A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom was published in two volumes by Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, in 1896.

In the introduction White states the original goal of his 1874 lecture on The Battlefields of Science and elaborated in a book The Warfare of Science the same year:

In these volumes he chronicles the gradual emancipation of science from theology in various fields.

The literal interpretation of Genesis, including denial of all death and of animals not of use to man before the introduction of sin, gives way to the recognition of the enormous number of species in the world. Various evolutionary ideas opposed progressively by Linnaeus, Cuvier and Agassiz led up to the theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin and Wallace. The initial theological opposition gradually gave way to compromise by most churches.

The spherical ideas of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle had replaced earlier ideas from Chaldeans and Egyptians of a flat earth. The church fathers favoured the idea of a solid roof or firmament over the earth and this was elaborated early on, but in the Middle Ages most followed authorities such as Thomas Aquinas in accepting sphericity. Jerusalem was accepted as the centre of the world and a refusal to accept the existence of antipodes led many to assume that the other side of the world was entirely aqueous. Opposition to the antipodes did not cease for centuries after Magellan's voyages and also contributed to underestimates of the size of the earth, which happened to help Columbus. Religious feeling encouraged the expansion of Europeans across the globe.

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