In the introduction to his 2009 book,
In Search of the Multiverse, Dr.
Gribbin starts off with the tired myth that Christianity hindered scientific
thought. As I wrote in my very
first blog, the truth is exactly the opposite. The
impression that Dr. Gribbin gives in the introduction is that Giordano Bruno
was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for exposing heretical scientific ideas “that the stars are
other suns, and that there must be other earths, and life elsewhere in the
universe.”[1] He
does add that this was not the main reason for his conviction, but nonetheless leaves
the impression that Christianity persecuted science.
The Church did not silence Bruno for his
scientific beliefs. Even though Bruno
did a little speculative astronomy, he was not really a scientist. He was a
renegade monk, a Hermetic sorcerer, and a philosopher. The troubles he had with the Church were
theological; involving the polytheistic existence of an infinite number of
worlds. This position included the idea that the universe was infinite, but he
came to that conclusion solely through imagination and speculation with
absolutely no evidence.
Bruno’s scientific position of an infinite universe was
not at all unique. There were many others in the same time period who held
similar scientific views and were never persecuted by the church. Nicolaus
Cusanus, in the first half of the 15th century, wrote of an
unbounded universe with many worlds and all of its parts in motion. The Church made him Papal legate to Germany in 1446, he was appointed cardinal for his merits by Pope Nicholas V in 1448, and he became vicar general in the Papal States in 1459. Obviously the
Church was trying to silence his views! Marsilio Ficino thought the sun was at the center of
the universe because it was created first.
In 1489
he was accused of magic (not free thinking) before Pope Innocent VIII, but he escaped any punishment. Georg Peurbach at the University of Vienna improved on
the planetary system of Ptolemy in 1473. Thomas Diggs, an English mathematician and astronomer, in 1576 wrote about the stars extending infinitely
up, and William Gilbert, in the late 16th century, understood the
universe to be infinite.
There is a long list of intellectual thinkers who were
never persecuted, even though they had scientific
ideas contrary to the Church. Science
and Christianity have historically complemented each other. Christians see God
as a Lawgiver, as a rational mind, and as the Creator. Because of this, the
world must be rational, must follow prescribed laws, and must have a reason for
its existence. Science is the way we study the world, the laws, and the
reasons. Christian theology also teaches that man was
created in the image of God, so we also have the ability to comprehend God’s
laws and reasons. Therefore, science arose only once: In Christian
Western Europe in the 17th century.
Christianity depicted God as a
rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as His
personal creation, thus having a rational stable structure, awaiting human
comprehension. Christians developed science because they believed it could be
done and they thought it should be done.[2]
Since they believed it could be
done, the vast majority of initial thinkers in science were Christians who did
their investigations because of the
Christian ideas they had about the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus was a church
deacon who did astronomy in his spare time. Robert Boyle, father of modern
chemistry, set up Christian apologetics lectures. Gregor Mendel, the father of
genetics, was a Christian monk. Isaac Newton, discoverer of the universal laws
of gravitation, finishes his Principia with:
This most beautiful system of sun,
planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an
intelligent and powerful Being...This Being governs all things, not as the soul
of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont
to be called Lord God.[3]
Johannes Kepler, discoverer of the laws of planetary motion,
wrote:
The chief aim of all investigations of
the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been
imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of
mathematics.[4]
Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate and
co-discoverer of the cosmic background radiation, says of Kepler’s philosophy:
That really
goes back to the triumph, not of Copernicus, but really the triumph of Kepler.
That's because, after all, the notion of epicycles and so forth goes back to
days when scientists were swapping opinions. All this went along until we had a
true believer and this was Kepler. Kepler, after all, was the Old Testament
Christian. Right? He really believed in God the Lawgiver. And so he demanded
that the same God who spoke in single words and created the universe is not
going to have a universe with 35 epicycles in it. And he said there's got to be
something simpler and more powerful. Now he was lucky or maybe there was
something deeper, but Kepler's faith was rewarded with his laws of nature. And
so from that day on, it's been an awful struggle, but over long centuries, we
find that very simple laws of nature actually do apply. And so that expectation
is still with scientists. And it comes essentially from Kepler, and Kepler got
it out of his belief in the Bible, as far as I can tell. This passionate belief
turned out to be right. And he gave us his laws of motion, the first real laws
of nature we ever had. And so nature turned out to redeem the expectations he
had based on his faith. And scientists have adopted Kepler's faith, without the
cause.[5]
One common charge against
Christianity is that it “hinders scientific progress.” Any commonly accepted
idea could hinder science—not just ones that Christians hold. The best example
was the dogmatic adherence to Aristotle that hindered scientific progress for
over 2000 years. One of the first people to disagree with Aristotle was a
Christian, Nicolaus Copernicus. And it was Galileo, also a Christian, who
challenged the prevailing scientific view of the universe in the name of
science. Most people at the time, including secular scientists, held the
Aristotelian idea that the earth was at the center of the solar system and
heavenly bodies moved in perfect circles. It was Kepler who showed planetary
orbits to be ellipses. Christians were the ones actually pushing science
forward in an age of scientific stagnation.
Another
example of this was Louis Pasteur, a devout Christian credited with the
discovery of germ theory. The prevailing view in Pasteur’s time was that
microbes could spontaneously appear from chemicals and this was the cause of
illness. Spontaneous generation disagrees with the Christian Doctrine of
Creation, so Pasteur set out, with obvious success, to show that life appearing
from non-life could not be correct. Based on his Christian beliefs, Pasteur was
motivated to test a prevailing scientific theory to the benefit of mankind.
A current example of a theory holding back science is the belief that our DNA contains a vast
amount of “junk” that has no function. Scientists held to this belief because
it was one of the evidences for evolutionary theory and this “held back”
science for 30 years. We are now discovering all kinds of function in “junk DNA” that we
never bothered to look for earlier because of
a dogmatic adherence to evolutionary theory. Christianity
is no more guilty of “holding back science” than any other commonly held idea
that society sees as correct.
For Giordano Bruno and
others persecuted by the Church, the dispute was not with science, but in
almost every case when blood was shed, the disputes were over theology, not a
dispute between theology and science. Bruno, for example, suggested that Satan was destined to be saved
and redeemed by God, he didn't think Jesus was the son of God, but rather “an unusually skilled magician.” He also publicly
disputed Mary's virginity and the doctrine of the trinity. In addition, he
constantly ranted about how idiotic his fellow friars were, calling them names and lamenting their adherence to
Catholic doctrine. For years, he'd set up shop in some city, find new patrons,
and promptly make enemies of them with his combative sarcasm and relentless
arguments. Even fellow Copernican pioneers, Galileo
and Kepler, scientists who actually used evidence, had no love for Bruno.[6]
Very few were harshly persecuted for reading a scientific book or proposing a
scientific theory. The Church allowed scientific thought and, as shown above,
science began and flourished during the Church’s reign in Western Europe.
Persecution of beliefs
did, sadly, occur because heretical theologies threaten the authority of those
in control in a way that science doesn’t. Galileo was never put on the list of
forbidden books and his harassment was over Church authority and who had the
right to interpret scripture. Church leaders usually allowed scientists to
sidestep theological conflict.
In this spirit the pope reassured Galileo that he had
nothing to fear as long as he made it clear that he spoke as a mathematician,
not a theologian. Specifically, Pope Urban instructed Galileo to acknowledge in
his publications that “definitive conclusions could not be reached in the
natural sciences. God in his omnipotence could produce a natural phenomenon in
any number of ways and it was therefore presumptuous for any philosopher to
claim that he had a unique solution.”[7]
Galileo did include this
statement in his Dialogue concerning the
Two Chief World Systems, but he tauntingly put it in the mouth of
Simplicio, the dullard who voiced all the errors in his book. Similarly to
Bruno, Galileo hurt himself by lying to, betraying, and insulting the
Pope. Even so, the Pope did thwart
efforts to impose more serious penalties on Galileo. All powerful institutions
and organizations suppress dissent and nonconformity and abuse their power. Autocrats do not tolerate disagreement.
But, insofar as the suppression of science is concerned, the
bloodiest incidents have been recent and have had nothing to do with religion.
It was the Nazi Party, not the German Evangelical Church, that tried to
eradicate “Jewish” physics, and it was the Communist Party, not the Russian
Orthodox Church, that destroyed the “bourgeois” genetics and left many other
fields of Soviet science in disarray.[8]
It is interesting to me that Bruno is commonly used as
an example of a scientist that was burned
at the stake for his heretical free thinking when Bruno was actually persecuted
(according to Dr. Tyson in Cosmos) for
teaching something that he learned in a vision, for which he had no evidence,
and that he initially read in an ancient text!
[1]
John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse,
Wiley, 2009, page 1
[2] Rodney Stark, For
the Glory of God, Princeton University Press, 2003, page 147
[3]
Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687
[4]
Johannes Kepler, Astronomia nova,
1609
[7]
Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God,
2003, Princeton University Press
[8]
ibid
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