The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine
(And the Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages*)Commentary by Jim Walker
Originated: 22 May 2007
Additions/corrections: 20 Jan. 2010Over the years I have received several letters from Christians attempting to salvage their religion by claiming that Christianity established modern science and medicine. Without Christianity, they claim, we would not have science, medicine or hospitals. Almost invariably, they mention scientists such as Isaac Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Boyle, Haller, Euler, Vesalius, or others who believed in a Christian god. Moreover, some love to report that the Church continues to finance and encourage experimental science, including the Vatican Observatory as one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world, and the Trinity College at the University of Cambridge which claims many alumni scientists. Therefore, from these examples (don't you see?) Christianity established modern science.
Nothing about this arrogant Christian claim could stand further from the truth.
Please understand that this kind of Christian apologetic argument fails for several reasons which fall into the trap of several fallacies including: appeal to ignorance (failing to understand the history of Christianity in how it did little to inspire science during the Dark Ages); confusing correlation with causation (just because a scientist accepts religion doesn't mean his science derived from religion); and non sequiturs (it doesn't follow that just because a few scientists believed in God that science resulted from it). The myth also spreads through the bandwagon fallacy (appealing to the popular notion that Christianity began modern science), and confirmation bias (list all the Christian scientists, but exclude their rejection of dogmas that conflicted with their science).
Just because Christians did scientific work has nothing to do with the founding of science. Not only does it not follow, but science existed long before Christianity, practiced by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Nor did science derive from the pagan religions as even then, scientists sometimes held views contrary to the prevailing religions. The ancient theological opponents did not have the encompassing institutional power as did Christianity during the Dark Ages. The historian Richard Carrier observes, "In contrast, the groups that opposed science in classical antiquity were small, few, rare, and ultimately powerless. That is exactly the opposite of what happened under Christianity." During the medieval period the little science that did occur progressed with little religious influence or, in most cases, in spite of Christianity, but not because of it.
From its very beginning, the Church has served as a stumbling block against scientific progress. By the time Theodosius proclaimed Nicene Christianity a state religion in 380 CE, progressive science had already stopped. Richard Carrier (through personal correspondence) puts it this way: "Even pagans, though cherishing their scientific heritage (unlike Christians who generally did not), and applying that heritage more avidly than their Christian peers, appear to have given up on advancing science. And then pagans slowly died out, leaving only Christians who were even less interested in such advancement or how to achieve it." Up until this time, Greek and Roman science and medicine stood at the pinnacle of reasoned thought. Although the Christians conserved their own biblical and religious exegesis, they did little to conserve pagan scientific writings to the same degree. The little that the Christians did save just barely survived. As Kenneth Clark wrote, "What with prejudice and destruction, it's surprising that the literature of pre-Christian antiquity was preserved at all. And in fact it only just squeaked through. In so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth." We owe the real foundations of science to the ancient Greeks and Romans, not to the Christians.
A Christian mob murdered the mathematician and philosophy teacher, Hypatia, in 415 CE. I use this date to mark the beginning of the Dark Ages, and its end at the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century because of the almost total lack of progressive science done during this period (most scholars today refer to the Dark Ages as the Early Middle Ages. See notes below). Hypatia's death serves as a convenient marking point, not because she died as the last pagan (pagan persecution lasted for centuries after) but because she lived as the last non-Christian of any merit that would teach science in the Western Christian world. Moreover, around this time, the Western Empire had begun to die. The Renaissance marks the approximate time when science began its catch-up with the ancient pagans.
As John Romer wrote in Testament, "As the Western Empire died, it left behind it empty cities with marble ruins lying like great skeletons, at their centres. Slowly the population was transformed into separate and modest nations of small farms and savage armies. There was little international trade and almost total illiteracy." Although Christianity did not cause the fall of the Roman Empire, its reliance on religion did little to improve conditions necessary for free scientific inquiry.
When Christians took over Europe, they abandoned many of the accomplishments of their predecessors. The great Roman aqueducts represented one of the greatest engineering feats of the ancient world that provided clean water to cities and industrial sites for centuries. The wonderful Roman roads once provided a way for transport throughout the Roman Empire. When the Christians took over they no longer supported these great public services and the aqueducts, sewers, and roads became ruins -- monuments to the past glory of Rome.
As Ruth Hurmence Green once wrote, "There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as The Dark Ages," yet the Church did little in regards to science. Although the Church educated their male clergy, in Western Europe the majority of women, the poor, and and serfs remained ignorant. The first schools didn't appear in Europe until around 400 years after the beginning of the Dark Ages. King Charlemagne started the schools, and over time the schools fused with the church to become cathedral schools, but these schools taught mostly to male students for careers in the church, not for scientific investigation into nature. Degree-granting universities didn't appear until centuries later.
Although the Church did not initially purposely set out to destroy scientific works, the atmosphere of faith over reason stymied much scientific thought. The few Christians that did any science during the early Dark Ages had little or no impact on later Renaissance scientists.
Many Christians believe that Christianity invented the first hospitals in the name of Christian charity, but the history of medical care betrays this belief. The earliest known institutions that claimed to provide cure came from the ancient pagans, long before Christianity. Albert Lyons writes, "Among the first Roman institutions to be dispensed with were those of law and medicine."
The earliest mention of cure centers came from Egyptians where they aimed to provide medical care in their temples. The Greeks also used their temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius where they admitted the sick (the medical profession still uses the Rod of Ascelepius, a serpent wound around a staff, as its medical symbol. The serpent, of course, represents Satan in Christian culture). The ancient Roman medical men had a fundamental understanding of medicine and used various surgical instruments and medicines that looked surprisingly similar to that of the late 19th century. The Romans created hospitals called valetudinaria for the care of sick slaves, gladiators and soldiers at around 100 BCE. Some credit the Sinhalese (Sri Lankans) as responsible for the introduction of the first dedicated hospitals (Sivikasotthi-Sala) to the world at around 4 BCE. The first teaching hospital came from the Persian Empire where physicians taught students, at the Academy of Gundishapur in the 6th and 7th centuries.
The first Christian medieval hospitals in the West conducted their institutions more through ecclesiastical means rather than medical. They did little to cure the sick by trying to advance medicine. They used these hospitals more as hostels (where the etymology of "hospital" came from), and almshouses for the poor. At their best Christian matrons used simple pagan folk methods such as simple foods, herbs, washing of wounds, etc. Dark Age Christian hospitals represented religious institutions, run mostly by nuns or monks, not by trained physicians (except for Eastern hospitals which, according to Richard Carrier, "were more similar to Asclepiea, with religious methods and hospice care combined with a few attending doctors applying pagan science of yore, even surgery." In spite of the honorable goal of treating the sick and poor, almost nothing happed to improve medical care. At its very best, Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.
During the Black Death in the 1300s, the Christian masses panicked and looked for supernatural solutions. They thought the plague came as an act of God, not nature. The Church could do nothing to fight the plague and, as a result, the people eventually began to question the ability of the Church to solve problems. This inspired William Langland, in a poem composed during the plague, to write:
"In religious orders and in all the realm among rich and poor
That prayers have no power to hinder these plagues.
For God is deaf nowadays and deigns not to hear us
And for our guilt grinds good men all up to death."In "The Black Death," Philip Ziegler writes: "The picture one forms to explain this seeming ingratitude on the part of the people towards their priests is that of a clergy doing its daily work but with reluctance and some timidity; thereby incurring the worst of the danger but forfeiting the respect which it should have earned. Add to this a few notorious examples of priests deserting their flocks and of conspicuous courage on the part of certain wandering friars, and some idea can be formed of why the established Church emerged from the Black Death with such diminished credit." The historian, John Kelly also agrees with Ziegler: "Despite the losses sustained by the clergy, the plague weakened the authority and prestige of the institutional Church." The Church's failure to solve the plague opened the eyes of the people to look elsewhere for solutions instead of from prayers and priestly sermons. In, A distant mirror: the calamitous 14th century, Barbara Tuchman writes, "By a contrary trend, education was stimulated by concern for the survival of learning, which led to a spurt in the founding of universities. Notably the Emperor Charles IV, an intellectual, felt keenly the cause of 'precious knowledge which the mad rage of pestilential death has stifled throughout the wide realms of the world." He founded the University of Prague in the plague year of 1348 and issued imperial accreditation to five other universalities. . ."
As for those who expressed heretical thoughts contrary to Church dogma, things did not fair well for scientists. The early 1500s brought the Protestant Reformation along with wars of religion in Germany and France. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities reasoned that control of the press coordinated between Church and State could prevent the spread of heresy. The first Roman blacklisting occurred in 1559 under the direction of Pope Paul IV and entire works of some 550 authors got on the Roman index, including authors of subjects ranging from botany, medicine, geography, and cosmography. Christians burned the priest Giordano Bruno to death in 1600 for the charge of holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith. Bruno praised Copernicus for establishing a scientific explanation for heliocentrism and published dialogues on the subject. (By the way, The Greek thinker, Aristarchus of Samos, developed the first heliocentric theory around 270 BCE, not Copernicus as many Christians falsely believe.) Although the Church did not specifically kill Bruno for his scientific theories, his religious heresy, along with his astronomical theories fell prey to the results of religious dogma. In 1603, Bruno's works appeared on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books). The Prohibitorum aimed to protect the faith and morals of the faithful by preventing the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors, although it also contained scientific works by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal and others. (Click here for a list of authors and works on the Prohibitorum). It took until 1966 before Pope Paul VI finally abolished the Prohibitorum. Regardless of how these blacklists ultimately affected science or not, it shows that the Church had little interest in free enquiry, especially when it conflicted with Church dogma.During a Roman Catholic Inquisition, they imprisoned Galileo for his heretical beliefs of a heliocentric solar system and forced him, under threat of torture, to recant. In spite of his recantation, Galileo had to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. Isaac Newton studied occult religion in secret. If some of the Anglican Christian authorities had discovered this, they would have labeled him a heretic (Newton also studied the pseudo-scientific practice of alchemy), but Newton's scientific work stood separate from his religious investigations. And how revealing to realize that although Newton made great advancements in science, not one of his religious investigations bore the slightest fruit, not to mention the valuable time he wasted that might have gone further to scientific advancement.
Science comes not from ideology or religion; it derives from natural human curiosity and the will to know, not the will to believe. Humans have an evolved innate built-in curiosity and science cannot survive without it. Even our early paleolithic ancestors knew how to make tools, predict the path of the sun through the celestial sphere and made star maps as depicted in the Lascaux cave paintings. You just can't have free scientific inquiry without curiosity. But humans also have the capacity to fool themselves and to believe without evidence (faith). The conflict between natural curiosity, skepticism and faith exists to this day.
The Old Testament starts with the condemnation of eating from the the tree of knowledge (Gen. 2:17) and the term "Doubting Thomas" derived from the New Testament (John 20:24-29) refers to one that refuses to believe something without direct evidence. Church fathers expanded on these unscientific biblical ideas.
Some of the most influential early church fathers, not only did not inspire curiosity, in many cases, they reviled it. Peter Harrison claims, "From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice." Early church fathers such as Tertullian despised Greek philosophy, and issued warnings against curiosity. He thought that curiosity ought not range beyond the rule of faith; restless curiosity, the feature of heresy. The Christian apologist Lactantius wrote, "when God revealed the truth to man, He wished us only to know those things which it concerned man to know for the attainment of life; but as to the things which related to a profane and eager curiosity He was silent, that they might be secret. Why, then, do you inquire into things which you cannot know, and if you knew them you would not be happier." Augustine also warned against the dangers of curiosity in his Confessions, "For over and above that lust of the flesh which lies in the delight of all our senses and pleasures--whose slaves are wasted unto destruction as they go far from you--there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delights in the body, but of making experiments with the body's aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge." Although these views did not represent the views of all the clergy, it certainly could not have helped develop an atmosphere of free inquiry. A common view of the church held that scriptural knowledge trumped knowledge gained through the senses. Augustine, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, thought of scriptural knowledge as vastly superior to knowledge gained by other means but he worried that Christians might express absurd opinions on cosmological issues, thus provoking ridicule, so he thought Christians should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation. Although the medieval Christians did not condemn scientific investigation, they simply thought it inferior to knowledge gained through God. The whole of education throughout the middle ages (and only the late middle ages) appears nothing more than a catch-up with what the ancient pagans had long known. And when this attitude later met with pure non-religious scientific investigation, scientists had to fight, tooth-and-claw, against Christian dogma to get their ideas accepted and one still had to live as a Christian believer (pretend or not) or else fear ostracism, or ridicule.
Revealingly, the scientists that Christians usually cite, lived during the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment when the Church began to lose its power and the populace began to wake up from its religious stupor. None of them (except for a very few), lived during the Dark Ages. If the foundation of science depended on Christianity, then why-oh-why didn't science develop and flourish during the Dark Ages at the height of Christian power and influence? They had centuries to invent or advance astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics, but they didn't. Why not? Because to do good science, you need an environment that encourages scientific thought, and the Church did little in this regard.
It came from scientific and enlightenment minds that influenced religion to bend its ways to concede to science, not the other way around. The Renaissance and the period of the Enlightenment came as a result from people beginning to reject certain religious beliefs. Renaissance means 'rebirth' and represented a cultural movement based on humanism to regain ancient classical sources that the Church had long suppressed or ignored. Moreover, the Renaissance inspired new ways of thinking about, not only science, but literature, philosophy, art, politics, and religion. The Age of Enlightenment (beginning approximately around the 18th century) represented the time when reason trumped religion as the primary source for thought. It resulted in the first concepts of secularism and the blasphemous idea that one does not need religion at all for workable investigations into nature.
The Church also frowned on the practice of alchemy thus chemistry, without which the understanding of matter could not have happened. Although Democritus first theorized about the nature of atoms in 460 BCE, it took until the 1800s before John Dalton performed experiments about the nature of atomic matter. Astronomy got limited to calendric events, and any discovery that went against the Bible's version of the cosmos could not have occurred. Natural history (biology) could not develop because any thought that went against Genesis would put any researcher in conflict with the Church. In the Dark Ages, math did not develop past that of the ancients and any new developments in mathematics got borrowed from other cultures. Geometry, trigonometry, fractions, division, multiplication, decimals, and algebra developed long before the Dark Ages. The introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe came to Leonardo of Pisa (also known as Fibonacci, famous for the Fibonacci numbers) but he did little to advance theories of mathematics. Although many cite Fibonacci for the Fibonacci sequence, he did not discover it as ancient Indians knew it well before the Christian Europeans. Even the Greeks developed the precursors to calculus. Arguably, the first original science done by Christians didn't occur until the beginning of the Renaissance by the Oxford Calculators, some 1,400 years after the beginning of Christianity!
Recently scholars recovered an ancient text called The Archimedes Palimpsest, a codex written by Archimedes that revealed that the Greeks knew about infinity (both infinities and infinitesimals) long before the advent of Christianity. Ironically a monk had used the Archimedes papers to create a prayer book. A monk (or monks) scraped off the Archimedes text and wrote prayers in Greek