I was asked by some friends to comment on a thread about Christianity's role in the progress of science. Other things were being discussed there, such as whether Martin Luther was a despicable ass or an admirable genius, which I didn't comment on because I know too little about the matter to add anything worthwhile. But the history of science is my Ph.D. field, so I could comment on that with some authority. And I did. What follows is expanded and adapted from what I said, and completely supercedes my comments there as far as I'm concerned. Don't worry, though. My blog isn't always going to be about the history of science.

It is becoming popular now to claim Christianity "responsible" for the scientific revolution (Stark, Jaki, etc.). My dissertation will refute much of that thesis, in about two chapters altogether. But we need to keep distinct the claim that Christianity did not actively oppose science (which is sometimes true, depending on how you define "oppose") and the claim that Christianity was necessary for the scientific revolution (which is certainly not true), as well as various claims in the middle--like "Christianity wasn't necessary, but helped," which again depends on how you define "helped"; or "all theologies can find a compatible incentive towards science, and Christianity is a theology like any other," which is true, depending on how you define "Christianity" and "theology"; and so on. Likewise "our concept of science is an outgrowth of Christian theology" is no more true than "our concept of science is an outgrowth of pagan theology." Modern science grew up in a Christian context, but only by re-embracing ancient scientific values against the grain of the original Christian mindset. In turn, those ancient scientific values grew up in a pagan context. As with Christianity, that's not causality, it's just circumstance.



However, in all this the one claim that cannot be sustained is that Christianity "encouraged" science. Had that been the case, then there would not have been almost a thousand years (from roughly 300 to 1250 AD) of absolutely zero significant advances in science (excepting a very few and relatively minor contributions by Hindus and Muslims), in contrast with the previous thousand years (from roughly 400 BC to 300 AD), which witnessed incredible advances in the sciences in continuous succession every century, culminating in theorists whose ideas and findings came tantalizingly close to the scientific revolution in the 2nd century AD (namely, but not only, Galen and Ptolemy ). You can't propose a cause that failed to have an effect despite being constantly in place for a thousand years, especially when in its absence science had made far more progress. Science picked up again in the 1200's precisely where the ancients had left off, by rediscovering their findings, methods, and epistemic values and continuing the process they had begun.





Sure, this was done by Christians, but only against the dominant grain, and at first only very slowly, and only by redefining what it meant to be a Christian in a way that would have been nearly unrecognizable to the Christians of the first four centuries, and was diametrically the opposite of what Christians of the early middle ages would have tolerated. A fair example is the treatment of John Philopon in the 6th century, possibly the only innovative "scientist" (if he can be called that) in the whole of Christian history before the 13th century: he was branded a heretic and everything he did in the sciences was effectively ignored. Though he wasn't condemned for being a scientist, he was condemned for thinking for himself in matters of theology, precisely in his effort to make science and religion compatible. But by opposing exactly that process, the Church killed any prospect for science under its watch for nearly ten whole centuries. You can call it collateral damage, but it's damage all the same. An accidentally dead Iraqi is still a victim of war, and so was medieval science a victim of Christianity.



Aquinas and Roger Bacon are often wheeled out here, but they are also examples of what I'm talking about: both post 1200 AD (hence again a thousand years too late), and both responding to the revival of ancient (pagan) scientific and philosophical literature and ways of thinking. At that point, that meant mostly just some Aristotle--whose work had already become largely obsolete even in antiquity. The real discoveries of what the ancients had achieved after him would take another century or more, and even then all they had achieved was never fully realized until the 20th century. Hence the new ideas under Aquinas and Bacon were not inspired by Christianity but in spite of it. They were inspired, instead, by the recovered ideas of ancient pagans, and the challenges they posed to Christian ways of thinking.



Moreover, neither Aquinas nor Bacon did anything significant in science. Neither conducted any significant experiments or advanced any scientific field in any notable way. Bacon's protoscientific work has been much exaggerated and misrepresented in the literature, and Aquinas didn't do anything scientific at all, proto or otherwise--in fact, he fathered the "scholastic" approach to natural philosophy, which was the antithesis of science and the butt of every joke among scientists of the Renaissance. Thus, neither of them represent examples of an "encouragement to science." At best they represent examples of attempting to find a compatibility between two otherwise alien ways of thinking, with mixed and insufficient results. And even then they were not representative of their times--they were both acting against the grain (the Church had only recently banned the study of Aristotle and then reluctantly changed its mind), in efforts to reconcile Christianity as-it-was with better ways of thinking. They were both arguing, in effect, that Christianity had to change, and change fundamentally, to allow improvement, and yet neither of them understood science anywhere near as well as the ancients did, nor did either have any idea what the results would be of what they were asking for--had they known, they might both have changed their minds about their respective projects.



Even so, it is still wrong to say, as a friend of mine did, that "Christianity has spent the majority of its 2000-plus years opposing science with theology, with the most brutal means at its disposal." As someone else said, that’s a gross oversimplification, exaggerated and excessive. But so is the claim that Christianity never presented any obstacles to science, or that it only occasionally did so. The reality is that it constantly presented obstacles, usually indirectly (but just as potently), and sometimes directly, but rarely "with the most brutal means at its disposal." In effect, using a whole arsenal of tactics, early (and especially early medieval) Christianity bitch-slapped all thinking that could have any tendency to support and inspire an embrace and pursuit of scientific values. This hostility and effort wasn't aimed at science directly, but at liberality of thought, and most of all, at the notion that evidence available to everyone is the only supreme authority in all debates of substance. The Church very definitely and actively opposed that idea. And even before the consolidation of the Church, as I show in my dissertation, most Christians were uniformly hostile to the whole system of scientific values, condemning them as vain, idolatrous, arrogant, and unnecessary, if not outright dangerous. It took a long, gradual process to finally change minds on that score.



From Aquinas and Bacon (and their peers) to the dawn of the scientific revolution spans a period of roughly 300 years, and it took over a thousand years for Christianity to finally produce an Aquinas or a Bacon--at least in terms of actual intellectual authority and influence. In some respects, Origen and Philopon were perhaps comparable, but both were branded heretics and their scientific values rejected by their Christian peers. And even in the 13th and later centuries opposition remained, despite a growing tide against it. And though that opposition to scientific values has gradually dwindled ever since, it remains large and powerful enough to elect the presidents of a world superpower. This is not a problem to be regarded flippantly. This is the bugbear in Christianity's closet, and Christianity has failed to kill it for two thousand years. Christianity must be judged by that very failure.



It has also been noted that "sure there have been conflicts, but many (if not most) of the great scientists of history have also been religious," like Newton and Galileo . Indeed. Most of the greatest scientists in antiquity were also religious. Galen and Ptolemy were pagans, even creationists. All that proves is that people can manipulate their religions to be compatible with a scientific mindset--often by compartmentalizing, which means only embracing scientific epistemic values when answering questions that don't challenge precious religious dogmas, which is really the issue. A religion will be capable of being made compatible with science only insofar as it restrains its dogmatic commitments far enough that science is unlikely to encroach upon them. The problem is that science always will encroach upon them eventually, and when that happens there will be only two responses to choose from: give up precious dogmas (in other words, change your religion to be compatible again with science) or stand your ground and oppose science (which is how the Intelligent Design movement has responded to evolution, for example, and soon will respond, I suspect, to advances in neuroscience).



It is certainly true that Christianity, like all religions, can be "retooled" to go either way, but not everyone will go the same way, hence there are Christians who are okay with science, and Christians who fight it tooth and nail. The problem with religion is exactly this: it keeps around this tendency to push a segment of the population against science, even as other segments find ways to make religion and science compatible. This tension is inherent in religious thinking and will never go away until religion goes away altogether. To be clear, by "religion" here (since I use that word in a different sense in other contexts) I mean any belief system that places faith above evidence and reason, accepting evidence and reason only when they do not conflict with an accepted set of faith-claims. Hence those two options for a religious person faced with scientific facts that contradict her faith: she can change her faith (and thus place science, and hence evidence, first in authority when choosing what to believe) or oppose science. Religion always produces the latter sort of person, even when it also produces the former, and that's what's wrong with it.



Hence the problem I am pointing to is not unique to Christianity. It existed even in the pagan world before Christianity. Anaxagoras was (at least allegedly) prosecuted by the Athenians for blasphemy simply for theorizing the sun is a hot stone. Other pagans tried to launch a blasphemy prosecution against Aristarchus when he claimed the earth revolves around the sun. Lucian had a contract put out on his head for claiming the miracles of a certain cult had natural explanations in ordinary fraud. Likewise, Neoplatonism sometimes resembled medieval Christianity in its disinterest in empirical studies and obsession with mystical approaches to science, often through armchair reasoning and "inspired intuition." But there was one enormous difference: science-hating pagans never had the institutional power and clout to enforce their views on the general society (all Anaxagoras and Aristarchus had to do to avoid their influence was leave town), but the Christians achieved and maintained precisely that power for many centuries, and so pervasively there was no way to escape their influence. What they did with that power was sufficiently scary that we should never want that to happen again.



Yet for all that, what I am asserting here is not that Christianity alone is responsible for the Dark Ages. I find Christianity to be a symptom, not a cause, of the fall of the Roman Empire and the ideals it founded or fought over (see my discussion The Rise of World Christianity ). What I am saying, however, is that Christianity didn't do any good. It neither corrected what had gone wrong nor reintroduced any striving for the dreams and aspirations of earlier Greek and Roman idealists, but to the contrary, Christianity embraced a partial and sometimes full retreat from them. Hence Christianity did not kill science. But it made no effort to rescue and revive its ideals, and instead let them drown, with little sign of regret, and in some cases even to praises of its demise. Thus, Christianity was bad for science. It put a stop to scientific progress for a thousand years, and even after that it made science's recovery difficult, painful, and slow.



I am also not saying Christianity "necessarily and uniformly" stomps out science, only that we cannot claim Christianity "encouraged" science during its first thousand years, even if some significant Christian factions did later or now do. Christianity threw up a great many obstacles to the recovery of pagan scientific values during and after its first thousand years, and to a lesser extent is still doing this today.

But again I am not saying all Christianity does this now. Rather, I am saying Christianity will always generate factions that do, as it always has. And the last thing we want is to allow one such faction back in power, as had been the case during Christianity's first thousand years in the saddle. We must not go back to the Dark Ages.



People still raise objections to various points above.



One might object and say, "Historians no longer believe there were any 'Dark Ages'!" That depends on what you mean by Dark Age. What I mean by that term here is any era in which a considerable amount of knowledge is lost, especially scientific and technical knowledge, while the ruling zeitgeist looks backwards to a time before more enlightened ways of doing things were embraced. The loss of over 90% of all literature, and the corresponding historical and scientific knowledge it contained, is a fact. The abandonment of the highest civilized, technological, historical, and scientific ideals of the early Roman elite, in exchange for more barbarian ways of thinking and doing things, is a fact. And that is, by my definition, a Dark Age.



Far less was recorded during the middle ages, and far less accurately, than had been the case in classical times, and only a small fraction of what was recorded before was preserved, and even what survived remained known to astonishingly few, and put to good use by even fewer. Again, by my definition, that's a Dark Age. At the same time, the greatest aspirations of the pagans, with their struggling ideals of democracy and human rights, just like their empirical ideals and the scientific spirit they inspired, were chucked out the window in favor of more primitive ideas of "god-given" kings constantly at war over a

feudal society