7

Bridges Badly Built

No Laufen Matter • Scarcely Recognized Even as a Class • Two Angry Men • A Friendship to Be Restored • The New Atlantis • A Thousand Threads • The Heterodox Side of Almost Every Question • Many Phases of Religious Belief • The Things That I Love to See • The Call of Your Innermost Nature • A Source of Strength to Both • Bridges Badly Built • Pure Materialism and Atheism • An Image Without a Soul

No Laufen Matter

The engineers of Laufenburg, Switzerland, and Laufenburg, Germany, were feeling confident. They planned to connect their two towns by building a bridge over the river Rhein, and they were pretty sure that all would go well. After all, the span required was only around 100 yards, and the group had full access to an impressive range of twenty-first-century tools and techniques—so what could possibly cause them any bother?

Well, this: that the Earth is not a sphere.

Don’t panic—we are not about to resurrect Lactantius and Cosmas. Instead, the point is that the Earth is not a perfect sphere. This makes deciding what is meant by “sea level” more complicated than it might at first seem; our planet’s slight oblateness means the height of the sea actually varies around the globe.

There are, therefore, different sea level options to pick from—Germany uses that of the North Sea, while Switzerland has opted for the Mediterranean. The Swiss scientists, then, had a disagreement of a worrying 27 centimeters with their Teutonic teammates.

Oh dear.

Thankfully, though, we are talking about an expensive project and some very smart people—and so this discrepancy was spotted in advance. The architects took it on board and made the necessary adjustments: the troublesome figure was carefully added onto one side of the schematics.

Which, as it later turned out, was the wrong side.

The resulting structure—to the assorted embarrassment, exasperation, and expense of many—missed its mark by twice as much as it would have done without the change: a whopping 54 centimeters.

Oh dear, oh dear.

There is a lesson in all this for Messrs. Draper and White. For, as far as they were concerned, the territories of science and religion had a yawning gap between them—one that both thinkers desired to bridge. But how should they ensure, as all good project managers would, that the two sides would meet in the middle? Should religion be realigned? Should science be shifted? And in which direction should the chosen side move?

After much consideration and study, each man wrote up his bridging blueprint: Conflict was Draper’s solution, and Warfare was White’s. So, would these texts help others to cross the divide?

Or, like the Laufenburg laughing stock, would they make matters doubly worse?

Scarcely Recognized Even as a Class

Given the significance of Draper and White to the emergence of the conflict thesis, it is hardly surprising that others have already wondered what made the two men tick. A handful of interesting theories have emerged as the front-runners, and it is worth having a quick look at them now. As we do so, Draper and White and their world will hopefully become all the more real to us—for the pair of polemic penmen were, of course, people. So, let’s put some flesh onto their nineteenth-century bones.

Perhaps the best known of all the conflict thesis origin stories comes from the late Yale intellectual historian Frank M. Turner. According to Turner, the still-fairly-new-on-the-scene professional scientific community was desperate to achieve genuine recognition as paid and specialized experts in their own right.

Up until this period—around 1850 or so—Turner explains that most scientists had been interested amateurs or hobbyists, and often members of the clergy. Now, however, science was morphing into a far more serious enterprise—and some of those more engaged in its practice quite fancied it as an honored form of employment in and of itself.

The continued presence of talented amateurs in the field, though, was an inconvenience for their cause. What made a full-time and professional “physicist” any more worth listening to (or, for that matter, worth paying actual money to) than a clever and committed scientifically minded vicar, for example—especially if the vicar was also a fellow of the Royal Society, had written plenty of scientific papers, and enjoyed the respect and friendship of other experimenters?

Turner put it thus:

The major characteristics of British science were amateurism, aristocratic patronage, minuscule government support, limited employment opportunities, and peripheral inclusion within the clerically dominated universities. . . . The Royal Society was little more than a fashionable club as befitted a normally amateur occupation of gentlemen. In 1851 [computing pioneer] Charles Babbage complained, “Science in England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognized even as a class.”¹

Those men—and it was usually men—who longed to be admired and esteemed as “scientists,” then, needed to bring about a change: that of professionalization. In short, they needed a clever and forceful narrative that would somehow push all the hobbyists out of their disciplines, and leave them as the new kings of the hill.

To some, at least, the answer was a rather obvious one: since most of the scientific amateurs were either employed by the church or otherwise part of the religious community, any decent argument that religion hampered science would do the job quite nicely. Turner again: “The professionalizers were not content merely to note or to ridicule the intellectual problems of the clerical scientist. In some cases they set out to prove that no clergyman could be a genuine man of science.”²

One such example of this is Francis Galton’s (1822–1911) statistical survey of “English Men of Science,” undertaken in 1872. Galton, having shown that churchmen were poorly represented among the most elite groupings of scientists, called for a new and alternative “scientific priesthood” to be established across the kingdom—one which would take the lead in education and, eventually, in all of the relevant concerns.

Yet Galton, one of the founding fathers of statistics, had fiddled the figures. He cherry-picked values that suited his agenda and defined a true “man of science” in such a way that only those thinkers that fit his own mold could ever be counted as one. Turner says Galton’s study

Effectively excluded both amateur aristocratic practitioners of science and the more notable of the clerical scientists . . . no matter what the quality of the work . . . or the number of scientific honors and offices achieved, those people had almost no impact on Galton’s data.³

Such professionalization was well underway when Draper and White were writing their manuscripts, so it is only natural that their works find themselves caught up in this same story. But were Conflict and Warfare really about a power-grab, and about proper recognition? Were they really manifestos for job creation? Were they really penned to prevent pesky preachers from practicing paleobiology without pay?

Or were things, perhaps, a little more personal than that?

Two Angry Men

The strongest language in Conflict is reserved for the Roman Catholic Church. It had, Draper said:

exercised an autocratic tyranny over the intellect of Europe for more than a thousand years. . . . Catholicism, as a system for promoting the well-being of man, had plainly failed . . . it had left the masses of men submitted to its influences, both as regards physical well-being and intellectual culture, in a condition far lower than what it ought to have been.⁴

He was not nearly as harsh toward Protestantism; it was clearly Rome which had really riled Draper, and many viewed his work as a relentless attack on the older Church. What, then, could have made the chemist-turned-historian so very angry? Was his merely an academic frustration—or was there something else altogether going on under the surface?

Donald Fleming wondered the same. He spent forty years in Harvard’s history department—but, a decade before he moved there, he wrote an influential biography of Draper. While interviewing some members of the family for his project, Fleming happened across an interesting little tidbit of information—one that might just explain why Conflict was so anti-Catholic.

Draper, it turns out, had an unmarried sister named Elizabeth—she is described as “the family rebel,” and Fleming recounts a story about her that is really rather horrible. It seems that Draper had allowed Elizabeth to live with him, his wife, and his six children, but that this was not met with gratitude on her part. When William, Draper’s 8-year-old son, became ill and was dying, the boy would repeatedly cry out for a Protestant devotional book—his favorite title—which alone could bring him comfort. Yet it was nowhere to be found. Then, when William finally passed away, it turned out that Elizabeth had hidden it:

After his death [Elizabeth] laid it on Draper’s breakfast plate. He met this cool challenge by ordering her out of the house. Though he never forgave her, she passed a happy, unrepentant life as a Catholic convert in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Perhaps her religious leanings lay at the bottom of the whole incident. If so, the experience may have helped sour Draper on the Catholic church.⁵

Maybe, then, unbridled fury is our surprisingly simple answer: maybe Draper wrote an angry book because he was an angry man. Could the same idea apply to White?

Well, yes, it possibly could.

As we might recall from Chapter 1, White’s near-lifelong dream had been to found his own independent and non-sectarian place of learning. When he was finally in the position to do so—alongside Ezra Cornell—the project was almost scuppered by pious men decrying their proposition as irreligious, as White forcefully relates:

Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze throughout the State—from the good Protestant bishop who proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders . . . to the zealous priest who published a charge that Goldwin Smith—a profoundly Christian scholar—had come to Cornell in order to inculcate the “infidelity of the Westminster Review”; and from the eminent divine who went from city to city, denouncing the “atheistic and pantheistic tendencies” of the proposed education, to the perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was “preaching Darwinism and atheism” in the new institution.⁶

White was incensed. Draper had fallen out with Rome; now White was mad at the whole of Christendom. Why couldn’t these interfering and backward clergy, he fulminated, stop meddling with his well-meaning and forward-thinking aspirations?

Here, then, is a straightforward explanation for the genesis of both Conflict and Warfare: hell hath no fury like a nineteenth-century American intellectual scorned.

So is that it? Did Draper and White write their books to accelerate the professionalization of science and, simultaneously, to gain revenge on mean-spirited relatives, obstinate detractors, and Christianity in general?

No. They didn’t.

A Friendship to Be Restored

Turner is undoubtedly correct about professionalization as a general movement, and also about professionalizers such as Galton deliberately undermining the notion of a clergyman-scientist. Indeed, such considerations probably appealed to both Draper and White—but, in the United States, there was no established Church, and so the dynamics were not quite the same as in England. Draper, in fact, had found it incredibly easy to get both employment and respect in Stateside science. In short, it was not a big enough issue to make either man put pen to paper.

Neither was Draper’s row with his sister. The family tale of poor William’s book was passed along secondhand at best, and can rank only slightly higher than hearsay—even Fleming himself warns that “there seems to be no surviving evidence on this score.”⁷ Draper definitely despised Catholicism, as Conflict clearly demonstrates; but still, that was not his final motivation.

Neither was the nasty experience with Cornell for White—or, at least, it couldn’t be unless the man could somehow travel backward through time. Those run-ins didn’t occur until the 1860s, but White had already formulated most of his thesis long before that—as we shall soon see.

In the harsh light of day, all these well-rehearsed and easy-to-understand explanations fail. They fail because each ends up making the same key mistake—they ignore, almost entirely, what Draper and White themselves actually said they were doing.

Here is White, for instance, at the conclusion of Warfare:

In the light thus obtained [from “modern science”] the sacred text has been transformed: out of the old chaos has come order. . . . Of all the sacred writings of the world, it shows us our own [the Bible] as the most beautiful and the most precious; exhibiting to us the most complete religious development to which humanity has attained, and holding before us the loftiest ideals which our race has known.⁸

and now Draper, at the end of Conflict:

For Catholicism to reconcile itself to Science, there are formidable, perhaps insuperable obstacles in the way. For Protestantism to achieve that great result there are not. In the one case there is a bitter, a mortal animosity to be overcome; in the other, a friendship, that misunderstandings have alienated, to be restored.⁹

What is this? A “friendship to be restored”? The Bible, under the light of science, becoming both “precious” and “beautiful”? These are hardly the words of angry men bent on burning bridges between science and religion. Indeed, they are not—for both Draper and White were hoping to build one.

With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we know that they failed—that they actually managed to do the opposite. But how, and why? To find out, we will need to examine their motives in a little more detail—what was really going on in their heads?

The New Atlantis

Draper, it turns out, is the trickier of the two to analyze. His refusal to use footnotes—not just in Conflict, but in general—means that finding out who and what most influenced him requires quite a lot of detective work. Fortunately, there are enough clues lying around for us to put a decent case together. The trail first gets warm way back in the 1600s—and with the mighty figure of Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon (1561–1626) was a huge fan of the Reformation—as far as he was concerned, the momentous split between the evils of Catholicism and his own beloved Protestantism had brought about a wonderful new age of enlightenment: “When it pleased God to call the Church of Rome to account. . . at one and the same time it was ordained by the Divine Providence, that there should attend withal a renovation and new spring of all other knowledge.”¹⁰

This “spring of all other knowledge,” he believed, included a novel(ish) kind of science—one driven by primarily experiment and then analyzed, if it was possible, mathematically. Although others had toyed with this sort of science before him—the now-famous fourteenth-century “Merton calculators” from Oxford, for example, had imagined how it might have been done—Bacon was almost certainly unaware of it. In the 1530s, the fashions in education had swung suddenly to the classics, and more recent scientific work was almost entirely purged by the universities to make room for Greek and Roman literature—meaning Bacon and his peers may never have seen any of it.¹¹

Back to Bacon’s view: he thought God had provided humankind with revelation in two forms—the Bible, and nature. Each of these was to be carefully studied, with the outcome being—if all was done correctly—a single, unified, truth. The natural philosopher (by which we effectively mean “scientist”), therefore, was doing God’s work every bit as much as the biblical scholar was. They were, in effect, a team.

Although many before him had intimated the same sorts of ideas—the idea of reading both Scripture and nature to know God went back at least as far as Augustine—Bacon pulled it all together into a coherent vision. For the first time, something recognizably like “modern” science was emerging as its own full-blown enterprise.

Bacon wrote down his philosophy in the form of a story, The New Atlantis. In his highly metaphorical text, a group of Catholic sailors are blown off course and arrive at an island unspoiled by contact with Rome. The islanders, who are unencumbered by ecclesiastical authority, are Christians nonetheless, since they found a Bible long ago in their past.

They also turn out to be scientist-scholars—they love nature, and constantly investigate it in order to better understand and worship God. Before long, the sailors are won over to this older, purer form of Christianity, and are then encouraged by the faithful philosophers to set sail once again and share its Gospel—an exciting fusion of Scripture, philosophy, and rational, experimental science.¹²

Many, especially in England, were smitten with Bacon’s vision, which was soon taken up by the nascent Royal Society—or, to give it its full name, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Protestantism, reason, and natural philosophy (by which we effectively mean “science”) were seen as bedfellows. This was rational religion—the best of both worlds—at its finest.

Soon, however, this happy equilibrium would be challenged: for rational religion was about to evolve.

A Thousand Threads

For many of those on the Protestant side of the reformational divide there was a sense of a hard-won freedom—of having thrown off the shackles of a heavier and more controlling type of thought, and of the empowerment of individual believers to think about their Christianity for themselves. This, along with the heady successes of the likes of the Royal Society—a realized New Atlantis that could boast discoveries such as gravitational theory, mathematical motion, the calculus, gas laws, and more as its achievements—made rational religion a real favorite of the intelligentsia.

Such theology had been, at its inception, firmly committed to Scripture. The original idea (as championed by giants such as Newton, Boyle, and Hooke) was that Christianity as a worldview could be investigated and supported by means of experiment, analysis, and induction—that both its message and its God were true and real, and could be bulwarked by the study of creation.

As time went on, however, the momentum shift toward “science”—although the name itself did not yet exist—began to have a negative impact on the standing of tradition and Scripture. Some of Bacon’s and Newton’s successors felt less prepared than their forebears to hang their hats on the writings of the Church Fathers or the ancient creeds, or even on divine revelation itself. Science just felt more solid to them than parables did.

In questioning or even rejecting dogma, though, these thinkers did not see themselves as abandoning true Christianity—in fact, more often than not, they believed that they were purifying it, or enhancing it, or even restoring it, somehow, to its original form.

William Whiston (1667–1752), for example, sat in the same mathematical chair as Newton had at Cambridge, and went as far as arguing for what he considered to be a literal interpretation of Scripture. Yet Whiston (a theologian and historian to boot) maintained that early Christian thinkers had corrupted the faith—and, in 1712, he published a five-volume work called Primitive Christianity Revived that purported to show how. In it, he dismissed the time-honored and universal doctrine of the Trinity, found himself labeled as a heretic, and quit the Anglican Church—but still thought of himself as a faithful Christian. His story, far from being unusual, is actually typical of his age.

The Reformation, it became clear, had given rise to a rather unexpected side effect: by shifting spiritual responsibility more toward the individual and away from the Church, it had produced a generation much more ready to take a sort of pick-and-mix approach to theology, à la Whiston. In fact, by the early to middle 1700s, scores of supposedly Protestant scientist-philosopher-theologians were essentially creating “religions” entirely of their own. Rational theology had blurred, for some, into the free-for-all that is liberal theology—and now it was each man or woman for themselves.

A number of these thinkers, then, chose a theology that vastly favored natural philosophy over revelation—ending up with a stripped-down, maximum-science-minimum-Bible “faith” that was distinctly uneasy about anything overly supernatural. Such a move left them with a supreme deity of some hopelessly undefined sort: a hazy, nebulous oneness who was far off and unknowable, but who could still just about be worshipped—albeit in a vague sort of way—by studying, and enjoying, his-or-its creation.

Such was the “God” of the wildly popular English deism that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the likes of Charles Blount (1654–1693), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), and Thomas Chubb (1679–1747) leading the way. This group of thinkers denied miracles, doubted the Bible, and did away with doctrine—for they saw them all as irrational. They adopted the term “natural religion,” and argued that theirs was the true and pure faith of Christ. This deism, in reality, was the logical outcome of a post-Baconian theology that had become very dependent on the book of nature and very liberal with the book of Scripture. The famed historian Peter Gay put it thus: “Liberal Anglicanism and the dawning deist Enlightenment were connected by a thousand threads.”¹³

And so, two centuries after Luther’s great Scriptural stand against Catholicism, a whole host of progressives and liberals who claimed the German monk as their champion had conspired to throw aside pretty much everything that he had fervently believed. Bacon’s crew of newly Protestant sailors had mutinied, and had headed off instead to their own island—a territory located in the Sea of Pseudo-Christianity.

And, if we really want to understand Draper, then one of these mutinous mariners is probably worth dropping in on: namely, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)—the discoverer of oxygen.

The Heterodox Side of Almost Every Question

A fellow of the Royal Society, Priestley was also a philosopher and theologian—making him exactly the type of character to continue what we might be tempted to call the liberal Protestant scientific revolution. Although he began his religious life in strict Calvinist orthodoxy, Priestley repeatedly changed his mind on matters of faith—each time moving himself further and further away from the traditional conventions, creeds, and catechisms.

“Christ was [only] a man like ourselves,” he pronounced; to worship him as God would be “idolatrous.” Priestley, the dissenter, was defiant: he said he “saw reason to embrace what is generally called the heterodox side of almost every question.”¹⁴

It might seem (and it certainly would to Luther, or Boyle, or Hooke) that Priestley was not really a Christian at all—after all, the divinity of Jesus is perhaps the central belief of Christianity. But the chemist simply did not see things this way. Instead, he claimed to “defend Christianity, and to free it from those corruptions which prevent its reception with philosophical and thinking persons.”¹⁵

Priestley believed, as strange as it maybe sounds, that he was running the same race as Bacon, and even as Luther. In fact, one phrase from his unorthodox Catechism, for Children, and Young Persons (1767) is extraordinarily reminiscent of Bacon’s own writings:

It pleased God to bring about a reformation, which is going on, and, we hope, will go on, till our religion be, in all respects, as pure, and as efficacious to promote real goodness of heart and life as it was at the first.¹⁶

Let’s sum Priestley up, for it will be helpful: he was an eminent scientist; he loved theology; he was a minister in the Unitarian Church; he rejected many of Christianity’s core teachings, calling them Catholic “corruptions”; he hated dogma; he saw himself as returning Christianity to its original form; he sought a religion that was rational; he viewed Luther as an inspirational figure; he believed he was continuing the Reformation.

Priestley died in 1804, but his thought lived on. We know this because his philosophy and his theology were repeated, approvingly, in an Introductory Lecture on Oxygen Gas, first published in 1848.

The author of this lecture was John William Draper.

Many Phases of Religious Belief

It might be very easy to picture Draper as a nineteenth-century Richard Dawkins, or Jerry Coyne—but he was, in fact, no atheist. He believed, for instance, that science directed the “mind of a philosopher to a perception of the laws upon what it pleases God to govern the universe.” Bacon, no doubt, would have approved of such sentiment.

Draper also praised Luther, saying his “grand idea which had hitherto silently lain at the bottom of the whole movement . . . the right of individual judgment” was a wonderful thing, and claiming that the Reformation had “introduced a better rule of life, and made a great advance toward intellectual liberty.”¹⁷

In reality, however, Draper was far more of an heir of Priestley than he was of either Luther or Bacon. Here, for instance, are his views on Scripture:

It is to be regretted that the Christian Church has burdened itself with the defense of these books, and voluntarily made itself answerable for their manifest contradictions and errors. . . . Let it be remembered that the exposure of the true character of these books has been made, not by captious enemies, but by pious and learned churchmen, some of them of the highest dignity.¹⁸

So Draper sees the Bible as full of errors, but also praises Christian piety—just as Priestley would have done. The similarities continue: Draper identifies as Protestant, and detests Catholicism; he treasures science and reason as the best guides to truth; he believes in a “God” and considers himself a Christian; he rejects nearly all traditional doctrine; he considers miracles to be myths and Scripture to be suspect; he wants to restore Christianity, using cool logic only, to its original and uncorrupted form.

In that Introductory Lecture on Oxygen Gas, in fact, Draper openly lauds Priestley: “We must not impute it to mental weakness, but rather to a pursuit of truth, that in succession [Priestley] passed through many phases of religious belief.”¹⁹

Draper, then, had taken the Reformation and run with it. He had ended up with a religion of his own—one that denied much of the Bible, and its revealed God, and its miracles—but that he thought of as Christianity nonetheless.

Well, OK—we now know Draper a little better. But we still haven’t answered the actual question: why did he write Conflict?

Draper, as we have already suggested, hoped to bridge science and religion. Getting them to line up, though, would require careful Laufenberg-like alterations to one side—and Draper believed that it was religion that needed to change.

Dogma had to go—and so did most of the supernatural claims of Scripture, and a divine Jesus, and any assertion about God that came only from revelation. Provided religion was prepared to ditch all this, it would get along with science just fine, thank you very much. There would be no mismatch any more.

But Draper was not daft; he knew this argument alone was not enough. For Conflict to be successful, he had to show that its message was needed in the first place. He had to prove that religion, in its more orthodox guise, was well out of line with science.

And so Conflict was born: a list of tales about how Rome or popes or priests or doctrine or dogma or Scripture had dealt devastating damage to science and scientists and rationality and reason. A compendium of flat Earths, of medical misdemeanors, of the Dark Ages, of Hypatia, of Bruno, of Copernicus, of Galileo, and all the rest. When his readers were faced with all this, he thought, they would have to concede the key point: dogmatic religion was no good for anyone—and especially not for science.

That, then, is the story of a very clever man who wrote a book all about reconciliation; and called it Conflict; and, in so doing, managed to make matters much, much worse than they ever had been before.

But what about White, and Warfare?

The Things That I Love to See

Andrew Dickson White, fortunately for us, loved using footnotes. He was also a prolific letter writer and diarist, and these scribblings are now publicly available through the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at his beloved Cornell University. White, then, is much easier to analyze than Draper—provided, of course, one is prepared to read through his extensive back-catalogue. So, is his story the same as that of his infamous partner in historical crime?

Well, at first it seems like it might be—for White was every bit as much a son of the Reformation as Draper. In fact, his interest in it bordered on an obsession: by the late 1880s he had built up a staggeringly large personal collection of more than 30,000 books on the topic.²⁰ Later in life, he donated them all to the library at Cornell, along with thousands of other manuscripts which had tickled his various fancies.

A second and related love affair in White’s life was with Germany—specifically its history and its educational atmosphere. In 1855, during several transformational years of study in Berlin, he wrote of a visit to Wartburg Castle—the place where Luther himself had been given protection by Prince Frederick III during the most dangerous times in his religious revolution. White’s diary entry says he:

lingered for a long time at [Luther’s] window, looking at the wild scenery at which he once looked. I can see that a great change has come over me in the things that I love to see and to linger over. At my first sight, seeing it was all castles and abbeys, regardless of their tenants in great measure. Now I ask more—ask for places where something has been done for the race, for men as well as monks, and of these man-monks Luther is chief.²¹

This moment of introspection is especially helpful to our understanding of who White really was. First, he is clearly not the hard-nosed and combative anti-theist that many have imagined him to be. Second, he obviously admires Luther’s Protestant remodeling of Christianity, seeing the “man-monk” as a hero. Third, he appears to be a man rather more connected to his own emotions than Draper. Indeed, this last observation, as we shall soon see, turns out to be a pretty significant one.

While in Berlin, White had studied the thought of many German philosophers and theologians, including the highly influential pair of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). For the previous half-century or so, Germany’s educational establishments had been making great moves in the academic world, and many young men at White’s time saw them as the places to be—rich and avant-garde American students often enjoyed a stint there, reveling in the new and daring ideas that percolated in the “free” universities of Berlin and elsewhere. Such institutions were not as closely linked to the Church as their predecessors had been—and they were, accordingly, much more willing to flirt with religious controversy.

White adored everything about this brave new world—eventually, it led to him founding Cornell on the same sort of non-sectarian ideals. In the meantime, though, what matters most to us is that Germany had inspired White toward his very own big-picture understanding of the world—and of science and religion in particular.

The Call of Your Innermost Nature

It was Lessing who had first got White thinking—as in really thinking—about the ideas that lay behind Warfare. In a series of books and plays, the German dramatist had argued that genuine religiosity involved an ever-evolving progression toward greater love and understanding. Each age could claim to have taken steps forward, as could each faith. The Old Testament, for example, was an “elementary primer”; the New Testament, itself just another placeholder, pointed toward an eventual “time of perfection.” Jesus was “the first reliable, practical teacher”—but no more than that.²²

Lessing maintained that all faiths would, one day, lead to the truth—but that none of them was there yet. No creed or dogma, therefore, should ever be considered complete or final; the idealistic “religion of Christ,” which he believed was in keeping with “true religion,” was not the same as that of the Bible, since the Bible was simply an ancient stepping stone to help earlier humankind along its way. White was fascinated by Lessing’s arguments. And then, when he read Schleiermacher, he was entranced.

Formerly a Calvinist and a hospital chaplain, Schleiermacher the philosopher had turned his mind to almost every academic discipline at one point or another. In 1810, he helped found the University of Berlin that White studied at and, as such, became an object of the American’s great curiosity. What White found in the German’s writings appealed greatly to him. They offered the reader a new worldview altogether: one that the famed Reformed thinker Karl Barth described as a “theology of feeling.”²³

This theology was Schleiermacher’s carefully devised tactic for dealing with the increasing amounts of religious skepticism that he saw around him, in Germany in particular. He considered himself to be a firm Protestant Christian—but understood that in the sense of Lessing’s evolutionary faith, and not of Luther’s far more orthodox stand on Scripture. It wasn’t doctrine, or holy writings, or dogma, or revelation that mattered, Schleiermacher said, so don’t worry about those things—instead, it was the inward witness of the heart that counts. Tackling the skeptics head-on, he challenged them to “become conscious of the call of your innermost nature and follow it.”²⁴

White was thrilled by both Schleiermacher’s touchy-feely religion and Lessing’s historical pilgrimage toward truth—so he combined the two to form his own take on life. The myths of the Bible, he decided, had indeed served a good purpose once upon a time—for they had helped simpler people to understand themselves, and to understand something of God, too.

Now, however, modernity was in need of a more enlightened analysis. Creeds, and doctrines, and literal approaches to Scripture were unhelpful in this new age—the real lessons to be learned from the Bible’s fanciful stories were actually about personal morality, and love, and goodness.

God, White believed, had always gently and providentially revealed new ideas to humankind—to one era at a time. It was, therefore, our collective responsibility to grow as a species with each fresh revelation—holding on to the dogmas of a previous age was like crawling when we should be walking; it was crying for a mother’s milk instead of eating solid food.

Here, then, is where Draper and White part ways—for, while Draper had advocated a return to a purer past to find an ancient truth, White was endorsing the exact opposite: he urged everyone onward into the future, in the hope of finding a newer and better one.

So where does science fit in to all this?

A Source of Strength to Both

White was not himself a physicist, or a chemist, or a biologist—but that didn’t mean, he thought, that his ideas were out of line with these disciplines. Indeed, Warfare described the new analysis of the Bible by the likes of Lessing and Schleiermacher as “science,” and those carrying it out as “scientists”—as far as he was concerned, these thinkers were making discoveries every bit as important as those made in electromagnetism, or geology, or thermodynamics.

In fact, in a lengthy paragraph at the conclusion of Warfare, White seeks to draw his entire argument together. Look out, then, for the following themes: human progression as a lawlike principle; true religion really being about heartfelt goodness; traditional dogma as outdated and dangerous; the need for a new chapter for humankind; and, of course, for science as a guide:

the Israelites, like other gifted peoples, rose gradually, through ghost worship, fetichism, and polytheism, to higher theological levels . . . their conceptions and statements regarding the God they worshipped became nobler and better . . . sciences are giving a new solution to those problems which dogmatic theology has so long labored in vain to solve . . . these sciences have established the fact that accounts formerly supposed to be special revelations to Jews and Christians are but repetitions of widespread legends . . . they have also begun to impress upon the intellect and conscience of the thinking world the fact that the religious and moral truths thus disengaged from the old masses of myth and legend are all the more venerable and authoritative, and that all individual or national life of any value must be vitalized by them.²⁵

Here, then, is White’s grand thesis: it is time for us all to grow up. God, via the sciences, has shown us a new set of truths, and we should respond accordingly. The older ways—the ways of doctrine, and Church Fathers, and a literal adherence to Scripture—should be left behind, for they are horribly unscientific, and belong to a previous and naïve age.

If we were only to listen to our hearts, White said, then we would appreciate the true meaning of the Bible, and grasp the true inner power of his vision. And, as an added bonus, science and religion would quite rightly be reconciled, once and for all:

Thus, at last, out of the old conception of our Bible . . . has been gradually developed through the centuries, by the labors, sacrifices, and even the martyrdom of a long succession of men of God, the conception of it as a sacred literature—a growth only possible under that divine light which the various orbs of science have done so much to bring into the mind and heart and soul of man—a revelation, not of the Fall of Man, but of the Ascent of Man—an exposition, not of temporary dogmas and observances, but of the Eternal Law of Righteousness—the one upward path for individuals and for nations. No longer an oracle, good for the “lower orders” to accept, but to be quietly sneered at by “the enlightened”—no longer a fetich, whose defenders must be persecuters, or reconcilers, or “apologists”; but a most fruitful fact, which religion and science may accept as a source of strength to both.²⁶

And so, with this aspirational image of the Bible drawing modern science and reimagined religion back together, Warfare draws to a close.

Bridges Badly Built

Messrs. Draper and White, as we have discovered in this chapter, were intellectual engineers looking to build bridges. For too long, each man argued, religion and science had been violently estranged, and it was now time to reconnect them.

The problem, it was clear to both of them, was on the religious side of the divide. Draper saw the solution as obvious: religion, if it was to re-friend science, must become more detached and rational. White favored an entirely opposite fix: religion should become more personal and emotional. Where these opposite views shared a piece of common ground, however, was their stance on dogma—it needed to go.

And so they both wrote bestselling but error-packed books about how dogma had ruined scientific progress throughout Christendom—and, in so doing, they fooled the world.

That, then, is that: that is how Conflict and Warfare, works of intended reconciliation, came into being. And then, of course, it all went wrong—for, entirely against their authors’ wishes, these two texts helped spark off a war that continues to this day. They are, to put it bluntly, badly built bridges. Yet neither of their authors was untrained, or untalented, or unintelligent—so how did they not see all this coming?

After all, plenty of their horrified readers did.

Pure Materialism and Atheism

When Draper and then White’s diatribes arrived on the scene, they provoked quite a reaction. Those who preferred their religion liberal—a loose, ill-defined, choose-the-bits-you-like approach to traditional ideas—were, broadly at least, fans.²⁷ One such reviewer at the New York Evangelist thought Conflict had succeeded in rationalizing and updating the faith, saying it was the “most powerful argument within my knowledge in defense of Protestantism and modern civilization.”²⁸

White received similar praise from similar outfits—but all this really tells us is that the two men had impressed those people who already agreed with their liberalism. Not everyone was so persuaded, however—and some of their detractors showed remarkable foresight in their criticism.

Essayist Orestes A. Brownson (1803–1876), a man who had done his fair share of exploring many different religious ideas before settling on Catholicism, thought that Conflict’s ancient-and-true-and-rational-and-natural faith was theological nonsense. Anyone denying revelation, and miracles, and doctrine, and a divine Christ, he opined, was hardly embracing a purer form of Christianity—instead, they were obliterating it: “[The] living and ever-present God, Creator, and upholder of the universe, finds no recognition in his physiological system . . . [it is] pure materialism and atheism.”²⁹

In other words, Brownson realized that Draper had made a very serious error of judgment. Conflict would not rescue Christianity from the skeptics, he warned—nor would it endow it with some sort of fresh intellectual rigor. The book’s actual effect, he was convinced, would be to promote science as a viable alternative to religion. There would be no reconciliation; Conflict would set the two against one another.

And, before long, others would make the same points about Warfare.

An Image Without a Soul

Andrew Dickson White received numerous letters from perceptive readers of his ideas, many of whom considered his reimagining of the Bible and spirituality to be hopeless and toothless, and no good for anyone. The physician John Shackelford, for instance, had some scathing words for him: “Christ’s religion goes by the boards. A religion without the authority of God back of it is a religion without power.”³⁰

A family friend of White’s, Mary Eaton, agreed with Shackelford. In an extraordinary and insightful series of letters, she spelled out to White exactly where Warfare had gone wrong—and also why it would almost certainly fail to achieve what he had hoped for it:

If I am not mistaken, the object is to prove the Christian religion a “cunningly devised fable”; the Bible which Christians accept a tissue of falsehoods; its Divine author a myth; his son, that this same Bible pronounces “God manifest in the flesh,” the greatest imposter the world has ever known; and then you inform us that it is true but in some high and mysterious sense!³¹

White was trying to have his cake and eat it, Eaton says. He wanted to be seen as a pious Christian arguing for the truth of Christianity, yet also to deny any and all parts of that faith that he didn’t personally like. This approach didn’t wash well with Eaton. What he was offering would not draw people toward God, she wrote—if anything, it would push them away:

What if you succeed in creating doubts in the minds of men, in taking from them all trust in the Revelation they have accepted as coming from God. What then? What will you give them in its stead? Your poor starving theories? . . . A religion evolved from human brains stripped of all that is Divine? An image without a soul?³²

White wrote back, claiming that he was trying to “save the Bible”—to which Eaton amusingly replied “what do you suppose has saved it all these centuries without your helping hand?”³³ She went on: his enlightened Christianity, she said, was really no Christianity at all. White’s ideas, Eaton predicted, were merely setting the stage for scientifically minded skeptics to jettison the divine once and for all:

You may not be an atheist in the sense that there is no God in the Universe, but when you declare that the Revelation he has made to man is fast crumbling away on account of what you call the “human theological foundations”—that Rock which he says the gates of hell shall not prevail against—I take the liberty by repeating: there is no God in your Bible.³⁴

After two years of back-and-forth with Eaton, an exasperated White had had enough. He told the older woman that he would not be writing to her again. His parting shot was dismissive: “you know nothing whatever of the problem involved.”³⁵

But White was wrong. The likes of Eaton, Shackelford, and Brownson were onto something. For, like the project managers of Laufenburg, Draper and White had made careful adjustments to try and get the two sides of their bridge—science and religion—to meet up properly; and, just like those engineers, they had ended up making a horrible mess of things. They had wanted reconciliation—instead, they birthed the conflict thesis.

And yet, as impossible as it might seem, both Conflict and Warfare are plagued by an even greater irony than that. It turns out that when they went after Christian doctrine for being the ultimate enemy of science, they were engaging in friendly fire. For, in actual fact, no other body of thought has ever been of greater benefit to scientific thinking than the central tenets of traditional Christianity have—in the whole of human history.

As we are about to find out.