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Did the Catholic Church give birth to science?

#1
C C Offline
https://areomagazine.com/2020/05/28/did-...o-science/

EXCERPT: . . . 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. [...] A common counterargument is that the Catholic Church was the only game in town ... 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 ... the Catholic tradition: that God created an orderly, rational universe. ... 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 [...] has by no means been a given throughout history. Most ancient cultures held ideas that inhibited the growth of scientific knowledge [...] 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 ... we would like the world to be comprehensible.”

The Catholic tradition did not have [...] 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. ... Catholic thinkers were often zealously compelled to study God’s creation...

[...] 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 [...] “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 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... (MORE - details)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
Even if you’re the most devoted believer in a creator god why would you not be interested in knowing how the deity did it?
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#3
Yazata Offline
I agree very strongly that the Catholic church wasn't an opponent of the Scientific Revolution. I agree very strongly that the actual historical record is much more complicated than that. There were many Catholic names in the history of science and the church itself often patronized and supported scientific activities.

But I do think that it's overstating things to say that the Catholic church gave birth to Science. Many other things were happening that must also be factored in. The Protestant reformation's skepticism about popular religiosity and its ever present divine miracles and divine manifestations for one. The Protestants emphasized the uniqueness of the Bible as divine revelation. ('Sola scriptura')

Nature started to be conceived as something fixed, operating according to "laws" set down by God at creation and holding true invariably ever since. Even today, when belief in God may arguably be disappearing among scientists, the idea of natural "laws" still remains behind like the Cheshire Cat's grin in Alice.
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#4
Secular Sanity Offline
(May 29, 2020 05:45 PM)Yazata Wrote: I agree very strongly that the Catholic church wasn't an opponent of the Scientific Revolution. I agree very strongly that the actual historical record is much more complicated than that. There were many Catholic names in the history of science and the church itself often patronized and supported scientific activities.

But I do think that it's overstating things to say that the Catholic church gave birth to Science. Many other things were happening that must also be factored in. The Protestant reformation's skepticism about popular religiosity and its ever present divine miracles and divine manifestations for one. The Protestants emphasized the uniqueness of the Bible as divine revelation. ('Sola scriptura')

Nature started to be conceived as something fixed, operating according to "laws" set down by God at creation and holding true invariably ever since. Even today, when belief in God may arguably be disappearing among scientists, the idea of natural "laws" still remains behind like the Cheshire Cat's grin in Alice.

According to Wikipedia, the Catholic Church has long regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy. I think they still equate it with atheism, but the ideas themselves are ancient.
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#5
Leigha Offline
I don't think the RCC ''gave birth'' to science, but it doesn't seem to find evolution in contradiction with its teachings. (It's ''okay'' to consider the Adam and Eve story in Genesis as allegory.) But, there was a time when the RCC taught creationism to be taken literally.
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