Confict Thesis Category
George Sarton’s Appeal to Andrew D. White
Posted on February 14, 2017 1 Comment
In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Belgian historian of science, founder of the review journal Isis, and secular humanist George Sarton (1884-1956), emigrated to the United States. One of his earliest publications on the discipline of history of science appeared in the philosophical journal Monist, which was an English translation of his […]
The Failed Project of the New Religion
Posted on December 28, 2016 Leave a Comment
In 1884 Hebert Spencer published his “Religious Retrospect and Prospect” in the Popular Science Monthly, which appeared simultaneously in the Nineteenth Century. In this article Spencer offered an evolutionary account of the “religious consciousness.” By looking at its evolutionary history, Spencer believed he could infer the religious ideas and sentiments of the future. Importantly, he […]
McCabe and the Land of Bunk
Posted on September 16, 2016 Leave a Comment
Joseph McCabe (1867-1955), a Roman Catholic monk who abandoned his religious beliefs around 1895, was a prolific author, writing over two hundred books on science, history, biography, and religion. Historians of science and religion have largely ignored McCabe, and it is unclear why. But if historians are looking for the intellectual forebears of the so-called […]
Little Blue Books
Posted on August 24, 2016 Leave a Comment
Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), a socialist reformer and newspaper publisher, began publishing his five-cent, papered-covered “Little Blue Books” series in 1919. Small, inexpensive staple-bound and extremely popular, the Little Blue Books reached both educated and working-class readers. The series included novels, how-to manuals, short essays on politics, philosophy, history, and science, but also covered more controversial topic such as […]
The Political Effect of the Decline of Faith in Continental Europe
Posted on July 28, 2016 Leave a Comment
In one of the last published pieces of his career, John William Draper returned to a topic he had briefly touched upon in both his Intellectual Development of Europe and his History of the Conflict. Published in the Princeton Review in 1879, Draper addresses the “political effect of the decline of faith in continental Europe.” He asks, “When comes […]
1885 New York Mail and Express Interview of Andrew Dickson White
Posted on July 24, 2016 Leave a Comment
In 1885 the New York newspaper Mail and Express interviewed Cornell University President Andrew Dickson White. One of the main topics of discussion was, unsurprisingly, science and religion. The interview was republished in the Cornell Daily Sun, the University school newspaper. When he was asked if the teachings of Huxley and Tyndall had any “serious effect on […]
John W. Draper as Protestant Historian
Posted on July 21, 2016 Leave a Comment
In his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), Draper commences his historical review of the interactions between science and religion by declaring that “modern science” was born in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, and indicates that Alexandria, particularly its Museum, was the first civilization to pursue a “practical interrogation of […]
George Lincoln Burr and the Progress of Religion
Posted on July 16, 2016 Leave a Comment
George Lincoln Burr (1857-1938), historian and librarian at Cornell University, was also a close collaborator of Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918). White had even once proposed that Burr share with him the title page of his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Burr declined, but the suggestion shows that both […]
John W. Draper on Natural Law and Providence
Posted on July 14, 2016 Leave a Comment
Descartes viewed nature as created by a wise Creator, who had created the universe from nothing and let it run, like a machine, by itself. That is, there was no need for God to constantly intervene. By contrast, Gassendi believed that the laws we discover in nature are our laws, not God’s, and therefore he […]
Joachim and Draper
Posted on July 12, 2016 Leave a Comment
A number of historians of the idea of progress trace the notion to the mystic Joachim of Floris (1131-1202). Karl Löwith, in his classic Meaning in History (1949), believed that Joachim had delineated a “new scheme of epochs and dispensations by which the traditional scheme of religious progress from Old to the New Testament became extended and […]