John William Draper i Andrew Dickson White wobec wojny nauki z religią. Rola metafory historiograficznej

The paper looks at one aspect of the development of relationship between science and religion in the United States and Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Until the middle of that century the relationship between science and religion had been perceived by both scientists and theologians as very good. This is testified to by numerous writings devoted to the complementarity and concurrence of the message conveyed, on the one hand, through God’s Word, i.e. the Holy Bible, and, on the other, through His Works, i.e. Nature. In the second half of the nineteenth century that coherent world view was split into ’’the world of religion” and ’’the world of science”, governed by different and contradictory laws. The paper deals with the role of historical writing in the emergence and the grounding of the metaphor o f’’war” between science and religion in the public mind. The special focus of the paper is on the studies in the history of science by John W. Draper and Andrew D. White, which have been selected due to their popularity in Great Britain and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The works of those two authors present science and religion as antagonistic from the very beginning of their existence. In the minds of the majority of the readers of those works, the origin of the relationship between science and religion was identified with its essence. While presenting the conflict between science and religion, the two authors claimed that the conflict had been present since the beginning of the coexistence of science and religion. In this way the metaphor o f’’warfare” used by Draper and White contributed to the belief that science and religion are phenomena that stand in a relation of essential antagonism.