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Most scientific and technical innovations prior to the Scientific Revolution were achieved by societies organized by religious traditions. Ancient Christian scholars pioneered individual elements of the scientific method. Historically, Christianity has been and still is a patron of sciences.^[1] It has been prolific in the foundation of schools, universities and hospitals,^{[2][3][4][5][6]} and many Christian clergy have been active in the sciences and have made significant contributions to the development of science.^[7]

Events in Christian Europe, such as the Galileo affair, that were associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment led some scholars such as John William Draper to postulate a conflict thesis, holding that religion and science have been in conflict throughout history. While the conflict thesis remains popular in atheistic and antireligious circles, it has lost favor among most contemporary historians of science.^[22][23][24] Most contemporary historians of science agree that the occurrence with Galileo was an exception, with the relationship between science and Christianity, and have corrected numerous false interpretations of said affair.^{[25][26][27][28]}

Overview

Most sources of knowledge available to the

Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas^[33] held that scriptures can have multiple interpretations on certain areas where the matters were far beyond their reach, therefore one should leave room for future findings to shed light on the meanings. Augustine Argued:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars ... Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.^[34]

The "Handmaiden" tradition, which saw secular studies of the universe as a very important and helpful part of arriving at a better understanding of scripture, was adopted throughout Christian history from early on.^[35] Also, the sense that God created the world as a self-operating system is what motivated many Christians throughout the Middle Ages to investigate nature.^[36]

The

David C. Lindberg states that the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages was a time of ignorance and superstition due to the Christian church is a "caricature". According to Lindberg, while there are some portions of the classical tradition which suggest this view, these were exceptional cases. It was common to tolerate and encourage critical thinking about the nature of the world. The relation between Christianity and science is complex and cannot be simplified to either harmony[47] or conflict,^[48] according to Lindberg.^[49] Lindberg reports that "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led. There was no warfare between science and the church."^[50] Ted Peters in Encyclopedia of Religion writes that although there is some truth in the "Galileo's condemnation" story but through exaggerations, it has now become "a modern myth perpetuated by those wishing to see warfare between science and religion who were allegedly persecuted by an atavistic and dogma-bound ecclesiastical authority".^[51] In 1992, the Catholic Church's seeming vindication of Galileo attracted much comment in the media:

Generations of historians and sociologists have discovered many ways in which Christians, Christian beliefs, and Christian institutions played crucial roles in fashioning the tenets, methods, and institutions of what in time became modern science. They found that some forms of Christianity provided the motivation to study nature systematically.^[52]

— Noah J. Efron

A degree of concord between science and religion can be seen in religious belief and empirical science. The belief that God created the world and therefore humans, can lead to the view that he arranged for humans to know the world. This is underwritten by the doctrine of

During the Enlightenment, a period "characterized by dramatic revolutions in science" and the rise of Protestant challenges to the authority of the Catholic Church via individual liberty, the authority of Christian scriptures became strongly challenged. As science advanced, acceptance of a literal version of the Bible became "increasingly untenable" and some in that period presented ways of interpreting scripture according to its spirit on its authority and truth.^[54]

Regarding the subject on the distribution of Nobel Prizes by religion between 1901 and 2000, the data taken from Baruch A. Shalev, shows that between the years 1901 and 2000 reveals that 654 Laureates belong to 28 different religion. 65.4% have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.^[55]

History

Roots of scientific revolution

Between 1150 and 1200, Christian scholars had traveled to Sicily and Spain to retrieve the writings of Aristotle, which had been lost to the West after the Fall of the Roman Empire. This produced a period of cultural ferment that one "modern historian has called the twelfth century renaissance".

Modern western universities have their origins directly in the Medieval Church.^{[61][62][63][64][65]} They began as cathedral schools, and all students were considered clerics.^[66] This was a benefit as it placed the students under ecclesiastical jurisdiction and thus imparted certain legal immunities and protections. The cathedral schools eventually became partially detached from the cathedrals and formed their own institutions, the earliest being the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Oxford (1096), and the University of Paris (c. 1150).^[67][68][69]

Some scholars have noted a direct tie between "particular aspects of traditional Christianity" and the rise of science.

Oxford historian Peter Harrison is another who has argued that a Biblical worldview was significant for the development of modern science. Harrison contends that Protestant approaches to the book of scripture had significant, if largely unintended, consequences for the interpretation of the book of nature.^{[82] [page needed]} Harrison has also suggested that literal readings of the Genesis narratives of the Creation and Fall motivated and legitimated scientific activity in seventeenth-century England. For many of its seventeenth-century practitioners, science was imagined to be a means of restoring a human dominion over nature that had been lost as a consequence of the Fall.^{[83][page needed]}

Historian and professor of religion

While refined and clarified over the centuries, the

Today almost all historians agree that Christianity (Catholicism as well Protestantism) moved many early-modem intellectuals to study nature systematically. Historians have also found that notions borrowed from Christian belief found their ways into scientific discourse, with glorious results.[100]

— Noah J. Efron

Galileo once stated "The intention of the

The Catholic Cistercian order used its own numbering system, which could express numbers from 0 to 9999 in a single sign.^[107][108] According to one modern Cistercian, "enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit" have always been a part of the order's identity, and the Cistercians "were catalysts for development of a market economy" in twelfth-century Europe.^[109] Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the technological advances in Europe were made in the monasteries.^[109] According to the medievalist Jean Gimpel, their high level of industrial technology facilitated the diffusion of new techniques: "Every monastery had a model factory, often as large as the church and only several feet away, and waterpower drove the machinery of the various industries located on its floor."^[110] Waterpower was used for crushing wheat, sieving flour, fulling cloth and tanning – a "level of technological achievement [that] could have been observed in practically all" of the Cistercian monasteries.^[111]

The English science historian

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the teaching of science in Jesuit schools, as laid down in the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu ("The Official Plan of studies for the Society of Jesus") of 1599,^[113] was almost entirely based on the works of Aristotle.

The Jesuits, nevertheless, have made numerous significant contributions to the development of science. For example, the Jesuits have dedicated significant study to earthquakes, and seismology has been described as "the Jesuit science".^[114] The Jesuits have been described as "the single most important contributor to experimental physics in the seventeenth century".^[115] According to Jonathan Wright in his book God's Soldiers, by the eighteenth century the Jesuits had "contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."^[116]

The

Protestantism has promoted economic growth and entrepreneurship, especially in the period after the Scientific and the Industrial Revolution.^[119][120] Scholars have identified a positive correlation between the rise of Protestantism and human capital formation,^[121] work ethic,^[122] economic development,^[123] and the development of the state system.^[124]

The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, encouraged some values which may have been conducive to encouraging scientific talents. A theory suggested by David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed indicated early Quakers in the US preferred "practical study" to the more traditional studies of Greek or Latin popular with the elite. Another theory suggests their avoidance of dogma or clergy gave them a greater flexibility in response to science.^[143]

Despite those arguments a major factor is agreed to be that the Quakers were initially discouraged or forbidden to go to the major law or humanities schools in Britain due to the

Among the Copts in Egypt, every monastery and probably every church once had its own library of manuscripts.[156]

In the fifth century AD, nine Christian Syrian Monks translated Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac works into the Ethiopian language of

In the field of Optics, Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology called the Ten Treatises on the Eye, which was written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject in the western world until the 1800s.^[164]

It was a Christian scholar and Bishop from Nisibis named Severus Sebokht who was the first to describe and incorporate Indian mathematical symbols in the mid 7th century, which were then adopted into Islamic culture and are now known as the Arabic numerals.^{[165][166][167]}

During the fourth through the seventh centuries, scholarly work in the Syriac and Greek languages was either newly initiated, or carried on from the Hellenistic period. Centers of learning and of transmission of classical wisdom included colleges such as the

The commom and persistent myth claiming that Islamic scholars "saved" the classical work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European Dark Age between the fifth and tenth centuries. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never "lost" to be somehow "recovered" and "transmitted" by Islamic scholars, as many keep claiming: the texts were always there, preserved and studied by the scholars and monks of the Byzantines and passed on to the rest of Europe and to the Islamic world at various times. Aristotle had been translated in France at the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel before translations of Aristotle into Arabic (via the Syriac of the Christian scholars from the conquered lands of the Byzantine Empire). Michael Harris points out:^[177]

The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece ... were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.... Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.

Historian John Julius Norwich adds that “much of what we know about antiquity—especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law—would have been lost forever if it weren’t for the scholars and scribes of Constantinople.”^[178]

The

Paper, which the Muslims received from China in the eighth century, was being used in the Byzantine Empire by the ninth century. There were very large private libraries, and monasteries possessed huge libraries with hundreds of books that were lent to people in each monastery's region. Thus were preserved the works of classical antiquity.[183]^[184]

When Saint Cyril was sent by the Byzantine emperor in an embassy to the Arabs in the ninth century, he astonished his Muslim hosts with his knowledge of philosophy and science as well as theology. Historian Maria Mavroudi recounts:^[185]

When asked how it was possible for him to know all that he did, he [Cyril] drew an analogy between the Muslim reaction to his erudition and the pride of someone who kept sea water in a wine skin and boasted of possessing a rare liquid. He finally encountered someone from a region by the sea, who explained that only a madman would brag about the contents of the wine skin, since people from his own homeland possessed an endless abundance of sea water. The Muslims are like the man with the wine skin and the [Greeks] like the man from the sea because, according to the saint's concluding remark in his response, all learning emanated from the [Greeks].

Perspectives on evolution

In recent history, the theory of

Some scholars have noted a direct tie between "particular aspects of traditional Christianity" and the rise of science.^[18][71]

The history professor Peter Harrison attributes Christianity to having contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution:

historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions. ... Yet, many of the leading figures in the scientific revolution imagined themselves to be champions of a science that was more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas about the natural world that they replaced.^[222]

Nobel Prize

According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of

In an estimate made by Weijia Zhang from Arizona State University and Robert G. Fuller from University of Nebraska–Lincoln, between 1901 and 1990, 60% of Physics Nobel prize winners had Christian backgrounds.^[231]

According of Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States by

Events in Christian Europe, such as the Galileo affair, that were associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment led scholars such as John William Draper to postulate a conflict thesis, holding that religion and science have been in conflict methodologically, factually and politically throughout history. This thesis is held by several scientists like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. While the conflict thesis remains popular in atheistic and antireligious circles, it has lost favor among most contemporary historians of science,^{[22][23][24][232]} and the majority of scientists in elite universities in the U.S. do not hold a conflict view.^[233]

More recently,

In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing observations made with his new telescope. These and other discoveries exposed difficulties with the understanding of the heavens that was common at the time. Scientists, along with the Catholic Church, had adopted Aristotle's view of the earth as fixed in place, since Aristotle's rediscovery 300 years prior.^[236] Jeffrey Foss writes that, by Galileo's time, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe had become "fully integrated with Catholic theology".^[237]: 285

Scientists of the day largely rejected Galileo's assertions, since most had no telescope, and Galileo had no physical theory to explain how planets could orbit the sun which, according to Aristotelian physics, was impossible. (That would not be resolved for another hundred years.) Galileo's peers alerted religious authorities to his "errors" and asked them to intervene.^{[237]: 285–286} In response, the church forbade Galileo from teaching it, though it did not forbid discussing it, so long as it was clear it was merely a hypothesis. Galileo published books and asserted scientific superiority.^[237]: 285 He was summoned before the Roman Inquisition twice. First warned, he was next sentenced to house arrest on a charge of "grave suspicion of heresy".^[237]: 286

The Galileo affair has been considered by many to be a defining moment in the history of the relationship between religion and science. Since the creation of the Conflict thesis by Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper in the late nineteenth century, religion has been depicted as oppressive and oppositional to science.^[238] Edward Daub explains that, while "twentieth century historians of science dismantled White and Draper's claims, it is still popular in public perception".^[239] Casting Galileo's story as a contest between science and religion is an oversimplification, writes Jeffrey Foss.^[237]: 286 Galileo was heir to a long scientific tradition with deep medieval Christian roots.^[46]

See also

Notes