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Myth: There is no war between science and
Christianity.
Fact: The Church has persecuted or opposed almost every great
scientist of the last 500 years.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-sciencechristianity.htm
Summary
The Church has never been
on the cutting edge of science -- on the contrary, it has been
the one persecuting scientists. The list of those who earned the
wrath of the Church reads like a Who's Who of Science:
Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Darwin,
Hubble, even Bertrand Russell. The Church has also been on the
wrong side of the social sciences for over 1,500 years, actively
promoting slavery, anti-Semitism, the torture and murder of
women as witches, sexual repression, censorship and the
Inquisition, Crusades and other aggressive wars, and capital
punishment for misdemeanors. This has given rise to a Christian
field called apologetics, which attempts to defend the
Church's errors, even claiming that science and Christianity are
compatible friends, not enemies. But the atrocities and
scientific errors were too profound, and stretched on for too
many millennia, to be defended in any reasonable manner.
Argument
Most Christians will deny it, but there is a long tradition
of warfare between science and Christianity. The source of this
conflict stems from the fact that both attempt to do the same
thing: to explain the world around us, and offer solutions to
our problems. The difference between these two attempts is
basically one of age. Religion comprises very old explanations
and solutions; science, newer ones. And because they differ,
they enter into conflict.
For example, all human societies have attempted to answer the
question: "Where do we come from?" In ancient Israel, the answer
was God and Creation, as described in the book of Genesis. But
as human knowledge has advanced and grown, different
explanations have arisen: namely, the Big Bang and evolution.
Because people loathe being proven wrong, the appearance of new
explanations has been threatening, and they react with hostility
to these rival accounts.
The threat was all the greater for the Christian Church, because
it prided itself on being the source of All Truth, guided by an
omniscient God. (The term "Christian Church" in this essay
refers to its spiritual leaders, leading theologians, writers of
sacred canon, and any members defending the orthodox or
fundamentalist viewpoint.) Being proven wrong on any count
therefore had disastrous implications for the Church, not only
because it undermined its authority, but its political and
economic power as well. Not surprisingly, the Church moved
energetically against scholars attempting to make scientific
progress, branding their work as "heresy" and persecuting them
to the fullest extent that they could. The full range of the
Church's actions included harassment, discrimination,
censorship, slander, scorn, abuse, threats, persecution, forced
recantations, torture and burning at the stake. The list of
great scientists opposed by the Church reads like a Who's Who of
Science: Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley,
Darwin, Hubble, even Bertrand Russell. At no time has the Church
been on the cutting edge of science -- it has opposed virtually
all scientific progress for nearly 2,000 years. And Protestants
would prove to be just as hostile to science as Catholics.
The war between Christianity and science has raged so long and
bitterly that even 100 years ago, Andrew White, a former
president of Cornell University, was able to write a huge
two-volume history of the conflict entitled The Warfare Of
Science With Theology. (1) Exhaustively covering hundreds of
historical cases, he was able to demonstrate that the Church
generally repeats the same three-step process whenever
confronted by a threatening scientific discovery:
- First, the Church
tries to crush the "heretical" view, often through
censorship and persecution of the scientist.
- But as the
evidence supporting the scientific viewpoint inevitably
grows, the Church struggles to find a compromise position
that incorporates both viewpoints.
- Eventually, the
scientific victory is complete, and the Church is left to
indulge in apologetics, a field of study that
explains away and defends the Church's actions. In this
stage, it is common for apologists to claim that there is
not, and never was, any conflict between the Church and
science.
This process has
occurred like clockwork down through history, resulting in a
Christian Church today that is completely unrecognizable from
the Early Christian Church -- indeed, if the two could ever
meet, they would denounce each other as heretics. No Christian
today could even begin to defend the Absolute Truth that the
Church proclaimed a mere 500 years ago. This included the
following beliefs:
- The earth was
flat, in accordance with its many descriptions in the Bible.
Catholic bishops warned Columbus that he would fall off the
edge of the earth for his lack of faith.
- The earth was
also the center of the universe, and the sun and planets
rotated around it, fixed in crystal spheres.
- Comets were not
celestial bodies obeying the laws of physics; they were
fireballs thrown in anger from the right hand of God, and
they were messengers of doom and despair.
- The ordinary
events of nature were not caused by routine laws of nature,
like physics or chemistry. Instead, they were the result of
magic, miracles, and angels or demons who actively caused
and intervened in ordinary events.
- Living in abject
filth, debasing the body, and refusing any sanitation or
hygiene was viewed as a glory to God, and a means to
salvation. Many saints were praised for refusing to wash for
most of their lives! (It showed that they were not "vain" or
"proud.") John Wesley's famous remark that "Cleanliness is
next to godliness" was a decidely modern viewpoint, one that
greatly reduced the plagues and diseases that ravaged
Europe.
- Both disease and
insanity were either a punishment of God or a possession by
devils, and using modern medicine to thwart the will of God
was a sin. When Dr. Zabdiel Boylston first inoculated his
own son against smallpox in 1721, the Church immediately
attacked him; they claimed that injecting someone with a
weakened strain of smallpox was "poisoning," and that it was
blasphemy "to infect a family in the morning with smallpox
and to pray to God in the evening against the disease."
- Lightning was
also considered a punishment of sinners by God; when
Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, Christians
everywhere bitterly assailed him for robbing God of his
judgment.
- Bad weather and
ferocious storms that ruined crops and killed people were
supposed to be the result of Satan's demons stirring
trouble. These demons were supposed to be frightened off by
the ringing of loud bells; that is why churches
traditionally have bells in their steeples.
- The European
forests were supposed to be filled with witches, gremlins,
fairies, leprechauns, dwarfs, ogres, incubi, succubi, and
spirits of the dead. They were thought to range from
friendly and mischievous to violent and dangerous, and they
were blamed or credited for much unexplained phenomena. The
Church, from the Pope on down, blessed various holy relics
and prayers that could be used to ward off these creatures.
- One of the most
bitterly fought "truths" was the supposed evil of usury,
which is nothing more than the loaning of money for
interest. For 1,700 years the Church saved its greatest
condemnations for money-lenders. Dante reserved his most
tortuous sections of hell for them. Today, of course, we
consider modern banking practices to be a great benefit to
society, one of the reasons why modern economies function so
well. But it was not always so.
The scientists
who challenged this Absolute Truth came to bitter ends. Although
the vast majority were Christians themselves who had no desire
to harm the Church, their findings were completely unacceptable
to the popes, saints and theologians who were already committed
to a previous version of the truth. Here is what happened to
some of the most famous scientists:
Copernicus had concluded by 1500 A.D. that that the sun
is the center of the solar system, but he kept his theories
secret for 30 years, not wishing to draw the wrath of the
Church. Shortly after publishing Revolutions of the Heavenly
Bodies, he died of old age, and was thus spared their angry
response. But they got their revenge anyway, by burying him in a
grave that marked none of his great accomplishments, but said:
"I ask not the grace accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter;
give me only the favour which Thou didst show to the thief on
the cross." Then they kept silent about his work for 70 years --
until the appearance of Galileo.
Bruno had no such luck; when he publicly defended
Copernicus, the Inquisition arrested him, tortured and burned
him at the stake.
Galileo, often called "the Father of Modern Science," was
the first astronomer to claim actual evidence that the earth was
not the center of the universe, but revolved around the
sun. For this, Galileo came under intense criticism and
persecution from the Church. Pope Urban VIII personally gave the
order in 1633 that Galileo, then an old man of 70, should be
threatened with torture if he did not renounce the heresy that
the earth revolved around the sun. Under repeated threats of
torture, Galileo finally renounced his beliefs. He was then
placed under house arrest, and not freed even after he went
blind. Technically, the Catholic Church never convicted Galileo
of heresy (only a "vehement suspicion of heresy") but it did
make clear that the "heresy" in question was defined as the
belief that the earth rotated around the sun. And, to leave
absolutely no doubt about how completely it condemned the ideas
of Galileo, the Church censored and prohibited all books
supporting his scientific findings for over 200 years. This
censorship was placed in the Index of Prohibited Books,
which was personally signed by every pope who renewed it.
Protestants would be mistaken in thinking this is a Catholic
embarrassment only. Every Protestant church before 1800 rose in
bitter opposition to the "atheistic" findings of Galileo.
Campanella was tortured seven times by the Inquisition
for a number of heresies, one of which was writing Defense of
Galileo.
Rene Descartes, alarmed by the Inquisition's
persecution of Galileo, delayed his plans to publish The
World, a book that agreed with Galileo's views. Later he
wrote Meditations on First Philosophy, which introduced
the idea that truth can be discovered only through scientific
investigation and the scientific method. This earned the
hostility of the Church, and their persecution caused Descartes
much suffering. This great philosopher, who is famous for
attempting a logical proof of God's existence, was called an
atheist, and his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited
Books. Protestant theologians in his resident Holland wanted
him tortured and put to death.
Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Edmond Halley
were pioneers in describing the orbits of celestial bodies like
comets and planets. The orderly laws of nature they described
contradicted the Church's belief that comets were thrown in
anger from the right hand of God, or that they portended
disaster and war. For over a hundred years the Church argued
against them -- to describe how heated, bitter and personal this
debate grew in a single paragraph is impossible. But Halley
secured the final victory by accurately predicting the return of
the comet that now bears his name. All three would have been
brought before the Inquisition had they not been Protestant.
Isaac Newton kept his true religious beliefs secret, for
fear of persecution, until literally his dying day. He privately
rejected his native Anglican Church at about age 30, convinced
that its teachings about Christ's divinity and the existence of
a Trinity were a fraud. He instead accepted Arianism, a 4th
century Christian heresy. Only on his deathbed did he reveal his
true beliefs by rejecting the Anglican sacrament. (2) Many
Christians opposed his scientific findings as well, for everyone
had previously believed that God actively and frequently
intervened in the ordinary events of the universe. Christians
charged that he "took from God that direct action on his works
so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to
material mechanism," and that he "substituted gravitation for
Providence."
Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, one of the more
colorful scientists in history, was the first to study fossils
and suggest that life forms had changed in the past. The
proto-version of evolution earned him the enmity the Church,
which forced him to resign from his Sorbonne University position
and recant his views. The Church then humiliated him by
publishing his recantation.
William Buckland, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, and
Adam Sedgewick were all 19th century Christian geologists
who originally set out to prove the story of creation and Noah's
Flood. But despite their best attempts to reconcile their
discoveries with the Bible, their findings kept pointing in the
other direction: namely, the earth was several billion years
old, not 6,000. One by one, they recanted their belief in the
literal interpretation of Genesis and accepted the findings of
modern geology. For their intellectual honesty, they came under
terrific attack from the Church, which hurled epithets like
"infidel," "impugner of the sacred record," and "assailant of
the volume of God." Their geology was condemned as "a dark art,"
"dangerous and disreputable," "a forbidden province," "infernal
artillery" and "an awful evasion of the testimony of
revelation."
Robert Chambers created a major scandal in 1844 when he
published an anonymous best-selling book entitled The
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The book
contained the blasphemous suggestion that an orderly progression
in the changes of fossils indicated that species themselves had
evolved. Religious leaders demanded to learn the identity of the
author and denounced the book in the angriest terms possible.
The ensuing controversy proved that Chambers had made the
correct decision to publish anonymously.
Charles Darwin knew that his revolutionary theories on
natural selection would invite the full fury of the Christian
world. He therefore delayed publishing his theory for over 20
years, agonizing over the decision of whether or not to publish.
His hand was forced in 1858, when he learned that the naturalist
Alfred Wallace was about to publish the same theory. His fears
proved true -- the reaction from the Church was shock,
disappointment and anger. The world-wide attacks on his
character, theories and personal life are common knowledge now,
but he was saved from physical harm for two reasons. First,
nearly the entire scientific community was quick to see the
soundness of his theories, and rallied immediately to his
defense. Second, the age of the Inquisition and other
torture-based persecutions had finally passed.
Bertrand Russell found that Christian persecution exists
even in the 20th century. One of the greatest of modern
philosophers, Russell angered many Christians with his essay,
Why I am not a Christian. And they exacted their revenge in
1940, when Russell accepted an appointment at the College of the
City of New York. The Christian community launched a furious and
protracted campaign to prevent the appointment, printing
slanderous accusations of homosexuality, child molestation,
public nudity and lechery. (This, for his mildly liberal views
on sex, which would be considered tame by today's standards.)
Even New York's highest political officials joined the assault,
calling him a "dog" who should be "tarred and feathered and
driven out of the country." Christians sued in court to prevent
Russell's appointment, and in a trial filled with legal howlers,
Russell was barred from teaching in New York State -- in a word,
censored. (3)
The above examples are only the highpoints of this history. To
see just how consistently and bitterly the Church opposed
hundreds of lesser scientists, one should read Andrew White's
The Warfare Of Science With Theology.
The social sciences
The Church has not only been proven wrong time and again in
the natural sciences. It has also erred repeatedly in the social
sciences. Consider the following examples:
For 1,500 years, the Christian empire was a slave-owning and
slave-trading empire, with popes and their bishops writing the
rules over what constituted "just and unjust slavery." Monarchs
routinely reported to the pope for permission to practice new
forms of slavery, such as Indian or African slavery; indeed, the
first African slave market in Europe was opened by papal decree.
True, all societies and cultures have practiced slavery, but the
Christian empire was the first to systematize it, mass-produce
it, and make it a major part of an international economy. No
other slave empire came close to its sheer size and brutality.
Scholars estimate that at least 10 million Africans died on the
horrific slave ship voyages to America alone, and another 60
million once they arrived.
Protestant as well as Catholic slave-owners defended their
actions from the pages of the Bible, claiming that Negroes were
condemned to slavery because they were supposedly descendants of
Caanan, whom God cursed in Genesis 9. In fact, most of the
world's bitter debate about slavery occurred in Biblical terms.
The first opposition to slavery came from the Quaker church, and
the issue would eventually split four American churches into
Northern and Southern factions. But the most relentlessly
pro-slavery institution was the Roman Catholic Church. It was
not until after the American Civil War, when the world's
navies had already shut down the slave trade, that the Catholic
Church finally abandoned its idea of "just and unjust" slavery,
issuing its first condemnation of all slavery in 1888.
(4)
The Church also condemned Jews for rejecting and killing Christ,
and proceeded to persecute Jews for over a thousand years. From
the 5th to 18th centuries, a major event involving the
slaughter, persecution or expulsion of thousands of Jews
occurred every decade. (5) Modern anti-Semitism, which
culminated in the Holocaust of 6 million Jews, has its roots in
the Church's long tradition of Jewish persecution. The fact is,
Nazi Germany did not have one original idea. All of their
philosophies came from anti-Semites of past centuries, much of
it from the Christian Church. Indeed, when Hitler (who was
raised a Catholic, but later became an atheist) became
Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he met with the German Catholic
leadership and openly identified with their anti-Semitism.
Historian Guenter Lewy writes:
On 26 April 1933 Hitler had a
conversation with Bishop Berning and Monsignor Steinmann [the
Catholic leadership in Germany]. The subject was the common
fight against liberalism, Socialism and Bolshevism, discussed in
the friendliest terms. In the course of the conversation Hitler
said that he was only doing to the Jews what the church had done
to them over the past fifteen hundred years. The prelates did
not contradict him. (6)
Medieval
Christians had forced Jews to identify themselves by wearing the
yellow "Badge of Shame;" the Nazis did likewise by making them
wear the Star of David. Medieval Christians accused Jews of a
secret international conspiracy to take over the world by
poisoning Christian wells with the Black Death; the Nazis also
accused the Jews of secretly plotting to take over the world
through international Jewish finance. Christians during the
Spanish Inquisition taught that the Jews were naturally inferior
due to their mala sangra, or "bad blood;" the Nazis
taught that the Jews were genetically inferior and subhuman.
Even the death machine of Auschwitz found its predecessor in the
death machine of the Inquisition, which systematically and
indiscriminately tortured and burned Jews by the tens of
thousands, for no other reason than they were Jews. Today, the
white hoods and the crosses of the Ku Klux Klan are taken from
14th century Christian history, when Christians adopted these
icons to slaughter the Jews who were supposedly responsible for
spreading the Black Death. (7)
As for women in Christian Europe, they were considered chattel
-- no less a man's possession than his ox or plow -- and it was
often legal in many provinces to beat a wife if she displeased
her husband. In Christian literature and doctrine, penned by
both pope and saint alike, there is a long and uniform tradition
of hatred for women. Just one of countless examples is Odo of
Cluny's famous statement that "to embrace a woman is to embrace
a sack of manure." Christian misogyny (both Catholic and
Protestant) reached its peak during the witch-hunts of the 16th
and 17th centuries, when over 110,000 women were tried for the
crime of witchcraft. Most trials included brutal torture to
secure a confession. Some 60,000 were executed, most of them
burned at the stake. (8)
The Church also declared its hostility to sex from the very
beginning, in contrast to all the other world's religions, which
view sex as a great blessing from God. Even ancient Judaism had
relatively liberal views on sex, allowing sex between anyone as
long as it was not with someone else's wife, a close relative,
or a member of the same sex. But when Christianity spread into
the Greek world, it absorbed the then-current philosophy of
Greek Stoicism, which argued that sex was a great evil. The
Church Father Origen even castrated himself so as to avoid
temptation. Angry denunciations of sex filled the writings of
the Church Fathers; their diatribes set the trajectory of
Christian attitudes towards sex for the next two millennia. Some
announced in public that they would no longer have sex with
their wives. Women were portrayed as sex-starved animals who
lured otherwise pure and chaste Christian men to their doom. It
doesn't take a modern psychologist to recognize that these men
were unwittingly describing themselves. (9)
Christianity also proved to be the world's greatest warring
religion, launching more wars of aggression than any other
religion in history. In fact, until recent times, every war in
Western history was waged in the name of God. The peak of the
Christian wars was the Crusades, when Catholic clerics would
preach from town to town, whipping up hatred and hysteria among
impoverished serfs against the "infidels" occupying the Holy
Land. The Crusaders convinced many peasants to drop their hammer
and plows on the spur of the moment and embark on a completely
uncertain journey to an unknown place a thousand miles away.
Along the way, the frenzied mob murdered, looted and raped all
the Jews they found. Once they reached the Holy Land, they
slaughtered the infidel until the blood flowed up to "the knees
of their horses." (10) Popes repeated these Crusades for four
centuries. It is a sign of how much the Lord blessed these
Crusades that by the time of the Reformation in the 16th
century, the Muslim forces had driven into the heart of Europe.
When it came to law and order, Christian Europe was committed to
the severe punishment of criminals; it tried to force people
into moral behavior on pain of death. Stealing sheep (a crime
usually prompted by starvation) was punished by hanging. In the
New World, the Puritans obsession with punishing and humiliating
criminals in public was not much of an exaggeration over the Old
World approach. It is interesting to note, however, that this
zero tolerance for crime did nothing to solve Europe's massive
crime problem. Highway brigands were so numerous that it was
actually considered dangerous to travel between cities. And
Puritan records show that they still had to deal with extensive
crime, some as outrageous as barnyard sodomy, despite the fact
many such crimes carried a certain death sentence. (11)
Modern social science has resulted in many moral advances over
these policies, which were advocated at the highest levels of
the Church for some 1,500 years. Both Catholics and Protestants
wrote libraries of books justifying these horrific social
policies, and rose in outrage against anyone who dared challenge
them.
Christian apologetics
Christians have gone to great lengths to develop a set of
arguments defending themselves from what would otherwise be a
damning indictment of history.
One is Cardinal Baronius' famous remark that "the Bible teaches
us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." But this is
demonstrably false. From the writers of the Old Testament to the
popes and prophets of the modern Christian Church, the authors
of Judeo-Christianity have attempted to explain just about
everything that piqued their curiosity. This ranged from disease
(a possession of devils) to the earth's origins (a six-day
Creation week), from rain (an opening of water windows in the
sky) to the arrangement of planets (hung like ornaments from the
giant tent covering that formed the earth's sky). These
explanatory efforts were real enough that Church elders could
feel threatened by the appearance of rival scientific theories.
Baronius' often-quoted remark is both historically and
Biblically incorrect.
Another defense is that the Church cannot be blamed for
everything done in its name. Granted, humans are not perfect,
but one would certainly expect the Church leadership to be more
divinely guided than the rest of us. The fact that popes and
saints alike could promote slavery for 1,500 years without a
single overt correction from God strongly suggests that they did
not enjoy the access to him that they boasted.
And this highlights the central problem with Christian
apologetics. If the Church were truly the source of All Truth,
then it would have been on the cutting edge of science,
not the persecutors of it. Instead of a vast field of
theology entitled "apologetics," there should be something like
"celebritics," a field celebrating all the scientific
vindications of the Bible. But this field doesn't exist, and
that is something else the apologists have to defend.
Endnotes:
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all history concerning the
Church's conflict with the natural sciences comes from Andrew
White, The Warfare of Science with Theology (1895). This
excellent and exhaustive work, whose scholarship has stood the
test of time (and been enlarged by modern scholars), can be
found online at
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/andrew_white/Andrew_White.html.
2. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest, (Cambridge, 1980).
3. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, and other
essays on religion and related subjects (1957).
4. This history of slavery is based on the following sources:
Forest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., 1990); John H. Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr.,
From Slavery to Freedom, 6th ed. (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1988); John F. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic
Church (London: Barry Rose Publishers, 1975); David M.
Reimers, White Protestantism and the Negro (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1965); H. Shelton Smith, In His
Image, But... (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972).
5. For a comprehensive timeline of anti-Semitic atrocities that
span the last 2,000 years, see Heinrich H. Graetz, History of
the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1898), 5 vols.
6. Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
(London and New York) 1964, p. 50ff.
7. Hoods and crosses: Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant
Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine)
1978, p. 113.
8. De Lamar Jensen, Reformation Europe, 2nd
ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1992), p. 392.
9. For a horrific look at the sexual history of the Christian
Church, see Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman
(London: Elm Tree Books, 1986); James A. Brundage, Law, Sex,
and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987); Geoffrey Parrinder, Sex
in the World's Religions (New York: Oxford University Press,
1980); Rosemary R. Ruether, New Woman, New Earth (New
York: The Seabury Press, 1975); Reay Tannahill, Sex in
History, rev. ed. (London: Cardinal Books, 1980 and 1989).
10. Quoted in Malcolm Hay, The Roots of Christian
Anti-Semitism (New York: Freedom Library Press) 1981, p. 27.
11. John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to
1649 (Boston) 1853, II, p. 73.
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