Science was developing in Europe as early as the High Middle Ages. Buridan and Oeresmus, professors at the Sorbonne, anticipated Newton's 1st Law of Motion as early as the 1300s. The view that the universe is fully ordered and ruled by law is an indispensible foundation for the advance of science, and it also happens to be part of Christian philosophy. It is a great coincidence to the Militantly Secular that science developed in the West despite the malevolent presence of the Christian superstition; to those who study the history it is no surprise that science did in fact develop in the Christian West.
The full story of the Galileo controversy is not the simplistic tale constantly repeated as fact. Galileo himself was a Catholic and saw no conflict between his science and his religion. His Vatican critics were neo-Platonists as to cosmology. Plato makes the Earth the center of the universe, it has to do with man being the most important part of creation and therefore necessarily at its center. It's the same reasoning that governed painting of that time, the most important elements were the biggest and most central and so forth. Kepler and Copernicus did their work under the protection of Protestant princes in northern Europe. The Vatican cosmologists couldn't stop them. Copernicus, of course, wrote a defense of Galileo.
The roster of those who have been Christian and doers of science is long and distinguished, but not too long for the militantly antireligious to always have an excuse. 'They had to pretend to believe', or they 'didn't actually believe', or 'they subscribed to a view of Two Kinds of Truth', and on and on. It always pays to bet that they can't produce anything to support their claims. There is no philosophical conflict between science and religion, but it constantly gets invoked as A Great Truth. Most of the halfwits who parrot this couldn't distinguish epistemology from proctology. This is one of the great frauds of what passes for intellectual life today. It's much easier to subscribe to the "everybody knows" school of knowledge. Alan Bloom wrote a book treating some of this a few years back, The Closing of the American Mind. |
