History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in ChristendomWhite, Andrew Dickson
Religion
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
White, Andrew Dickson
Religion and science -- History
One of the first evidences of the completeness of this surrender has
been so well related by the eminent physiologist, Dr. W. B. Carpenter,
that it may best be given in his own words: "You are familiar with a
book of considerable value, Dr. W. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. I
happened to know the influences under which that dictionary was
framed. The idea of the publisher and of the editor was to give as much
scholarship and such results of modern criticism as should be compatible
with a very judicious conservatism. There was to be no objection
to geology, but the universality of the Deluge was to be strictly
maintained. The editor committed the article Deluge to a man of very
considerable ability, but when the article came to him he found that
it was so excessively heretical that he could not venture to put it in.
There was not time for a second article under that head, and if you look
in that dictionary you will find under the word Deluge a reference to
Flood. Before Flood came, a second article had been commissioned from a
source that was believed safely conservative; but when the article came
in it was found to be worse than the first. A third article was then
commissioned, and care was taken to secure its 'safety.' If you look
for the word Flood in the dictionary, you will find a reference to Noah.
Under that name you will find an article written by a distinguished
professor of Cambridge, of which I remember that Bishop Colenso said
to me at the time, 'In a very guarded way the writer concedes the whole
thing.' You will see by this under what trammels scientific thought has
laboured in this department of inquiry."(166)
(166) See Official Report of the National Conference of Unitarian and
other Christian Churches held at Saratoga, 1882, p. 97.
A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition of Horne's
Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard textbook of orthodoxy, its
accustomed use of fossils to prove the universality of the Deluge was
quietly dropped.(167)
(167) This was about 1856; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 329.
A like capitulation in the United States was foreshadowed in 1841, when
an eminent Professor of Biblical Literature and interpretation in the
most important theological seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church,
Dr. Samuel Turner, showed his Christian faith and courage by virtually
accepting the new view; and the old contention was utterly cast away
by the thinking men of another great religious body when, at a later
period, two divines among the most eminent for piety and learning in
the Methodist Episcopal Church inserted in the Biblical Cyclopaedia,
published under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs
from geology, astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was not
universal, or even widely extended, and this without protest from any
man of note in any branch of the American Church.(168)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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