A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (Great Minds Series) (Set of 2 ) [Paperback]

 

 

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The conflict laid out here in fascinating detail is between science and theology, not between science and religion or between science and Christianity. The distinction is important. Although Andrew Dickson White was denounced as an atheist by various divines, he was in fact an Episcopalian (the US brand of Anglicanism) who thought an enlightened clergy "a great blessing to any country". (Perhaps this is one of the reasons he was attacked: he did not suffer gladly an unenlightened clergy.) As an influential educator (he wrote the charter for Cornell University and was its first president), he insisted that his university be free from religious control and he stressed the importance of a scientific education. Science was no less worthy of study than literature or history (his own subject) and deserved to be taught by the best minds without clerical interference. As a prominent public figure in nineteenth-century America, he saw for himself how "phrase-making" was often "substituted for investigation". As a historian, he showed how this was nothing new but had been going on for centuries. This two-volume study is his readable and scholarly account of this intellectual history, and although first published in 1896 it is still relevant to the science-versus-religion debate and highly recommended.

In ancient Greece, thinkers like Anaximander, Aristarchus and Aristotle all anticipated scientific theories that are now well established. More important than any single discovery, however, was their idea that "a science of Nature" was possible, and that the highest occupation of man is the discovery of its laws. "Still another gift from them was greatest of all, for they gave scientific freedom. They laid no interdict upon new paths; they interposed no barriers to the extension of knowledge; they threatened no doom in this life or in the next against investigators on new lines; they left the world free to seek any new methods and to follow any new paths which thinking men could find."

What happened to this freedom? What happened to this first blossoming of scientific thought, to this respect for scientific pursuits? While Christianity was probably not wholly responsible for the retardation, its theological boot did grind the flower of rational progress into the dirt for century after century. What is certain is that the "establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution of theology, arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years."

White identifies two major causes. First, it was widely believed (and still is by many Christians) "that the end of the world was at hand; that the last judgment was approaching; that all existing physical nature was soon to be destroyed". Hence, "the greatest thinkers in the Church generally poured contempt upon all investigators into a science of Nature, and insisted that everything except the saving of souls was folly". Second, scripture had all the answers anyway. "The most careful inductions from ascertained facts were regarded as wretchedly fallible when compared with any view of nature whatever given or even hinted at in any poem, chronicle, code, apologue, myth, legend, allegory, letter, or discourse of any sort which had happened to be preserved in the literature which had come to be held as sacred."

St Augustine, in his commentary on Genesis, made this second point crystal clear: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind." Where he led, countless lesser minds followed. For another thousand years, "theology continued to spin its own webs out of its own bowels, and all the lesser theological flies continued to be entangled in them". It's a familiar and depressing pattern: anyone even suspected of contradicting scripture risked being "completely abased and thwarted by theological oppression".

The Reformation, if anything, made matters worse as Protestants and Catholics "vied with each other in proving their orthodoxy" and their loyalty to scripture. The "vast authority of Luther was thrown in favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source of natural science" and Calvin asked, "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" Even "Melanchthon, mild as he was, was not behind Luther in condemning Copernicus" - perhaps an instance of how, for a good man to do evil, it takes religion.

And then came Francis Bacon, "who more than any other led the world out of the path opened by Aquinas, ... whose keenness of sight revealed the delusions of the old path and the promises of the new". He "showed the modern world the way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method and reverence for fact".

It still wasn't made easy for science. While John Wesley was "standing firmly for witchcraft" Benjamin Franklin was making his experiments with the kite on the banks of the Schuylkill. And, "at the moment when he drew the electric spark from the cloud, the whole tremendous fabric of theological meteorology reared by the fathers, the popes, the medieval doctors, and the long line of great theologians, Catholic and Protestant, collapsed". Although prayers continued to be offered up by the faithful to ward off storms believed to be under the control of demons, the more sensible made sure their churches were protected by a lightning rod. Franklin may have been an "arch-infidel" but his new scientific discovery proved more effective than prayer.

And so it goes. When the pope appears in public today, it is behind bullet-proof glass because he knows that the prayers of a billion Catholics afford no protection against even a few grams of metal.

More important than its failure as an intellectual system, however, is the moral argument against theology, that it has caused great harm to the human race. It is worth quoting White at length (he is referring to Roger Bacon): "Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to the world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held the key of treasures which would have freed mankind from ages of error and misery. With his discoveries as a basis, with his method as a guide, what might not the world have gained! Nor was the wrong done to that age alone; it was done to this age also. The nineteenth century was robbed at the same time with the thirteenth. But for that interference with science the nineteenth century would be enjoying discoveries which will not be reached before the twentieth century, and even later. Thousands of precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for this mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing the earth."

Such arguments are worth making today against church opposition to, for example, stem cell research, and, as Andrew Dickson White shows, it is an argument that can be made by a sincere Christian as well as a non-believer. In the end, while I question the success of his attempt to quarantine Christian theology from the Christian religion, I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion that science gives "new and nobler paths to man's highest aspirations".

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