The Warfare of Science

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.

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 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,

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.

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.