History double major rant incoming because I have no where else to post this.
Studying history has made me angry at my old self and so many people who hold the view point that religion held science back in the middle ages. The middle ages weren't a by product of Christianity but rather a byproduct of the collapse of Rome and losing thousands of years of knowledge with it. and the catholic church didn't repress science in the middle ages; They're the reason so much knowledge survived the collapse of the roman empire and kept it around. Plus bishops/priests/monks were actively perusing science in the middle ages but many new age intellectuals love to say that Rome is the enemy of reason/scientific progress. I always cringe at that one graph of 'here look! If it weren't for Christians we'd have space elevators now! hurrrr' so much intellectual dishonesty. And it makes me angry because this is a common view point among every single person I've ever asked about the church in the middle ages.
And it blows my mind to this day people will accept that the church hated science when it's not even true. And so many people hold this view its scary. All they need to disprove this is a simple medieval studies course and maybe things might start changing.
/end angry history nerd raeg
Angry history nerd agreement
I hate these people so much. It's inaccurate and can be disproven with basic f***ing research. Hell, I'm an apatheist (I literally don't give a damn if God exists or not) who's had periods of militant atheism, and even I can admit the Church has preserved a ton of knowledge over the years. The whole 'let's fight people who challenge our orthodoxy' thing didn't even become a thing until the Protestant Revolution started destabilizing the Catholic Church's views and power. Religion and science don't have to be opposed, just look at some of the things Pope Francis has said about evolution and the Big Bang.
Bloody 'Dung Ages' ideas infecting popular culture...
Yeah except no.
What I see here is a lot of conflation and confusion, and we have different attitudes emerging at different times.
The space elevator idea doesn't work because it presumes that we have an unbroken development of empiricism from Aristotle to now that was delayed by the emergence of christianity. That is only partly true. The simple reality is that for all their cleverness, the ancients had major conceptual hurdles to overcome - and they didn't. Mostly for historical reason. Aristotle's school went into decline - they went from research to just commentary (oh hey just like a lot of university programs nowadays) and then eventually just disappeared. Also, unfortunately for everyone involved, platonism and neo-platonism found a lot of favour and were more active - and endured. Ancient philosophy, today, is just a history of platonism and neo-platonism. Aristotle and the pre-socratics, well some of them, as well as the geometers of the ancient world, were the closest thing we had to scientists.
And then you add the christian element.
Read any Church father and you will find a virulent anti-pagan knowledge tract. These people hated the philosophers and the naturalism of Greek and Roman cultures. Justinian did close the philosophical schools. Granted those schools were largely neo-platonic, so who cares. We would be better off without their mystical mathematics.
To then say that the Church conserved this greco-roman heritage is highly dubious. What actually happened is that the church was also composed of a lot of roman aristocrats (and greek aristocrats in the case of Byzantium) that did not share the same zeal for destruction of the pagan culture. They pushed for a "christian interpretation" of the classics so that they would not have to choose, as the saying went apparently, "between Christ and Cicero". You find the same attitude with the scholars of Baghdad. Intellectuals, impressed by the thinking of the ancients, tried to read into them legitimization of their worldviews. They conserved, but whatever they could not fit in their worldview was discarded, censured, or simply neglected. To treat the church as safekeeper of the tradition is nonsensical. It kept what it thought grounded it's claims or what classical educated church clergies were able to "concord" with scriptures. In other words, ancient knowledge and their enduring authority were used to buttress church dogma. Anything that fell outside was discarded.
As such, to say that because of the church we are not on Mars IS somewhat disingenuous, so is claiming that the church kept the ball rolling.
Most of modern science has, in fact, been elaborated completely outside the context of the ancients and thanks to the rediscovery of a few text thought lost (specifically the Nature of Things of Lucretius, condemned and slandered by the Church Fathers and the Church) but kept not just in monasteries (as the usual story goes) but also private collections. The reason we are not on Mars yet, if you want to play that game, is that Francis Bacon wasn't born 2500 years ago and recognized as a genius at that time. What Bacon formulated completely annihilated the hierarchy and authority of knowledge instituted by the church which had assimilated the Aristotelian (via Aquinas) and Plato (partly through Augustine, but platonic philosophy lends itself to christian otherworldliness - whereas a text like the Illiad, the Odyssey, or even the Tragedies, don't - hence what we got in terms of those are literally pure luck. For instance, why do we have a bunch of Euripides plays? Because we found a random codex that had all the plays in alphabetical order and we found a section of that codex. Those plays are not even his best ones - they are just the plays from one letter to another.) The combination of Bacon and Descartes, primed as it where by the work of renaissance writers such as Galileo and Newton, left the world of the ancient-medieval completely behind. There is no relation between the universe described by Aristotle and the one described by the early modern philosophers, even if these philosophers, educated often by the church/church dominated universities/and always under the watchful eye of the church, still used the language of the church.
So let's make something clear here. The Church DID suppress and persecute knowledge, both passively (through censure, control of what was read) and actively (people burned, forced to recant). The Church thrives on ignorance. Paul preferred fools and madmen, and so did its creation, along with lambs and those with childlike understanding.
I come from a place where the Church actively tried to control and limit education well into the 20th century, as well as trying to keep people in the countryside, even if that meant condemning people to bare subsistence and general misery, simply because it is in such environment that it thrives. Authority through control of information and the control of thought, reinforced by the community and the threat of excommunication and guilt.
The Church does hate science. It hates anything that challenges its temporal authority and its dogma. What the church had, though, is intellectuals who pursued science despite their commitment to the church - for the simple reason that for many people there were no other options for education. But let's make something clear here - their achievements were accomplished DESPITE the church, certainly not THANKS to the church. If the lyceum was still around, these people would have had a free hand and pursued research in a way that is more akin to our modern university. Under the church, every discovery had to be subsumed to Church doctrine, justified in long introduction, demonstrated to not contradict holy writ or the authority of the local bishop.
We would already be touching the stars if Pagan Materialism and Naturalism bloomed into a proper tradition. It did not. Platonism became prevalent, it was picked up by this new sect called Christianity, which then developed it's own parallel power structure within the Roman empire, and came to dominate in the post-roman times. That Pagan Materialism and Naturalism was rediscovered during the renaissance, and developed and furthered into intellectual dynamite that led to the enlightenment and eventually 19th century and 20th century science as we know it as the ultimate, self-correcting model of knowledge creation.
You history nerds need to hit the books harder.
