In the ever-secularising West, many proudly identify as anticlerical. Christian feasts are still celebrated – we decorate the Christmas tree and stuff ourselves with Easter eggs – but we no longer know, or want to know, what we are celebrating. Nobody goes to Sunday mass anymore except for some elders – watching Netflix is way more exciting than listening to the monotonous preaching of a pastor who looks like he needs a coffin. Miracle-performing Messiahs who walk on water and resurrect from death are fairytales anyway. Religious writings such as the Bible are archaic documents full of senseless violence (except for the Quran, not a bad word about that literary pearl, please), and wearing a crucifix is now frowned upon.
Since Nietzsche has declared God is dead, atheism is on the rise. We no longer need God to answer existential questions, science will do that. Why do we exist? Why do we suffer? Where do we go when we die? Do we überhaupt go anywhere? All of these questions have, however, remained unanswered by scientists. Only quantum physicists are now beginning to unravel aspects of consciousness that mystics have speculated on for millenia.
Yet the average Westerner associates the belief in a transcending consciousness and the existence of a divine Creator with a lack of intelligence. To him, empirically demonstrable data are the only valid source of knowledge and the sole path leading to Truth. And not without reason: only of hypotheses we can perceive with our senses and test with reliable scientific methods, can we claim with absolute certainty whether or not they are valid.
Since we can’t perceive a divine being, we can only believe in it. But faith is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable guides to rational individuals who see objectivity and quantifiable data as exclusive measures. The majority of scientists prefer not to believe in things, and certainly not in a Creator, although they have no proof of the inexistence of that Creator. Believers cannot prove that God does exist, either – but that is where faith comes into play: whoever believes does not require evidence.
The western atheist is convinced that Church and science do not mix, and that these two irreconcilable antagonists have been engaged in a bitter battle since the emergence of the latter. A struggle that only ended when the Church lost its political power. One not insignificant fact, however, is being overlooked: the fact that the Catholic Church, target of postmodern ridicule, has by far been the largest disseminator of science in the Western hemisphere over the last millennium. This essay thus attempts to counterbalance the oversimplified conflict thesis of animosity between church and reason that the unbeliever is so eager to address.
This conflict thesis is mainly fueled by the backlash two historical scientists received for their revolutionary vision. Commonly accepted in the 16th century was the Aristotelian perception that Earth was immobile and the center of the universe. A Polish clerk called Nicolaus Copernicus labelled this geocentrist theory as false, and claimed Earth revolved around the sun, like all the other planets of our galaxy. This controversial thesis caught the attention of Pope Clement VII, aka Giulio de ‘ Medici, a progressive pope who was a member of one of the most influential Italian families of the Renaissance. After this initial acceptance, the heliocentric view was banned by the Church, under pressure from hysterical protests from Protestants who found it a reprehensible idea. Copernicus’ book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelistium ended up in the Index of the Forbidden Books until another pope approved it again three centuries later. Despite his controversial theory, Copernicus remained in good terms with the Church, and it was under the auspices of the Church that he made it known.
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed space with his self-made telescope and became an open supporter of Copernican heliocentrism. In 1633, the Inquisition charged him with suspected heresy. His punishment was house arrest for life and the mandatory reciting of the Psalms three times a week – a mild punishment in times when women were tortured and drowned for feeding black cats. It wasn’t until 1992 that Pope John Paul II admitted that Galileo had been wrongly accused. Seven years later, NASA honored the rebel by naming a space probe after him. Today, Galileo has already completed 34 tours around Jupiter.
Indeed, the medieval Church silenced voices if it believed they contradicted the Holy Scriptures. Yet these events must not lead to the oversimplified view that Church and science were each other’s arch enemies.To quote the historian Lawrence M. Principe: “From historical records it becomes clear that the Catholic Church was probably the only and longest lasting patron of science in the history of mankind, that many contributors to the Scientific Revolution were Catholic, and that several Catholic institutions and perspectives have exerted an extremely important influence on the growth of modern science ”.
Everything starts with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. The monks in the abbeys preserved and copied from morning dew to moonlight the astronomical, geometric, medical and philosophical knowledge of the Greeks and Romans in manuscripts. The oeuvre of the Greek thinker Aristotle in particular would play a major role in the development of science in the coming centuries.
Early medieval priests studied these manuscripts and many became, inspired by the healing miracles of Christ, doctors treating the sick. Nuns took on the role of nurses. The abbess Hildegarde von Bingen was an important motet composer, but also wrote botanical and medicinal books, including The Book of Simple Medicine and Natural History, an encyclopedia on the natural sciences. The first hospitals in Europe, such as the beautiful Hospices de Beaune in France, were thus Catholic institutions. Today, the Christian saints’ names of many modern hospitals are silent witnesses to this.
The mathematical findings of monks allowed the construction of the majestic Gothic cathedrals – an architectural revolution triggered by the urge to build houses of God that reached heaven. These spiritual skyscrapers with vaulted roofs and polychrome windows were not only places of prayer, but the first observatories to study the sun. By strategically placing primitive ‘cameras’, the incidence of light and the position of the sun were analyzed. In 1582, the Julian calendar was thus transformed into the more precise Gregorian calendar. Today, this is the worldwide official measure of time orientation.
Cathedrals were linked to scholae, educational institutions that metamorphosed over the centuries into the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, and the other numerous universities in Europe. Christian theologians there studied the translations of Aristotle’s thought and sought to reconcile their beliefs through argumentative, critical, and dialectical thinking. This is how scholasticism developed the first rational, scientific method. This was a giant leap forward in logic.
God’s creation was physical and could be understood through sensory inquiry, but God Himself could ony be found in prayer and meditation. In 1265 however, the priest Thomas Aquinas attempted to empirically prove the existence of God and came up with five proofs of God. His complete scholastic writing Summa Theologiae is considered to be the foundation of empirical thinking.
Aquinas was a Dominican, but of all the Christian orders, it was the Jesuits who contributed the most to the formation and dissemination of Western knowledge within and outside Europe. They theorised the circulation of blood, observed the surface of Jupiter, the nebula of Andromeda and the rings of Saturn. Numerous missionaries traveled to China, such as Brother Johan Schall. Because his astronomical measurements were so accurate, he was appointed chairman of the Qing Dynasty Mathematical Court, where he improved the Chinese calendar. (However, he was charged with the crime of sheltering illegal immigrants in his churches, was sentenced to incarceration, and died in prison – or how to bite the hand that feeds you knowledge.)
Harvard University’s star rating system exists today thanks to brother Pietro Angelo Secchi. Other brothers did pioneering work in meteorology, spectroscopy, geomagnetism, geophysiology, geology, and seismology. The latter is even called the Jesuit science, because their contribution was so great. In some Asian and African countries, the Jesuits established the first scientific institutes. The Belgian physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre came up with the Big Bang theory, and the Augustinian priest Gregor Mendel founded modern genetics.
The disdain of the Church by the critical atheist thus hungers for nuance: The Catholic Church, despite its censorship of controversial scientific discoveries, has for centuries been the greatest stimulus of many academic disciplines in Europe, and its missionaries have spread knowledge on other continents. Pope John Paul II wrote to the Director of the Vatican Astronomical Observatory: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.” Or, as Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, famously said:
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”