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
Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, bitter as some of its
writers had been, now came argument to prove that the Catholic faith
does not prevent any one from holding the Darwinian theory, and
especially a declaration from an authority eminent among American
Catholics--a declaration which has a very curious sound, but which it
would be ungracious to find fault with--that "the doctrine of evolution
is no more in opposition to the doctrine of the Catholic Church than is
the Copernican theory or that of Galileo."
Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, Mivart, and Wigand,
in view of theological considerations, sought to make conditions; but
the current was too strong, and eminent theologians in every country
accepted natural selection as at least a very important part in the
mechanism of evolution.
At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one place in
England where his body should be laid, and that this place was next the
grave of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. The noble address of
Canon Farrar at his funeral was echoed from many pulpits in Europe and
America, and theological opposition as such was ended. Occasionally
appeared, it is true, a survival of the old feeling: the Rev. Dr. Laing
referred to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey as "a proof that
England is no longer a Christian country," and added that this burial
was a desecration--that this honour was given him because he had been
"the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the species and
the ape descent of man."
Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, Thomas Carlyle.
Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more
heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's
generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him
to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney,
he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin
as an "apostle of dirt worship."
The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between Scotland and
America. In the former country, in 1885, the Rev. Dr. Lee issued a
volume declaring that, if the Darwinian view be true, "there is no place
for God"; that "by no method of interpretation can the language of Holy
Scripture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of
man's natural history"; that "Darwinism reverses the revelation of God"
and "implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of
our Incarnate Lord"; and he was pleased to call Darwin and his followers
"gospellers of the gutter." In one of the intellectual centres
of America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged
frantically that "the battle be set in array, and that men find out
who is on the Lord's side and who is on the side of the devil and the
monkeys."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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