The first episode of the “new” Cosmos series by
Dr. Tyson perpetuates the myth that Christianity hindered scientific thought.
As I wrote in my first blog on January 9th, the truth is exactly the opposite. Using
Giordano Bruno, Tyson shows how the Church silenced Bruno by burning him at the
stake for his scientific beliefs. Tyson opens the series with the statement
that he will “follow the evidence wherever it leads.” Surprisingly, he didn’t bother to check the historical
evidence.
Even though he did a little speculative astronomy, Bruno 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 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.[1]
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.[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
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.
Returning
to Giordano Bruno and the accusation by Dr. Tyson in Cosmos, the book that “Bruno dared to read” and was supposedly the
beginning of Bruno’s persecution, Lucretius, was banned by a Florentine synod
of clerics in schools in 1516, but
the punishment was minimal. Violators were threatened with “eternal damnation”
and a fine of 10 ducats, about $175 today. The Catholic Church didn't
even have an official
position on the
heliocentric universe in 1600, and support for it was not considered heresy
during Bruno's trial.
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. 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.[5] 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.”[6]
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.[7]
As an interesting aside, in Cosmos, Dr. Tyson used Giordano Bruno as an example of a scientist
that was burned at the stake for his heretical free thinking when Bruno was persecuted,
according to Tyson, 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] Rodney Stark, For
the Glory of God, Princeton University Press, 2003, page 147
[2]
Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687
[3]
Johannes Kepler, Astronomia nova, 1609
[4] Michael Bumbulis, Christianity and the Birth
of Science, http://www.ldolphin.org/bumbulis/
[6] Rodney
Stark, For the Glory of God, 2003,
Princeton University Press
[7] ibid
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