Fact: The Church has persecuted or opposed almost every great scientist of the last 500 years.
Primary Source:
A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (2 Volumes, 1898) by Andrew D. White.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.
more, full discussion here:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-sciencechristianity.htm 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
