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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




After giving some extracts from the Chaldean creation tablets he
says: "In the light of these facts it is difficult to resist the
conclusion that the biblical narrative is drawn from the same
source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is
plain, derived their materials from the best human sources
available....The materials which with other nations were
combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a
grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the
inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become
the vehicle of profound religious truth."

Not less honourable to the sister university and to himself is
the statement recently made by the Rev. Dr. Ryle, Hulsean
Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He says that to suppose that
a Christian "must either renounce his confidence in the
achievements of scientific research or abandon his faith in
Scripture is a monstrous perversion of Christian freedom." He
declares: "The old position is no longer tenable; a new position
has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen, and hopefully
held." He then goes on to compare the Hebrew story of creation
with the earlier stories developed among kindred peoples, and
especially with the pre-existing Assyro-Babylonian cosmogony, and
shows that they are from the same source. He points out that any
attempt to explain particular features of the story into harmony
with the modern scientific ideas necessitates "a non-natural"
interpretation; but he says that, if we adopt a natural
interpretation, "we shall consider that the Hebrew description of
the visible universe is unscientific as judged by modern
standards, and that it shares the limitations of the imperfect
knowledge of the age at which it was committed to writing."
Regarding the account in Genesis of man's physical origin, he
says that it "is expressed in the simple terms of prehistoric
legend, of unscientific pictorial description."

In these statements and in a multitude of others made by eminent
Christian investigators in other countries is indicated what the
victory is which has now been fully won over the older theology.

Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources,
it has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at
the leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of
creation with which for nearly two thousand years all scientific
discoveries have had to be "reconciled"--the accounts which
blocked the way of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and
Laplace--were simply transcribed or evolved from a mass of myths
and legends largely derived by the Hebrews from their ancient
relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a monotheistic sense,
imperfectly welded together, and then thrown into poetic forms in
the sacred books which we have inherited.

On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to
the physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the
universe, as we at present know it, is the result of an
evolutionary process--that is, of the gradual working of physical
laws upon an early condition of matter; on the other hand, we
have other great groups of men devoted to historical,
philological, and archaeological science whose researches all
converge toward the conclusion that our sacred accounts of
creation were the result of an evolution from an early chaos of
rude opinion.

The great body of theologians who have so long resisted the
conclusions of the men of science have claimed to be fighting
especially for "the truth of Scripture," and their final answer
to the simple conclusions of science regarding the evolution of
the material universe has been the cry, "The Bible is true." And
they are right--though in a sense nobler than they have dreamed.
Science, while conquering them, has found in our Scriptures a far
nobler truth than that literal historical exactness for which
theologians have so long and so vainly contended. More and more
as we consider the results of the long struggle in this field we
are brought to the conclusion that the inestimable value of the
great sacred books of the world is found in their revelation of
the steady striving of our race after higher conceptions,
beliefs, and aspirations, both in morals and religion. Unfolding
and exhibiting this long-continued effort, each of the great
sacred books of the world is precious, and all, in the highest
sense, are true. Not one of them, indeed, conforms to the
measure of what mankind has now reached in historical and
scientific truth; to make a claim to such conformity is folly,
for it simply exposes those who make it and the books for which
it is made to loss of their just influence.

That to which the great sacred books of the world conform, and
our own most of all, is the evolution of the highest conceptions,
beliefs, and aspirations of our race from its childhood through
the great turning-points in its history. Herein lies the truth
of all bibles, and especially of our own. Of vast value they
indeed often are as a record of historical outward fact; recen
researches in the East are constantly increasing this value; but
it is not for this that we prize them most: they are eminently
precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the
evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because
they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing
the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem,
chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect
this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity.
To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a
flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to
scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble
form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the
book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting
under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or
India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to
humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and
modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for
the old--the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea
of evolution for that of creation--has added and is steadily
adding a new revelation divinely inspired.

In the light of these two evolutions, then--one of the visible
universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend--science and
theology, if the master minds in both are wise, may at last be
reconciled. A great step in this reconciliation was recently
seen at the main centre of theological thought among
English-speaking people, when, in the collection of essays
entitled Lux Mundi, emanating from the college established in
these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Oxford, the
legendary character of the creation accounts in our sacred books
was acknowledged, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked,
"May not the Holy Spirit at times have made use of myth and
legend?"[10]

[10] For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of
Genesis, by the Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., Canon of Christ Church
and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford , in the Expositor for
January, 1886; for the second series of citations, see the Early
Narratives of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor
of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 1892. For evidence that even
the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have come to discard the old
literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the
declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as a "disproved
theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch, in Contemporary
Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland--especially
page 550.



II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN.

In one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediaeval
glass-stainer has represented the Almighty as busily engaged in
creating the animals, and there has just left the divine hands an
elephant fully accoutred, with armour, harness, and housings,
ready-for war. Similar representations appear in illuminated
manuscripts and even in early printed books, and, as the
culmination of the whole, the Almighty is shown as fashioning the
first man from a hillock of clay and extracting from his side,
with evident effort, the first woman.

This view of the general process of creation had come from far,
appearing under varying forms in various ancient cosmogonies. In
the Egyptian temples at Philae and Denderah may still be seen
representations of the Nile gods modelling lumps of clay into
men, and a similar work is ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to
the gods of Babylonia. Passing into our own sacred books, these
ideas became the starting point of a vast new development of
theology.[11]

[11] For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of
lumps of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p.
156; for the Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals,
see ibid., p. 543; see also George Smith, Chaldean Accounts of
Genesis, Sayce's edition, pp. 36, 72, and 93; also for similar
legends in other ancient nations, Lenormant, Origines de
l'Histoire, pp. 17 et seq.; for mediaeval representations of the
creation of man and woman, see Didron, Iconographie, pp. 35, 178,
224, 537.


The fathers of the Church generally received each of the two
conflicting creation legends in Genesis literally, and then,
having done their best to reconcile them with each other and to
mould them together, made them the final test of thought upon the
universe and all things therein. At the beginning of the fourth
century Lactantius struck the key-note of this mode of
subordinating all other things in the study of creation to the
literal text of Scripture, and he enforces his view of the
creation of man by a bit of philology, saying the final being
created "is called man because he is made from the ground--homo
ex humo."

In the second half of the same century this view as to the
literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St.
Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that "Moses
opened his mouth and poured forth what God had said to him." But
a greater than either of them fastened this idea into the
Christian theologies. St. Augustine, preparing his Commentary
on the Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous sentence the law
which has lasted in the Church until our own time: "Nothing is to
be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is
that authority than all the powers of the human mind." The
vigour of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing
down the centuries: "Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis
humani ingenii capacitas."

Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no
other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of
influential churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for
a modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held
the minds of men firmly. The great Dominican encyclopaedist,
Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror of Nature, while mixing ideas
brought from Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood
firmly by the first of the accounts given in Genesis, and
assigned the special virtue of the number six as a reason why all
things were created in six days; and in the later Middle Ages
that eminent authority, Cardinal d' Ailly, accepted everything
regarding creation in the sacred books literally. Only a faint
dissent is seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this
later period, who, while giving, in his book on the beginning of
things, a full length woodcut showing the Almighty in the act of
extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of new-formed
Nature in the background, leans in his writings, like St.
Augustine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of matter.

At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in
favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source
of natural science. The allegorical and mystical interpretations
of earlier theologians he utterly rejected. "Why," he asks,
"should Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical
creatures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and
of a visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped? Moses
calls things by their right names, as we ought to do....I hold
that the animals took their being at once upon the word of God,
as did also the fishes in the sea."

Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of
creation given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those who, by
taking another view than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to
expect a judge who will annihilate them." He insists that all
species of animals were created in six days, each made up of an
evening and a morning, and that no new species has ever appeared
since. He dwells on the production of birds from the water as
resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds, "If the
question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that water
is more akin to air than the earth is." As to difficulties in
the scriptural account of creation, he tells us that God "wished
by these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with
astonishment."

The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly held this
view. In the seventeenth century Bossuet threw his vast
authority in its favour, and in his Discourse on Universal
History, which has remained the foundation not only of
theological but of general historical teaching in France down to
the present republic, we find him calling attention to what he
regards as the culminating act of creation, and asserting that,
literally, for the creation of man earth was used, and "the
finger of God applied to corruptible matter."

The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently. In the
seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his
time, attempted to reconcile the two main legends in Genesis by
saying that of the "clean sort of beasts there were seven of
every kind created, three couples for breeding and the odd one
for Adam's sacrifice on his fall, which God foresaw"; and that
of unclean beasts only one couple was created.

So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation that
in these days it can scarcely be imagined. The Almighty was
represented in theological literature, in the pictured Bibles,
and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and
venerable Nuremberg toymaker. At times the accounts in Genesis
were illustrated with even more literal exactness; thus, in
connection with a well-known passage in the sacred text, the
Creator was shown as a tailor, seated, needle in hand, diligently
sewing together skins of beasts into coats for Adam and Eve.
Such representations presented no difficulties to the docile
minds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period; and in the
same spirit, when the discovery of fossils began to provoke
thought, these were declared to be "models of his works approved
or rejected by the great Artificer," "outlines of future
creations," "sports of Nature," or "objects placed in the strata
to bring to naught human curiosity"; and this kind of
explanation lingered on until in our own time an eminent
naturalist, in his anxiety to save the literal account in
Genesis, has urged that Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata,
scattered the fossils through them, scratched the glacial furrows
upon them, spread over them the marks of erosion by water, and
set Niagara pouring--all in an instant--thus mystifying the world
"for some inscrutable purpose, but for his own glory."[12]

[12] For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Instit., lib.
ii, cap. xi, in Migne, tome vi, pp. 311, 312; for St. Augustine's
great phrase, see the De Genes. ad litt., ii, 5; for St. Ambrose,
see lib. i, cap. ii; for Vincent of Beauvais, see the Speculum
Naturale, lib. i, cap. ii, and lib. ii, cap. xv and xxx; also
Bourgeat, Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856, especially
chaps. vii, xii, and xvi; for Cardinal d"ailly, see the Imago
Mundi, and for Reisch, see the various editions of the Margarita
Philosophica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften,
ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i; for
Calvin's view of the creation of the animals, including the
immutability of Species, see the Comm. in Gen., tome i of his
Opera omnia, Amst., 1671, cap. i, v, xx, p. 5, also cap. ii, v,
ii, p. 8, and elsewhere; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur
l'Histoire universelle (in his Euvres, tome v, Paris, 1846); for
Lightfoot, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822; for
Bede, see the Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, p.21; for
Mr. Gosse'smodern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos,
London, 1857, passim.


The next important development of theological reasoning had
regard to the DIVISIONS of the animal kingdom.

Naturally, one of the first divisions which struck the inquiring
mind was that between useful and noxious creatures, and the
question therefore occurred, How could a good God create tigers
and serpents, thorns and thistles? The answer was found in
theological considerations upon SIN. To man's first
disobedience all woes were due. Great men for eighteen hundred
years developed the theory that before Adam's disobedience there
was no death, and therefore neither ferocity nor venom.

Some typical utterances in the evolution of this doctrine are
worthy of a passing glance. St. Augustine expressly confirmed
and emphasized the view that the vegetable as well as the animal
kingdom was cursed on account of man's sin. Two hundred years
later this utterance had been echoed on from father to father of
the Church until it was caught by Bede; he declared that before
man's fall animals were harmless, but were made poisonous or
hurtful by Adam's sin, and he said, "Thus fierce and poisonous
animals were created for terrifying man (because God foresaw that
he would sin), in order that he might be made aware of the final
punishment of hell."

In the twelfth century this view was incorporated by Peter
Lombard into his great theological work, the Sentences, which
became a text-book of theology through the middle ages. He
affirmed that "no created things would have been hurtful to man
had he not sinned; they became hurtful for the sake of
terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and perfecting
virtue; they were created harmless, and on account of sin became
hurtful."

This theological theory regarding animals was brought out in the
eighteenth century with great force by John Wesley. He declared
that before Adam's sin "none of these attempted to devour or in
any wise hurt one another"; "the spider was as harmless as the
fly, and did not lie in wait for blood." Not only Wesley, but
the eminent Dr. Adam Clarke and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas
had the very greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and
even among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held
firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own time,
geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivorous
creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other
animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the
appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by science over
theology in this field.

A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the belief
drawn by sundry old commentators from the condemnation of the
serpent in Genesis--a belief, indeed, perfectly natural, since it
was evidently that of the original writers of the account
preserved in the first of our sacred books. This belief was
that, until the tempting serpent was cursed by the Almighty, all
serpents stood erect, walked, and talked.

This belief was handed down the ages as part of "the sacred
deposit of the faith" until Watson, the most prolific writer of
the evangelical reform in the eighteenth century and the standard
theologian of the evangelical party, declared: "We have no
reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in
any mode or degree until its transformation; that he was then
degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the
contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form."
Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method diligently
pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly two
thousand years; but this "sacred deposit" also faded away when
the geologists found abundant remains of fossil serpents dating
from periods long before the appearance of man.

Troublesome questions also arose among theologians regarding
animals classed as "superfluous." St. Augustine was especially
exercised thereby. He says: "I confess I am ignorant why mice
and frogs were created, or flies and worms....All creatures are
either useful, hurtful, or superfluous to us....As for the
hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, or
terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this
life." As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they
are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the
universe is thereby completed and finished." Luther, who
followed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to
follow him fully in this. To him a fly was not merely
superfluous, it was noxious--sent by the devil to vex him when
reading.

Another subject which gave rise to much searching of Scripture
and long trains of theological reasoning was the difference
between the creation of man and that of other living beings.

Great stress was laid by theologians, from St. Basil and St.
Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from Luther to
Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God
having created man "in his own image." What this statement meant
was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that "Adam
begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image."

In view of this and of well-known texts incorporated from older
creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be
widely held that, while man was directly moulded and fashioned
separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were
evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice.

A question now arose naturally as to the DISTINCTIONS OF SPECIES
among animals. The vast majority of theologians agreed in
representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and named
by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever afterward under
exactly the same species. This belief ripened into a dogma.
Like so many other dogmas in the Church, Catholic and Protestant,
its real origins are to be found rather in pagan philosophy than
in the Christian Scriptures; it came far more from Plato and
Aristotle than from Moses and St. Paul. But this was not
considered: more and more it became necessary to believe that
each and every difference of species was impressed by the Creator
"in the beginning," and that no change had taken place or could
have taken place since.

Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology progressed and
revealed ever-increasing numbers of species; but through the
Middle Ages, and indeed long after the Reformation, these
difficulties were easily surmounted by making the ark of Noah
larger and larger, and especially by holding that there had been
a human error in regard to its measurement.[13]

[13] For St. Augustine, see De Genesis and De Trinitate, passim;
for Bede, see Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-
38, 42; and De Sex Dierum Criatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p.
215; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententiae,
lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682; for Wesley,
Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from them and notes thereto in
my chapter on Geology; for St. Augustine on "superfluous
animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26; on Luther's
view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, "Odio
muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hoereticorum"; for the
agency of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the
fixity of species into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte
der Botanik, Munchen, 1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113.


But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics and
laymen a human desire to go beyond these special points in the
history of animated beings--a desire to know what the creation
really IS.

Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, poor as
they were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity in this
field.

Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had made the
first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, and had
begun a development of studies in natural history which remains
one of the leading achievements in the story of our race.

But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in the early
Church--that all study of Nature was futile in view of the
approaching end of the world--indicated so clearly in the New
Testament and voiced so powerfully by Lactantius and St.
Augustine--held back this current of thought for many centuries.
Still, the better tendency in humanity continued to assert
itself. There was, indeed, an influence coming from the Hebrew
Scriptures themselves which wrought powerfully to this end; for,
in spite of all that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to
the futility of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the
Psalms regarding the beauties and wonders of creation, in all the
glow of the truest poetry, ennobled the study even among those
whom logic drew away from it.

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