Religion and the Rise of Modern Science

At noon on June 22 in the third century before Christ, a Greek called Eratosthenes inserted a stick vertically in the ground in Alexandria and measured the length of its shadow. On the Tropic of Cancer in southern Egypt at Syene (modern Aswan) such a stick placed in the ground the same time and day would cast no shadow. Using the length of the shadow and the distance between Alexandria and Syene, Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the earth to be 12,641 kilometres. Because his figure for the distance between the two places was 84 kilometres too short there was an error of 0.5 per cent. He was not the only Greek to make a discovery like that. No other race at the time even got close to the scientific and other advances that the Greeks made.

Christians evinced a like regard for truth. Augustine wrote, “Truth, wherever it may be found, must be avidly accepted.” It was this conviction that led to the rise of modern science. The myth that the church has always bitterly opposed science is of Enlightenment provenance, and has ever since had its adherents, some of whom have combed the records for evidence of it. Paul Monk in “The Open Society and its Friends” (Quadrant, March 2010), for example, says:

Scientific attitudes towards reality were completely confounded, however, by Christianity. The great St Augustine, in Book X of his Confessions, dismissed natural science as mere vulgar curiosity unworthy of a person’s attention, while they should be immersed in mysteries like that of the Trinity and of their immortal souls.

Augustine wrote:

So they go on to pry into natural phenomena, not beyond our knowledge, but which it is not to our profit to know, and which men simply are curious to understand. Hence too, occult arts are used for the same end of perverted knowledge. Hence, even in religion itself, God is tested when signs and wonders are demanded, not for any salutary end, but merely for experience … True, the theatres do not now snatch me away, and I am not eager to know the courses of the stars, nor has my soul ever sought answers from the dead.

The fact that Augustine quotes occult knowledge, messages from the dead and probably astrology, as examples of useless knowledge, makes one wonder if he is referring to incorrect scientific knowledge. Indeed Arthur Koestler, who cites the same passage and draws from it much the same conclusions, chides Augustine for rejecting the incorrect science of Thales, Anaximenes and Epicurus.

In the Confessions Augustine addressed God. He described profound spiritual experiences in which nothing seemed important to him but personal relationships, particularly with God. Most of us, perhaps when we have lost a loved one, experience times when things which used to interest us and bring us joy now seem completely inadequate for the task. We would feel it unfair if someone who caught us at such a moment were to conclude that we always felt that way. Most of us would feel that a complete classification of the world’s beetles, for example, is not going to be much help in solving our deepest needs. As E.O.Wilson says, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

Paul Monk wishes us to see Book X of Augustine’s Confessions as an example of “the complete confounding of reality by Christianity”. As it happens, we do have a definitive statement of Augustine’s attitude to science. He believed that the Bible should always be interpreted to accord with science’s established findings. He writes:

‘Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even the size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and the moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh him to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but the people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticised and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books on matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience in the light of reason?

Galileo made use of these words to try to convince the church authorities of the need to reinterpret passages of the Bible that appeared to teach a stationary Earth.

The emperor Justinian does not come across as a model Christian. However, according to Henry Chadwick, he closed the Academy in Athens not because it was pagan, but because of the militantly anti-Christian attitude of its principal, the Neoplatonist Damascius. A similar establishment in Alexandria was allowed to continue its work unhindered. Previously the emperor Julian had sacked Proaeresius from the Athenian Academy because he was a Christian. Christians in other institutions that taught classical rhetoric, literature and philosophy found themselves without a job because of his decree. This hardly accords with the oft-repeated claim that Christians were dedicated to rooting out all elements of classical learning from the culture.

The story that the Roman prefect Symmachus (345–402) vainly pleaded with the Christian emperor Gratian to restore the altar of the goddess Victory to the Senate, arguing it didn’t matter “by which road each man pursues the truth” because “so great a mystery” cannot be reached by one road alone, is often recited in the literature as an example of Christian intolerance. However, readers are seldom told that Symmachus had also bought twenty-nine Saxon prisoners to be slaughtered by wild beasts in the arena to celebrate the birthday of his young son, and then complained that he had been defrauded of his money when they strangled themselves rather than “entertain”.

George, the Christian patriarch of Alexandria in the fourth century, had a library so rich in the works of classical learning that the emperor Julian coveted it. When George was murdered, Julian ordered his troops to ship the library to him, instructing them not to burn the Christian books, just in case classical works might inadvertently be destroyed. Instead he would supervise the necessary burning. Diocletian also was well known for his eagerness to burn anything the Christians put on paper. Nor can it be denied that Christians sometimes burnt the works of other Christians with whom they disagreed.

However, it goes far beyond the evidence to state that once the Christians got their hands on the levers of power there was a frenzied burning of books of classical learning across the empire. Paul Monk, for example, believes that “the works of countless writers, both pagan and Christian, were destroyed in those centuries or allowed to moulder because deemed odious, heretical or irrelevant”. David Hart writes:

even MacMullen, desperate to provide some evidence of a special Christian malice towards ancient literature, can do no better than to point to the decision of the Christian imperial regent Flavius Stilicho (365–408) to destroy the Sibylline books.

Jonathan Kirsch, running a similar agenda, asserted that Christians destroyed all the works of Aristotle in the Greek language. Actually the works of Aristotle were preserved in the Greek-speaking parts of the empire and many were brought to Western Europe via the Italian cities of Palermo, Pisa and Italy, and by returning crusaders, and later by refugees from the Ottoman Turk invasion of the Christian empire of Byzantium. Scholars such as William of Moerbeke translated these works into Latin. Syrian Christians translated many Greek classical texts into their own language and took them on their eastward migration. Eventually they found themselves in the Islamic empire and the works were re-translated into Arabic and spread throughout the Muslim area of influence reaching as far as Spain. Here they were translated into Latin and entered Western Europe. R.W. Southern wrote:

In 972 none of Aristotle’s works on natural science were known in Latin. By 1204, there were translations of Aristotle’s works on Physics, on the Heavens, on Meteorology, on the Soul, on Sensation, on Memory and Remembering, on Sleeping and Waking, on Longevity and its opposite, on Youth and Old Age, on Respiration, on Life and Death.

People able to speak and understand Greek became rare or non-existent throughout the Western empire, and so Boethius made Latin translations of some works of Plato and Aristotle. Monks preserved these and other works, diligently copying them before they disintegrated from old age. In this way the works of Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Horace, Statius, Persius, Lucan, Suetonius, Seneca, Martial, Apuleius, Juvenal, Terence and parts of Plato and Aristotle were made available to subsequent generations. David Hart writes, “It was a consequence of historical misfortune, not of wilful rejection, that more had not survived.”

It would be untrue to say that all Christians wanted all the works of the early Greek and Latin writers preserved, however it is true that Christians respected truth, irrespective of the means by which it reached them. This follows from their belief that God is the author of all truth, and that the Bible is not the only way by which truth is mediated to mankind. Chadwick writes that Christians:

claimed that the intellectual tradition of the classical past was not alien to them … Stoic ethics required attitudes to slavery and wealth that they found congenial. “Seneca is often one of us,” said Tertullian … In Justin, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Platonism and Christian thought came to keep house together.

In the Middle Ages, improved technology made it possible for more people to devote time to scholarly pursuits. By contrast the scientific advances of the Greeks were built on an oppressive and degrading slave culture. In Western Europe fast-flowing rivers were harnessed to drive water wheels which provided power to saw logs and stones, turn lathes, grind knives and swords, hammer metal, draw wire, grind grain, full cloth and pulp rags to make paper. Wind power was harnessed to pump water from swamps to provide new land for crops. Mouldboard ploughs allowed farmers to cultivate heavy soils, almost doubling crop yields. Harness for horses allowed the weight of carts to be placed on their shoulders rather than their necks, enabling them to pull heavier loads more quickly; and iron shoes prevented them becoming lame and allowed them to gain traction more effectively. Medieval builders performed wonders of engineering using flying buttresses and pointed arches to create soaring cathedrals of stone. These advances were indigenous, owing nothing to the “rediscovery” of classical knowledge; and they were far-reaching. David Hart wrote, “no previous culture had ever boasted technological advances of such scope and variety”.

Universities were established in which truth of all kinds was taught and discussed. Theological thinking prepared the way for scientific thinking. Freeman Dyson wrote:

‘Western science grew out of Christian theology. It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to natural phenomena.’

Almost all the earliest scientists were Christians, and many of them were ministers or laymen deeply interested in theology. According to Lynn White, by “the late 13th century Europe had seized global scientific leadership”.

Christians and Jews expected the universe to be orderly and rational because they believed in a God who had these qualities. Melvin Calvin, Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry, said:

As I try to discern the origin of that conviction [that the universe is orderly], I seem to find it in a basic notion discovered 2000 or 3000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods each governing his own province according to his own laws. This monotheistic view seems to be the historical foundation for modern science.

That is why Kepler, Newton and Galileo, all of whom were devout Christians, were not at all surprised to discover scientific laws that could be expressed in mathematical terms.

It is not accurate to say that the rediscovery of Greek science powered the emergence of modern science. The worldview of the Greeks made scientific progress beyond a certain point difficult if not impossible. For them the natural world was a living thing with a soul. Being alive, it was unpredictable and might not always act in the same way. The Greeks assumed that the planets were gods, perfectly spherical in shape, which moved in circular orbits at a constant speed and some believed they were embedded in transparent spheres that revolved around a stationary earth. Perfection was to be found at the moon and beyond, regions that were qualitatively different from the Earth.

However, the planets did not move in circles around the Earth. Rather than abandon their preconceptions, some thinkers deployed a number of rotating spheres or interacting circles called epicycles so that the resultant motion would correspond to the reality observed in the night sky. Plato, Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy all drew up models incorporating one of these features. The orbits of comets were an even greater problem. They were so eccentric that they must be in the imperfect region between the moon and the Earth.

So great was the reputation of Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy among medieval Christians that it was difficult to break free from what Koestler called the “curse” that Plato had laid on astronomy. Advances were hesitant, as followers of Aristotle in particular were powerful in the universities. Copernicus was the first to move, postulating that the sun was the centre around which the Earth and the other planets revolved. This was not an original idea. Aristarchus had discovered this in the third century before Christ, and was charged with impiety by the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes.

The invention of the telescope brought down more features of the Greek edifice. Galileo reported that the moon was not perfectly smooth and spherical but was “full of hollows and protuberances, just like the surface of the earth itself”. The discovery of spots in the sun showed that it too was blemished.On November 11, 1572, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe observed a new star in the sky, so bright that the keen-sighted could see it during the day. It did not move, so it could not be a tail-less comet as some suggested. This and a supernova which appeared in October 1604 appeared to contradict Aristotle’s theory that the sky was immutable. This discovery embroiled Galileo in an acrimonious debate with a leading Aristotelian, Cesare Cremonini, professor of philosophy at Padua. Galileo wrote:

‘There remain in opposition to my work some stern defenders of every minute argument of the Peripatetics. So far as I can see, their education consisted in being nourished from infancy on the opinion that philosophising is and can be nothing but to make a comprehensive survey of the texts of Aristotle … They wish never to raise their eyes from those pages—as if this great book of the universe has been written to be read by nobody by Aristotle, and his eyes have been destined to see for all posterity.’

The Greek “curse” had to be removed from other fields. Koestler wrote:

The Ockhamist school in Paris, which flourished in the fourteenth century … had made considerable advances in the study of motion, momentum, acceleration and the theory of falling bodies. They had shown that Aristotelian physics with its “unmoved movers”, its “natural” and “violent” motion etc., was empty verbiage; and they had become very close to formulating Newton’s Law of Inertia…

When Tycho Brahe observed a large comet which was in his opinion travelling far beyond the moon, moving freely through the region where the Aristotelian invisible spheres were supposed to be located, Galileo was unconvinced, believing that comets were disturbances in the upper atmosphere. However, an observatory based at the Jesuit College in Rome confirmed not only that the comets orbited in outer space beyond the moon, but also that the sun was “spotted” and the moon’s surface pitted.

Tycho Brahe owned an observatory on the Danish island of Hveen, in which he accurately located the positions of a thousand stars and plotted the movements of the planets. The German astronomer Johann Kepler wrote:

Tycho possesses the best observations, he only lacks the architect who would put all this to use according to his own design … he is obstructed in his progress by the multitude of phenomena and by the fact that the truth is deeply hidden in them.

After he gained access to Tycho’s observations, Kepler calculated where Mars should be at two points and found he was out by eight seconds of arc. He said:

But for us, who by divine kindness were given an accurate observer such as Tycho Brahe, for us it is fitting that we should acknowledge this divine gift and put it to use … For if I had believed we could ignore these eight minutes, I would have patched up my hypothesis accordingly. But since it is not permissible to ignore them, these eight minutes point the road to a complete reformation of astronomy.

Could the orbit be elliptical? If the solution was that simple, surely the Greeks Archimedes and Apollonius would have discovered it?

It was that simple, and this discovery condemned the spheres and circles of the Greeks to the junk heap of history. Galileo, however, continued to believe in astronomical circles. Kepler went on to discover mathematical relationships between the heavenly bodies. He found that the squares of the years of any two planets was proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun, and that an imaginary line from the centre of the sun to any planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. These “were the first ‘natural laws’ in the modern sense: precise, verifiable statements expressed in mathematical terms; at the same time, they represented the first attempt at a synthesis of astronomy and physics which, during the preceding 2000 years, had developed on separate lines”. He was far ahead of all his colleagues in his understanding of the solar system. While Galileo gave away telescopes to rich and influential friends, he refused to lend one to Kepler, who would have made most use of it. However, Kepler borrowed one of Galileo’s gifts, and went on to create the new science of dioptrics, ­the science of refraction by lenses.

Kepler’s idea that the tides were caused by the attraction of the moon on the Earth was ridiculed by Galileo. “He has lent his ear and his assent to the moon’s dominion over the waters, and to occult properties and such like fancies.” Galileo believed that they were caused by the Earth’s daily rotation and its movement around the sun, and so could serve as a proof for the movement of the Earth around the sun. He was wrong on both counts. However, he explicated both propositions in his book The Dialogue.

It was foolhardy to assert heliocentrism ahead of proof, because the official church position was that it was unproved. Some scriptural verses which seemed to contradict heliocentrism would have to be re-interpreted and the church was not going to do that without proof. As well, The Dialogue made Pope Urban, a friend of Galileo’s, look ridiculous. Before the Inquisition, Galileo denied that his book taught heliocentrism as proved. The inquisitors had on their desks a report listing numerous quotations from his book that showed otherwise. Those who did not share his views, which included at least some of the inquisitors, were characterised as “mental pygmies”, “dumb idiots” and “hardly deserving to be called human beings”. The Inquisition declared him guilty, but the punishment was so light as to be hardly deserving of the name. He was never imprisoned or tortured. He was allowed to continue his scientific studies in matters unrelated to heliocentrism.

The attempt to make Galileo some sort of martyr to science is without foundation. The prominent atheist Sam Harris has spoken of the tradition of “torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars”. Christopher Hitchens, though he mentions Galileo a number of times in his book God Is Not Great and would like to say what Harris did, had sufficient intellectual honesty to keep his fingers off the keyboard. Richard Dawkins, though he mentions Galileo once on another matter, left it alone as well.

Galileo’s troubles, such as they were, were pretty much all his own making. Much of his astronomy was wrong, his proofs for the movement of the earth were not proofs at all and his flawed understanding of comets and the tides seems to have motivated by a desire to prove others wrong, rather than by the scientific passion for truth. As it was, the church treated him far better than he with his venomous pen and tongue treated others. If those who march under the banner of science-over-all had to pick a scientific martyr to venerate they should have picked a better candidate—but they were handicapped by the fact that there were no other candidates. It was left to the descendants of the Enlightenment philosophes to produce the first scientific martyr. Appeals to delay the fall of the guillotine on the neck of the chemist Lavoisier met with the response, “The Revolution has no need of scientists.”

The idea that modern science was dependent on the rediscovery of Greek science is an Enlightenment myth. The philosophes re-jigged historical fact in order to claim for themselves and their supposed soulmates in classical times credit for the rise of science. While the Greeks made enormous advances in learning it does no credit to their memory to attribute to them beliefs they never had and advances they never made. Sometimes they got things wrong, and it was these errors that delayed the rise of modern science. David Hart wrote:

‘Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science, but its final defeat. A person of perverse temperament might even be tempted to argue that, had there actually been a greater conflagration in Alexandria in which some vast inheritance of Greek scientific texts had been consumed, or if indeed “ancient Greek science” had come to a peremptory halt sometime in the fifth century the cause of science might have been considerably advanced.’

Peter Barclay PhD is a former minister of religion and missionary in West Papua where he wrote a grammar of the West Dani tribe. A footnoted version of this article is available on Quadrant Online.