Andrew Dickson White - The warfare of science (1876)

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The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

Andrew Dickson White
The 'law of wills and causes,' formulated by Comte,... is that when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their own; thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of science, and this theory forms a basis for theology.

Andrew Dickson White
Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained...

Andrew Dickson White
In an address before the "Academia," which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as "a brutal philosophy to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam."...These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several years.

Andrew Dickson White
Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man.

Andrew Dickson White
The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.

Andrew Dickson White
The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst.

Andrew Dickson White