Professional science, deep time, and Darwin; the warfare story was written in this century by Draper and White, while many of the era’s leading scientists — and many churchmen — saw no war to fight.
Tagged: Biology and evolution Chemistry Medicine and anatomy Physics Catholic
The century professionalized science — the word ‘scientist’ was coined in 1833 — and built its empires of fact: geological surveys, observatories, laboratories, and museums. Geology stretched the earth’s age to hundreds of millions of years through the work of, among others, devout men: William Buckland, an Anglican cleric, and Charles Lyell, whose uniformitarianism Darwin absorbed at sea. When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, its first responses were mixed in every camp; the famous Oxford exchange of 1860 between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce grew into legend largely through later retelling, and many churchmen — Charles Kingsley, Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury — accepted evolution early.
The warfare story was manufactured in this era, deliberately: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896) wrote the conflict thesis into textbooks, where parts of it survive as folklore. Historians have spent fifty years dismantling it case by case — the flat earth that medieval people supposedly believed in is one of its inventions — without denying that real conflicts occurred, over real doctrines, in particular places.
Meanwhile the century’s science ran on religious money and motives as often as against them: missionary linguists and naturalists catalogued the world’s languages and species; Maxwell, Faraday, and Kelvin held their physics and their faiths together without public strain; and the era’s genuine scandal — science enlisted for racial hierarchy — was powered by an alliance of materialist and theological racisms alike, which the record should not let either side forget.
The Worldview Stakes
Evolution forced the era’s real question, which was not ‘science or faith’ but ‘what kind of God, and what kind of human?’ Design arguments adapted (Asa Gray’s theistic evolution), retreated, or were rebuilt; doctrines of providence and human uniqueness carried the weight. The century also taught each camp to write history as advocacy — a habit the complexity thesis exists to correct.
Elsewhere on This Site
References
- James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979)
- Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009)
Related Across the Site
- Enlightenment Science Era — The philosophes made knowledge a program against priestcraft while physico-theologians mined the same discoveries for design; deism flourished and thinned; chemistry and natural history professionalized.
- Greco-Roman Science Era — Greek natural philosophy separated explanation by nature from explanation by myth, while Roman engineering turned knowledge into aqueducts, roads, and concrete — and physicians and astronomers worked for patrons of every cult.
- Islamic Golden Age Science Era — Under the Abbasid caliphs, Baghdad’s translation movement turned Greek, Persian, and Indian learning into an Arabic science that advanced astronomy, optics, algebra, and medicine — and argued about philosophy’s place beside revelation.
- Medieval European Science Era — Latin Christendom built the university, recovered Aristotle through Arabic and Greek, and debated the eternity of the world, the plurality of worlds, and the freedom of God — inside theology faculties, not against them.
- Patristic Science Era — The Church Fathers received Greek learning as a handmaid: useful for reading Scripture and ordering life, subordinate to revelation, and preserved — selectively — through the collapse of Roman institutions.
- Renaissance and Reformation Science Era — Print, recovered Greek texts, and confessional rivalry reshaped European knowledge: Copernicus the canon published a heliocentric cosmos, Vesalius remade anatomy, and Jesuit colleges became engines of mathematical science.
- Scientific Revolution Science Era — Kepler’s ellipses, Galileo’s telescope and trial, Boyle’s Christian experimentalism, and Newton’s designed cosmos: the century that invented modern science also shows why the simple war story fails — most of its soldiers were believers arguing with believers.
- Twentieth Century Science Era — Relativity, quantum theory, and a priest’s Big Bang; war made science a state enterprise and the scientist’s conscience a public problem; creation-evolution litigation defined the American quarrel while genetics under Lysenko showed the cost of policing conclusions.