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We have seen in the previous chapter how very old hat and unoriginal the ideas of the New Atheists really are, and how they invariably repeat, in modern form, what has been around for centuries. But where, historically speaking, does the idea of science and Christianity in particular being in conflict actually come from, and why?
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, two distinguished American authors put their cards on the table, with a pair of books, whose pugnacious titles leave one in no doubt about what they are going to say. The first was Dr John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), and the second Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Indeed, this seems plain fighting talk, reminiscent, perhaps, of that of Shelley’s Necessity for Atheism, but written not as an anonymous piece of undergraduate bravado, but by two mature men of the highest intellectual standing, who were not afraid of putting their names on their title pages.
Draper was an eminent physician and professor of chemistry at New York University. The English-born son of a Wesleyan minister, he emigrated to America aged twenty in 1831, where members of his mother’s family were already settled. Qualifying as a doctor, he not only went on to become a prominent academic physician in New York Medical School, but was a significant figure in both chemistry and astronomy. He took, for example, the first ever photograph of an astronomical body, the moon, in 1840. His deceased father’s Wesleyan Methodism had long since been a thing of the past, however, as he had read Comte and become a positivist and an ardent devotee of the religion of scientism. For Draper, science became The Truth. He also developed his own “take” on positivism, which in 1859 he infused with the newly published evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, to produce a philosophy of biological and social progressivism.
Andrew D. White was an eminent academic historian and educator, co-founder and first president of Cornell University, and later US ambassador to Germany. He was a passionate believer in science and progress, who early in his career came to associate religious belief with anti-modern, anti-scientific values.
Both Draper’s and White’s books are replete with scholarship, ranging from classical and early church history to the latest advances in modern science. Furthermore, both men were committed to making the world a better place. So what made them so bitter about Christianity, and what led them to interpret history as a saga of conflict between foolish blind faith and ignorance on the one hand and enlightened scientific optimism on the other?
Of course, positivism coloured both. And like so many people of a positivistic turn of mind, Draper and White were inspired not only by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, but also by his The Descent of Man of 1871, in which Darwin explored the human–primate connection.
One does not need to proceed very far into either author’s book, however, to detect a distinct animus against Roman Catholicism. And I would suggest that the conservative Pius IX, pope from 1846 to 1878, was regarded with especial distaste, and seen as an anachronistic autocrat by the progressives. The contemporary promulgations of the Vatican Council, and most of all its new 1870 doctrine that the Pope was theologically infallible, aroused them to fury. Indeed, Draper rehearses this whole scenario in his chapter XII, “The Impending Crisis”, where he discusses “the dogmatic constitution of the Catholic faith” and “its denunciation of modern civilization”.
Irrespective of how a person may regard Roman Catholicism and its history, no one can deny that the Catholic Church was facing political crisis in the nineteenth century. But this is perhaps best seen in the context of wider history. Since first the French Revolutionary and then the Bonapartist armies “liberated” and invaded Italy in the 1790s, the country had been in a state of political ferment, with outbreaks of civil war and efforts to found a largely secular Italian state after 1871. So Italy’s history and apparent “progression” from a Catholic land in 1790 to a secular government and intelligentsia with the Vatican in visible retreat enthused many abroad who not only sympathized with the plight of “backward”, un-industrialized, “priest-ridden” Italy, but also harboured their own animus against Christianity, which they saw epitomized in Pope Pius IX.
Andrew D. White, who very clearly in his writings, lectures, and actions saw himself as a crusader against Christian theology’s involvement with science, acknowledged the work of Draper in his “Introduction”, as well as making subsequent text references to his writings. White, however, may not have been an atheist as such, but rather someone who believed that science and religion occupied distinct spheres and should not be mixed. And interestingly enough, he presented himself as a “myth-buster”. Indeed, in Volume Two, chapter 18, he lays into the “mythologies” not only of Christianity, but of Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, and even into European folk tales. The message he sustains throughout the Warfare volumes is that mankind lay for centuries in the dark bondage of religious superstition, and that now, at last, science has come to illumine all!
Yet nowhere in this undoubted masterpiece of scholarship does he ask the question “Am I as blinkered in my materialist scientific adulation as peoples of the ‘Dark Ages’ were in their religion?” Time and again, he piles erudite bare fact upon fact to show how the superstitious ignorance of the past crumbled before the relentless power of science.
None of White’s facts are in themselves incorrect, and it is all too easy for a reader to be beguiled by his meticulously marshalled notes and references, as to some degree I was myself when I first read his Warfare as an undergraduate! Yes, there really were unwashed monks who died from sundry pestilences; there were some ignorant Christians who thought the earth was flat; and there was a belief that mental illness could be ascribed to demonic possession. But that was not the whole story, and it was in the undisguised one-sidedness of White’s argument that I first began to smell a rat. While, in fairness, White does mention medieval people who did not hold “superstitious” views about the natural world, he presents them as besieged minorities in a surrounding culture of darkness. But very often, his exceptions prove the rule. Having, for example, discussed superstitious flat-earth views, he goes on to cite Augustine, Ambrose, Bede, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, Dante, Vincent of Beauvais, and others who argued that the earth was spherical! Only the most distinguished and influential thinkers of early Christendom, no less – none of whom suffered punishment for their views!
His presentation of medical “backwardness” is similarly one-sided. Yes, there were ignorant monks who thought soap and water were wicked luxuries, but there were lots of other monks and clergy who did not. What about the Cistercians, whose twelfth-century monasteries had the most advanced plumbing and clean water supplies of the age? Or the Benedictines, who treated hygiene as a necessary prerequisite for proper communal living? Mental illness was also understood to have organic causes, dating back to the much-lauded Hippocrates, as well as a demonic one. And while White mentions eminent medical men, such as William of Saliceto and Guy de Chauliac (a devout papal physician, incidentally), he sets them in enlightened isolation in an ocean of medical mumbo-jumbo! In spite of the abundance of classically based university medical faculties across Europe!
It is ironic, therefore, that two books, each written with the express intention of displaying the myths and fallacies of Christianity and its supposed antipathy to science, should themselves become foundation stones for one of the greatest myths of the modern world; namely, that science and the Christian faith must of necessity be at war with each other.