A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom was published in two volumes by Andrew Dickson White, a founder of Cornell University, in 1896. In the introduction White states the original goal of his 1874 lecture on The Battlefields of Science and elaborated in a book The Warfare of Science the same year:
In these volumes he chronicles the gradual emancipation of science from theology in various fields.
Content
Chapter 1 From Creation to Evolution
The literal interpretation of Genesis, including denial of all death and of animals not of use to man before the introduction of sin, gives way to the recognition of the enormous number of species in the world. Various evolutionary ideas opposed progressively by Linnaeus, Cuvier and Agassiz led up to the theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin and Wallace. The initial theological opposition gradually gave way to compromise by most churches.
Chapter 2 Geography
The spherical ideas of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle had replaced earlier ideas from Chaldeans and Egyptians of a flat earth. The church fathers favoured the idea of a solid roof or firmament over the earth and this was elaborated early on, but in the Middle Ages most followed authorities such as Thomas Aquinas in accepting sphericity. Jerusalem was accepted as the centre of the world and a refusal to accept the existence of antipodes led many to assume that the other side of the world was entirely aqueous. Opposition to the antipodes did not cease for centuries after Magellan's voyages and also contributed to underestimates of the size of the earth, which happened to help Columbus. Religious feeling encouraged the expansion of Europeans across the globe.
Chapter 3 Astronomy
Despite earlier more literal ideas, the Ptolemaic view of a geocentric universe was allegedly adopted by the Church, adding an immovable heavenly sphere above the stars and hell below the earth. In the sixteenth century, Copernicus challenged this view but his book was not published until after his death, when it was given a preface suggesting that it was simply a hypothesis. When Galileo used his telescope to show other reasons for rejecting the Ptolemaic view he faced opposition from both Catholics and Protestants. He was forced to renounce his sun-centred view, which was not formally accepted by the Catholic church before the nineteenth century. In England attacks continued into the eighteenth.
Chapter 4 From "Signs and Wonders" to Law in the Heavens
Comets, meteors and eclipses were widely seen as portents of doom by most early civilizations. Although natural explanations for eclipses were understood in the Christian era, comets and meteors continued to be regarded as warnings by Bede, Aquinas and others and they could not be reconciled with conceptions of the heavenly spheres. Till the end of the seventeenth century there were attempts to keep astronomical explanations of comets from the university curriculum and church congregations.
Chapter 5 From Genesis to Geology
Early Greek germs of explanations of fossils received no attention in Christendom before Leonardo da Vinci and even in the mid-eighteenth century Comte de Buffon was forced to retract simple geological truths by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne. The doctrine of creation provided no room for animals, particularly carnivores, prior to Adam's fall and most theories of geology revolved around the flood which broke open "the fountains of the great deep". Attacks on geologists such as William Buckland, Dean Conybeare and Prof Sedgwick from religious people continued into the nineteenth century, claiming that geology was "not a subject of lawful inquiry" and that they were "attacking the truth of God". But finally, Buckland abandoned his adherence to the special place of the flood in geological history and Lyell's uniformitarian doctrine held sway. Subsequently George Smith's discovery that the Genesis story was an adaptation of earli—er Chaldean flood myths finished most attempts to use the flood story in science.