Historically, the creation of ideas has been a messy process. Knowledge has not usually been delivered as an immaculate gem, but as a needle in a grubby haystack of wrong ideas. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we are able to differentiate between our ancestors’ mistakes and their genuine discoveries. It may therefore be a mistake to reject a tradition altogether, even if some of its pillars seem absurd in light of our modern scientific and moral theories. We should instead cherish the good ideas that our ancestors did deliver. One culture in particular, though it offers a false account of reality, may have contained the knowledge required to give birth to modern science. That culture is the Catholic Church.
We have all heard about Galileo’s tragic confrontation with the church in the seventeenth century. However, as Cardinal Newman noted centuries ago, it is telling that this is almost the only example that comes to mind when arguing that the Church was at odds with science.
The historical evidence reveals a far more complex picture. Historian of science John L. Heilbron has noted that the Roman Catholic Church, “gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other institutions.” The university system, too, was essentially an invention of the Catholic Church. As author Thomas Woods writes, “Historians have marveled at the extent to which intellectual debate in those universities was free and unfettered. The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange—all sponsored by the Church—provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.”
Entire scientific fields owe their genesis to Catholic scientists. Geology and Egyptology were founded by Father Nicholas Steno and Father Athanasius Kircher, respectively. Eighteenth-century polymath Father Roger Boscovich developed ideas that presage modern atomic theory. Jesuits contributed so much to the science of seismology that it was often regarded as the Jesuit science. Even economics—far from beginning with Adam Smith—was founded by fourteenth-century Catholic thinkers, such as Jean Buridan and Nicolas Oresme.
A common counterargument is that the Catholic Church was the only game in town during the Middle Ages and early Enlightenment and so, of course, its adherents were the only ones who could develop science. There may be some truth to this. But this still doesn’t tell us why they were engaged in such intellectual pursuits in the first place, nor why they were so successful in such a wide array of fields. The answer may be that needle in the haystack of ideas that is the Catholic tradition: that God created an orderly, rational universe. As physicist and historian of science Father Stanley Jaki writes, “The world, being the handiwork of a supremely reasonable Person, is endowed with lawfulness and purpose.” Wisdom 11:21 of the Bible states that God, “ordered all things by measure, number, weight.” In Ecclesiasticus 42:21, it is written that “He has imposed an order on the magnificent works of his wisdom.” Thus, Catholic scientists had faith that God had created an explainable, quantifiable universe. Investigation into the workings of reality was thus a spiritual endeavor.
The concept of a consistent, explicable world is crucial to scientific progress, and—although it may seem obvious to us now—it has by no means been a given throughout history. Most ancient cultures held ideas that inhibited the growth of scientific knowledge (see Jaki’s book, Science and Creation, for an extended discussion of this). Polytheism and animism lent themselves to a philosophy in which the world was subject to the whims of intervening gods. In such a milieu, conceiving of a universe that conformed to regular laws and patterns would have been difficult.
In modern science, the idea that the world is comprehensible is elegantly expressed as a physical law of nature called the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle. Roughly speaking, this means that any phenomenon in nature can be simulated by a computer. As Michael Nielsen puts it, “the CTD Principle amounts to the belief that a limited physical system, like the human brain, ought to be capable of simulating the behavior of an arbitrary physical system … This is a very appealing proposition to most scientists … we would like the world to be comprehensible.”
The Catholic tradition did not have the philosophical and scientific tools to formulate anything close to the modern CTD principle. Yet, to the extent that its adherents had faith that God’s world could be understood by rational investigation, this deep principle was very much in their minds.
Because the comprehensibility of the world was rooted in their religion, Catholic thinkers were often zealously compelled to study God’s creation. The twelfth-century cathedral School of Chartres is a prime example of this phenomenon. Under the leadership of a Catholic polymath named Fulbert, the institution glorified a myriad of intellectual pursuits. Thinkers at the School believed that, by studying arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy—collectively known as the quadrivium—they could come closer to understanding God’s elegant design of the world. The cathedral boasted sculptures of historical thinkers like Aristotle, Euclid and Pythagoras. One student, Abelard of Bath, writes, “It is through reason that we are men. For if we turned our backs on the amazing beauty of the universe we live in we should indeed deserve to be driven therefrom … we must listen to the very limits of human knowledge and only when this utterly breaks down should we refer things to God.”
Another philosopher of Chartres, named Thierry, flirted with the idea that celestial objects might be composed of ordinary matter. He contended that the behavior of the stars should be understood as conforming to physical laws, rather than godly ordinance. Historian of science Thomas Goldstein believes that “Thierry will probably be recognized as one of the true founders of Western science.”
About the School of Chartres itself, Goldstein writes, “in a period of fifteen to twenty years, around the middle of the twelfth century, a handful of men were consciously striving to launch the evolution of Western science, and undertook every major step that was needed to achieve that end.”
The intellectual spirit of Chartres was no flash in the pan. A century later, Franciscan friar Roger Bacon took a giant leap forward in the philosophy of science with his short work, Opus Maius, in which he argues for the necessity of experimental testing. Bacon also writes about how progress may be impeded by faulty cultural norms, such as accepting ideas merely due to their popularity. Around the same time, Dominican saint and prolific naturalist Albert the Great was gathering data for his work on botany, physiology, and astronomy. His writings reveal many of the characteristics of a modern scientific mind: an emphasis on empirical evidence, a refusal to accept assertions on authority, and an appreciation that regularities in nature have definite causes. Robert Grosseteste, the thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln, is perhaps the first person to have written an entire manual explaining how to execute a scientific experiment.
The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola in the sixteenth century, contained a number of impressive priest-scientists. According to Olufemi Emanuel Dokun Babalola, the Jesuits
contributed to … scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They theorized about the circulation of the blood … the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light … Star maps … symbolic logic … all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents.
Jesuits gathered vast swathes of data in encyclopedias, helping scholars to share their work with each other and make further progress. In 1651, Father Riccioli published the Almagestum Novum, a compendium of astronomical data, pictures, text and tables. He was also the first man to ascertain the rate at which a falling object accelerates.
The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not emerge in a vacuum. Thinkers of the Middle Ages set the scene for Kepler, Descartes, Hooke, Newton and all the other scientists and philosophers who ushered in the modern scientific frame of mind. The Catholic Church helped to establish the infrastructure that allowed for scientific communication, open discourse and the interrogation of nature through telescopes, microscopes and experimentation. Catholicism lent itself to a notion of reality as comprehensible, to the idea that God’s creation could be understood by man. As a result, many of its adherents regarded the investigation of nature as a way of glorifying god.
Of course, dogma and tyranny often thwarted scientific progress. But, for the majority of human history, failure to improve our understanding of the world was the norm. The interesting question is not why scientific progress did not occur in most societies, but how and why thinkers were able to make the advances that lead to the scientific revolution. The Catholic Church may have given scientists of the Middle Ages the tools that they needed: the CTD principle, clothed in religious garb. This belief in a comprehensible world was a stroke of extremely good fortune. For, if Catholic thinkers of the Middle Ages had not had faith in God’s orderly universe, the scientific revolution might never have happened, and all of the wonders of modern civilization might have remained a distant dream.
[…] Note — this was originally published with Areo magazine and can be found here. […]
I agree with this. However, in order for science to transition from where it consisted of competing idealized conceptions of the world, it needed to combine experimental method with capitalism. People who tinkered had to have the ability to take risks and make money from their inventions. The industrial revolution developed earlier in Protestant areas. I was recently rereading “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. There really is a lot of wisdom there in why regions where Protestantism was more deeply rooted had a competitive advantage.
Around 1300 there is a sharp transition from stylized art to realism. It has been argued by Thomas Cahill (The Hinges of History series) that this was due to a desire for a personal relationship with Jesus and Mary such that realism was desired. This led to an interest in nature, in perspective, etc. In addition, it was felt around this same time that the truth was hard to find, and in the early universities debate was promoted as a way to find the truth. Clocks received an impetus from the Church for use by monks in the 1200s to say their prayers on schedule (and for ships as well) and this led to more and more precise machining, including scientific instruments like telescopes.
The Catholic Church’s relationship with science did not begin in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church is the reason we had the Dark Ages.
Church authorities encouraged their adherents to destroy anything that did not conform with dogma. This is how great works of the Classical Period were lost forever. The carnage continued for centuries as the religion spread. Only after this work was done could the church reconstitute “science” within the narrow Overton window of orthodoxy.
Among other things, this Overton window created the Eurocentric view of science that prevails in the West to this day. Catholic scholars receive credit for inventing things that existed for hundreds of years in cultures not controlled by the Pope. Heathens can’t create anything useful, doncha know?
There is no atoning for 1500 years of damage to science.
Excellent essay and interesting comments.
“I can certainly understand how you, or anyone, would think that science could not progress without the tools that we are all familiar with today.”
Much could be done, but much could not. When Galileo was figuring out the law of the pendulum, he had to use his heart-beat as his timer. Physics without instruments is like music without instruments.
Should Gregor Mendel be included?
Christianity and enlightenment are more or less identical. The denunciation of the Middle Ages as backward and anti-Science was a political campaign by some enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, but it is simply propaganda. In 1486 Pico della Mirandola published his “On Human Dignity”, which promoted the idea of choice and free will as the strongest characteristic of human beings, drawing heavily on ideas of Petrarca, an Italian philosopher who lived a century earlier. The discovery of antiquity during renaissance was another hoax that enlightenment philosophers pulled, but which was simply marketing for their bookselling. The more one goes back the more it turns out that the principle ideas of enlightenment, like human rights, individual freedom and universal truth go back to Thomas of Aquinus and Duns Scotus, who lived in the 13th and 14th century. Europe was from the Middle Ages on, on the pathway to science and universality, which… Read more »
The debate over the relation between the Church (historically the Catholic Church) and science always seems to miss something in my eyes. I mean : I do agree with the aithor of this article. But what we ought to understand is that nor the greek, nor the catholic church, nor the Chines… were against empirical method. Every scholar in history was in agreement with that. Aristotle was, and Plato was. The thing is that, the question of experimental science did not interest Plato. Still remember that the Timaeus contained the cutting edge scientific knowledge of its time. Even if what is in it seems laughable to us. From the greek to the catholic, the idea is the same, empirical method was recognized as the method to use in natural philosophy (as they called our science), see Grosseteste for example. But, all those people did not have the tools for that.… Read more »
See: https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/the-birth-of-experimental-science/.
After the Dark Ages, the revival of classical logic and reason in Western Europe was highly significant to the development of universities and subsequent intellectual progress. It was also a precursor to the development of empirical scientific methods in the thirteenth century, which I think were even more important because of the later practical benefits of science to humanity. The two most influential thinkers in development of scientific methods at this time were the English philosophers Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253) and Roger Bacon (c.1219/20-c.1292). (Note: Roger Bacon is not to be confused with Francis Bacon).