Evolution Professor Praises Andrew Dickson White’s Whig History

Self-Destructing

The winners, as they say, get to write the history, and nowhere is this more obvious than with evolution. Evolution has long since won the battle of who gets to tell our creation story, and so evolution also gets to tell the history of that battle. And tell it they do. The problem is that, as with the science, evolutionists misrepresent the history as well.

Two classic examples are (i) Andrew Dickson White’s nineteenth century mythical tome, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom and (ii) Jerome Lawrence’s and Robert Lee’s cartoon rendition of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, Inherit the Wind. The latter is slightly complicated by the fact that Lawrence and Lee made no attempt to represent accurately the events in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925, but rather liberally adapted the story to fit their purpose of criticizing McCarthyism and its witch hunts. But that only makes matters worse for evolutionists, for they have no excuse for coopting the screenplay as an important and insightful historical reference point in the twentieth century origins debate. Indeed, if you compare the history with the script, you can see Lawrence and Lee altered the former in order to sanitize and exalt the evolutionists while slandering their opponents.

Likewise evolutionists have no excuse for adopting White’s contrived Warfare Thesis based on his silly misrepresentations of the history of thought.

The fact that evolutionists do enlist both Inherit the Wind and White’s Warfare Thesis is just another sign of the anti intellectualism at the heart of evolution. Notable examples in recent years include Judge John Jones of Dover fame hilariously revealing that he actually wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the Dover case because, after all, the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context” (Jones later unbelievably explained that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind”), and legal expert Andrew Cohen not only giving high praise to Inherit the Wind, but absurdly calling it “one of the great trial movies of all time.”

Now arch evolutionist Jerry Coyne joins in with his laughable approbation of White’s Warfare Thesis, revealing that he is reading through White’s “famous 840-page anti-accommodationist book.”

Famous?

If White’s book is famous for anything it is for the immediate debunking of its mythical content. No historian takes it seriously. Or perhaps it is famous for serving as a keystone of evolution’s false history.

Evolutionists are making public spectacles of themselves with their blatant misrepresentations of both science and history. They insist it is a fact that the biological world arose spontaneously and they insist that skepticism of their “fact” comes from parochial, anti-intellectualism. This is like a bad dream.