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A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (Two Vomule Set)

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Andrew Dickson White's _A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom_ is one of the two great, classic works on the history of science and freedom of thought in Christian Europe. (The other is William Edward Hartpole Lecky's _History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe_.)

White was the first president of Cornell University, and he caused some consternation in mid-nineteenth-century America by determining that the university would not be beholden to any particular school of religious or theological thought. Naturally, there were complaints and public outcries. More or less by way of response, White wrote this massive two-volume work.

Some of it is dated; White tends, for example, to treat then-current scientific theories as more firmly established than they turned out to be. But be that as it may, he sorts quite judiciously through the history of Christendom and argues forcefully that at every point, scientific progress was impeded by the tendency of theologians to overstep the proper bounds of their discipline.

White's broadside takes all of Christendom as its target -- both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Of course he takes on the obvious enemies in Catholic history, but he does not spare the great figures of the Reformation (mainly Luther and Calvin).

Judaism and Islam come in for a little bit of criticism too, but on the whole these two faiths fare rather well. Indeed, White points out repeatedly that adherents of each faith attempted to pursue scientific inquiries but found themselves stopped, even persecuted, by Christian authorities.

Then, too, White has a healthy appreciation for the fact that the Psalms specifically call attention to the wonders of "nature" and recognizes that there is much in this marvelous poetry to spur scientific research. And he goes out of his way to appreciate, for example, the degree to which the sanitary and hygienic practices of Jewish civilization surpassed those of medieval Christendom. In short, though he is willing to criticize the other great Western religions when he finds it necessary to do so, the brunt of his attack is specifically Christendom itself, not "religion" generally.

On the whole, then, although there are lots of specific passages with which I could take issue, White's massive work still stands as a salutary warning about the proper relations between free scientific inquiry, on the one hand, and religious (specifically Christian) interpretation of sacred texts, on the other. Religious thinkers who have no objections to science will for the most part find White likewise unobjectionable; but those who confine themselves to an untenable (and anti-biblical) "biblicism" will find in him an implacable and redoubtable foe.

Like Lecky's equally great work (and by the way, both of them are available online as e-texts), still well worth reading for anyone interested in the relations between science and religion.

I bought this book because Bertrand Russell Quotes it extensively (and, I believe, uses it even more) in his wonderful "Religion and Science".
This book was published in the late 1800's and it shows in its style which to me (a non-native English speaker) is a bit hard to follow. Nevertheless I strongly recommend it. It details how both Protestant and Catholic clergy opposed many of the scientific discoveries we now take for granted because they did not agree strictly with scripture.
Unbelievably to me, the author manages to keep his faith and claim that proving the bible wrong actually enhances religion...
The notes are extensive and provide huge amounts of sources (but they are very hard to read.)
One curious thing: Since at that time "gentlemen" studied Latin, there are many quotations without a translation.

I was bored over my holiday break (December 2002), and thought I would just read a few pages of this book to help me fall asleep. Three hours later, I was riveted to the book and couldn't put it down (or sleep).

Originally written in 1886, this is a comprehensive account of clashes between theological and scientific claims about how nature works. White systematically chronicles the persecution all the major areas of scientific inquiry had to go through from theologans before they were accepted : geology, mechanics, medicine, meteorology, biology, etc..

For example, in one chapter he meticulously works through the emergence of the heliocentric view of the world, as opposed to that endorsed by the Pope where the earth is the center of the universe. There are tragic tales of threats (Galileo), torture, and execution (Bruno) of scientific minds who made claims that conflicted with the Church.

The chapters are exceedingly well-crafted. He starts out each chapter by describing the origins of the Christian view of the topic (for instance, that there is literally a stone firmament above the earth through which rain is let in). He then discusses how scientists came to question such views, their persecution by the church, and eventually how the Church backtracked and hedged and finally accepted the scientific view.

Compared to a lot of work by skeptics these days, the book is very scholarly: it is exceedingly well referenced, so that you can go find the original sources of both the theological and scientific viewpoints. On the other hand, since the book is over 100 years old, there are some ideas that are a bit antiquated. For example, his discussion of "primitive and savage cultures" extant in Africa are a bit dated. Also, the references to the 'recent' Civil War in the United States shows the books age. These anachronisms come off as interesting more than anything else. Overall, stylistically the book reads better and is more thoroughly researched than most modern skeptical thoughts.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the real story about how science and religion have related to one another in history. To those creationists who say that scientists are being dogmatic by adhering to naturalism, I say read this book. Naturalism as a scientific methodology is not a dogma (where a 'dogma' is something believed without evidence). Rather, science is naturalistic because 1000 years of the alternative were an abject failure: based on historical evidence, religious thinking *in science* only stunts the creativity and logical thought processes of scientists. In my experience in neuroscience, I have seen this many times.

Finally, this book should be on every scientist's bookshelf. As a working neuroscientist, I take for granted that I am free to think in any direction about how the brain works. I do not need to answer to any higher authority than evidence provided by experiments. I am accorded this privilege because of people like Galileo, Darwin, Lyell, and Harvey who stood up to the Church establishment and had the courage, in the face of sometimes fatal reproach, to say what they thought was true.

"A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom" was a two volume work that was first published in 1898. It is a devastating and encyclopedic account of the practically incessant warfare of science with theology over a period of 20 centuries.

The author, Andrew Dickson White, was a historian, diplomat, and the first president of Cornell University. He has produced one of the great masterpieces of research which is as timely today as when it was written over 100 years ago.

I have long been aware of the major confrontations between theology and science in astronmy, geography, evolution, and the like but I never realized the enormity, the magnitude, or the consistency of this fight. Dickson's history records not merely a series of battles or even wars, but rather, constant, incessant warfare on issue after issue. Invariably, the scientific explanation has ultimately emerged victorious.

Generally, throughout this long history the theological attack has gone through three periods or phases: (1) general use of scriptural texts and statements against the scientific position; (2) the pitting against science of some great doctrine in theology; and (3) attempts at compromise by means of far-fetched reconciliations of textual statements with ascertained fact. This final phase is always the most amusing since the theologians, instead of admitting they were wrong, proclaim, in effect, that "we were with you all along," or, as they would say "science concurs with theology." In other words, theology never disagreed with such and such a scientific position even though a not inconsiderable number of people may have been burned at the stake for professing belief in that position.

The difference between scientific and theological reasoning is beautifully illustrated by Johannes Kepler and the law for cometary movement. Kepler's main reasoning was right but his secondary reasoning, that comets move in straight lines, was wrong. Subsequent scientists accepted his general theory which was true but rejected his secondary theory which was false. As a result of both of what they accepted and of what they rejected, was evolved the basis of the whole modern cometary theory.

Very different was this from the theological method. As a rule, when there arises a thinker as great in theology as Kepler was in science, the whole mass of his conclusions ripens into dogma. His desciples labor not to test it but to establish it; and while, in the Catholic Church, it becomes a dogma to be believed or disbelieved under penalty of damnation, it becomes in the Protestant Church the basis for one more sect.

Twenty chapters with numerous subdivisions record this multi-millenial conflict. The scope as well as the variety of these confrontations are indicated by the chapter headings themselves: From Creation to Evolution; Geography; Astronomy; From Signs and Wonders to Law in the Heavens; Genesis to Geology; The Antiquity of Man, Egytpiology and Assyriology and Pre-Historic Archeology; The Fall of Man and Anthropology - Ethnology -History; From the Prince of the Power of the Air to Meteorolgy; From Magic to Chemistry and Physics; Miracles to Medicine; Fetish to Hygiene; Demoniacal Possession to Insanity; Diabolism to Hysteria; Babel to Comparative Philology; Dead Sea Legends to Comparative Mythology; From Leviticus to Political Economy; From Divine Oracles to The Higher Criticism.

The author begins at the beginning, i.e. Genesis and describes the difficulties encountered by theologians from the outset. First of all, it is not clear from Bibilical texts whether God created the world with his hands or with his voice or by both means., Worse still, however, was the fact that one account in Genesis described the creation of the world as extending through six days but another spoke of "the day" in which the Lord God made the earth and the heavans. The safe and proper course, it was thought, was to believe literally both statements; that is some mysterious manner God had created the universe in six days and yet brought it all into exisstence in a moment! The theologians were in agreement, however, that everything had been made for the convenience of man. Thus, down to a period almost within living memory it was held, virtually "always, everywhere and by all", that the universe as we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice of hands of the Almighty, or by both - out of nothing - in an instant or in six days, or in both - about four thousand years before the Christian era - and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole structure.

However, the concept that the universe evolved is at least as old and probably older than the Judeo-Christian tradition. Assyrian inscriptions recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of an evolution of the universe abd the Ionian philosophers Anaxamander and Anaxamenes clearly developed the idea. Plato withstood it but Aristotle developed it in a manner reminiscent of modern views. In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary ideas seemed to take more definite form in the mind of Giordano Bruno who evidently devined the fundamental idea of what is now known as the "nebular hypothesis." However, as a result of his murder by the Inquisition at Rome, this idea seemed to disappear in the flames that consumed his body in 1600.

Yet, within two centuries of Bruno's death there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our race has ever produced - Copernicus, Kepler, Gallileo, Descartes, and Newton - and when their work was done the old theological conception of the universe was gone. "The spacious firmament on high" - "the crystalline spheres" - the Almighty enthroned upon "thie circle of the heavans" and with his own hands or with angels as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion for the benefit of the earth, opening and closing "the windlows of heavan," letting down upon the earth the "waters above the firmament," "setting his bow in the cloud," hanging out "signs and wonders," "hurling comets," "casting forth ligthnings" to scare the wicked, and "shaking the earth in his wrath." All this had disappeared.

This book looks extensively at what happens when superstition pretends to have a better claim to reality than nature itself: the result is that it constantly looks foolish. Over and over again, religion has refused to acknowledge the objective truths that are set before everyone regardless of cultural origin. The result is strife and wasted energy over things that never should have been thought of as "debates".
However, the greatest hidden gems in this work are the second-volume chapters on linguistics/biblical analysis and comparative religion/mythology. Not what we would typically call "sciences" (unless they be social sciences) these chapters illustrate why religion had challengers long before the Scientific Revolution: inconsistencies between bible manuscripts and between translations, pre-biblical occurrences in earlier cultures of stories often thought of as biblical, etc., etc., etc.
A great read.

Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in 1860, "Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain." This remarkable book documents this history. The author is respectful but painstakingly thorough. Page after page one will read of the idiocies propagated by Christian theologians and their inevitable refutation by advancing scientific knowledge. This book should be read by everyone, especially those remnants of the middle ages who still believe the Bible is a reliable guide to the study of nature.

Don't be put off by the stultifying title and heftiness of this book. As history books go, this is a page-turner. It's a highly readable and thoroughly documented history of how Christian dogmatists have fought virtually every advance in human knowledge in the Western world: from astronomy to anatomy, evolution to Egyptology, linguistics to lightning rods.

This book first appeared in 1896. Since then, science has advanced and grown faster than ever before--yet Christian religious dogma is unchanged. Incredibly, we still hear from some states, towns, and public school systems (at least in the U.S.) the same biblical-fundamentalist arguments against scientific inquiry that, as Prof. White's book meticulously demonstrates, have been raised and debunked repeatedly over the past two millennia.

It's up to us whether we let religious fundamentalists paralyze progress in our era. Never forget which fruit God told the humans not to eat.

I am in a Master's program in Science and Religion. The facts are, White was the first president of Cornell University. Cornell was the first secular institution of higher learning in the US. White was resisted because of his desire to make the University purely secular; in response he wrote this polemic specifically against religion. He misrepresents history on many counts. For example, he quotes the mythical account of Columbus' alleged conversation with Ferdinand and Isabella about sailing to the New World to show the earth is round. I was taught that myth in grade school, only realizing in the last few months that this is a fable. Washington Irving is the one that made the story up about Columbus, White quoted him, and the fable has been perpetrated since. White has been used to perpetuate the myth that the Christian Church held that the earth is flat, which is again completely false. No serious historian of science today accepts the conflict thesis between science and religion, and no one in the field accepts White as anything more than historical curiosity. While the book might inflame people already predisposed to attack religion, serious investigators about the relationships between science and religion would do better to read real historians such as John Hedley Brooke, David Lindbergh and Ronald Numbers, or Dennis Danielson. The nuances in historical episodes such as the Galileo affair, who by the way was never tortured, are much more complex than the simplistic parrot talk usually perpetuated about these subjects.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: to know if a book is reliable, you have to understand a little bit about the author. White wrote this book in angry response to criticism for refusing to give his students at Cornell religious tests. As noble as his intentions may have been, the resulting book is a travesty and is largely responsible for creating the common Warfare Myth that has plagued the relationship between science and faith since the nineteenth century. Not only were reliable historical sources much rarer in 1869, White's idea of research was getting his untrained graduate students to dig up whatever they could find to support his thesis.

To make my case, I'll use the section on Galileo. White totally ignores the fact that Galileo himself was a faithful Christian and had no desire to be at "war" with the Church. The disagreement was not over the relationship between religion and science but between interpretation of Scripture. Furthermore, White introduces many outright lies into his argument. He claims that Galileo was subjected to imprisonment and torture when in reality, he was given a five room suite in a palace during his time in Rome. White uses sensationalism and melodrama freely in such ridiculous phrases as "seething, squabbling, screaming mass of priests, bishops, archbishops..." and "screamed in rage against the Copernican system." In short, the Galileo affair is extremely complex with errors occurring on both sides. To twist facts and tell outright lies to say that the issue was a struggle between science and religion only shows White's gross ignorance of the matter.

As a Christian and a person with an avid interest in modern science, I'm shocked to see that people still use this ridiculous 134 year old sham to feed the Warfare Myth. In using this book against Christians, scientists are being just as narrow minded and naïve as the Christians who attack reliable scientific evidence in the name of God. Now that I've probably managed to make everybody angry, I urge everyone to realize that the issues White tries to cram into his simple model of "a" versus "b", are actually very complex and one would do well to do some real research into the issues addressed in this book rather than buy into White's sensationalized oversimplification.

Just another atheist with an axe to grind. He puts words in the mouths of famous persons that are the opposite of what these authorities actually said he distorts and places in improper context many others. The one that really got my goat was when he stated that Thomas Aquinas said the earth was flat when what actually was said was a quote from Psalms that ws used by Aquinas to teach that we must not take scripture as always factual.