The Synergetic Relationship Between Science & Christianity - Part 2
The "Dark Ages"
Science and Christianity have traditionally complemented each other – even in the so called “Dark Ages” - and have been intimately connected throughout history. In part 1of this post, I briefly showed with three examples how prominent Christian thinkers from the 5th century to the 8th century promoted science as a second way to know God’s truth. Augustine was confident that we could use our reason and experience to read the book of nature because it was created by God. He wanted the interpretation of scripture to stay consistent with the cosmology and physics of the classical tradition and used the natural sciences in his role as a theologian and Bible interpreter. The Roman Senator Boethius and the English Monk Bede both had Christian worldviews that were not at all in conflict with a mechanistic universe governed by natural cause and effect.[1]In part 2, I will continue to look at how the Christian view of God as a lawgiver, a rational mind, and as the Creator gave rise to modern science.
Beginning with the University of Bologna in 1088, followed by Paris and Oxford before 1200, the invention of the church supported university had much – if not everything – to do with the “Scientific Revolution.” These universities, and the Christians who supported and ran them, provided the stimulus to translate Greek and Arabic texts – many of which concerned the knowledge of nature - into Latin. “If European Christians had been closed-minded to the earlier work of pagans, as the [“Dark Ages”] myth alleges, then what explains this ferocious appetite for translations?”[2]
The Franciscan cleric and university scholar Roger Bacon read much of the newly translated work … By evaluating this past work and introducing some controlled observations – what we now call experiments – Bacon brought the science of light to its most sophisticated stage of medieval development.[3]
Roger Bacon’s work from the 13th century, Opus Majus, is evidence enough that medieval Christians did not “hold back science!” If you need more evidence, consider that thirty percent of the medieval university liberal arts curriculum addressed what we would call science.[4]
Most “histories” about the “rise of science” begin with Copernicus and how his work brought about a drastic change in how people thought about the universe. This fiction ignores the fact that Copernicus received an excellent education at some of the best Christian universities of the time (Cracow, Bologna, Padua). It also assumes that the idea of the Earth orbiting the sun came to him out of the blue, instead of simply adding the next implicit step to what the Scholastic scientists had formulated and taught for the past two centuries.[5]
To the Greeks, continuous motion required continuous force; this thought about the heavenly bodies continued through Aquinas in the 13th century. Because of his belief that space was a vacuum, William of Ockham broke from this tradition in the 14th century by arguing that a body in motion may not require continuous pushing and once a body had been set in motion by God, it would remain in motion.[6]Jean Buridan, rector at the University of Paris, extended on this idea, anticipating Newton’s First Law of Motion.
[When moving the celestial orbs, God] impressed upon them impetuses which moved them without His having to move them any more … And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased nor corrupted afterwards because there was no inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which could be corruptive or repressive of that impetus.[7]
Buridan then proposed that the Earth turns on its axis. Objections to the Earth moving, such as why there is not a constant wind and why arrows do not land far away from their origin, were addressed in the 14th century by both Nicole d’Oresme and Albert of Saxony with explanations that sound a lot like Newton’s inertia.[8]Christian university professors began to teach that sunrise and sunset could be caused by the rotation of the earth; in the 14th century it was no longer necessary to assume that the sun circled the Earth![9]
Nicholas of Cusa took the next step in the 15th century:
[Nicholas] noted that, “as we see from its shadow in eclipses, … the earth is smaller than the sun” but larger than the moon or Mercury, Nicholas went on to observe (as had Buridan and d’Oresme) that “whether a man is on the earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless centre, and that all other things are in motion.” It followed that humans need not trust their perception that the earth is stationary, perhaps it isn’t.[10]
All of the theorizing of Ockham, Buridan, d’Oresme, Albert, and Nicholas was known prior to Copernicus and taught at the Christian centered universities! The scientific revolution did not begin with Copernicus, he simply took the logical next step.[11]
Science and Christianity have traditionally complemented each other and have been intimately connected throughout history. Science was not “held back” during the so-called “Dark Ages.” In fact, scientific thought continued to move forward, even foreshadowing Newton’s Laws and providing the scaffolding needed for Copernicus, a canon in the Catholic Church, to make his contribution to science.
If the medieval church had intended to discourage or suppress science, it certainly made a colossal mistake in tolerating – to say nothing of supporting – the university. In this new institution, Greco-Arabic science and medicine for the first time found a permanent home, one that – with various ups and downs – science has retained to this day. Dozens of universities introduced large numbers of students to Euclidean geometry, optics, the problems of generation and reproduction, the rudiments of astronomy, and the arguments for the sphericity of the earth.[12]
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