Myth and facts in the Historical Encounters of Science and Christian Faith

Myth and facts in the Historical Encounters of Science and Christian Faith

Number, Ronald L., ed. Galileo Goes to Jail: and other myths about science and religion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McGrath, Alister. Science and Religion: A new Introduction. UK: Blackwell publishers, 2010.

Grayling, A C. The Age of Genius: the seventeenth century and the birth of the modern mind. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Noble, David F. The religion of technology: The divinity of man and the spirit of invention. New York: Penguin, 2013.

1. Critical examination of the conflict metaphor with the following test cases

(a) Church opposed dissection of dead bodies and hence prevented advances in medical sciences.

Every human body is both quite similar and quite different, so dissecting dead bodies allows a new doctor to experience firsthand the uniqueness that exists from person to person. This will help them tremendously when they get out into the field. It helps doctors to learn human anatomy and body systems, and for practicing medical procedures to know a variety of causes of death, to get a better understanding of the effect of diseases on body systems, and the stages those diseases go through as they progress to the terminal stage. But, the notion of the Church has a different perspective and is regarded as defiling the sacredness of the human body.

Pope Boniface VII [sic] banned the practice of cadaver dissection in the 1200s. This stopped the practice for over 300 years and greatly slowed the accumulation of education regarding human anatomy. Finally, in the 1500s, Michael Servetus used cadaver dissection to study blood circulation. He was tried and imprisoned by the Catholic Church. The myth that the medieval church prohibited human dissection has several variants. Andrew Dickson White in the late nineteenth century A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and quoted ‘Western Christianity was implacably hostile to the study of anatomy through dissection’. This attitude was codified by Pope Boniface VIII in his bull Detestande feritatis (Of detestable cruelty) of 1299–1300, which threatened those who practiced it with ex-communication and persecution. White attributed the church’s supposed hostility to its commitment to the sacredness of the human body, the divinely created “temple of the soul,” and to its doctrine that all human bodies would be resurrected at the Last Judgment.

The appearance of human dissection—the opening of corpses in the service of medical teaching and research, continuous with modern academic practices—took place around 1300 in the Italian city of Bologna. Critical examination and its appraisal is very complex. The modern church practically has no objection but science has also adopted another way round to advance in medical sciences without dissecting the human body.

(b) Church taught a flat earth cosmogony and tried to prevent Christopher Columbus from his voyage.

Boise Penrose, in his book ‘Travel and Discovery in the Renaissancei argues that ‘With the decline of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages, geography as science went into hibernation, from which the early Church did little to rouse it . . . Strict Biblical interpretations plus unbending patristic bigotry resulted in the theory of a flat earth with Jerusalem in its center, and the  four Rivers of Paradise. People living in the “Dark Ages” were so ignorant (or so deceived by Catholic priests) that they believed the earth was flat. For a thousand years they lingered in ignorant obscurity and were it not for the heroic bravery of Christopher Columbus and other explorers, they might well have continued in this ignorance for even longer. Thus, it was the innovation and courage of investors and explorers, motivated by economic goals and modern curiosity, that finally allowed us to break free from the shackles forged by the medieval Catholic Church.

Major Greek geographical thinker, including Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), Eratosthenes (third century B.C.), and Ptolemy (second century A.D.), based his geographical and astronomical work on the theory that the earth was a sphere. Likewise, all of the major Roman commentators, including Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.), Pomponius Mela (first century A.D.), and Macrobius (fourth century A.D.), agreed that the earth must be round. Most famous was Aristotle’s proof of the sphericity of the earth, an argument used by many thinkers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Among the early church fathers, Augustine (354–430), Jerome (d. 420), and Ambrose (d. 420) all agreed that the earth was a sphere. Given this background, it would be silly to argue that Columbus proved the world was round or even argued so. Two Christian writers are known to have advocated flat earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century Egyptian Monk, Cosmas Indicopleustes.Later, these two writers were used as the prime evidence to prove that the flat-earth view was accepted by the Church as a whole—or at least by large parts of it. The myth that the Church ‘condemned as heretics all who claimed that the earth was round’ was ‘invented by two fabulists working separately: Antoine-Jean Letronne, an anticlerical 19th-century Frenchman, and Washington Irving. They were flat-earth believing churchmen who vehemently opposed Columbus’ plan to travel to the Indies on the grounds that his ship would fall off the edge of the earth while attempting to sail across the Atlantic.

(c) Church opposed the Heliocentric Model and persecuted Copernicus, Galileo and other Martyrs of Science.

Nicolaus Copernicus

The 16^th  century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), “when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world- system of a magnitude hardly conceivable”. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy, which Copernicanism eventually superseded, was indeed geocentric in the sense that it placed earth (geo-) at the center of the universe (Heliocentric) literally and geometrically. Copernicus first outlined his ideas about the heliocentric theory in a manuscript titled “Commentariolus.” There he suggested a heliostatic system, where the sun was at the center of the universe and the earth made rotations. He published “De revolutionibus” in March 1543, after more than a decade of revisions. The book included a letter to Pope Paul III arguing the legitimacy of the heliocentric theory, then fiercely opposed by the Catholic Church.” The article, “The Copernican myths,” debunks many assumptions: that people regarded Earth as the center of the universe with pride, that Earth was believed to be the center of the universe rather than at the center, that the Catholic Church immediately rejected Copernicus’ findings. It was not until 1616 that the church banned the book. The ban continued until 1835.

Galileo Galilei

In the early years of the seventeenth century the Italian mathematician and natural philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) openly advocated the theory of the earth’s motion elaborated in Nicolaus Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543). As a result, he was persecuted, tried, and condemned by the Catholic church. He spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest in his villa outside Florence.

Galileo started showing real physical truth with the new telescopic evidence rendered Copernicanism a serious contender and, he came increasingly under attack from conservative philosophers and clergymen. They argued that he was a heretic because he believed in the earth’s motion and the earth’s motion contradicted Scripture. Galileo felt he could not remain silent and decided to refute the biblical arguments against Copernicanism. He wrote his criticism in the form of long, private letters, in December 1613 to his disciple Benedetto Castelli and in spring 1615 to the grand duchess dowager Christina. In December 1615, however, Galileo went to Rome of his own accord to defend the Copernican theory.

On June 22, 1633, with a harsher sentence, the verdict found Galileo guilty and called him ‘vehement suspicion of heresy'. This happened when Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. On June 30 the pope granted Galileo permission to travel to Siena to live under house arrest at the residence of the archbishop, a good friend of Galileo’s. The archbishop hosted him for five months. In December 1633 Galileo returned to his own villa in Arcetri, near Florence, where he remained except for a brief period in 1638, when he resided within the city limits of Florence under house arrest until his death in 1642.

Giordano Brunoi First Martyr of Modern Science

Giordano Bruno, original name Filippo Bruno, byname Il Nolano, (born 1548, Nola, near Naples [Italy]—died February 17, 1600, Rome), Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and occultist whose theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the multiplicity of worlds, in which he rejected the traditional geocentric (Earth-centred) astronomy and intuitively went beyond the Copernican heliocentric (Sun-centred) theory, which still maintained a finite universe with a sphere of fixed stars. Bruno is, perhaps, chiefly remembered for the tragic death he suffered at the stake because of the the tenacity with which he maintained his unorthodox ideas at a time when both the Roman Catholic and Reformed churches were reaffirming rigid Aristotelian and Scholastic principles in their struggle for the evangelization of Europe.

Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who was known as a heretic and an advocate of Copernican theory. While he was condemned, Bruno became to be known as “the first martyr of the new science” after he was burned at the stake on 17 February 1600 in Rome’s Flower Market called Campo de’ Fiori.

(d) Church opposed Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution tooth and nailed when he came out with his theory.

Charles Darwin, in full Charles Robert Darwin, (born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England—died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent), English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), the second son of a freethinking doctor and a devout Unitarian mother, was christened in the Church of England. Since his childhood, he was a regular Church goer but he finds no science in Genesis. Darwin saw that living species—like races of people, plants, and animals—might have come into existence by descending from one another Darwin married Emma Wedge wood in 1842. Emma was a sincere Christian like Charles’s mother, Unitarian by conviction, Anglican in practice. But Charles’ collapse when his father died in 1848 he was collapse and his father’s death had spiked his faith. Also, when in 1851 his ten years old daughter Annie died, he found no comfort in Emma’s creed. So, began to develop his works Origin of Species (1859), but did not mention the word evolution, but Darwin used creation and its cognates over one hundred times. In his long- awaited Descent of Man (1871), Darwin portrayed humans as evolving physically by natural selection and then intellectually and morally through the inherited effects of habit, education, and religion. Later, theism evident in the Origin of Species became worn down and with no belief in the presence of a personal God, Darwin felt he must be content with Agnostic and his confession was published after his death in 1887.

The initial reaction of the Church seemed to have been one of panic. Initially, there was strong opposition from the clergy, because of the perceived implications of the theory. The Church opposed it tooth and nailed to the new scientific hypothesis which is considered to be heretics against God’s creation. Some accused evolutionary theory of bringing together “the occult, magic, and every conceivable human depravity,” while others  portrayed it as “the continuation of Satan's long war against God," and as Satan’s weapon for dethroning God (Morris 1989). But eventually, drawing inspiration from St. Augustine, who had made the startling statement as far back as the fifth century AD, that God had given the world at its creation the power and life germs which would unfold as the cosmos developed, some proposed that evolution is consistent with the idea of the providence of God guiding the emergence of humanity. Although critical of any idea that biological evolution is due to random factors (where "random" is understood as meaning "outside the control of God"), writers such as Benjamin B. Warfield held that evolution was consistent with the biblical view of the origins of human nature. Going further, some saw the new theory as shedding further light on the process through which God created the world and human beings. Psychoanalysis: The Freudian Critique of Religion

(e) The Christian roots of Western Science

(1) It is certainly true that the fathers of the early Christian church did not view support of the classical sciences as a major obligation. These sciences had low priority for the church fathers, for whom the major concerns were (quite properly) the establishment of Christian doctrine, defense of the faith, and the edification of believers. But (2), low or medium priority was far from zero priority. Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern period the handmaiden formula was employed countless times to justify the investigation of nature. Indeed, some of the most celebrated achievements of the Western scientific tradition were made by religious scholars who justified their labors (at least in part) by appeal to the handmaiden formula. (3) No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church. Contemporary pagan culture was no more favorable to disinterested speculation about the cosmos than was Christian culture. It follows that the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of the natural sciences.

(f) Scientific Method and the ends of Astrology, Cabalism and Rosicrucian traditions

Tyndall and Thompson, Galton claimed that the scientific method was the only appropriate means for knowing the natural world: “An unscientific reasoner will be guided by a confused recollection of crude experience. A scientific reasoner will scrutinize each separate experience before he admits it as evidence, and will compare the cases he has selected on a methodical system.”

Church Father especially Augustine believed in the reality of celestial forces, but rejected their influence on the mind on account of the fatalistic implications. Christians, he warned, should have nothing to do with astrologers. But to discredit astrology, he did not merely point to its theological dangers; he also advanced scientific arguments. a substantial current of antiastrological sentiment during the Middle Ages took its inspiration from Augustine and other theologians who were opposed to astrology because, in its deterministic form, it threatened the ideas of human free will and responsibility.

Mersenne a French Priest works in 1623 were attacks on scepticism and atheism A sustained attack on magic, cabalism, astrology and other like ‘arts’, and forms part of the important moment in the history of ideas when the transition from thought’s obeisance to the demands of religious orthodoxy passed through a period of inflated hopes for mystical or magical short-cuts to the universe’s secrets. Mersenne’s attack on magic, Cabala and the rest was of a piece with the efforts by Bacon and Descartes to distinguish, each in his own way, science from those magical forms of thinking, by describing and enjoining methodologies better destined to arrive at knowledge.

Rosicrucianism is a spiritual and cultural movement which arose in Europe in the early 17th century. The mysterious doctrine of the order is allegedly "built on esoteric- all forms of occultism, alchemy, magic truths of the ancient past", which "concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe, and the spiritual realm." Supported enthusiastically by Frederick V the Elector Palatine but when his tenure of the Bohemian throne ended at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the Church with his militant wing- the Jesuit suppressed Rosicrucianism and anything occult associated activities involving Hermeticism, magic or Cabala, as threatening individuals and cities. This was successfully done in the first half of the 1620s, so in 1923 especially Rosicrucianism in France faded away.

(g) Religion and the rise of technology

From Medieval to our today’s world expectations assume a more modern, technological expression. The present enchantment is rooted in religious myths and ancient imagining. Today’s technology in their sober pursuit of utility, power, and profit seems to sets society’s standard for rationality, they are driven also by distant dreams, spiritual yearnings for supernatural redemption. With the new approach, we are witness to two seemingly incompatible enthusiasms and a widespread infatuation with technological advances and confidence in the ultimate triumph of reason also a resurgence of fundamentalist faith to a religious revival.

The advance of science and technology with its rational rigors grounded in practical experience and material knowledge signaled the demise of religious authority and enthusiasm based upon blind faith and superstitions. Religion belonged to the primitive past, secular science, and technology to the mature future. Religious leaders promote their revival of spirit through an avid and accomplished use of the latest technological advances, scientists and technologists increasingly attest publicly to the value of their work in the pursuit of divine knowledge.

The resurgence of religious expression testifies to the spiritual sterility of technological rationality, that religious belief is now being renewed as a necessary complement to instrumental reason because it provides the spiritual sustenance that technology lacks. Modern technology and modern faith are neither complementary nor opposites, nor do they represent succeeding stages of human development. They are merged and an essentially religious endeavor. Modern technology and religion have evolved together and that the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief.

Religious preoccupations pervade the space programs at every level and constitute a major motivation behind extraterrestrial; travel and exploration. Artificial Intelligence advocates possibilities of machine based immortality and resurrection, the architects of virtual reality and cyberspace. Genetic Engineers imagine themselves divinely inspired participants in a new creation. All these technological pioneers harbor deep-seated beliefs which are variations upon familiar religious themes.