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History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

A >> Andrew Dickson White >> History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom





But, strange as it may seem, even after theologians had thus
settled the manner of creation, the matter employed in it, the
time required for it, and the exact date of it, there remained
virtually unsettled the first and greatest question of all; and
this was nothing less than the question, WHO actually created the
universe?

Various theories more or less nebulous, but all centred in texts
of Scripture, had swept through the mind of the Church. By some
theologians it was held virtually that the actual creative agent
was the third person of the Trinity, who, in the opening words of
our sublime creation poem, "moved upon the face of the waters."
By others it was held that the actual Creator was the second
person of the Trinity, in behalf of whose agency many texts were
cited from the New Testament. Others held that the actual
Creator was the first person, and this view was embodied in the
two great formulas known as the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds,
which explicitly assigned the work to "God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth." Others, finding a deep meaning in
the words "Let US make," ascribed in Genesis to the Creator, held
that the entire Trinity directly created all things; and still
others, by curious metaphysical processes, seemed to arrive at
the idea that peculiar combinations of two persons of the Trinity
achieved the creation.

In all this there would seem to be considerable courage in view
of the fearful condemnations launched in the Athanasian Creed
against all who should "confound the persons" or "divide the
substance of the Trinity."

These various stages in the evolution of scholastic theology were
also embodied in sacred art, and especially in cathedral
sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, and in missal
painting.

The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third
person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos;
sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes
as the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable;
sometimes as the first and second persons, one being venerable
and the other youthful; and sometimes as three persons, one
venerable and one youthful, both wearing papal crowns, and each
holding in his lips a tip of the wing of the dove, which thus
seems to proceed from both and to be suspended between them.

Nor was this the most complete development of the medieval idea.
The Creator was sometimes represented with a single body, but
with three faces, thus showing that Christian belief had in some
pious minds gone through substantially the same cycle which an
earlier form of belief had made ages before in India, when the
Supreme Being was represented with one body but with the three
faces of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.

But at the beginning of the modern period the older view in its
primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Christians by the most
mighty genius in art the world has known; for in 1512, after four
years of Titanic labour, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes
within the vault of the Sistine Chapel.

They had been executed by the command and under the sanction of
the ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the conception of
Christian theology then dominant, and they remain to-day in all
their majesty to show the highest point ever attained by the
older thought upon the origin of the visible universe.

In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Father--the
first person of the Trinity--in human form, august and venerable,
attended by angels and upborne by mighty winds, sweeps over the
abyss, and, moving through successive compartments of the great
vault, accomplishes the work of the creative days. With a simple
gesture he divides the light from the darkness, rears on high the
solid firmament, gathers together beneath it the seas, or summons
into existence the sun, moon, and planets, and sets them circling
about the earth.

In this sublime work culminated the thought of thousands of
years; the strongest minds accepted it or pretended to accept it,
and nearly two centuries later this conception, in accordance
with the first of the two accounts given in Genesis, was
especially enforced by Bossuet, and received a new lease of life
in the Church, both Catholic and Protestant.[7]

[7] For strange representations of the Creator and of the
creation by one, two, or three persons of the Trinity, see
Didron, Iconographie Chretienne, pp. 35, 178, 224, 483, 567-580,
and elsewhere; also Detzel as already cited. The most naive of
all survivals of the mediaeval idea of creation which the present
writer has ever seen was exhibited in 1894 on the banner of one
of the guilds at the celebration of the four-hundredth
anniversary of the founding of the Munich Cathedral. Jesus of
Nazareth, as a beautiful boy and with a nimbus encircling his
head, was shown turning and shaping the globe on a lathe, which
he keeps in motion with his foot. The emblems of the Passion are
about him, God the Father looking approvingly upon him from a
cloud, and the dove hovering between the two. The date upon the
banner was 1727.


But to these discussions was added yet another, which, beginning
in the early days of the Church, was handed down the ages until
it had died out among the theologians of our own time.

In the first of the biblical accounts light is created and the
distinction between day and night thereby made on the first day,
while the sun and moon are not created until the fourth day.
Masses of profound theological and pseudo-scientific reasoning
have been developed to account for this--masses so great that for
ages they have obscured the simple fact that the original text is
a precious revelation to us of one of the most ancient of
recorded beliefs--the belief that light and darkness are entities
independent of the heavenly bodies, and that the sun, moon, and
stars exist not merely to increase light but to "divide the day
from the night, to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and
for years," and "to rule the day and the night."

Of this belief we find survivals among the early fathers, and
especially in St. Ambrose. In his work on creation he tells us:
"We must remember that the light of day is one thing and the
light of the sun, moon, and stars another--the sun by his rays
appearing to add lustre to the daylight. For before sunrise the
day dawns, but is not in full refulgence, for the sun adds still
further to its splendour." This idea became one of the
"treasures of sacred knowledge committed to the Church," and was
faithfully received by the Middle Ages. The medieval mysteries
and miracle plays give curious evidences of this: In a
performance of the creation, when God separates light from
darkness, the stage direction is, "Now a painted cloth is to be
exhibited, one half black and the other half white." It was
also given more permanent form. In the mosaics of San Marco at
Venice, in the frescoes of the Baptistery at Florence and of the
Church of St. Francis at Assisi, and in the altar carving at
Salerno, we find a striking realization of it--the Creator
placing in the heavens two disks or living figures of equal size,
each suitably coloured or inscribed to show that one represents
light and the other darkness. This conception was without doubt
that of the person or persons who compiled from the Chaldean and
other earlier statements the accounts of the creation in the
first of our sacred books.[8]

[8] For scriptural indications of the independent existence of
light and darkness, compare with the first verses of the chapter
of Genesis such passages as Job xxxviii, 19,24; for the general
prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmogonie, pp. 31, 33,
41, 74, and passim; for the view of St. Ambrose regarding the
creation of light and of the sun, see his Hexameron, lib. 4, cap.
iii; for an excellent general statement, see Huxley, Mr.
Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, reprinted
in his Essays on Controverted Questions, London, 1892, note, pp.
126 et seq.; for the acceptance in the miracle plays of the
scriptural idea of light and darkness as independent creations,
see Wright, Essays on Archeological Subjects, vol. ii, p.178; for
an account, with illustrations, of the mosaics, etc.,
representing this idea, see Tikkanen, Die Genesis-mosaiken von
San Marco, Helsingfors, 1889, p. 14 and 16 of the text and Plates
I and II. Very naively the Salerno carver, not wishing to colour
the ivory which he wrought, has inscribed on one disk the word
"LUX" and on the other "NOX." See also Didron, Iconographie, p.
482.


Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it was held,
virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that the universe, as
we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice or
hands of the Almighty, or by both--out of nothing--in an instant
or in six days, or in both--about four thousand years before the
Christian era--and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the
earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole
structure.

But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of
another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as
the Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find
recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of AN EVOLUTION of the
universe out of the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the
animal creation out of the earth and sea. This idea, recast,
partially at least, into monotheistic form, passed naturally into
the sacred books of the neighbours and pupils of the
Chaldeans--the Hebrews; but its growth in Christendom afterward
was checked, as we shall hereafter find, by the more powerful
influence of other inherited statements which appealed more
intelligibly to the mind of the Church.

Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought by the
early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably transmitted
from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. In the minds of
Ionians like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly
developed: the first of these conceiving of the visible universe
as the result of processes of evolution, and the latter pressing
further the same mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in
cosmic development recognised in modern science.

This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold
upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some
ingenious, some perverse. Plato, indeed, withstood it; but
Aristotle sometimes developed it in a manner which reminds us of
modern views.

Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the
evolutionary process virtually to all things.

In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation
direct, material, and by means like those used by man, was
all-powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on evolution.
From the more simple and crude of the views of creation given in
the Babylonian legends, and thence incorporated into Genesis,
rose the stream of orthodox thought on the subject, which grew
into a flood and swept on through the Middle Ages and into modern
times. Yet here and there in the midst of this flood were high
grounds of thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena and Duns
Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, had
caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to their
successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolutionary
process in the universe.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary
theories seemed to take more definite form in the mind of
Giordano Bruno, who evidently divined the fundamental idea of
what is now known as the "nebular hypothesis"; but with his
murder by the Inquisition at Rome this idea seemed utterly to
disappear--dissipated by the flames which in 1600 consumed his
body on the Campo dei Fiori.

Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death the world
was led into a new realm of thought in which an evolution theory
of the visible universe was sure to be rapidly developed. For
there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our
race has produced--Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and
Newton--and when their work was done the old theological
conception of the universe was gone. "The spacious firmament on
high"--"the crystalline spheres"--the Almighty enthroned upon
"the circle of the heavens," and with his own lands, or with
angels as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion
for the benefit of the earth, opening and closing the "windows of
heaven," letting down upon the earth the "waters above the
firmament," "setting his bow in the cloud," hanging out "signs
and wonders," hurling comets, "casting forth lightnings" to scare
the wicked, and "shaking the earth" in his wrath: all this had
disappeared.

These five men had given a new divine revelation to the world;
and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception,
destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had
shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice,
all-pervading law. The bitter opposition of theology to the
first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so
widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious
spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged
against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he
"took from God that direct action on his works so constantly
ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material
mechanism," and that he "substituted gravitation for Providence."

But, more than this, these men gave a new basis for the theory of
evolution as distinguished from the theory of creation.

Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of Descartes,
erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view of the
lack of physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done much to
weaken the old conception. His theory of a universe brought out
of all-pervading matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by
movements in accordance with physical laws--though it was but a
provisional hypothesis--had done much to draw men's minds from
the old theological view of creation; it was an example of
intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the
advent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his almost
morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small
factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a
reception of the thoughts of more unfettered thinkers.

Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different
sort, but with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cudworth
published his Intellectual System of the Universe. To this day
he remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in
tolerance, and in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the
English Church, and his work was worthy of him. He purposed to
build a fortress which should protect Christianity against all
dangerous theories of the universe, ancient or modern. The
foundations of the structure were laid with old thoughts thrown
often into new and striking forms; but, as the superstructure
arose more and more into view, while genius marked every part of
it, features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious
misgivings. From the old theories of direct personal action on
the universe by the Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the
action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous
intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world
there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued vigorously in favour
of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a slow and
gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward
principle. The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might
well condemn this honest Balaam.

Toward the end of the next century a still more profound genius,
Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the
light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never
before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater
strength by mathematical reasonings of wonderful power and
extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that
our own solar system and others--suns, planets, satellites, and
their various movements, distances, and magnitudes--necessarily
result from the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws.

Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once
against "atheism," and war raged fiercely. Herschel and others
pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous. They
showed by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the
hypothesis accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite
clamour, were gaining ground, when the improved telescopes
resolved some of the patches of nebulous matter into multitudes
of stars. The opponents of the nebular hypothesis were
overjoyed; they now sang paeans to astronomy, because, as they
said, it had proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to
the conclusion that all nebula must be alike; that, if SOME are
made up of systems of stars, ALL must be so made up; that none
can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, because some are not.

Science halted for a time. The accepted doctrine became this:
that the only reason why all the nebula are not resolved into
distinct stars is that our telescopes are not sufficiently
powerful. But in time came the discovery of the spectroscope and
spectrum analysis, and thence Fraunhofer's discovery that the
spectrum of an ignited gaseous body is non-continuous, with
interrupting lines; and Draper's discovery that the spectrum of
an ignited solid is continuous, with no interrupting lines. And
now the spectroscope was turned upon the nebula, and many of them
were found to be gaseous. Here, then, was ground for the
inference that in these nebulous masses at different stages of
condensation--some apparently mere pitches of mist, some with
luminous centres--we have the process of development actually
going on, and observations like those of Lord Rosse and Arrest
gave yet further confirmation to this view. Then came the great
contribution of the nineteenth century to physics, aiding to
explain important parts of the vast process by the mechanical
theory of heat.

Again the nebular hypothesis came forth stronger than ever, and
about 1850 the beautiful experiment of Plateau on the rotation of
a fluid globe came in apparently to illustrate if not to confirm
it. Even so determined a defender of orthodoxy as Mr. Gladstone
at last acknowledged some form of a nebular hypothesis as
probably true.

Here, too, was exhibited that form of surrendering theological
views to science under the claim that science concurs with
theology, which we have seen in so many other fields; and, as
typical, an example may be given, which, however restricted in
its scope, throws light on the process by which such surrenders
are obtained. A few years since one of the most noted professors
of chemistry in the city of New York, under the auspices of one
of its most fashionable churches, gave a lecture which, as was
claimed in the public prints and in placards posted in the
streets, was to show that science supports the theory of creation
given in the sacred books ascribed to Moses. A large audience
assembled, and a brilliant series of elementary experiments with
oxygen, hydrogen, and carbonic acid was concluded by the Plateau
demonstration. It was beautifully made. As the coloured globule
of oil, representing the earth, was revolved in a transparent
medium of equal density, as it became flattened at the poles, as
rings then broke forth from it and revolved about it, and,
finally, as some of these rings broke into satellites, which for
a moment continued to circle about the central mass, the
audience, as well they might, rose and burst into rapturous
applause.

Thereupon a well-to-do citizen arose and moved the thanks of the
audience to the eminent professor for "this perfect demonstration
of the exact and literal conformity of the statements given in
Holy Scripture with the latest results of science." The motion
was carried unanimously and with applause, and the audience
dispersed, feeling that a great service had been rendered to
orthodoxy. Sancta simplicitas!

What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been seen
elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a broader stage.
Scores of theologians, chief among whom of late, in zeal if not
in knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, have endeavoured to
"reconcile" the two accounts in Genesis with each other and with
the truths regarding the origin of the universe gained by
astronomy, geology, geography, physics, and chemistry. The
result has been recently stated by an eminent theologian, the
Hulsean Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He
declares, "No attempt at reconciling genesis with the exacting
requirements of modern sciences has ever been known to succeed
without entailing a degree of special pleading or forced
interpretation to which, in such a question, we should be wise to
have no recourse."[9]

[9] For an interesting reference to the outcry against Newton,
see McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, New York, 1890,
pp. 103, 104; for germs of an evolutionary view among the
Babylonians, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Gensis, New
York, 1876, pp. 74, 75; for a germ of the same thought in
Lucretius, see his De Natura Rerum, lib. v,pp.187-194, 447-454;
for Bruno's conjecture (in 1591), see Jevons, Principles of
Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 36; for Kant's statement, see
his Naturgeschichte des Himmels; for his part in the nebular
hypothesis, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i,
p.266; for the value of Plateau's beautiful experiment, very
cautiously estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36; also Elisee
Reclus, The Earth, translated by Woodward, vol. i, pp. 14-18, for
an estimate still more careful; for a general account of
discoveries of the nature of nebulae by spectroscope, see Draper,
Conflict between Religion and Science; for a careful discussion
regarding the spectra of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, see
Schellen, Spectrum Analysis, pp. 100 et seq.; for a very thorough
discussion of the bearings of discoveries made by spectrum
analysis upon the nebular hypothesis, ibid., pp. 532-537; for a
presentation of the difficulties yet unsolved, see an article by
Plummer in the London Popular Science Review for January, 1875;
for an excellent short summary of recent observations and
thoughts on this subject, see T. Sterry Hunt, Address at the
Priestley Centennial, pp. 7, 8; for an interesting modification
of this hypothesis, see Proctor's writings; for a still more
recent view see Lockyer's two articles on The Sun's Place in
Nature for February 14 and 25, 1895.


The revelations of another group of sciences, though sometimes
bitterly opposed and sometimes "reconciled" by theologians, have
finally set the whole question at rest. First, there have come
the biblical critics--earnest Christian scholars, working for the
sake of truth--and these have revealed beyond the shadow of a
reasonable doubt the existence of at least two distinct accounts
of creation in our book of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced
to agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with
each other. These scholars have further shown the two accounts
to be not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but
evidently fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies,
accepted in good faith and brought together for the noblest of
purposes by those who put in order the first of our sacred books.

Next have come the archaeologists and philologists, the devoted
students of ancient monuments and records; of these are such as
Rawlinson, George Smith, Sayce, Oppert, Jensen, Schrader,
Delitzsch, and a phalanx of similarly devoted scholars, who have
deciphered a multitude of ancient texts, especially the
inscriptions found in the great library of Assurbanipal at
Nineveh, and have discovered therein an account of the origin of
the world identical in its most important features with the later
accounts in our own book of Genesis.

These men have had the courage to point out these facts and to
connect them with the truth that these Chaldean and Babylonian
myths, legends, and theories were far earlier than those of the
Hebrews, which so strikingly resemble them, and which we have in
our sacred books; and they have also shown us how natural it was
that the Jewish accounts of the creation should have been
obtained at that remote period when the earliest Hebrews were
among the Chaldeans, and how the great Hebrew poetic accounts of
creation were drawn either from the sacred traditions of these
earlier peoples or from antecedent sources common to various
ancient nations.

In a summary which for profound thought and fearless integrity
does honour not only to himself but to the great position which
he holds, the Rev. Dr. Driver, Professor of Hebrew and Canon of
Christ Church at Oxford, has recently stated the case fully and
fairly. Having pointed out the fact that the Hebrews were one
people out of many who thought upon the origin of the universe,
he says that they "framed theories to account for the beginnings
of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for themselves
or borrowed those of their neighbours"; that "of the theories
current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved,
and these exhibit points of resemblance with the biblical
narrative sufficient to warrant the inference that both are
derived from the same cycle of tradition."

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