving (better known as the author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow") in 1838. The real tale is far more complex and interesting.

Earth's roundness had been accepted as fact by European scholars as early as the fifth century BCE. In the late third or early second century BCE, the Alexandrian geographer Eratosthenes even measured its circumference with impressive accuracy. Both Arab and European academics knew and accepted his calculations. Columbus, however, believed the planet considerably smaller. On the basis of this belief, he reasoned that a westward route to the Spice Islands was feasible.

His detractors argued from Eratosthenes' observations that it would be impossible to carry enough supplies for so long an ocean voyage. What none of them knew, of course, was that two continents and an array of islands stood in the way. When Columbus found these, he was convinced that he had proved his point. To the end of his life, long after others realized that he had encountered lands hitherto unknown to Europeans, he insisted that he had indeed sailed all the way to the East Indies.

What happened? What changed this historic verity into the garbled tale so many Americans learn and, ironically, often cite as a parable to illustrate the importance of standing up for the truth?

What happened was that, some 30 years after Irving wrote his little story, two authors, John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White, separately cited it as a factual account. Both writers exploited it in support of their contentions that religion in general (and Catholicism in particular) has ever been at war with science. Since Columbus' detractors had been Catholic clerics, his supposed victory over them represented to Draper and White the triumph of reason and science over faith and superstition.

Unfortunately, their books catered to the anti-Catholic prejudices of many 19th century Americans, and were therefore uncritically received as authoritative. Thanks to them, both Irving's fanciful tale and the notion of perpetual warfare between science and Christianity came to be accepted as true.

So, are science and religion, reason and faith, eternal enemies? Thinkers from St. Augustine, who argued that both correct reasoning and correct faith were necessary for salvation, to the founders of the modern denominations as Christian Science, Religious Science and Science of Mind have not assented to this proposition. What good can acceptance of it bring to either Christians or scientists?

If God has endowed humanity with both mind and heart, the proclivity for logic and the capacity for faith, how can they be at odds? Are they not, as the 1998 papal encyclical "Faith and Reason" affirms, "two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"?

H.M. Wyeth is a member of the Christian Science Society, Kaua'i.