Lucius Septimius: Falling off the Edge

Van Halen - Aint talkin' bout love

I been to the edge
And there I stood and looked down
You know I lost a lot of friends there baby
I got no time to mess around

Falling off the Edge

First in a series of notes on the war between science and religion
by Lucius Septimius


Before Columbus sailed across the ocean people thought the world was flat. The greatest thinkers of the Spanish church confronted Columbus with evidence drawn from the Church Fathers – from St. Augustine, from Lactantius, from Cosmas Indicopleuces as well as myriad biblical citations which demonstrated to the Faithful that the world was flat. Although a few forward looking thinkers had clung to the wisdom of the ancients, who knew the truth about the shape of the earth, in Catholic Europe and especially in the Most Catholic kingdom of Spain, official dogma prevailed. The world was flat – slightly rectangular in shape, in fact – and any man who tried to sail "around" it would fall off the edge. But Columbus could not be convinced. His research and his calculations showed quite clearly that the world was a sphere. And, in the end, he, not the Catholic dogmatists and superstitious sailors who argued against him, was right.



If you went to public school in the United States, most if not all of this probably sounds familiar. For generations this is what most of us were taught. The image of Columbus, the fearless scientist going toe to toe with the foolish and ignorant theologians of the court, has been deeply imprinted on the public consciousness. There’s only one problem. It didn’t happen. Nothing in the previous paragraph is true. Of course that hasn’t prevented the story from being widely disseminated. It may be found, in varying degrees, in five of the major high school American history textbooks, in one widely-used college text and, until the 1970s, the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Daniel Borstin repeats the tale with great embellishment in his popular history of the age of discovery.


But repeating a lie doesn’t make it true. No serious thinker at the time of Columbus thought the world was flat. When scholars questioned Columbus it was because he’d cooked the books. He grossly underestimated the size of the earth; had he not stumbled onto the Americas, he and his crew would have starved to death.


How did this idea get started? Around the time of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, noted history Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote a little book exploring the origins and implications of the "flat earth" myth. In Inventing the Flat Earth, Russell shows that the Columbus legend was not something that came about by accident. A number of prominent scholars and scientists concocted the myth in the nineteenth century. And they did it on purpose. And the purpose was to discredit Christianity and advance the cause of Darwinism.



To understand how a lie became history, we need to consider the intellectual world of the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment had been famously hostile to Christianity – recall Voltaire’s invective "destroy the execrable thing!" Others were less extreme in their criticism. David Hume admitted that Christianity had a place in the development of thought, but drew firm distinctions between the various realms of knowledge. Later Hegel presented these different modes of thought as existing in some kind of historical series. Hegel’s idea was developed further and systematized by Auguste Comte in the 1840s. In Comte’s scheme human knowledge developed over time, passing from superstition to religion and thence to philosophy and, in its highest stage, science.



For Comte and other scientific realists, science held the ultimate claim to truth. The older ways of thought captured parts of it, but in an incomplete and often distorted way. Science alone provided the means of detecting "reality." And as we progress further along the path of knowledge, the closer mankind will come to "truth," discovered through the application of increasingly precise and accurate scientific methods.


Comte’s views had a profound impact, providing much of the intellectual underpinnings of nineteenth century Progressivism. His scheme privileged science as a "way of knowing"; meanwhile his notion of progress was attractive to Hegelians, Marx and his followers, and ultimately to the Darwinists. For the latter, the twin ideas of progress and scientific realism were mutually reinforcing: they had the tools to discover truth, and the demonstration of that truth would show the superiority of their way of thinking.



There was only one problem: a lack of evidence. Critics of Darwinism brought up logical flaws in the theory, but also demanded proof. And here it was not merely religious thinkers, such as Bishop Wilberforce, but other scientists who held the Darwinist’s hind limbs to the fire.



The more passionate defenders of Darwinism responded by going on the offensive. Since they couldn’t disprove the assertions of their critics, they chose to impeach the witnesses.



The first scholar to put forth the idea that Christianity and science were at war was William Whewell (1794-1866). A more extreme formulation appeared in the works of John Draper (1811-1882). Draper was a lapsed Methodist who studied medicine, later becoming a professor of chemistry and biology and head of the New York University medical school. In 1873 Draper – who was not an historian – published The History of the Conflict between Science and Religion. This book, Russell points out "fixed in the educated mind the idea that ‘science’ stood for freedom and progress against the superstition and repression of ‘religion.’ Its viewpoint became conventional wisdom."[p. 38]



Lest one think we exaggerate, here are Draper’s own views on the subject:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of the struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man ... The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is the narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary [sic] faith and human interests on the other .... Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place. [p. 39]

As "evidence" Draper produced the myth of Columbus as scientist, persecuted by a dogmatic and ignorant body of churchmen. "Flat earther" now became the convenient insult to hurl at those who questioned the superiority of science over religion.



The reason for focusing on Columbus was twofold. For progressives such as Draper, it was essential to present England and America as standing at the leading edge of history. Columbus, as the discoverer of America, the focal point for Anglo-American triumphalism, must therefore be presented as the quintessence of Anglo-American scientific rationalism. At the same time, his Catholic taint had to be expunged. The Progressives were notorious in their anti-Catholic bigotry. The ferocity of their hatred spread to all of Christianity, depicted as a force at odds with science, progress, democracy, and freedom. Columbus became a potent symbol – the lone Scientist besieged by the bogeyman of intolerant Religion. (Draper also was among the first to extol the superiority of Islam as the bearers of the scientific knowledge of the ancients through the dark ages of medieval Christianity).


The next figure to take up the gauntlet was Andrew Dickson White, founder of Cornell University, and a historian of some skill. Unfortunately he used that skill to dissemble, obscure, and, when all is said and done, lie. His first foray against religion appeared in a series of articles published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1869; eventually he collected his thoughts into a two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, published in 1896.


White’s magnum opus is a marvel of deliberate obfuscation. He admits that various medieval theologians understood quite well the shape of the earth, but then claims – against all evidence – that they were persecuted as "sorcerers." The ideas of other theologians he willfully distorted, making them appear to argue for positions that they simply did not hold. All of this in an effort to demonstrate the stifling effect of "Christian theory" [emphasis added] on the advance of scientific knowledge.


Columbus was, of course, one of his heroes:

The warfare of Columbus the world knows well: how the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how sundry wise men of Spain confronted him with the usual quotations from the Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine; how, even after he was triumphant ... the Church by its highest authority solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray ... [pp. 45-46]

Of course the scenes which White claimed that "the world knows well" never happened – his historical narrative comes from an historical novel by Washington Irving, as historically accurate as a Disney cartoon. White knew better, but made a point of only citing authors who agreed with him, even if they were demonstrably unreliable. The weight of evidence, or so he claimed, was on his side.


Religion, Christianity specifically, was at war with Science.


Draper and White’s viewpoints became gospel to the Progressives. In 1927 Maynard Shipley, President of the "Science League of America" and sometime Democratic candidate for Congress, declared:

More than twenty-five millions of men and women, with ballot in hand, have declared war on modern science. Ostensibly a "war on the teaching of evolution in our tax-supported schools," the real issue is much broader and deeper, much more comprehensive in its scope.


The deplorable fact must be recognized that in the United States to-day there exist, side by side, two opposing cultures, one or the other of which must eventually dominate our public institutions, political, legal, education, and social. On the one side we see arrayed the forces of progress and enlightenment, on the other the forces of reaction, the apostles of traditionalism. There can be no compromise between these diametrically opposed armies.
If the self-styled Fundamentalists can gain control ... much of the best that has been gained in American culture will be suppressed or banned, and we shall be headed backwards to the pall of a new Dark Age. [pp. 46-47]

A few years later, Shipley was among the signatories of the first "Humanist Manifesto," which describes humanism as a new religion intended to replace the older deity-based religions, in particular Christianity.


As he said, there could be no compromise with the older theistic, or even deistic faiths; only a "new religion" based upon humanist principles would be acceptable in a "progressive" society.


As for White, Columbus was not his only hero – indeed, he catalogued thousands of individuals who he saw as casualties in the war between religion and science, victims of Christianity’s relentless persecution of the purveyors of rationalist and scientific knowledge.


He devoted vast resources at Cornell University to documenting the brutal annihilation of early modern scientists. The result of his efforts is one of the worlds’ largest manuscript collections on the witch hunts.

(To be continued)