Is Christianity Opposed to the Pursuit of Science? (Part II) 


On to part two of what I started this morning. My apologies for being repetitive about this introduction:

Here's one of the standard objections to Christianity: that Christians oppose the pursuit of science. For example, the great scientist Galileo was persecuted by the church for researching the shapes and motions of the heavenly bodies. The church vilified Copernicus for moving mankind out of the center of the knowledge where God had put him. Christianity suppressed knowledge until finally the Enlightenment overthrew its prejudices. Being stuck in the dogmatism of the past, the church continually does what it can to impede the forward movement of science. We believed in a flat earth before Columbus, now we believe in Intelligent Design. It's all the same thing all over again.  

 So what is the truth here?

Let's start with where this whole idea began. Surprisingly to many, it wasn't with Galileo or Copernicus. It wasn't even with the Enlightenment. Two highly regarded historians, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, reveal that the supposed war between science and Christianity was a 19th-century invention. This "war" had a lot to do with the personal agendas of two men, Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper. Lindberg and Numbers concentrate primarily on White:
 
"Some of the bloodiest battles, White believed, had been fought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the so-called Scientific Revolution, when powerful church leaders repeatedly tried to silence the pioneers of modern science. Nicolaus Copernicus, who dared to locate the sun at the center of the planetary system, risked his very life to publish his heretical views and escaped 'persecution only by death.' Many of his disciples met a less happy fate: Bruno was 'burned alive as a monster of impiety; Galileo tortured and humiliated as the worst of unbelievers; Kepler hunted alike by Protestants and Catholics.' Andreas Vesalius, the sixteenth-century physician who laid the foundations of modern anatomy by insisting on careful first-hand dissection of the human body, paid for his temerity by being 'hunted to death.' The latest victim in the protracted war on science, said White in an obvious reference to his own experience, was a certain American university, denounced from pulpit and press as 'godless' merely because it defended scientific freedom and resisted sectarian control. White no doubt felt that [as] its president, [he] too deserved to be ranked among the martyrs of science for the persecution that he had endured." 
 
. . .  
 
"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. Although it is not difficult to find instances of conflict and controversy in the annals of Christianity and science, recent scholarship has shown that the warfare metaphor to be neither useful or tenable in describing the relationship between science and religion." 
 
To be more specific,  
 
"If Copernicus had any genuine fear of publication, it was the reaction of scientists, not clerics, that worried him. Other churchmen before him- Nicole Oresme (a bishop) in the fourteenth century and Nicholas of Cusa (a cardinal) in the fifteenth - had freely discussed the possible motion of the earth, and there was no reason to suppose that the reappearance of this idea in the sixteenth century would cause a religious stir." 
 
Concerning Galileo, the problem had at least as much to do with politics as science, if not more; and accounts of Galileo's being tortured are overstated: 
 
"Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appeared in 1632. In it, Galileo not only unambiguously defended the heliocentric system as physically true, but also made the tactical mistake of placing the pope's admonition about its hypothetical character in the mouth of the slow-witted Aristotelian, Simplicio. Although the official imprimatur of the church had been secured, Galileo's enemies, including the now angry Urban VIII, determined to bring him to trial. The inquisition ultimately condemned Galileo and forced him to recant. Although sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life, he lived comfortably in a villa outside Florence. He was neither tortured nor imprisoned-simply silenced." 
 
Then there's that old flat-earth charge. The easy answer to this is that it's just not true! I know, I know, you heard it all the time in school. So did I. (It's not the first "old wives' tale that's been found to be false.) I was just as surprised as you probably are to learn where it really came from: Washington Irving, who made it up for a short story he wrote in 1828. White and Draper repeated and amplified this error. In fact, people have known for millennia that the earth is round, and the so-called "Dark Ages" did not challenge that knowledge. 
 
Now for the even bigger surprise, for some readers. Science only developed in countries that were thoroughly imbued with Christian thinking. And that is no coincidence. 
 
The top scholar helping us understand this is social historian Rodney Stark, who documented it in at least two books: For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. (I've read the first of the two; I'm halfway through the second right now.) Stark didn't invent this proposition; it was first articulated, perhaps, by the Alfred North Whitehead. To quote from Victory of Reason (p. 15): 
 
"Whitehead . . . had grasped that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science in the West, just as surely as non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific quest everywhere else. As he explained: 'The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief that . . . there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. Has has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? . . . It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every details was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. 
 
"Whitehead ended with the remark that the images of gods found in other religions, especially in Asia, are too impersonal or irrational to have sustained science. Any particular 'occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot' god, or might be 'some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There is not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.'" 
 
But what of atheistic views? Recall that the great Eastern religions, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, are (in their pure forms) atheistic. None of them led to science. The atheism of today is perhaps a product of science, which is in turn a product of faith. Michael Bumbulis has an important insight on that: 
 
"Nowadays, Christianity seems irrelevant to science because science can point to its successes. But before there was success, there was only faith that science would succeed. And that faith stemmed from the Christian world view." 
 
One could go to even greater lengths on this, but I must restrain myself. This is a blog, not a book. I'll refer you instead to a number of excellent web resources: 
 
 
Of course I also recommend the Rodney Stark books to you. Far from being opposed to the pursuit of science, Christianity was essential to it from the very beginning. 
 
P.S.: Update December 11: Cadre Comments has just posted on the same topic. Richard Carrier has a contrary view that's worth looking at; I'll have to come back to it later. 
 
Related Posts:
1. Christianity and Science
2. Is Christianity Opposed to the Pursuit of Science? (Part I)
3. Is Christianity Opposed to the Pursuit of Science? (Part II) 

Posted: Fri - December 8, 2006 at 09:42 AM           |

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