I guess you don’t count Galileo who was imprisioned by the Inquisition or Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake. Nor the fact that both their writings and those of many others were forbidden reading by the Catholic church. Pray tell, what were all these roads that were built?
[ I guess you don’t count Galileo who was imprisioned by the Inquisition or Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake. Nor the fact that both their writings and those of many others were forbidden reading by the Catholic church. Pray tell, what were all these roads that were built? ]
That was a roadblock for sure, but one road was Gregor Mendel who studied plant genetics.
Here is a List of more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_Catholic_cleric%E2%80%93scientists
There are Bad things the Church has done, but they also fostered science as well.
Don’t throw out the scientific baby with the church bathwater.
Not to mention all the schools that Church supported over the centuries that helped educate scientists some persecuted some not to become men of science!
Did you know that 105 of the first 107 colleges founded in the American Colonies were Christian?
Did you know that the reason why we can read today--the idea of a public education, which started with "hornbooks" (Google it) was because it was an expectation of Protestants that every person should be capable of reading, thinking, and understanding?
So many misconceptions stem from television and the bias from today's college professors.
The fact is, Christianity advanced knowledge. No other religion did the same. It is no coincidence that Europe came out on top, scientifically. It wasn't dumb luck. It was the influence of Christianity encouraging exploration and understanding, which was considered to be an essential part of a thinking mind.
Most of our history books contain more than a little anti-Christian bias....
Galileo's scientific peers are no different than the rabid climate scientist of today that want climate change deniers put to death.
Galileo's heliocentric hypothesis was NOT the reason for his being sentenced to house arrest.
The problem as seen by the Scientists of the age, the vast majority of whom were connected to the Catholic Church one way or another was that to PROVE the motion of the earth, one would have to show some APPARENT motion of the stars, parallax.
No instrument was sufficiently precise to show parallax. Consequently, the motion of the earth was not proved. And so the Church said that while Galileo could certainly propose his conjecture, he could not describe it as certainly true. But he insisted on doing so, despite the lack of proof.
Despite his having been given public and official honors and patronage by the Church, Galileo (a lot of whose stuff I have read, though it was forty years ago) was gratuitously offensive. In my college, where we ALL read Galileo,we all agreed that he was baiting the Church.
He asked for it. He got it. I honestly think that if he were alive today he would have been diagnoses with a personality disorder. They guy was obviously brilliant and obviously obnoxious.
But to parlay his imprisonment into an anti-science stand does not stand up to history. It was because the scientists of the Church were MORE rigorous and logical than Galileo that they would not approve of his work.