It is a historical fact that after the poor performance of the Catholic church regarding Galileo, and during the Enlightenment and beyond, independant intelligent investigators of the natural sciences, including priests became increasingly disenchanted with the orthodox Christian religion.
It was only a matter of time that each generation, emboldened by the last, abandoned even Protestant religion, and perhaps religion entirely by the 19th century. It probably seemed that further apostacy was the 'only' course forward to those who wished to push the envelope in social 'evolution'.
While after the Galileo 'episode' the church (both Catholics and Protestants) rather rapidly disengaged themselves from open confrontation with 'science' no matter how improbable to their world view. In fact, from the sheer weight of humiliation in front of the world of reason, it is a fair assessment to say that the majority of bishops and priests in the 19th century abandoned conservative dogmatic positions entirely in a wholesale exodus.
The result was so shockingly dyslexic that Protestant and Catholic conservatives accused their complimentary 'liberal' counterparts of heresy and evidence that Protestantism/Catholicism was the 'AntiChrist'! But their voices were hardly heard in the rush to abandon traditional religion. For a while things were so confusing that you had Protestant leaders like Newman renouncing Anglicanism and converting to Catholicism and Jesuits espousing Darwin's theory of Evolution!
But all the while, the 'scientists' stubbornly refused to acknowledge the almost complete change of Western religious perception and sentiment, and continued to vehemently attack all (at least Christian) religion as a 'hostile' anti-reason force blinding and darkening mankind's ability to think clearly.
Yet this was and still is an absurd position. While most of mainstream and established religion abandoned dogmatic positions regarding 'science' and began to write volumnous tomes upon the complimentarity of science and religion, and the complete lack of overlap in their respective domains, popular 'science' continued its demonization of religion based upon the 400 year old and absurdly out of date characature of pre-Reformation Christianity inspired by the anomaly of the the 'Inquisition'.
In reality, while there were always (and still are) a minority of extreme conservative forces in modern Christianity, this 'fundamentalist' camp, although noisey, hardly represents more than a few percentage points of mainstream Christianity, either by laity or clergy, and certainly not in the published literature.
For instance, if one looks at the Oxford and Cambridge publications under religious study, or international journals on Christian theology, one finds almost nothing of fundamentalism. A perusal of the Anglican run Christian bookstore shows an amazing promulgation of titles, however none of them, even the most conservative apologetics show any sign of a 'Creationist' or anti-science bent.
The 'evolutionists' have been hysterically screaming into a vacuum, or else skirmishing with a small minority of stupid Americans from the 'bible belt', who actually don't represent even Christian America at all, but rather the vested interests of a Freemasonic Cult of Machiavellian pragmatism which really believes Carl Marx far more than Jesus Christ. In this instance, 'Christianity' is perceived by rich oil barons as an 'opiate' to keep Blacks under control, and whites organized to herd them like cattle. But this is a ludicrous American phenomenon, and not representative of Christianity anywhere else in the world.
In summary, American scientists are hysterical idiots, and so are American fundamentalists. Apparently they deserve each other.
