After Mike drew attention to how glowingly Cornell University's president spoke of Andrew Dickson White's book on the warfare between science and religion, I've been re-reading some writings about the subject. White's book formed, together with a similar book by John William Draper, the foundation for the warfare model: A popular perception that science and religion has always been at war, with religion trying (and usually failing) to supress the march of science. But despite its popularity, the warfare model has been rejected by historians and science, and has been so for the last thirty years.

As historian of science Colin A. Russel writes:

"For nearly a century, the notion of mutual hostility (the Draper-White thesis) has been routinely employed in popular-science writing, by the media, and in a few older histories of science. Deeply embedded in the culture of the West, it has proven extremely hard to dislodge. Only in the last thirty years of the twentieth century did historians of science mount a sustained attack on the thesis, and only gradually has a wider public begun to recognize its deficiencies."
Colin A. Russel, "The Conflict of Science and Religion", in Gary B. Ferngren (ed.), Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction (John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 4

But, if the thesis is wrong, why does so many people still believe in it? The reason, it seems, can in part be traced back to Thomas Huxley, who earned the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog":

"Given then, that the warfare model is so inaccurate, one may wonder why it has lasted so long. This is, indeed, a major question for historians. The explanation may lie at least partly in the celebrated controversy of Huxley and his friends with the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. [This group attempted to overthrow the hegenomy of the English church by generating "a flood of articles, lay "sermons," and verbal attacks on the clergy, and included conspiratorial attempts to get the 'right man' into key positions in the scientific establishment."] In addition to the strategies mentioned above, they had another tactic, more subtle and yet more bold than anything else they accomplished. By establishing the conflict thesis, they could perpetuate a myth as part of their strategy to enhance the public appreciation of science. Thus Huxley could write, with a fine disregard for what history records: "Extinguished theologians lie about the craddle of every science as the strangled snakes besides that of Herkules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy has been fairly opposed, the latter have been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihalated, scotched if not slain." The Huxleyite warriors were outstandingly successful in this respect, and their ideals were enshrined in the works of Draper and White, best understood as polemical tracts that advanced the same cause."
Russel, p. 10, references omitted

Sermons, verbal attacks, conspiratorical moves to have their own people placed in key positions, and the rewriting of history. Wow, that almost sounds as what the ID movement is being accused of doing. Yet it was carried out by a group of people that is today remembered as the front line defenders of science and progress. If that isn't ironic, then I don't know what is.

Update October 26: At ID the Future, an unnamed historian of science also has a good laugh over Rawlings' praise of White.

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