INTRODUCTION
Ronald L.
Numbers
I propose, then, to present to you this evening
an outline of the great sacred struggle for the liberty of Science—a struggle
which has been going on for so many centuries. A tough contest this has been! A
war continued longer—with battles fiercer, with sieges more per sis tent, with
strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of
Alexander, or Cæsar, or Napoleon... In all modern history, interference with
Science in the supposed interest of religion—no matter how conscientious such
interference may have been—has resulted in the direst evils both to Religion
and Science, and invariably.
—Andrew Dickson White, “The Battle-
Fields of Science” (1869)
The
antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of
a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power . .
. The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a
narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the
human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary
faith and human interests on the other.
—John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874)
The greatest myth in the history of science and religion
holds that they have been in a state of constant conflict. No one bears more
responsibility for promoting this notion than two nineteenth- century American
polemicists: Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) and John William Draper
(1811–1882). White, the young president of Cornell University, became a
believer in the warfare between science and religion after religious critics
branded him an infidel for, as he put it, trying to create in Ithaca “[a]n
asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, not stretched
or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.” On a winter’s evening in December
1869 he strode to the podium in the great hall of Cooper Union in New York
City, ready to smite his enemies with history, to give them “a lesson which
they will remember.” In a melodramatic lecture titled “The Battle- Fields of
Science” the historian surveyed “some of the hardest- fought battle- fields” of
the “great war” between science and religion. He told of Giordano Bruno’s being
“burned alive as a monster of impiety,” of Galileo’s having been “tortured and
humiliated as the worst of unbelievers,” and much more, ending with the latest
scientific martyrs, Cornell University and its beleaguered president. As White
must have anticipated, his lecture sparked even more controversy, prompting,
according to one observer, “instantaneous outcry and opposition.” Over the next
quarter century White expanded his talk into a huge two- volume work, A History
of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), widely
translated and frequently reprinted down to the present. In it, as Elizabeth
Cady Stanton gleefully noted, he showed “that the Bible has been the greatest
block in the way of progress.”
Draper was equally
exercised when he wrote his History of the Conflict between Religion and
Science (1874). An accomplished physician, chemist, and historian, Draper
largely excused Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy of crimes against science
while excoriating Roman Catholicism. He did so, he wrote, “partly because its
adherents compose the majority of Christendom, partly because its demands are
the most pretentious, and partly because it has commonly sought to enforce
those demands by the civil power.” In addition to chronicling the church’s age-
old opposition to scientific progress, he ridiculed the recently promulgated doctrine
of papal infallibility, which he attributed to men “of sin and shame.” He never
publicly mentioned, however, what may have agitated him the most: his antipathy
toward his own sister, Elizabeth, who had converted to Catholicism and who for
a time lived with the Drapers. When one of the Draper children, eight year- old
William, lay near death, Aunt Elizabeth hid his favorite book, a Protestant
devotional tract—and did not return it until after the boy had passed away. The
grieving father angrily kicked her out of his house, no doubt blaming the
Vatican for her un Christian and dogmatic behavior. Draper’s tale of “ferocious
theologians” hounding the pioneers of science “with a Bible in one hand and a
fiery fagot in the other,” as one critic characterized his account,
understandably provoked numerous counterattacks. The American convert to
Catholicism Orestes Brown son, who described the book as “a tissue of lies from
beginning to end,” could scarcely contain his fury. “A thousand highway-
robberies or a thousand cold- blooded murders,” he fumed, “would be but a light
social offence in comparison with the publication of one such book as this
before us.”
Discussions of the relationship between “science” and “religion”
originated in the early nineteenth century, when students of nature first began
referring to their work as science rather than as natural philosophy (or natural
history). Before that time there were occasional expressions of concern about
the tension between faith and reason, but no one pitted religion against science
or vice versa.3 By the 1820s, however, books and articles featuring the phrase
“science and religion” in their titles were starting to appear. One of the
first, if not the first, English language books with the words in their titles
came out in 1823: Thomas Dick’s popular The Christian Philosopher; or, The Connection
of Science and Philosophy with Religion. By midcentury “science and religion”
was becoming a literary trope, and during the 1850s and 1860s several American
colleges and seminaries established professorships devoted to demonstrating
(and pre serving) the harmony of science and revealed religion.
Although a few freethinkers, most notoriously Thomas Cooper
of South Carolina College, denounced religion as “the great enemy of Science,”
antebellum Americans, especially the clergy, worried far more about the threat
of science to orthodox Christianity than about religious barriers to science.
By the middle third of the nineteenth century some observers were beginning to
suspect that “every new conquest achieved by science, involved the loss of a
domain to religion.” Especially disturbing were scientific challenges to the first
chapters of the Bible. During the three de cades between about 1810 and 1840
men of science pushed successfully to replace the supernatural creation of the
solar system with the nebular hypothesis, to expand the history of life on
earth from 6,000 to millions of years, and to shrink Noah’s flood to a regional
event in the Near East. Many Christians readily adjusted their reading of the
Bible to accommodate such findings, but some biblical literalists thought that
the geologists of the day were taking too many liberties with God’s word. The
Reverend Gardiner Spring, for example, resented scientific efforts to explain
creation, which he regarded as “a great miracle,” incapable of being accounted
for scientifically. “The collision is not between the Bible & Nature,” he
declared, “but between the Bible & natural philosophers.”
At the time it was not uncommon for men of science to engage
in biblical exegesis while denying theologians and clergy men the right to
monitor science. This practice, along with the increasing marginalization of
theologians from the scientific enterprise, galled Charles Hodge, the most
eminent Calvinist theologian in midcentury America. Although he continued to
venerate men of science who disclosed “the wonderful works of God,” by the late
1850s he was growing increasingly frustrated by their tendency to treat
theologians who expressed themselves on scientific subjects as “trespassers”
who should mind their own business. He attributed the growing “alienation”
between men of science and men of the cloth in part to the former’s “assumption
of superiority” and their practice of stigmatizing their religious critics “as
narrow- minded, bigots, old women, Bible worshippers, etc.” He resented the
lack of respect frequently shown to religious men, who were instructed by their
scientific colleagues to quit meddling in science, while they themselves belittled
religious beliefs and values. At times Hodge worried that science, devoid of
religion, was becoming downright “satanic.” He had no doubt that religion was
in a “fight for its life against a large class of scientific men.
The spread of “infidel” science—from geology and cosmogonies
to biology and anthropology—caused many Christians, both conservatives and
liberals, to feel under attack. According to the southern intellectual George
Frederick Holmes, “The struggle between science and religion, between
philosophy and faith, has been protracted through centuries; but it is only
within recent years that the breach has become so open and avowed as to be
declared by many to be irreconcilable.” Worse yet, even the working classes
were joining the fray. As one British writer noted in 1852, “Science is no
longer a lifeless abstraction floating above the heads of the multitude. It has
descended to earth. It mingles with men. It penetrates our mines. It enters our
workshops. It speeds along with the iron courser of the rail.”
The debates over Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
(1859), in which the British naturalist sought “to overthrow the dogma of
separate creations” and extend the domain of natural law throughout the organic
world, signaled a shift in emphasis. Increasingly, scientists, as they were
coming to be called, ex pressed resentment at playing handmaiden to religion.
One after another called not only for scientific freedom but also for the
subordination of religion—and the rewriting of history with religion as the
villain. The most infamous outburst came from the Irish physicist John Tyndall
(1820–1893), who in his 1874 Belfast address as president of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science thundered:
The impregnable position of science may be
described in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire
domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon
the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control,
and relinquish all thought of controlling it. Acting otherwise proved
disastrous in the past, and it is simply fatuous to- day.
Two years later Tyndall wrote a laudatory preface to a
British edition of White’s The Warfare of Science. With such endorsements, the
conflict thesis was well on its way toward becoming the historical dogma of the
day, at least among intellectuals seeking freedom from religion.
Historians of science
have known for years that White’s and Draper’s accounts are more propaganda
than history.9 (An opposing myth, that Christianity alone gave birth to modern
science, is disposed of in Myth 9.) Yet the message has rarely escaped the
ivory tower. The secular public, if it thinks about such issues at all, knows
that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress (witness the
attacks on Galileo, Darwin, and Scopes). The religious public knows that
science has taken the leading role in corroding faith (through naturalism and
antibiblicism). As a first step toward correcting these misperceptions we must
dispel the hoary myths that continue to pass as historical truths. No scientist, to our knowledge, ever lost his life because of his scientific views,
though, as we shall see in Myth , the Italian Inquisition did incinerate the
sixteenth- century Copernican Giordano Bruno for his heretical theological
notions.
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