Within the United States of America A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom was published in two volumes by Andrew Dickson White, a founder of Cornell University, in 1896.

Various evolutionary ideas opposed progressively by Linnaeus, Cuvier and Agassiz led up to the theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin and Wallace.

The church fathers favoured the idea of a solid roof or firmament over the earth and this was elaborated early on, but in the Middle Ages most followed authorities such as Thomas Aquinas in accepting sphericity.

Opposition to the antipodes did not cease for centuries after Magellan's voyages and also contributed to underestimates of the size of the earth, which happened to help Columbus.

Despite earlier more literal ideas, the Ptolemaic view of a geocentric universe was allegedly adopted by the Church, adding an immovable heavenly sphere above the stars and hell below the earth.

Although natural explanations for eclipses were understood in the Christian era, comets and meteors continued to be regarded as warnings by Bede, Aquinas and others and they could not be reconciled with conceptions of the heavenly spheres.

Early Greek germs of explanations of fossils received no attention in Christendom before Leonardo da Vinci and even in the mid-eighteenth century Comte de Buffon was forced to retract simple geological truths by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne.

The doctrine of creation provided no room for animals, particularly carnivores, prior to Adam's fall and most theories of geology revolved around the flood which broke open "the fountains of the great deep".

But finally, Buckland abandoned his adherence to the special place of the flood in geological history and Lyell's uniformitarian doctrine held sway.

Joseph Scaliger had previously argued for taking the histories of Egypt and Babylon into account and during the eighteenth century it became increasingly difficult to fit their chronologies into this timescale.

In the nineteenth century, Menes, the first king of Egypt, was dated at more than 3,000 BC and that itself represented an advanced civilization, with its pyramids, sphinxes and astronomical knowledge.

From early ages people had found "thunder-stones, shaped stones which were built into walls in Chaldea and hung round the necks of Egyptian dead.

In the late 16th century, Michael Mercati attempted to prove they were weapons or implements of early races of men, but his and later finds were largely ignored until in 1847 Boucher de Perthes published the first volume of Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities which included engravings of some of the thousands he had found close to the Somme.

In 1861, Edward Lartet showed evidence that humans had coexisted with extinct quaternary animals whose bones had cut marks on them and subsequently the existence of cave paintings at Les Eyzies and La Madeleine.

History shows many examples where weaker bodies of men driven out of society have not relapsed to barbarism but have risen even under the most unfavourable circumstances.

By 1317 when Pope John XXII issued his bull aimed at the alchemists, he also dealt a severe blow to the beginnings of chemical science.

In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII let inquisitors loose in Germany armed with the Witches Hammer to torture and destroy men and women for sorcery and magic.

Pestilences were frequent in medieval times but an idea took hold that cleanliness betokens pride and filthiness humility, leading to many of the great saints not washing for years.

In Greek and Roman times, the idea of insanity as brain disease was gradually developed, but this was forgotten by a church who believed in diabolic possession, despite the efforts of some religious orders to keep scientific doctrines alive.

Great efforts were made to trace the roots of European languages back to Hebrew, culminating in Bishop Walton's Polyglot Bible.

This was confounded when Sanskrit, brought back to Europe originally by Jesuit missionaries, was shown by Sir William Jones to be the root of all the Indo-European languages, a verdict accepted by theologians, despite final skirmishes.

But the legends such as the pillar of salt said to be Lot's wife, near the Dead Sea, were universally believed in Christendom, from St. Jerome to Sir John Mandeville.

Yet from the 16th century, travellers from Pierre Belon were more sceptical, culminating in the visit of Lieutenant Lynch of the US Navy who sailed on the Dead Sea in 1847 and claimed justification for the Biblical story, but described the pillar of salt as a superstition.

White welcomes the change by theologians and concludes "the worst enemy of Christianity could wish nothing more than that its main leaders should prove that it can not be adopted save by those who accept, as historical, statements which unbiased men throughout the world know to be mythical".

No change happened in Catholic countries until Benedict XIV in 1745 left open vague "occasions" and "special grounds" on which extra money could be charged.

In 1860, Bishop Wilberforce, who had a few months before battled Huxley over evolution, turned on Essays and Reviews, which brought this thinking to England, creating a huge storm.

He goes on, "Such judgments, however appealing they may be to foes of "scientific creationism" and other contemporary threats to established science, fly in the face of mounting evidence that White read the past through battle-scarred glasses, and that he and his imitators have distorted history to serve ideological ends of their own.

White popularized the baseless notions that before Columbus and Magellan, the world was thought to be flat and that the Earth’s sphericity was officially opposed by the Church.

The notion - eternally repopularized by Hollywood - that the medieval Church condemned all science as devilry runs throughout White; this view is likewise baseless.