reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty.”
Both Draper and White developed their basic model of science versus theology in the context of a seminal and contemporary struggle all too easily viewed in this light—the battle for evolution, specifically for Darwin’s secular version based on natural selection. No issue, certainly since Galileo, had so challenged traditional views about the deepest meaning of human life, and therefore so contacted a domain of religious inquiry as well. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Darwinian revolution directly triggered this influential nineteenth-century conceptualization of Western history as a war between science and religion. White made an explicit connection (quoted on this page ) in his statement about Agassiz (the founder of the museum where I now work, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell). Moreover, the first chapter of his book treats the battle over evolution, while the second begins with the flat-earth myth.
Draper wraps himself even more fully in a Darwinian mantle. The end of his preface designates five great episodes in the history of science’s battle with religion: the debasement of classical knowledge and the descent of the Dark Ages; the flowering of science under early Islam; the battle of Galileo with the CatholicChurch; the Reformation (a plus for an anti-Catholic like Draper); and the struggle for Darwinism. Moreover, no one could claim a more compelling personal license for such a view, for Draper had been an unwilling witness—one might even say an instigator—of the single most celebrated incident in the overt struggle between Darwin and divinity. We all have heard the famous story of Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley duking it out at the British Association meeting in 1860. But how many people know that their verbal pyrotechnics did not form the stated agenda of this meeting, and only arose during free discussion following the formal paper officially set for this session—an address by the same Dr. Draper on the “intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.”
This link between struggles over Darwinism and the construction, by Draper and White, of the mythical model of warfare between science and religion—a model that must be debunked for the NOMA principle to prevail—permits a smooth transition to my inevitable discussion of the most potent and current American battle between scientific evidence and claims advanced in the name of religion—the attempt by biblical fundamentalists, now extending over more than seventy contentious years, to ban the teaching of evolution in American public schools, or at least to demand equaltime for creationism on a literal biblical time scale (with an earth no more than ten thousand years old) in any classroom that also provides instruction about evolution. If this battle has played a major role in the twentieth-century cultural history of America, and has consumed the unwelcome time of many scientists (including yours truly) in successful political campaigns to preserve the First Amendment and reject the legislatively mandated teaching of palpable nonsense, then how can NOMA be defended as more than a pipe dream in a utopian world?
1 Much of the rest of this section comes from a previous essay, “The Late Birth of a Flat Earth,” published in
Dinosaur in a Haystack
(Harmony Books, 1995).
Defending NOMA from Both Sides Now: The Struggle Against Modern Creationism
CREATIONISM: A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN VIOLATION OF NOMA
The myth of Columbus and the flat earth supports NOMA by the negative strategy of showing how the opposite model of warfare between science and religion often invents battles that never occurred, but arise only as forced inferences from the fictional model. Christian scholars never proclaimed a flat earth against the findings of science and the knowledge of antiquity, and Columbus fought no
Both Draper and White developed their basic model of science versus theology in the context of a seminal and contemporary struggle all too easily viewed in this light—the battle for evolution, specifically for Darwin’s secular version based on natural selection. No issue, certainly since Galileo, had so challenged traditional views about the deepest meaning of human life, and therefore so contacted a domain of religious inquiry as well. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Darwinian revolution directly triggered this influential nineteenth-century conceptualization of Western history as a war between science and religion. White made an explicit connection (quoted on this page ) in his statement about Agassiz (the founder of the museum where I now work, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell). Moreover, the first chapter of his book treats the battle over evolution, while the second begins with the flat-earth myth.
Draper wraps himself even more fully in a Darwinian mantle. The end of his preface designates five great episodes in the history of science’s battle with religion: the debasement of classical knowledge and the descent of the Dark Ages; the flowering of science under early Islam; the battle of Galileo with the CatholicChurch; the Reformation (a plus for an anti-Catholic like Draper); and the struggle for Darwinism. Moreover, no one could claim a more compelling personal license for such a view, for Draper had been an unwilling witness—one might even say an instigator—of the single most celebrated incident in the overt struggle between Darwin and divinity. We all have heard the famous story of Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley duking it out at the British Association meeting in 1860. But how many people know that their verbal pyrotechnics did not form the stated agenda of this meeting, and only arose during free discussion following the formal paper officially set for this session—an address by the same Dr. Draper on the “intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.”
This link between struggles over Darwinism and the construction, by Draper and White, of the mythical model of warfare between science and religion—a model that must be debunked for the NOMA principle to prevail—permits a smooth transition to my inevitable discussion of the most potent and current American battle between scientific evidence and claims advanced in the name of religion—the attempt by biblical fundamentalists, now extending over more than seventy contentious years, to ban the teaching of evolution in American public schools, or at least to demand equaltime for creationism on a literal biblical time scale (with an earth no more than ten thousand years old) in any classroom that also provides instruction about evolution. If this battle has played a major role in the twentieth-century cultural history of America, and has consumed the unwelcome time of many scientists (including yours truly) in successful political campaigns to preserve the First Amendment and reject the legislatively mandated teaching of palpable nonsense, then how can NOMA be defended as more than a pipe dream in a utopian world?
1 Much of the rest of this section comes from a previous essay, “The Late Birth of a Flat Earth,” published in
Dinosaur in a Haystack
(Harmony Books, 1995).
Defending NOMA from Both Sides Now: The Struggle Against Modern Creationism
CREATIONISM: A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN VIOLATION OF NOMA
The myth of Columbus and the flat earth supports NOMA by the negative strategy of showing how the opposite model of warfare between science and religion often invents battles that never occurred, but arise only as forced inferences from the fictional model. Christian scholars never proclaimed a flat earth against the findings of science and the knowledge of antiquity, and Columbus fought no
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