ABSTRACT

Science and the humanities were not always at "war," a hyperbolic metaphor. From ancient times to the Renaissance the distinct fields of knowledge first laid out by Aristotle existed on a continuum essentially undisturbed by the encroachments of one field upon another. In the Middle Ages, the continuum became a hierarchy with theology assuming the role of queen of the sciences. The seeds of usurpation were present in scholasticism; reason exercised in behalf of faith threatened to assert its autonomy. The long peace was undermined by the Copernican revolution, which replaced Ptolemaic earth-centered cosmology with a heliocentric one and by the confirming experiments of Kepler and Galileo. One effect of Darwinism in the nineteenth century, which has persisted through the twentieth and the present century, has been to intensify the defensive literalism of the fundamentalist interpretation. It is almost as if the church enters the fray on the scientist's ground of factual truth and finds itself at a disadvantage.