Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

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Science and Religion 263

organisation of the facts of the religious consciousness,” those behavioral
scientists concluded that in the lives of most people, theology played a
relatively minor role. In 1922, Edward L. Schaub of Northwestern Uni-
versity, summarizing the research of the previous quarter century, em-
phasized that psychologists of religion had “set into clearer light the fact
that religion is not creed but life in its loftiest reach; and they have like-
wise shown that all man’s conscious powers—cognitive, emotional, and
conative—enter into its structure.”^20
By the end of the nineteenth century, a number of ideological currents
had converged to convince many liberals that religion should be distin-
guished from doctrinal theology. This context served as the backdrop for
Andrew Dickson White’s evolving interpretation of the history of the rela-
tionship between science and religion. In 1869, White, who taught history
at the University of Michigan before becoming Cornell’s fi rst president,
presented a lecture at New York’s Cooper Union titled “The Battlefi elds of
Science.” Arguing that “interference with Science in the supposed interest
of religion” had led to “the direst evils both to Religion and Science,” he
contended that religion and science should “stand together as allies, not
against each other as enemies.” In his short book The Warfare of Science
(1876), White continued to depict “religion” and “science” as the central
parties in the “warfare,” and he admonished religious leaders to see that
the “readjustment of religion to science be made as quietly and speedily
as possible.”^21
By 1896, the year that White’s massive, lavishly documented two-
volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom ap-
peared, he had subtly but signifi cantly altered his views. He now refused
to characterize the issue as a struggle between science and religion. Rather,
he announced that he had only the highest regard for religion, which
he envisioned in terms laid down by Matthew Arnold (the recognition
of “a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteous-
ness”) and, more broadly, as “the love of God and of our neighbor.” From
this perspective, he denounced the notion that “religion and science are
enemies” as the “most mistaken of all mistaken ideas.” The villain, he
asserted, was not religion but “Dogmatic Theology.” Only after science
had cleared away the debris of “mediaeval” theological dogma could “the
stream of ‘religion pure and undefi led’... fl ow on broad and clear, a bless-
ing to humanity.”^22
As a number of critics at the time and since have suggested, White
exaggerated both the incidence and the severity of confl ict between par-
tisans of theology and practitioners of science. He also oversimplifi ed the
complexities of the interaction by implying that the “warfare” found sci-

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