HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM
BY
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
I am here to show the untruth of mythical religion. Call me vile, idiotic, new age, pagan, or just plain old sinner. Nancy Your negative words can not affect and the law is even as you preach, you will reap what you sow.
There are multitudes of educated people say you are evil such as this book by the co-founder of Cornell University. The book is online in the gutenberg libray or in any public local library.
TWO VOLUMES COMBINED
To the Memory of
EZRA CORNELL
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we
Breathe cheaply in the common air.--LOWELL
Dicipulus est prioris posterior dies.--PUBLIUS SYRUS
Truth is the daughter of Time.--BACON
The Truth shall make you free.--ST. JOHN, viii, 32.
INTRODUCTION
My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface my
eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the Neva
under my windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the rays
of the April sun into the great ice barrier which binds together
the modern quays and the old granite fortress where lie the bones
of the Romanoff Czars.
This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many
places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole,
so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in
shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a
great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets
above are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up
against it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is
danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break
suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their
foundations, bringing desolation to a vast population, and
leaving, after the subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue
of slime, a fertile breeding-bed for the germs of disease.
But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier,
exposed more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of
channels they are making, will break away gradually, and the
river will flow on beneficent and beautiful.
My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujik on the
Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical
truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches
the modern world to mediaeval conceptions of Christianity, and
which still lingers among us--a most serious barrier to religion
and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of
society.
For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising --the
flood of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier
also, though honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a
danger--danger of a sudden breaking away, distressing and
calamitous, sweeping before it not only out worn creeds and
noxious dogmas, but cherished principles and ideals, and even
wrenching out most precious religious and moral foundations of
the whole social and political fabric.
My hope is to aid--even if it be but a little--in the gradual and
healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the
stream of "religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and
clear, a blessing to humanity.
And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book.
It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored with
Ezra Cornell in founding the university which bears his honored
name.
Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an
institution for advanced instruction and research, in which
science, pure and applied, should have an equal place with
literature; in which the study of literature, ancient and modern,
should be emancipated as much as possible from pedantry; and
which should be free from various useless trammels and vicious
methods which at that period hampered many, if not most, of the
American universities and colleges.
We had especially determined that the institution should be under
the control of no political party and of no single religious
sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent
provisions to this effect in the charter.
It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us that
in all this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian.
Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he
had from his fortune liberally aided every form of Christian
effort which he found going on about him, and among the permanent
trustees of the public library which he had already founded, he
had named all the clergymen of the town--Catholic and Protestant.
As for myself, I had been bred a churchman, had recently been
elected a trustee of one church college, and a professor in
another; those nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious;
and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so personal to my
self, my most cherished friendships were among deeply religious
men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment were
ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and the more devout
forms of poetry. So, far from wishing to injure Christianity, we
both hoped to promote it; but we did not confound religion with
sectarianism, and we saw in the sectarian character of American
colleges and universities as a whole, a reason for the poverty of
the advanced instruction then given in so many of them.
It required no great acuteness to see that a system of control
which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or
Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to
what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged,
could hardly do much to advance the moral, religious, or
intellectual development of mankind.
The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, so cogent
that we expected the co-operation of all good citizens, and
anticipated no opposition from any source.
As I look back across the intervening years, I know not whether
to be more astonished or amused at our simplicity.
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, since to the Church alone
was given the command, "Go, teach all nations," 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.
As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were introduced
into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored clergymen solemnly
warned their flocks first against the "atheism," then against the
"infidelity," and finally against the "indifferentism" of the
university, as devoted pastors endeavoured to dissuade young men
from matriculation, I took the defensive, and, in answer to
various attacks from pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted
to allay the fears of the public. "Sweet reasonableness" was
fully tried. There was established and endowed in the university
perhaps the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most
vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the
United States; but all this did nothing to ward off the attack.
The clause in the charter of the university forbidding it to give
predominance to the doctrines of any sect, and above all the fact
that much prominence was given to instruction in various branches
of science, seemed to prevent all compromise, and it soon became
clear that to stand on the defensive only made matters worse.
Then it was that there was borne in upon me a sense of the real
difficulty-- the antagonism between the theological and
scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to
it; therefore it was that, having been invited to deliver a
lecture in the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I
took as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this
thesis which follows:
In all modern history, interference with science 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 science, and invariably; and, on the other hand,
all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous
to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to
be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion
and science. |
