hostility to theology, but only recorded his 

 desire to foster an ecumenical religious 

 spirit: 



It had certainly never entered into the mind 

 of either of us that in all this we were doing 

 anything irreligious or unchristian.... I had 

 been bred a churchman, and had recently 

 been elected a trustee of one church college. 

 and a professor in another... my greatest 

 sources of enjoyment were ecclesiastical ar- 

 chitecture, religious music, and the more 

 devout forms of poetry. So far from wishing 

 to injure Christianity, we both hoped to pro- 

 mote it; but we did not confound religion 

 with sectarianism. 



But the calumnies of conservative cler- 

 gymen dismayed him profoundly and en- 

 ergized his fighting spirit: 



Opposition began at once... from the good 

 Protestant bishop who proclaimed that all 

 professors should be in holy orders, since to 

 the Church alone was given the command 

 "Go, teach all the nations," to the zealous 

 priest who pubUshed a charge that... a pro- 

 foundly Christian scholar had come to Cor- 

 nell in order to inculcate infidelity... from 

 the eminent divine who went from city to 

 city denouncing the "atheistic and pantheis- 

 tic tendencies'" of the proposed education, 

 to the perfervid minister who informed a de- 

 nominational synod that Agassiz, the last 

 great opponent of Darwin, and a devout the- 

 ist, was "preaching Darwinism and athe- 

 ism" in the new institudon. 



These searing personal experiences led 

 White to a different interpretation of the 

 "warfare of science with theology." 

 Draper was a genuine antitheist, but he 

 confined his hostility almost entirely to the 

 Catholic church, as he felt that science 

 could coexist with more liberal forms of 

 Protestantism. White, on the other hand, 

 professed no hostility to religion, but only 

 to dogmatism of any stripe — while his 

 own struggles had taught him that Protes- 

 tants could be as obstructionist as anyone 

 else. He wrote: 



Much as I admired Draper's treatment of the 

 questions involved, his point of view and 

 mode of looking at history were different 

 from mine. He regarded the struggle as one 

 between Science and Religion. I believed 

 then, and am convinced now, that it was a 

 struggle between Science and Dogmatic 

 Theology. 



White therefore argued that the triumph 

 of science in its warfare with dogmatism 

 would benefit true religion as much as sci- 

 ence. He expressed his credo as a para- 

 graph in italics in the introduction to his 

 book: 



In all modem history, interference with sci- 

 ence in the supposed interest of religion, no 



matter how conscientious such interference 

 may have been, has resulted in the direst 

 evils both to religion and to science, and in- 

 variably; and, on the other hand, all untram- 

 melled scientific investigation, no matter 

 how dangerous to religion some of its stages 

 may have seemed for the time to be, has in- 

 variably resulted in the highest good both of 

 religion and of science. 



Despite these stated disagreements with 

 Draper, their accounts of the actual inter- 

 action between science and religion in 

 Western history do not differ greatly. Both 

 essentially tell a tale of bright progress 

 continually sparked by science. And both 

 develop and utilize the same myths to sup- 

 port their narrative, the flat earth legend 

 prominently among them. Of Cosmas In- 

 dicopleustes's flat earth theory, for ex- 

 ample. White wrote: 



Some of the foremost men in the Church de- 

 voted themselves to buttressing it with new 

 texts and throwing about it new outworks of 

 theological reasoning; the great body of the 

 faithful considered it a direct gift from the 

 Almighty. 



As another interesting similarity, both 

 men developed their basic model of sci- 

 ence versus theology in the context of a 

 seminal and contemporary struggle all too 

 easily viewed in this light — the battle for 

 evolution, specificaUy for Darwin's secu- 

 lar version based on natural selection. No 

 issue, certainly since Galileo, had so chal- 

 lenged traditional views of the deepest 

 meaning of human life, and therefore so 

 contacted a domain of religious inquiry as 

 well. It would not be an exaggeration to 

 say that the Darwinian revolution directly 

 triggered this influential nineteenth-cen- 

 tury conceptualization of Western history 



as a war between two taxonomic cate- 

 gories labeled science and religion. White 

 made an explicit connection in his state- 

 ment about Agassiz (the founder of the 

 museum where I now work and a visiting 

 lecturer at Cornell). Moreover, the first 

 chapter of his book treats the battle over 

 evolution, while the second begins with 

 the flat earth myth. 



Draper wraps himself even more fully 

 in a Darwinian mantie. The end of his 

 preface designates five great episodes in 

 the history of science's battle with reli- 

 gion — the debasement of classical knowl- 

 edge and the descent of the Dark Ages, the 

 flowering of science under early Islam, the 

 battle of Galileo with the Catholic church, 

 the Reformation (a plus for an anti- 

 Catholic like Draper), and the struggle for 

 Darwinism. No one in the world had a 

 more compelling personal license for such 

 a view, for Draper had been an unwilling 

 witness — one might even say an instiga- 

 tor — of the single most celebrated incident 

 in the overt struggle between Darwin and 

 divinity. We all have heard the famous 

 story of Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. 

 Huxley duking it out at the British Associ- 

 ation meeting in 1860. But how many peo- 

 ple know that their verbal pyrotechnics did 

 not form the avowed agenda of this meet- 

 ing, but only arose during free discussion 

 following the formal paper officially set 

 for this session — an address by the same 

 Dr. Draper on the "intellectual develop- 

 ment of Europe considered with reference 

 to the views of Mr. Darwin." (I do love co- 

 incidences of this sort. Sociologists tell us 

 that we can touch anyone through no more 

 than six degrees of separation, given the 



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