Andrew Dickson White
Wikipedia
Conflict Thesis
At the time of Cornell's founding, White announced that it would be "an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion."[33] Until then, most of America's private universities had been founded as religious institutions and generally were focused on the liberal arts and religious training.
In 1869, White gave a lecture on "The Battle-Fields of Science", arguing that history showed the negative outcomes resulting from any attempt on the part of religion to interfere with the progress of science. Over the next 30 years, he refined his analysis, expanding his case studies to include nearly every field of science over the entire history of Christianity but also narrowing his target from "religion" through "ecclesiasticism" to "dogmatic theology."
The final result was the two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) in which he asserted the conflict thesis of science with dogmatic theology. Initially less popular than John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), White's book became an extremely influential text on the relationship between religion and science. In it, he argued that "the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, had sought to crush it beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul."[34] White's conflict thesis has been widely disputed among contemporary historians of science.[35][36][37] The warfare depiction remains a popular view among critics of religion, but not the general public.[38]
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