It is believed in pop culture that medieval Catholicism upheld an attitude of anti-intellectualism during the Middle Ages, where one's faith in God was placed above everything else, and the sciences and reason were more or less demonized as heresy. However, while I was researching medieval Catholicism to gain inspiration for my story, I started to discover that was not necessarily the truth sometimes. The Church apparently did sponsor scholars and universities, although in most cases, these were members of the clergy and concentrated within monasteries...so in a way, I suppose they still held onto the reins of knowledge, for a time.

So then my question is: How far did the Church take their studies of the sciences, as opposed to their anti-intellectualism?

Quite a lot, they and their Eastern Orthodox counterparts helped preserve enormous amounts of Classical literature by constantly having them copied. Their big mistake was largely blindly following Aristotle's ideas about the world.

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They also destroyed enormous amounts of material due to reusing the parchment. It is not that clear cut.

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It's really difficult to evaluate the relation between Catholicism and science; suffice it to say that it was mixed. It's very difficult to determine whether its net impact was 'positive' or 'negative'.

It might be easier to explain Catholicism effects on the sciences via taboos.

Biology in particular got affected by this, due to the sponsering of Galen text and then forbidding the autopsy of human cadevars.

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This information is limited since it mostly comes from TV programs on the history channel and what little I recall from grade school so take it with a bit of salt. But as far as I recall, during the middle ages the church promoted it's own brand of science named scholastics. The idea was that you take the bible and adjoining scriptures as a part of your base assumptions and draw conclusions from there. And from that point on you were safe becouse using normal scientific methods you can't reach conclusions that are contrary to your base assumptions.

Like, you were free to find and catalog all the types of beasts and plants out there and their interactions. But when you come to ask why they are what they are and act the way they do the answer would be becouse god wants it.

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Terry Jones Medieval Lives has an episode on the Philosopher/Alchemist which covers science in the middle ages and argues that there were cases where they knew more than pop culture lets them know with some interesting examples.

It's also one of my favorite documentary series.

It's available for free viewing from the BBC on Youtube here.

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Scholastics was a philosophical school, which tried to combine the Bible and the writings of Church-approved philosophers of the antiquity (mostly Aristotle, but also some Plato's and later middle and neo-platonist ideas) into a single comprehensive philosophy. Scholastic philosophy was not 'science' in the modern sense, but it was a major philosophical school that produced some interesting results, which are sometimes needlessly ignored by later thinkers because of their religious connection.

I would also like to point out that drawing conclusions from basic assumptions is not the scientific method as we know it. It is rationalist philosophy that is based on deduction. Science is based primarily on experiments and induction, in other words science is empirical.

Pope John XXI (XX) from 1276-77 was a rather scientific person for the standards of the day and was a practising physician who published commentaries on Aristotle, plus other books on medicine, but sadly the roof of his private study at the Viterbo papal palace collapsed on him. He was frowned upon by some for being a magician.

Closer to the present day Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) founded the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936, but has it been taken seriously by the rest of the scientific establishment?

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Church in order to maintain their dominance and control of people's minds, the development of Christian theology into a system of large， careful argument about God's knowledge, the so-called "scholastic philosophy". asked to use human reason to prove God's existence and its great strength. Even if the study of natural science, if violated religion and theology, would have to be brutally suppressed.

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The scholastic mindset was arguably a pre-condition for science as we now know it, because it promoted the kind of community and attitudes within which science as we know it could develop. The idea of institutions devoted to refined study, of a professional class of scholars who are free to look into subjects that interest them,* the idea that there are large swathes of the human experience that should be looked at with a rationalist mindset that actually thinks things over rather than entrenching itself in tradition and shrugging off any open question as an ineffable mystery of life... all that is important.

*Even if, yes, they can get into one hell of a lot of trouble by promoting the 'wrong' arguments.

I suppose it's worth noting that Catholicism in the Middle Ages inhereted a fair amount of intellectual baggage from earlier periods. Though perhaps not the best source on the subject, Bertrand Russell contended that the preeminence of Platonic and, particularly Aristolelian philosophy did enormous harm to further progress and innovation. So much of what early modern scientists like Galileo did had to be pitted against centuries of long-established, basically, Aristotelian dogma.

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The irony is that Aristotle was mostly unknown in the West during the early middle ages, because his works were written in Greek, which the medieval Roman catholic clerics no longer could read. There were not even many Latin translations available, since the early Christian theologians and Church fathers like St. Augustine had been influenced mostly by platonists (or rather middle or neo-platonists to be exact).

Even more ironic is the fact the Aristotle's philosophy was for a large part introduced to the west by Pierre (Peter) Abelard, who was perhaps the most rebellious of all famous Scholastics and got into serious trouble with Church authority in many occasions. Nevertheless, his ideas were later accepted by the Church and lead for a large part to the dogmatization of Aristotelian philosophy in the late Medieval Roman catholic church.

Galileo was an interesting chap and quite dogmatic himself (he firmly believed that circular motion is the fundamental behavior of everything and could never accept Kepler and his funny elliptical idea) and with lots of rather displeasant personal traits, which allowed him to gain enemies and lose friends rather easily. About the famous Galileo Affair, he was more pitted against the experimental evidence than Aristotelian dogma. Before the famous measurement of Bessel in 1838 the heliocentric model needed the assumption that the stars are (almost) infinitely far away since the logical consequence of a heliocentric world would be the stellar parallax. Thus using Occam's razor the official Tychonian model (where the Earth is rest, the Sun and the Moon orbits around Earth, the planets orbit around the Sun, while the Jovian moons orbits around Jupiter and all of them are using complex pathes made as composition of multiple circles) is superior since it requires one less assumption. Now the Keplerian model is a different thing because the elliptical orbits clearly favors a Sun centered system (though the problem of the stellar parallax still holds), but once again Galilei firmly opposed it.

Even Kepler didn't believe his own results - he reinvestigated them several times because he didn't buy that the orbits weren't circular.

Yes one of the most underrated moments in the history of science/philosophy/culture/whatever. The first time someone arrived to a conclusion, that the Universe is not perfect (or not perfect in the sense it is commonly thought) based on that experiments override theory (though not totally new, far from beign generally accepted). Of course it was fucking hard to accept, even for a genious.

How much the Church helped/hindered science? The answer is... complicated.

First, you state the Church helped with funding of the universities. This is only partially true. On one hand, university had to have permission of the Pope in order to work - so, what they could teach was limited in order to not lose the "license". On the other, Church did pay universities - but it's only part of the story. Typical medieval university was based on one of two (roughly) models - Bolognian model, in which students paid teachers (and, sometimes, had enormous powers) - this is (almost) secular university, which was main driving force behind 'progress' as we define it today. The other model was Parisian one - university paid by church, which in exchange teached dogma, and concerned science as we would call it today as almost heresy. This type of church functioned mostly as a forge of future church cadres, but it also taught law, and produced various bureaucrats needed to run the state, while giving the king points in Vatican, making it popular choice for the rulers. Sometimes universities switched between these models, as was the fate of my Alma Mater in her early years. So, church did funded universities, but I wouldn't exactly call that helping science, they did that to ensure future cadres.

Second point is free thought - here, church did enormous damage, first by siphoning the most intelligent, educated people into such productive concerns as disputing how many angels can dance on a needlepoint, secondly, by making practicing most sciences heresy, if not directly, then by banning the results they produced as conflicting with the Bible. IIRC, Copernicus was so afraid of the inquisition, that his most important work was published posthumously, and even then, the local priests tried to "save" his name by writing in the introduction of the book that Heliocentric model is one big lie, but it 'sometimes' produces better mathematical results and can be used solely for convenience of it...

An this fear wasn't unfounded, as the case of Giordano Bruno (who burned at the stake for, between others, claiming the Earth isn't the only world in the Universe) and Galileo (who was "merely" sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life, with merciful inquisitors not allowing him to visit or call doctor when he developed eye problems, causing him to live his final years blind) can attest. The Galileo's case is especially interesting - I saw in his biography a claim that just before arrest, Galileo begun working on primitive version of Newton's Laws, and even made one of them in a crude form. Who knows, maybe science was set back full century in that one decision, and maybe free Galileo and his students would have produced Newton's laws full century earlies, with Newton working on Maxwell's Laws instead?

If you read this thread, you'd almost think that scientific discoveries follow inevitably, as long as there's no external force hampering the internal progress of science. I didn't realize teleology was back in.

Would you like the expanded form? It seems that everybody else is able to follow the implications that if the church hadn't pressured scientists (whatever they call it they're still performing experiments to discern the nature of reality) to conform to its outlook, then the scientists already working would have been free to follow better methodology and allow observation to more thoroughly shape their hypotheses. The effect of this given the large number of scientists working through the centuries the Church had such a large effect produces a statistical near certainty of a greater number and magnitude of scientific discoveries.

Or we could say "the Church's promotion of it's dogma held back scientific progress by [insert large, obviously rounded guess] years" instead of that wall of text.

Do you rage whenever somebody slips and says a biological feature was designed for something when it's clear they mean it evolved to do that something? (actually that last one gives the fundies ammo, while this doesn't so if you want to be useful start picketing biology departments).

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I'm not objecting to semantic issues. I'm objecting to (a) the notion that science progresses inevitably unless there are specific factors that inhibit that progress, (b) the notion that there was significant scientific development during the centuries prior to the dominance of the Church, and (c) the notion that the net effect of the Church on scientific development must necessarily have been negative. Several posts above (including yours) indicate that you accept assumption (a); I assume it's not a metaphysical assumption for you, but it's still a very strong belief, and I don't share it. Scientific communities can easily be stale without any external inhibition.

As far as b) goes, I believe recent research on ancient "science" has strengthened the notion that there was significant "scientific" progress in the Roman world. I am using quotation marks, because none of the philosophy and engineering of the Antiquity was exactly like modern science, but neither was it completely different, and indeed some historians do talk about ancient science.

I would also like to have a concrete example of a "stale" scientific community using the modern definition of science. Ancient philosophical schools sometimes did become stagnated and dogmatic, but like I wrote, their philosophical basis was not the same as modern science.

Assumption a) of course is not something you can easily prove, but based on experimental evidence from the history of science durign the last 300 years it appears to be true. Of course the advancement of science cannot be separated from other socioeconomic issues, so one can't yet say that it is completely proven, but it certainly appears so.

Assumption c) is controversial and would require some kind of generally accepted methology to evaluate "scientific progress". Even so counterfactual speculation would be necessary (i.e. "what if the Catholic church did not exist"), which would open a whole new can of worms. The collapse of the West-Roman empire certainly played a major role as well and it's difficult to separate from the effect of the church, especially since that collapse no doubt played a significant role in the formation of the medieval Roman catholic church and its dogmas.

Historians talk about ancient science - but they always qualify the term. The term "natural philosophy" is far more appropriate for periods before the 18th century, and especially for antiquity. Moreover, I've yet to see any indication of a thriving culture of natural philosophy in the Roman period (although there were great feats of engineering).


That is the entire point: modern science is something entirely new. It's a conglomerate that came about in the last few centuries, and that has created an entirely different theoretical and moral basis than ancient science or natural philosophy. It is not something that a culture would inevitably 'discover' - it is a method of approaching the natural world that we have created, and that has proven very succesful at providing understanding and making useful predictions about the actions of the natural world.


Assumption (a) is the most derided assumption in all the history of science. Almost nobody who actually studies the history of science shares it. People on internet fora do, and scientists who haven't studied the history of their science (and by that I mean the actual history, not the textbook versions that present the development of science as progress after progress after progress) - but not historians of science.


While I believe counterfactual speculation has a worthwhile place in historical enquiry, I think a giant claim such as "What if the Catholic Church did not exist?" is an entirely meaningless question - you can't evaluate what would have happened, since the Catholic Church was so ingrained in Western society and culture that its removal would have had vast, unforeseeable consequences. Any answer to that counterfactual question would be no more than random speculation.

Well, there certainly was in Alexandria, even though that was not attributable to Romans but more to the Hellenistic culture. It is also not entirely fair to separate engineering from natural philosophy and say that only the latter represents scientific progress. Many historians when they talk about "ancient science" include engineering, medicine and other applied sciences because they are also included in the modern definition of science at least peripherally. The borderline between natural philosphy and engineering was more strict in Antiquity, but that was their view that we don't necessarily have to share.


Are you talking about modern science in the Enlightenment sense or do you include "natural philosophy"? Because if you are referring to the former, it sounds to me that you have read too much Kuhn and historians influenced by Kuhnian thinking. In contrast, there are many philosophers of science who say that the concept of "paradigm shift" does not really apply to natural sciences in the way Kunh intended. It does apply fairly well to some social sciences, but one can't expand that to all sciences.

Furthermore, of course one can't say that science advances "inevitably unless there are specific factors that inhibit hat progress", because the spesific factors you referred to remain undefined, and disputing that notion is essentially a straw man attack unless you define what you mean by "spesific factors". Like I wrote, the advancement of science is of course dependant on socioeconomic factors. Saying that science progresses magically without, for example, adequate funding would be idiotic.


Which is exactly what I meant. However, if you want to evaluate the net effect (your expression) of Roman catholic church to advancement of science, you inevitably imply that counterfactual, because you need to establish some kind of baseline to evaluate the net effect from. The conclusion is that the "net effect" is unknowable and always will be. The best we can do is to evaluate some spesific points, although even that is quite a tall order.

However, analogies to the Islamic world are useful for some kind of estimations. There the advancement of natural philosophy was rapid before the onset of religious conservatism that shunned philosophy in favor of Islamic orthodoxy. And yet again, there were also socioeconomic factors that played a role in the emergence of a more dogmatic Islam, so one cannot really say which factor was more important. What we can say is that the emergence of intolerant religious orthodoxy usually has a detrimental effect on the advancement of science; a very general and bland conclusion, but I don't think we can do any better.

There's a reason I stressed natural philosophy as a theoretical tool for understanding the world - it's absolutely essential for the development of modern science, and the joining of natural philosophy with mixed mathematics and engineering are some of the most important steps in creating the conglomerate we know as modern science.

Perhaps it's wrong for me to stress natural philosophy as the crucial element (although I rather doubt that), but the point that I'm trying to make is: the above conglomerate of natural philosophy, mixed mathematics and engineering isn't something that must necessarily develop. It didn't develop in ancient Athens. It didn't develop in ancient Alexandria. It didn't develop in the Islamic world. It didn't develop in China. It didn't develop in Africa. It didn't develop in the Americas. It only developed in Europe. The development of modern science is a unique event - it's the exception, not the rule. In such a case, it's wiser to look for causes of that development rather than looking for inhibiting factors that held it back.

The general tendency in this topic - the tendency to look at the Church as an inhibiting factor for the development of modern science, rather than as a complex web of influences - implies the naive notion that modern science is what naturally follows when one tries to understand the natural world for long enough.



I've not used the word paradigm shift even once in the above block of text. There are certainly some Kuhnian influences in mainstream history of science these days, but nothing I said requires one to accept his more controversial ideas (incommensurability, paradigm shifts, normal science vs revolutionary science, etc.)


The point is that there is a danger in limiting the factors you take into account - as your example shows. Funding is one of the most obvious influences - but what about conceptual schemes, the social status of individual sciences, interpretations of what constitutes a good experiment, power relations, the social status and background of scientists, etc. Scientific advancement isn't simply about "insert money here" - it's intertwined with intellectual culture, philosophy, social stratification, etc.


Exactly.


I don't know enough about Islamic science to point to the exact reasons of its flourishing ending; however, I don't think it's abnormal. To quote Stephen Gaukroger, "Scientific developments in the classical and Hellenistical worlds, China, the medieval Islamic world, and medieval Paris and Oxford, share a distinctive feature. They each exhibit a pattern of slow, irregular, intermittent growth, alternating with substantial periods of stagnation, in which interest shifts to political, economic, technological, moral, or other questions." As he goes on to say, "The 'Scientific Revolution' of the early-modern West breaks with the boom/bust pattern of all other scientific cultures, and what emerges is the uninterrupted and cumulative growth that constitutes the general rule for scientific development in the West since that time. (...) This form of scientific development is exceptional and anomalous."

Also if someone want to understand what happened before the paradigm shift before the birth of Modern Science looking the events before the Quantum Boom in the early XXth century provide some clues. So the shere weight and completeness of the Aristotelean system itself prevented any reform, it was all encompassing and each item was connected with millions of other. There was no way to slowly "reform" it, either one have to accept it or abandon it. Just like the Newtonean Mechanics it was marvellous and awed by any other scientific field. And even though people realized its faults by the late nineteenth century there was little to do, because one needed a whole alternative system instead of if. A very similar thing happened in the Medieval time, there was a vivid discussion about the apparent faults of the Aristotelean thought (some of them way more daring than the more famous followers in the Renessaince) however the critical mass was not present. The intellectuals realized that the accepted philosphy have serious problems, but they do not have a better idea about how the new natural philosophy should look like.

Now the position of the Church is interesting... first there was no such thing as "The Church" in the Medieval times, the King of France was in a strong enough position to name an Antipope when he desired to do so. And exactly because of this the Church in general cared shit about marginal philosophical questions. There was politics to make (the all-time favorite Giordano Bruno was burned because of his political and religious works... his views about Trinity, transmigration, Virgin Mary were the all important thing): positions to gain and lose, gold to count, different factions to support, internal disputes to resolve... etc. Of course if some philosphical problem (though usually it was a complex theological question rather than natural philosophy) could be used to stengthen or discredit a certain faction, they might employed it, but in general it was just power politics. The net effect of the (Western) Christianity on developing Modern Science, well only Western Europe developed Modern Science by itself, so the influence of (Western) Christianity is at most/least (depending on the p.o.v) neutral as compared to the other available religious/cultural backgrounds.