Month: January 2019

Limited Beginnings with Greek Science
Western science owes its origins to early Greek civilization. It was the Greek belief that nature is undergirded by a rational order (Logos) and is therefore inherently intelligible which laid the germinal seeds that led eventually to the development of modern science. As H.D.F. Kitto writes, “Here we meet a permanent feature of Greek thought: the universe, both the physical and the moral universe, must be not only rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple.” /1/ Hence, it is to the ancient Greeks that we owe the beginnings of mathematics, astronomy, physics and biology. Continue reading “Christianity and the Rise of Modern Science – Science and Christianity Part 2/6”

Supplementary Reading for the Earlier Posts:
Is there a War between Science and Religion? – Science and Christianity: Part 1
How the Myth of Warfare between Science and Christianity Began in Victorian England

MYTH
With the decline of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages, geography as a 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 Garden of Eden somewhere up country, from which flowed the four Rivers of Paradise. —Boise Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance (1955)

The authority of the Fathers, and the prevailing belief that the Scriptures contain the sum of all knowledge, discouraged any investigation of Nature . . . the question of the shape of the earth was finally settled by three sailors, Columbus, Da Gama, and above all, by Ferdinand Magellan.—John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874)

QUESTION
Did people in the Middle Ages think that the world was flat? Certainly the writers quoted above would make us think so. As the story goes, people living in the “Dark Ages” were so ignorant (or so deceived by Catholic priests) that they believed the earth was flat.

DOCUMENTED HISTORICAL FACT
But the reality is more complex than either of these stories. Very few people throughout the Middle Ages believed that the world was flat Continue reading “Did the Medieval Church Teach that the Earth Was Flat?”

I. YES! for Jerry Coyne: “Yes, there is a War between Science and Religion.”

Opposing methods for discerning truth
My [Coyne] argument runs like this. I’ll construe “science” as the set of tools we use to find truth about the universe, with the understanding that these truths are provisional rather than absolute. These tools include observing nature, framing and testing hypotheses, trying your hardest to prove that your hypothesis is wrong to test your confidence that it’s right, doing experiments and above all replicating your and others’ results to increase confidence in your inference…

The conflict between science and faith, then, rests on the methods they use to decide what is true, and what truths result: These are conflicts of both methodology and outcome. Continue reading “Is there a War between Science and Religion? – Science and Christianity: Part 1/6”