And answered seriously:
We have all heard about Galileo’s tragic confrontation with the church in the seventeenth century. However, as Cardinal Newman noted centuries ago, it is telling that this is almost the only example that comes to mind when arguing that the Church was at odds with science.
The historical evidence reveals a far more complex picture. Historian of science John L. Heilbron has noted that the Roman Catholic Church, “gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other institutions.” The university system, too, was essentially an invention of the Catholic Church. As author Thomas Woods writes, “Historians have marveled at the extent to which intellectual debate in those universities was free and unfettered. The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange—all sponsored by the Church—provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.”
Logan Chipkin, “Did the Catholic Church Give Birth to Science?” at Areo
The Church recovered the classical academy—Plato and Aristotle and so forth.
As for the unfettered debate that was then permitted, under university atheism, it is becoming nearly extinct in many faculties today, due in part to disbelief in the reality of the mind.
Wonder why there is no one objecting to this
I’d expand the basic point. The church maintained and expanded old Greek and Roman AND Islamic scholarship, in astronomy and medicine and math.
As for free debate in universities, real debate has NEVER been the norm. Occasionally it happens, but the authorities soon shut it down. This happened in the 1000s when Ockham questioned the Prosperity Gospel, leading to the Inquisition. And it has happened countless times since then, in Christian and Islamic and Jewish and atheist universities. Rigid orthodoxy is the norm.
“Rigid orthodoxy is the norm.”
Are you talking about Darwinian evolution?
Galileo: the Church silence him because his views were not “main-stream” science views. IOW, it was not a theological issue; rather, it was the advent of “scientific consensus” building way back then.
Ockham lived in the 13th and mostly 14th century. As to the inquistion, a quick search reveals this:
“William of Ockham, one of the Doctors of the Church, lived in England as a Franciscan theologian and writer. He developed a unique and controversial philosophy which trimmed much from Aristotle’s system of the world. These radical beliefs made an enemy of John Lutterell, the chancellor of Oxford at the time. Lutterell sent a document to Pope John XII criticizing Ockham’s work. Ockham was not officially condemned by the papal office at this juncture.”
Aha. Not theological orthodoxy directly, but the abandonment of Aristotle’s science. Again, “accepted” science is the culprit. There’s a lesson to be learned here.
Why is this still even a question to be discussed? The theism vs science war myth has been debunked so often and so thoroughly, yet it keeps coming back; think Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example. The war myth must get a lot of traction in some groups to remain believable by anyone for so long. Alternatively, the true believers are truly blind and will not even consider correctives to their favoured memes. It is just too good an idea to let it go despite having almost zero supporting evidence.
Not only has Christianity never been at war with science, the fact of the matter is that it is Darwinian evolution itself that is at war with science. As Cornelius Hunter explains, “Historians have understood for the better part of a century now that this Warfare Thesis (between science and religion) is a false history. It was constructed by evolutionists to frame the origins debate in their favor. In fact the conflict is the exactly the opposite—it is between the metaphysical foundation of evolutionary thought and science. . That metaphysical foundation of naturalism is unyielding and unbending, and it makes no sense on the science. It is the evolutionists who have a conflict between their religious beliefs and science.”
Although it is naturalism itself that is at war with science, it is still widely believed, due to the dishonesty of atheists, that ‘methodological naturalism’ is the required assumption for doing science.
Wikipedia calls Methodological Naturalism the “required assumption of philosophical naturalism when working with the scientific method.”
The judge in the Dover case, John E. Jones, who ruled against Intelligent Design being taught in Pennsylvania public schools as a science, went so far as to claim that “Methodological naturalism is a ‘ground rule’ of science today”
Yet, the claim that “Methodological naturalism is a ‘ground rule’ of science today” is simply a patently false claim.
Contrary to what many people have apparently been falsely led to believe by atheists, the fact of the matter is the existence of science itself is proof, in and of itself, that everything in this universe cannot possibly be explained solely by reference to purely natural and/or material causes, but that intelligent causation must be invoked in order to explain science itself.
In fact, far from being at war with science, Christianity itself, and the presuppositions therein, were necessary for both the birth of modern science and those presuppositions continue to be essential for the successful practice of science.
And as Robert C Koons explains, “Without the faith in the rational intelligibility of the world and the divine vocation of human beings to master it, modern science would never have been possible, and, even today, the continued rationality of the enterprise of science depends on convictions that can be reasonably grounded only in theistic metaphysics.”
In fact, not only is the premise of materialism and/or naturalism not an intuitively true premise to start off with within science, but the conclusions that are deduced directly from that primary premise of materialism are “counter-intuitive” and “mystifying.” To quote Richard Lewontin, “we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.”
Here are a few instances of just how counter-intuitive, and mystifying the deductive conclusions can be when one is forced to draw conclusions by assuming materialism and/or naturalism as your primary premise in science.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more at war with science, indeed more at war with common sense and reality itself, than methodological naturalism has turned out to be,
It’s no secret that the origins of scientific inquiry lay within the various religions.
Thankfully since then, science has outgrown the shackles of religion.
Both are still needed in society of course:
One is a rigorous method to study and explain the world around us while furthering society, the other is to coddle the masses with answers that help them sleep at night.
I was really thinking certain individuals we’re going to show up and start talking about how religion sucks, Galileo, blah blah science is hindered by religious irrationals, GOG arguments, blah blah
Hence my comment at 1
Sven Mil states that…
Well actually, modern science owes its origins to Christianity and to Christianity alone. As Calvin Beisner noted, “such diverse historians and philosophers of science as Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Duhem, Loren Eiseley, Rodney Stark, and many others have observed,, science—not an occasional flash of insight here and there, but a systematic, programmatic, ongoing way of studying and controlling the world—arose only once in history, and only in one place: medieval Europe, once known as “Christendom,” where that Biblical worldview reigned supreme. That is no accident. Science could not have arisen without that worldview.”
And as Rodney Stark noted, “the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious, Christian scholars.”,,,
Here is a list of the ‘deeply religious, Christian scholars’ who founded modern science,
Wikipedia itself, which is certainly no friend of Intelligent Design, and which is also often openly hostile to Christianity, basically admits as much in its list of Christians in science and technology before the 18th century
I guess since Sven Mil could no longer claim that Christianity is ‘at war’ with science, the next best thing for him to try to claim, as an atheist, was that Christianity was really not all that essential to the rise of modern science.
If we ask ourselves, “What was the crucial element and/or belief of Christian theology that enabled the rise of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe, the crucial element that was missing from ancient Greek culture and that was also missing from all the other various religions that failed to make the crucial leap into experimental science?”, we find that that crucial element and/or belief of Christian Theology that enabled the rise of modern science was the Christian belief that the universe not eternal but that the universe was created by God and that the universe itself is not self existent but contingent and/or dependent upon God for its existence.
Within the Medieval Universities, which the church founded, ancient Greek philosophy was vigorously discussed and debated. As the following article notes, during the 12th to 16th Century, “Scholasticism is best known for its application in medieval Christian theology, especially in attempts to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers (particularly Aristotle) with Christian theology.
During the period of intense discussion and debate in the Medieval Christian universities about the similarities and differences between Greek philosophy and Christian theology, one of the main conflicts that was found to exist between ancient Greek philosophy and Christian theology was the realization that Greek philosophy held to, basically, a deterministic and necessitarian view of creation wherein the universe itself was considered to be eternal, whereas in Christian theology it is held that the universe was created by God and that the universe is contingent, and/or dependent, upon God for its existence.
As the following article notes, “Aristotle,,, believed in the eternity of the world,,,, This view conflicted with the view of the Catholic Church that the world had a beginning in time. The Aristotelian view was prohibited in the Condemnations of 1210–1277”
And in fact, it was this necessitarian and/or deterministic view of the universe in which the universe was held be eternally existent that prevented the ancient Greek philosophers from ever making the crucial leap into experimental science.
As the following article makes clear, “Both Greek and biblical thought asserted that the world is orderly and intelligible. But the Greeks held that this order is necessary and that one can therefore deduce its structure from first principles. Only biblical thought held that God created both form and matter, meaning that the world did not have to be as it is and that the details of its order can be discovered only by observation.”
In fact, it was only with the Church’s quote unquote, ‘outlawing’ of Aristotle’s deterministic and necessitarian view of creation, in which the universe itself was held to be eternally existent, that experimental science was finally able to find fertile ground, take root, and eventually flourish in Medieval Christian Europe,
As the preceding article goes on to explain, in the Christian’s view of creation, “The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.”
This shift from the Greeks’s necessary view of the universe, in which the universe has always existed, and whose order could be deduced from first principles, to the Christians’s contingent view of creation, in which the universe was created, and whose order must be discovered via a posteriori investigation, represented a major shift in the types of reasoning used by each culture. Specifically it represented a shift away from the ‘top-down’ deductive reasoning that was predominant among the ancient Greeks’s, and which was even used by Aquinas himself, a predominate form of reasoning in which these philosophers “pronounced on how the world should behave, with insufficient attention to how the world in fact did behave.”,,,,
,,,, to the new form of ‘bottom up’ inductive reasoning of Christians in which the order of creation had to be discovered via a posteriori investigation.
In other words, this major shift in reasoning from a more or less purely ‘top down’ deductive form of reasoning of the ancient Greeks to this new form of ‘bottom up’ inductive reasoning of the Medieval Christians represented nothing less than the birth of the scientific method itself.
This new form of inductive reasoning, which led to the birth of the scientific method itself, apparently took a while to take hold in Medieval Christian Europe but this new form of reasoning was eventually, and famously, elucidated and championed by Francis Bacon in 1620 in his book that was entitled Novum Organum. Which is translated as ‘New Method’. In the title of that book, Bacon is specifically referencing Aristotle’s work Organon, which was Aristotle’s treatise on logic and syllogism. In other words, Organum was basically Aristotle’s treatise on deductive reasoning.
And thus in his book Novum Organum, Bacon was actually championing a new method of inductive reasoning, where repeated experimentation played a central role in one’s reasoning, over and above Aristotle’s deductive reasoning which had been the dominate form of reasoning that had been around for 2000 years at that time.
And indeed, repeated experimentation, ever since it was first set forth by Francis Bacon, has been the cornerstone of the scientific method. And has indeed been very, very, fruitful for man in gaining accurate knowledge of the universe in that repeated experiments lead to more exacting, and illuminating, conclusions than is possible with the quote-unquote, educated guesses that follow from Aristotle’s deductive reasoning.
Interestingly, the failure to use inductive reasoning over and above deductive reasoning is exactly where Darwinian evolution has gone off the rails as a scientific theory. Dr. Richard Nelson, in his book Darwin, Then and Now, has noted that Charles Darwin, in his book ‘Origin of Species’, “selected the deductive method of reasoning – and abandoned the inductive method of reasoning.”
Likewise Richard Owen, in a review of Charles Darwin’s book shortly after it was published, had found that Charles Darwin, as far as inductive methodology itself was concerned, had failed to produce “inductive original research which might issue in throwing light on ‘that mystery of mysteries.’.
In other words, Darwin had failed to produce any original experimental research that might support his theory for the “Origin of Species”.
And on top of Richard Owen’s rather mild rebuke of Darwin for failing to use inductive methodology, Adam Sedgwick was nothing less than scathing of Darwin for deserting, “after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth – the true method of induction, and started us in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins’s locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon.”
Adam Sedgwick also called Darwin out for being deceptive in exactly what form of reasoning he was using in his book. Specifically Sedgwick scolded Darwin that “Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction?”
And it was not as if Darwin was ignorant of the fact that he had failed to follow Bacon’s inductive methodology, Charles Darwin himself, two years prior to the publication of his book, confessed to a friend that “What you hint at generally is very very true, that my work will be grievously hypothetical & large parts by no means worthy of being called inductive; my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.”
In short, when Darwin published his book, and in regards to inductive reasoning itself, Darwin did not do, or have, any original experimental research that would actually establish his theory as being scientifically true. i.e. Darwin had failed to use the scientific method!
And over a century and a half later the situation still has not changed. To this day, Darwinists still have no experimental research that would establish Darwin’s theory as being scientifically true,
As Dr Richard Nelson also noted in his book Darwin, Then and Now, “After 150 years of research,,, the scientific evidence is clear: there are no “successive, slight” changes in the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, or genetics to support Darwinism or neo-Darwinism.”
Moreover, on top of the fact that there is no experimental evidence to substantiate the claim from Darwinists that it is possible for one species to transmutate into another species, there are, in fact, now numerous lines of experimental research that have now falsified many fundamental predictions of Darwin’s theory as being true.
Dr. Cornelius Hunter has evaluated 22 specific predictions that are fundamental to Darwin’s theory and has found that when those specific predictions were tested and evaluated against the experimental evidence then those fundamental predictions of Darwin’s theory were found to be false.
Yet, despite the fact that core and fundamental predictions that arise from Darwin’s theory itself are falsified by the experimental evidence time and again, Darwin’s theory is simply never allowed to be seriously questioned in the minds of most Evolutionists.
As Dr. Cornelius Hunter noted elsewhere, “Being an evolutionist means there is no bad news. If new species appear abruptly in the fossil record, that just means evolution operates in spurts. If species then persist for eons with little modification, that just means evolution takes long breaks. If clever mechanisms are discovered in biology, that just means evolution is smarter than we imagined. If strikingly similar designs are found in distant species, that just means evolution repeats itself. If significant differences are found in allied species, that just means evolution sometimes introduces new designs rapidly. If no likely mechanism can be found for the large-scale change evolution requires, that just means evolution is mysterious. If adaptation responds to environmental signals, that just means evolution has more foresight than was thought. If major predictions of evolution are found to be false, that just means evolution is more complex than we thought.”
In short, Darwin when he first formulated his theory, and Darwinists still today, have abandoned inductive reasoning altogether. Darwin himself, as Richard Owen noted, produced no original experimental research that would support his theory. And still today Darwinists ignore inductive reasoning in that repeated experimentation, no matter how badly the experimental evidence contradicts core predictions of their theory, is simply never allowed to question the core materialistic and/or naturalistic presuppositions of their theory.
In short and in conclusion, it is Darwinian materialism itself, and certainly not Christianity, that is ‘at war’ with science!
Verse:
BA77, those were some great comments.
The longer I live the more I appreciate Christ’s description of Satan as the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning.