History Of The Warfare Of Science [Paperback]

To make my case, I'll use the section on Galileo. White totally ignores the fact that Galileo himself was a faithful Christian and had no desire to be at "war" with the Church. The disagreement was not over the relationship between religion and science but between interpretation of Scripture. Furthermore, White introduces many outright lies into his argument. He claims that Galileo was subjected to imprisonment and torture when in reality, he was given a five room suite in a palace during his time in Rome. White uses sensationalism and melodrama freely in such ridiculous phrases as "seething, squabbling, screaming mass of priests, bishops, archbishops..." and "screamed in rage against the Copernican system." In short, the Galileo affair is extremely complex with errors occurring on both sides. To twist facts and tell outright lies to say that the issue was a struggle between science and religion only shows White's gross ignorance of the matter.

As a Christian, a scientist, and a fairly intelligent person, I'm shocked to see that people still use this ridiculous 134 year old sham to feed the Warfare Myth. In using this book against Christians, scientists are being just as narrow minded and naïve as the Christians who attack reliable scientific evidence in the name of God. Now that I've probably managed to make everybody angry, I urge everyone to realize that the issues White tries to cram into his simple model of "a" versus "b", are actually very complex and one would do well to do some real research into the issues addressed in this book rather than buy into White's mindless garbage.

This book first appeared in 1896. Since then, science has advanced and grown faster than ever before--yet Christian religious dogma is unchanged. Incredibly, we still hear from some states, towns, and public school systems (at least in the U.S.) the same biblical-fundamentalist arguments against scientific inquiry that, as Prof. White's book meticulously demonstrates, have been raised and debunked repeatedly over the past two millennia.

It's up to us whether we let religious fundamentalists paralyze progress in our era. Never forget which fruit God told the humans not to eat.

Originally written in 1886, this is a comprehensive account of clashes between theological and scientific claims about how nature works. White systematically chronicles the persecution all the major areas of scientific inquiry had to go through from theologans before they were accepted : geology, mechanics, medicine, meteorology, biology, etc..

For example, in one chapter he meticulously works through the emergence of the heliocentric view of the world, as opposed to that endorsed by the Pope where the earth is the center of the universe. There are tragic tales of threats (Galileo), torture, and execution (Bruno) of scientific minds who made claims that conflicted with the Church.

The chapters are exceedingly well-crafted. He starts out each chapter by describing the origins of the Christian view of the topic (for instance, that there is literally a stone firmament above the earth through which rain is let in). He then discusses how scientists came to question such views, their persecution by the church, and eventually how the Church backtracked and hedged and finally accepted the scientific view.

Compared to a lot of work by skeptics these days, the book is very scholarly: it is exceedingly well referenced, so that you can go find the original sources of both the theological and scientific viewpoints. On the other hand, since the book is over 100 years old, there are some ideas that are a bit antiquated. For example, his discussion of "primitive and savage cultures" extant in Africa are a bit dated. Also, the references to the 'recent' Civil War in the United States shows the books age. These anachronisms come off as interesting more than anything else. Overall, stylistically the book reads better and is more thoroughly researched than most modern skeptical thoughts.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the real story about how science and religion have related to one another in history. To those creationists who say that scientists are being dogmatic by adhering to naturalism, I say read this book. Naturalism as a scientific methodology is not a dogma (where a 'dogma' is something believed without evidence). Rather, science is naturalistic because 1000 years of the alternative were an abject failure: based on historical evidence, religious thinking *in science* only stunts the creativity and logical thought processes of scientists. In my experience in neuroscience, I have seen this many times.

Finally, this book should be on every scientist's bookshelf. As a working neuroscientist, I take for granted that I am free to think in any direction about how the brain works. I do not need to answer to any higher authority than evidence provided by experiments. I am accorded this privilege because of people like Galileo, Darwin, Lyell, and Harvey who stood up to the Church establishment and had the courage, in the face of sometimes fatal reproach, to say what they thought was true.