Posted on 12/04/2003 11:18:40 AM PST by Mr. Silverback
To paraphrase the opening of a popular ESPN show, these four things everyone knows are true: Before Columbus’s first voyage, people thought the world was flat. When Copernicus wrote that the Earth revolved around the Sun, his conclusions came out of nowhere. The “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century invented science as we know it. And the false beliefs and impediments to science are Christianity’s fault.
There’s just one problem: All four statements are false.
As Rodney Stark writes in his new book, For the Glory of God, “every educated person” of Columbus’s time, especially Christian clergy, “knew the earth was round.” More than 800 years before Columbus’s voyage, Bede, the church historian, taught this, as did Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Aquinas. The title of the most popular medieval text on astronomy was Sphere, not exactly what you would call a book that said the earth was flat.
As for Copernicus’s sudden flash of insight, Stark quotes the eminent historian L. Bernard Cohen who called that idea “an invention of later historians.” Copernicus “was taught the essential fundamentals leading to his model by his Scholastic professors”—that is, Christian scholars.
That model was “developed gradually by a succession of . . . Scholastic scientists over the previous two centuries.” Building upon their work on orbital mechanics, Copernicus added the “implicit next step.”
Thus, the idea that science was invented in the seventeenth century, “when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it,” as it is said, is false. Long before the famed physicist Isaac Newton, clergy like John of Sacrobosco, the author of Sphere, were doing what can be only called science. The Scholastics—Christians—not the Enlightenment, invented modern science.
Three hundred years before Newton, a Scholastic cleric named Jean Buridan anticipated Newton’s First Law of Motion, that a body in motion will stay in motion unless otherwise impeded. It was Buridan, not an Enlightenment luminary, who first proposed that Earth turns on its axis.
In Stark’s words, “Christian theology was necessary for the rise of science.” Science only happened in areas whose worldview was shaped by Christianity, that is, Europe. Many civilizations had alchemy; only Europedeveloped chemistry. Likewise, astrology was practiced everywhere, but only in Europe did it become astronomy.
That’s because Christianity depicted God as a “rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being” who created a universe with a “rational, lawful, stable” structure. These beliefs uniquely led to “faith in the possibility of science.”
So why the Columbus myth? Because, as Stark writes, “the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three centuries, been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack of faith.” Opponents of Christianity have used bogus accounts like the ones I’ve mentioned not only to discredit Christianity, but also to position themselves as “liberators” of the human mind and spirit.
It’s up to us to set the record straight, and Stark’s book is a great place to start. I think it’s time to tell our neighbors that what everyone knows about Christianity and science is just plain wrong.
What a ridiculous, unproveable statement.
More than 800 years before Columbus’s voyage, Bede, the church historian, taught this, as did Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Aquinas.
Can someone please point out exactly where Hildegard von Bingen taught this? I've read her extensively, and don't recall anything even remotely relating to this.
This is a classic non-sequitur born of academic imperialism. Unless someone embraces Lyell's unprovable long ages and ignores the evidence for a young earth, he's a heretic, anathama to the scientific establishment. They are no different than Rome in the middle ages.
Ab urbe condita, "from the founding of the city". It was ancient Rome's dating system. 1 AD corresponds to 754 AUC.
That's an assertion that has no backing. The language is nice and powerful, but it's powerfully stating an utter lie.
Serious question: Do you know where and how dogma is defined in the Catholic Church? Because if you do, this is something quite easy to fact check on your own.
What did I say to bring that on?
Mantra for the threatened worldview. Think of a terrified ingénue menaced by a vampire. Instead of a crucifix, she whips out ... a woodpecker. Somehow, somewhere, you scared the poor silverback. Evidently not a silverback gorilla.
I can remember once having to admit I didn't know how the poor woodpecker got his tongue all twisted up like that, but nevertheless citing Dawkins that "Evolution is smarter than you are." (Which is always taken by creationists to mean that Evolution is some kind of anthropomorphic God to the evos after all.)
1) feel the earth move, or something,
or,
2) feel like a real knot-head.
Personally, I think he was going loopey.
GS>But wasn't Newton pretty devout, too?>>>
RBJ>Nope. In point of fact he was a pagan alchemist.
37 posted on 12/04/2003 1:54:21 PM MST by Ronly Bonly Jones
Even a cursory glance at his Biography would yield:
"Issac Newton was a deeply religious man"
VII RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS AND PERSONALITY Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton's unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century: but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God's providential role in nature.
a bondslave to the Christ
chuck
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