Christianity gave rise to modern science

The so-called Church's opposition to science is a grotesque myth that was forged in the 19th century. And it's not just false, it's exactly the opposite: it was in fact Christianity that created modern science, and it couldn't have been any other way, as Pierre Duhem (Catholic Science, 1906) and Rodney Stark (The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success 2005) demonstrated: medieval Christianity provided a conceptual, intellectual and cultural framework that encouraged the emergence of modern science. In the Christian logic of a God of "logos" theChurch promoted realism, the search for an explanation of the world, rationality, freedom, respect for the individual, individual rights, faith in progress and reason, the search for orthodoxy, looking to the future (rather than orthopraxis, which is turned toward the past), encouraging the development of trade, capitalism (monks, Venice, Genoa, Florence) and, above all, knowledge, education, schools and the great universities where all knowledge was gathered and developed. Christianity never burnt down libraries: on the contrary, in medieval monasteries, monks and scholars preserved and passed on ancient knowledge and developed new ideas. The desire to build ever more grandiose churches and cathedrals and to promote the arts and civilisation greatly stimulated the development of science and technology.

iStock/Getty Images Plus/ChatkarenStudio

Reasons to believe:

Christian Europe, which began exploring the Earth in the 16th century (Christopher Columbus reached America in 1492; Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498; Magellan circumnavigated the globe in 1522), discovered that it had an immense technological advantage over the rest of the world. This was to lead to its global domination in the centuries that followed.

As early as the 16th century, Europe, which had built monumental Romanesque and then Gothic churches and cathedrals, had inventions that no one else had: water mills, windmills, dams, mechanical paper production, horse teams, harnesses, irons, ploughs, compasses, spectacles, magnifying glasses, chimneys, clocks, chemistry, astronomy, agricultural techniques, weaving techniques, the textile industry, the cast iron industry (bells, cannons), mastery of gunpowder, architectural techniques, oil painting, navigation knowledge, musical instruments (organ, violin, harpsichord), musical notation, etc.

It was in the Middle Ages, again in Europe, that universities were founded, in Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford and Cambridge (12th century), and many others besides, each with its own specialities and areas of excellence, thus maintaining a long history of academic excellence, as well as making significant contributions to research and higher education around the world.

Modern science grew out of this foundation developed in and by Christianity, which is why, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, all the great scientists who advanced modern science were of European and Judeo-Christian origin.

The list of scientists presumably persecuted by the Church includes just one name: Galileo, who was sentenced to live at home and recite seven psalms once a week for three years, a sentence he entrusted to his nun daughter.

Summary:

The myth of the Church's opposition to science originated in the nineteenth century. Two books contributed to this belief: John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). These books appeared in the wake of Darwin's 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, and they spread the impression that religious critics of Darwinism were threatening science, as Stephen C. Meyer describes so well in his book Return of the God Hypothesis: "The Draper-White thesis has been widely used in popular science writings by the media and in works on the history of science", so much so that people started to believe in the idea of a war between science and religion.

But this misrepresentation needs to be corrected, as has been done by a slew of 20th- and 21st-century historians, philosophers and sociologists of science such as Herbert Butterfield, A. C. Crombie, Michael B. Foster, Loren Eiseley, David Lindberg, Owen Gingerich, Reijer Hooykaas, Robert Merton, Pierre Duhem (author of "Catholic Science" in 1906), Colin Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Peter Hodgson, Ian Barbour, Christopher Kaiser, Holmes Rolston III, Steve Fuller, Peter Harrison and Rodney Stark (author of The Triumph of Reason: How Christianity Led to Reason, Christianity, and Western Success, 2005), to name but a few. All these historians observed that belief in a God - and Christianity in particular - played a decisive role in the development of modern science.

Of particular note is the important role played by Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, who in 1277, with the support of Pope John XXI, condemned the "necessary theology" of the Church and 219 separate theses influenced by Greek philosophy on what God could or could not do, which was limiting science. Before this decree, Christian theologians and philosophers (particularly those at the influential University of Paris) followed the cosmological, physical and biological theories of Aristotle and others, who believed that nature had to conform to apparently self-evident logical principles and necessities, such as the eternity of the Universe, the perfection of the sky, the necessarily circular orbits, the impossibility of creating empty space, other planetary systems or new species. The biblical Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation thus helped to liberate Western science from such "necessary" deductive thinking, by affirming the contingency of nature to the will of a rational God.

One of the most important figures of the scientific revolution and the founder of modern chemistry, Robert Boyle, explained it this way: the work of the "philosopher of nature" is not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did. Moreover, as the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it: "There can be no living science without a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an order of things. And, in particular, of an Order of Nature". Thus, the hypothesis that a rational Mind with a purpose created the Universe gave rise to two ideas, contingency and intelligibility, which in turn provided a strong impetus to study nature with confidence, because it was believed to be possible to understand it. And it was with this dual approach, confident and empirical, based on observation of the real world and experimentation (Grosseteste, Bacon), that science was to really take off.

Ian Barbour concludes that "science in its modern form" emerged in Western civilisation alone, among all the cultures of the world "because only the Christian West had the "the intellectual premises necessary for the development of said science" (Francisco Ayala, Darwin's Revolution, p. 4).

So what else is there? In the nineteenth century, the Galileo affair became the subject of much controversy. Admittedly, some Churchmen were guilty in this matter, as Pope John Paul II acknowledged in 2000, after having had the case analysed in great detail. But it is just as absurd to claim, on the basis of this unfortunate case, that the Church is opposed to science as it would be to say that she is against holiness because she burnt Joan of Arc!

It would be just as absurd to claim that the government is at war with science because when Antoine de Lavoisier was arrested in November 1793 during the Reign of Terror and sentenced to death, Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal, a judge of the Revolutionary Tribunal, claimed that "the Republic has no need of scientists". Evidently, this was an isolated case not representative of the whole French Revolution.

In fact, as Frédéric Guillaud reminds us in his latest book Et si c'était vrai, on page 35:

"Anyone who looks closely at the history of Galileo's trial will realise that it had more to do with a conflict between the Holy Office, the Congregation of the Index and Pope Urban VIII (a friend of Galileo's) than with any manifestation of a Church's age-old hostility to science. As soon as the optical proofs of the Earth's rotation were published by Bradley - we forget that Galileo had none! - Benedict XIV gave his imprimatur, in 1748, to a complete edition of Galileo. While we're on the subject of naming names, let us remember that Copernicus was a canon and dedicated his book to Pope Paul III; that the laws of genetics were discovered by an Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, and that the Big Bang theory was developed by the physicist Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest by trade. But we need to go deeper.

Not only is there nothing contrary to reason in the Catholic faith, but there is also a historical fact to be noted: modern science was born in the Christian world, and nowhere else. There has been no shortage of refined civilisations in history: ancient Greece, Rome, China, India, the Incas, Islamic Persia - but none of them invented experimental science. This is more than just a coincidence. Christianity is the only religion to affirm three key things, which provide a particularly favourable framework for the scientific enterprise:

1. the entire physical Universe was freely created by a God endowed with 'logos'.

2. man was created in the image of God, endowed with an intelligence capable of finding in reality the traces of divine intelligence.

3. the temporal enjoys a certain autonomy from the spiritual. In this perspective, it makes sense to research the universal laws by which nature functions, and the enterprise of doing so is not prevented by spiritual power, since it results in glorifying the wisdom of the Creator.

Things were very different in other world systems.

For Hindus and Buddhists, the world was a vast illusion without consistency, which discouraged any scientific endeavour; for animists, it was 'full of gods' who explained events, which prevented any search for regular laws. For the Greeks, there was a radical separation between the sublunary world and the supralunary world, which limited science to astronomical surveys, the terrestrial world being considered too disordered for mathematics to apply to it. Finally, for Islam, the physical world was not conceived as regulated by laws, but as subject at all times to the arbitrary will of Allah. Added to this is the devaluation of temporal activities. In other words, without realizing it, the most anti-clerical scientists benefited from the Christian culture!

It should be noted that Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) is sometimes associated with Galileo, but wrongly so, because Bruno was not tried for his scientific work but for atheism, magic and occultism. For him, God was merely the spirit of the universe (pantheism), and he asserted reincarnation and final salvation for Satan (apocatastasis); for him, Jesus Christ was merely a clever magician; he denied the Holy Trinity, rejected the Blessed Virgin Mary, asserted that all religions were good and equal, and practiced magic. A zoologist, he also advocated vegetarianism. Without, of course, legitimizing his condemnation to be burned alive at the stake, which was unfortunately part of the customs of the time throughout the world, we must insist on the fact that Giordano Bruno was not at all a martyr for science, and he was not condemned for having asserted "the plurality of inhabited worlds".

Olivier Bonnassies