Some fields complement one another. Half of all recent advancements in biology would not have been possible without advancements in chemistry. Biologists would have no knowledge of DNA, or the structure of protean had it not been for chemistry and for x-ray physics. Advances in geometry such as Descartes' coordinate system begot great advances in algebra. They are both greater then before. An expansion it one doesn't preclude in advancement it another; on the contrary, it makes it all the more likely.
Other fields decline as its relatives advance: witch-docterism declines in tandem with the ascendance of medicine; chemistry grows, seizing the dominion of alchemy.
More then even alchemy, one thing has declined more precipitously then anything else: religion. In the time of Innocent III, religion's tentacles permeated every discipline. (It is no coincidence that this high point of religion was a low point for civilization!) Progress since then can be traced with the decline of religion. Religion's first retreat happened on the grounds of the fine arts in the Renaissance. What spectacular results! Once dominated by Madonnas of two dimensions, monophonic chants, and noxious morality plays, mankind saw all the fine arts flourish with the decline of faith in the Renaissance, and since then. Most of the pinnacles of the arts occurred in The Age of the Enlightenment, notable for its irreligion.
The effect on the natural sciences of the decline of religion, while occurring later, has been even more pronounced then in the fine arts. Once, religion prevented all but its stooges in the monasteries from becoming literate. Following its god's example at Babel, it attempted to stifle all of man's great scientific achievements. Do I even have to bother telling you the story of Galileo? Voltaire thinks I should. He writes "If you clerics have been condemned 100 times, let me be the 101st. I desire it be carved on the door of St. Peter, 'here some petty priests took the master of thought in Italy, at age seventy, and threw him into prison and made him fast on bread and water for the crime of instructing the human race."
Let me attack from another angle. I'll gladly give to you your audacious assertion of the existence of a supreme being and creator (doubting that even your lord and savior would be so generous). The lion has his size and fearsome teeth & claws. Rabbits have speed and large litters. Etc. Man has none of that; he is unique in that it is his mind that is his primary tool of survival. Without it he would quickly fall prey to stronger animals, as he is a naked "unfeathered two-legged creature." God, seeing the inherit weakness of man's body, gave him that mind, one rivaled by none. Now tell me, why would God, not known as a jokester, give man this great mind if he did not intend for him to use it? Why would he give him this great mind if he wanted him to blindly accept every word some priest says? Why would he not want man to know of his origin? I'm sure I could find other contradictions, but finding those in religion is like shooting fish in a fingerbowl.
The forces of unreason, that is the religious, have given up trying to prove that the earth is flat and the earth is the center of the universe. But they can not accept yet another defeat by science. They must prove that God created the universe. I must confess the reason why they have these irrational compulsions is beyond me, and I won't burden you with speculations, but will rather report their frolics through the lands of absurdity objectively.
Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859. Soon after it took America by storm. By 1880 the Christian magazine The Observer was challenged by a rival to name just three working scientists who where not evolutionists. It could not.
Acceptance by religious leaders in the 19th century was understandably not as fast as acceptance by scientists, but it did occur quickly by the standards of religion. By the 1890's a vast majority clergyman in the Catholic, main line Protestant, and even the Mormon denominations accepted evolution, and an evangelical newspaper fretted that as many as half of its preachers had become Darwinists. The only denominations whose clergymen were largely unaffected were the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the cultish Seventh-Day Adventists.
The first major anti-evolution crusade began in the early twenties due mainly to the efforts of populist William Jennings Bryan, three time Democratic candidate for president, and three time loser. He had long derided evolution in speeches, calling its supporters "sons of apes," but what spurred him to lead an organized campaign against evolutionists by learning that it was in fact Darwinists, and not the Austrians, who had started the Great War. This was, of course, a ploy: his motivation was religious and to a lesser degree cultural. Bryan got numerous evolutionists removed from their teaching posts at every collage where he held sway. Then he tried to get laws against teaching evolution passed in several Southern states, and seceded in a few. He even managed to get a bill to the floor of the United States Senate that would ban discussion of evolution on the radio. The law failed. One law that did not fail was a Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. A high school teacher that disobeyed this law was actually tried in what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The movement, which was never seen by the public as anything more then the rabble rousing of hicks, died with Bryan.
The movement was revived in the early sixties due to the federal government's increased emphasis on science education in public schools, which was caused by the Communists launching Sputnik. A pivotal year for the new creationists was 1963, when the Creation Research Institute was founded. Because they limited their membership to those with at least a bachelor's degree in a science, they could find only nine members, several of which quickly quitted the organization. From this slow start they quickly expanded, and in 1965 mounted a challenge to the adoption of a tenth-grade biology textbook that emphasized evolution by Texas, which is a key state for textbook publishers because it is one of the few states that chooses its textbooks at the statewide level. When members of the selection committee asked for a creationist biology text the CRI had to admit that the last serious one had been out of print since 1935. The only other creationist biology book published in the 20th century was published by the Adventists and was full of Ellen E. Smith's prophesies, not exactly what the Texas board was looking for.
The top priority now for the creationists was to write a slick high school biology textbook. They did this on a shoestring budget, but it did surprisingly well, even when it was outlawed for use in public schools by a court case in Indiana. The profits from the text book, along with the generosity of a Lutheran rose-breeder, allowed the creationists to expand their activities. They even opened a graduate school in California, though it was never accredited.
In 1983 Ronald Reagan said that if evolution was to be taught in biology classrooms then creationism ought to be taught along side it. Though they had a friend in the White House for the first time ever, the creationists stagnated in the eighties as the Christian Right shifted their focus to school prayer and other issues. Recently the creationists have revived and rechristened their movement. They are now the "Intelligent Design" movement.
There are three major competing creationist theories. The first is the "Day-Age" theory, where the Bible's six days correspond to long geological epochs. This "old-earth" theory even allows for some evolution, with God starting lines and leading them along their way. This theory was vogue form 1860 to 1930.
A second theory, based on Georges Cuvier's works, was advocated in George McCready Prices's large 1923 book The New Geology. It is remarkably precise, with Noah's flood, which was not really as big as the Bible puts it, happening on 2348 BC. Creation week began on October 29, 4004 BC, (at about nine a.m. London Time) and before that was a series of disasters that caused the mass extinctions and the formation of fossils. Price postulates one of those disasters is the reason the earth's rotational axis is off 23 degrees.
The theory that is currently in fashion is the literal biblical story of creation. It emphases Noah's Flood, which they say caused the mass extinctions, and also invalidated the laws of physics, which unanimously point to an earth older then six thousand years old. US News & World Reports recently had an article about a creationist of the third stripe that claims to have come across proof of evolution using a computer that he helped program. The scientist, who unfortunately is receiving federal money, forgets the fundamental law of computer programming: If you put garbage in, you will get garbage out. The garbage that he puts into his equation is that radiometric-dating techniques are invalid. Why? Because they contradict the Bible. The tectonic plates also must move at a different speed then they do. Why? Because if they have always moved at a speed close to what they do now then the creationist's own computer program has the earth at 4.6 billion years old! This is not science. A scientist draws his conclusions from observations available to him, and is willing to abandon his conclusions the second the facts warrant it. What do you call someone who draws his conclusions from the most ludicrous myth in a book full of them, and then conforms the facts to his theory, rather then vice versa? A charlatan or a creationist, whichever you prefer. Don't use both together though, that would be redundant.