"Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. The moral imperative is reduced to this: 'Do not know'. The rest follows from there".
-Friedrich Nietzsche.
"For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God."
-St. Augustine, On Faith, Hope and Love (Enchiridion) 3,9.
Many Christians loudly proclaim that Christianity made possible the modern scientific revolution and that other religions or beliefs would have made it impossible for science to flourish.
Pioneers of science were nearly always in christian orders simply because without the possession of private wealth no avenue for study existed outside of the Church. Usually heretical in their opinions, 'monkish scientists' often lost their sinecures and fell foul of the Inquisition.
European Universities were only possible in High Middle Ages, ie, 700 years after Christianity took control over society, and though controlled by Christianity, their existence is due naturally to innate curiosity, genius, and initiative of European mankind.
However, for those bright and privileged enough to seek education, career opportunities now lay exclusively within the hierarchy of the church and a Christianised state bureaucracy. With the active cooperation of the imperial court the Church had grasped complete control over education and, having done so, restricted instruction to potential priests.
Initially, rhetoric and grammar remained on the syllabus but knowledge which did not serve the purposes of the Church was suppressed. Mathematics, with its historic link to the 'demonic' philosophy of the Pythagoreans, was especially suspect:
European Universities were only possible in High Middle Ages, ie, 700 years after Christianity took control over society, and though controlled by Christianity, their existence is due naturally to innate curiosity, genius, and initiative of European mankind.
However, for those bright and privileged enough to seek education, career opportunities now lay exclusively within the hierarchy of the church and a Christianised state bureaucracy. With the active cooperation of the imperial court the Church had grasped complete control over education and, having done so, restricted instruction to potential priests.
Initially, rhetoric and grammar remained on the syllabus but knowledge which did not serve the purposes of the Church was suppressed. Mathematics, with its historic link to the 'demonic' philosophy of the Pythagoreans, was especially suspect:
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell."
– St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37.
Some classic writers – Homer (in whose work Christians saw allegories), Plato and Aristotle (philosophies which 'anticipated' Christianity'), and some poetic and rhetorical works (Juvenal, Ovid and Horace) useful as teaching aids – were preserved; most were destroyed.
Such was Christian hostility to general learning and practical knowledge that access to scripture itself was forbidden to any lay-person who might still be literate. Preoccupied with ceremonial and holy pageants, within a few generations most members of the priesthood could not even read their own Bible. Ritual had replaced reading, iconography had replaced words.
Scientific method – empirical observation of the natural world, the testing of hypotheses and revision of assumptions – had no role in an age in which eternal truth had been made known to man by the revealed Word of God.
Martin Luther condemned Copernicus' heliocentric theory and Protestant Johannes Kepler, a follower of Copernicus, is expelled by his coreligionists from the theological school of Tübingen.
In Galileo’s days, you had to profess Christian faith or you’d be burned at the stake. Galileo spent the last decade of his life under house arrest. And in 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned alive because his ideas contradicted the christian faith. Galileo was aware of this and remained silent to preserve his life. Thus it took many centuries and hurdles to get scientific facts accepted because Christianity held them back.
It was not until Darwin that it became safe enough to have a different opinion about the world, but even then there were massive social persecutions. But once religion’s power grip loosened, science began to flourish faster.
The ancient Greeks and Romans faced the same problems when Christianity came to power. Atomism was banned as blasphemy, even though it was correct 2,400 years ago. And the dark ages fell over Europe. The Church stagnated scientific progress. In China, there were actually more advances in technology before the modern era, we just hear history from a Western perspective. The compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing, were all invented in China centuries before Europeans had them. And the Islamic Golden Age made advances in astronomy, math and science before the modern scientific revolution in Europe.
So it is not true that Christianity can be thanked for science. The foundations of it go way back before Christianity, specially in Pagan Europe. The truth is that Christianity since IV century destroyed large part of the European knowledge accumulated over centuries, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, geometry. Anything that might remind ancient pagan beliefs and traditions, any medicinal knowledge of plants or animals, was branded as heresy and persecuted. Any kind of knowledge that was not Judeo-Christian, was pursued thoroughly. The spiritual terror had appeared in the ancient world, bursting bloodily in Europe.
The Natural World was demonized. The 'philosophy of the pagans' and secular public education were thus marginalised and eliminated. Lamented Ammianus Marcellinus, Rome's last great historian (who died in 395):
Such was Christian hostility to general learning and practical knowledge that access to scripture itself was forbidden to any lay-person who might still be literate. Preoccupied with ceremonial and holy pageants, within a few generations most members of the priesthood could not even read their own Bible. Ritual had replaced reading, iconography had replaced words.
Scientific method – empirical observation of the natural world, the testing of hypotheses and revision of assumptions – had no role in an age in which eternal truth had been made known to man by the revealed Word of God.
Martin Luther condemned Copernicus' heliocentric theory and Protestant Johannes Kepler, a follower of Copernicus, is expelled by his coreligionists from the theological school of Tübingen.
In Galileo’s days, you had to profess Christian faith or you’d be burned at the stake. Galileo spent the last decade of his life under house arrest. And in 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned alive because his ideas contradicted the christian faith. Galileo was aware of this and remained silent to preserve his life. Thus it took many centuries and hurdles to get scientific facts accepted because Christianity held them back.
It was not until Darwin that it became safe enough to have a different opinion about the world, but even then there were massive social persecutions. But once religion’s power grip loosened, science began to flourish faster.
The ancient Greeks and Romans faced the same problems when Christianity came to power. Atomism was banned as blasphemy, even though it was correct 2,400 years ago. And the dark ages fell over Europe. The Church stagnated scientific progress. In China, there were actually more advances in technology before the modern era, we just hear history from a Western perspective. The compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing, were all invented in China centuries before Europeans had them. And the Islamic Golden Age made advances in astronomy, math and science before the modern scientific revolution in Europe.
So it is not true that Christianity can be thanked for science. The foundations of it go way back before Christianity, specially in Pagan Europe. The truth is that Christianity since IV century destroyed large part of the European knowledge accumulated over centuries, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, geometry. Anything that might remind ancient pagan beliefs and traditions, any medicinal knowledge of plants or animals, was branded as heresy and persecuted. Any kind of knowledge that was not Judeo-Christian, was pursued thoroughly. The spiritual terror had appeared in the ancient world, bursting bloodily in Europe.
The Natural World was demonized. The 'philosophy of the pagans' and secular public education were thus marginalised and eliminated. Lamented Ammianus Marcellinus, Rome's last great historian (who died in 395):
"Those few mansions which were once celebrated for the serious cultivation of liberal studies, now are filled with ridiculous amusements of torpid indolence ... The libraries, like tombs, are closed forever."
Most Christians today are anti-science. More than half don’t accept evolution. Same is true with Muslims. The more Christian a country is today, the more uneducated they tend to be on science. For a great majority of the Christian scientists during the early centuries of the scientific revolution, denying Christianity wouldn’t be compatible with staying alive. Science thus flourished in spite of Christianity's domination, not because of it.
