ABSTRACT
Andrew Dickson White did more than any other American to impress upon late nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought the idea that science and religion are enemies locked in combat on an almost military scale. At some point during his education, White broke with orthodoxy as he recognized the incompatibility of the genealogies of Jesus given in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. On December 18, 1869, he delivered a pugnacious lecture in which he indicted religion as the greatest enemy of scientific discovery. Posted to St. Petersburg as US minister to Russia from 1892-1893, White began to assemble his magnum opus, a two-volume work published in 1896 as A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. In correspondence he wrote that he intended History to stake out a position between "such gush as Newman's on one side and such scoffing as Ingersoll's on the other".
