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 2007Over the years I have received several letters from Christians who attempt to salvage their religion by claiming that Christianity established modern science and medicine. Without Christianity, they claim, we would not have modern 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 these arrogant Christian claims could stand further from the truth.
Please understand that these kind of Christian apologetic arguments fail for several reasons which fall into the trap of several well known fallacies including: appeal to ignorance (failing to understand the history of Christianity in how it barred scientific thought, and in many cases still does); confusing correlation with causation (just because a scientist accepted a religion doesn't mean his science derived from it); 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 some Christians did scientific work or that the Church helped fund scientific research has nothing to do with the founding or even the advancement of science. Not only does it not follow, but the historical record shows that science progressed in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
From its very beginning, the Church has served as the largest stumbling block against scientific progress in the history of mankind. When Constantine established orthodox Christianity in 325 CE (at the Council of Nicaea), scientific investigation virtually stopped. Up until that time, Greek and Roman science and medicine stood at the pinnacle of reasoned thought. With the aimed destruction of any thought that went against religious dogma, the Christians tried to destroy every pagan and scientific literature including the great libraries of the world.
The destruction of the library of Alexandra (the greatest learning center in the world) and the murder of Hypatia by Christians in 415 CE, marked the beginning of the Dark Ages. As Ruth Hurmence Green once wrote, "There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as The Dark Ages." The Priests of Christianity kept the public from education, including the study of their own Bible. Only the hierarchy of the Church allowed education for themselves, and when their thoughts went against their own dogmas (as eventually it would have to) they barred it as heresy. It came from the Church itself that tried to destroy free scientific inquiry, even amongst its priests.
When Christianity took over Europe, scientific and engineering advancement virtually stopped. The great Roman aqueducts represented one of the greatest engineering feats of the ancient world and provided clean water to cities and industrial sites for centuries. When the Christians took over they no longer supported these great public services and the aqueducts became ruins -- monuments of the past glory of Rome. Christianity banned the Roman bath houses and bathing itself became an act of sin. The ancient Roman sewers no longer worked. For centuries after, Christians lived in filth, ignorance, and disease.
During the Black Death in the 1300s, the masses turned to the Church instead of medicine. The Church explained that the plague came as an act of God, not nature, as a punishment for sins of not obeying Church authority. The Church banned Greek and Roman medicine to fight the plague and considered it heresy. After the plague, the Church banned any formal discipline of medicine.
Christians love to 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. 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). In India, King Ashoka founded hospitals in 230 BCE, that included physicians and nursing staffs. The Romans created 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 6th and 7th centuries.
The first Christian hospitals, on the other hand, did not aim to cure the sick through scientific medicine at all, but rather to condemn or to save the sick through religious practices. They used these hospitals more as asylums to put away sinners, lepers, and the diseased to isolate them from the rest of the populace. Medieval Christian hospitals represented religious institutions, run by monks and nuns, not by trained physicians.
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! Many early heretic physicians hid their knowledge of Galen to prevent others of accusing them of heresy. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance when people began to question religious authority) did the physician Andreas Vesalius translate Galen's texts to Latin. The history of Christianity shows that it did everything in its power to suppress the advancement of medicine.
As for the scientists, Christians burned the priest Giordano Bruno to death for the charge of holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith. They imprisoned Galileo for his heretical ideas of heliocentric solar system, and rejected his science (by the way, The Greek thinker, Aristarchus, developed the first heliocentric theory in 270 BCE, not Copernicus as many Christians falsely believe). Isaac Newton studied occult religion in secret, something that Christian authorities, had they known, would have labeled him a heretic (Newton also studied the pseudo-scientific practice of alchemy), but his 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.
Recently, scholars found an ancient text written by Archimedes that revealed that the Greeks knew about the concept of infinity and calculus long before the advent of Christianity. Ironically a monk had used the Archimedes papers to create a prayer book. The monk washed out the Archimedes text and wrote supernatural nonsense in its place. The Archimedes text remained hidden for centuries until modern scientists found a way to retrieve the washed out text. Without religion hiding and destroying ancient scientific texts, imagine how different the world would look today if the Church had not suppressed, just calculus alone, hundreds of centuries before Isaac Newton published the idea in 1693.
To say that a few successful scientists happen to believe in the tenants of Christianity says nothing at all about religion supplying the fuel for science. To do so would constitute a grand non sequitur. Should I dare credit quantum physics to Nazism because of the many great scientists that came from fascist Germany that included Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Wernher von Braun, among many others, who founded their science with the help of Nazis? Of course not. Should I honor communism for post-modern science because of the great communist scientists such as Kovalev, Landau, Tsiolkovski, Kapitza, and many others? These men, nurtured in the communist belief system, financed by communism, and believed in its ideological foundations, produced great science. Have I made a case for communism or a connection between great science and communism? Of course not. Well, neither can one support the notion that scientists derived their science from Christianity.
Almost all the scientists and physicians that Christians love to tout practiced their science as heretics or did their science in secret. These scientists had to fight, tooth-and-claw, against Christian dogma to get their ideas accepted. You had to live as a Christian believer (pretend or not) in those days or else fear ostracism, or ridicule.
Interestingly, every one of the the scientists that Christians love to 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 lived during the Dark Ages.
It came from scientific and enlightenment reason 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 who rejected certain religious beliefs.
Not only the scientists but the scientific institutions that Christians love to cite also came well after the Dark Ages. The Trinity College in Cambridge didn't come into existence until 1546 and only because King Henry VIII wanted to close down the universities. Katherine Parr, the queen, intervened and convinced her husband not to close two of them but to combine them to create a new college. (Katherine Parr, by the way, held heretical and reformed ideas about religion that would have had her put to death by the Church only a few years earlier.) The British Kingdom confiscated the lands from the Church to establish the college, thus, the Trinity College only pays an indirect homage to religion in the name "Trinity" (of which Isaac Newton, by the way, did not believe in, among many other scientists).
The Vatican Observatory didn't come into existence until 1891, and not for scientific inquiry as much as for establishing a better calendar to determine the time to celebrate religious events. Today it hardly stands as the best example of astronomical observation and I suspect that its Church support comes mainly as a propaganda ploy to say in effect: "See, we support science too," when in fact, it still opposes many scientific truths, or utilities god-of-the-gaps thinking to justify only the most obvious scientific facts (such as planets, heliocentricity, etc.) The Greek, Roman, and Arabic names for the stars, planets and constellations also shows the absence of Christian influence (not too surprising when you consider that the Bible believing Christians thought the stars represented peep-holes for their god to look through).
Science never needed religion or any ideological system for its support or advancement, and the best scientific research centers today have nothing at all to do with religion. On the contrary, any faith-based system opposes any scientific inquiry that relies on evidence, free investigation, and reason. It also bears importance to reveal the fact that throughout the history of science, not one scientific formula contains the variable of god or any supernatural agent. On religion's end, it bears equal revelation to understand that religion has never uncovered a single workable fact about nature or the universe. Not one. Everything we know about the universe comes from scientific inquiry.
Scientific facts have never derived from religion, but religion has conceded to science. But even here, the Church's concessions to science have come through bitter delay and sometimes reverses its concessions. Not until 1993 did Pope John Paul II acquit Galileo, 360 years after his indictment of heresy! The Pope even conceded to the idea of evolution "as an effectively proven fact," over 130 years after Darwin's first publication of the fact. Unfortunately the present Pope does not accept evolution, so I guess for Catholics, it comes down to a belief of which pope possesses the most infallible position.
Nor did Catholicism alone stand against scientific progress. Protestant Christians like to point out that the Reformation changed Christianity for the better and they love to blame Islam for its backward scientific and political progress because it never went through a reformation as did Christianity. But the Reformation did nothing of the sort to improve Christianity or scientific advancement. Protestantism, from its very beginning, abhorred scientific reasoning. Martin Luther, its founder, condemned using reason and taught that faith alone should fill the minds of Christians. The Reformation only set Christians against Christians which resulted in hundreds of years of wars and intolerance. The only reason why Christianity appears more modern than Islam comes from the historical fact that Christianity conceded to science and reason through heretical enlightenment thinkers. Islam needs an Enlightenment, not a Reformation!
It also bears importance to realize that Christianity never accepts science on scientific facts alone but always with the condition that an invented theological explanation must accompany a scientific fact. Thus theists can only accept evolution by hypothesizing that god uses evolution as his creation method. The Big Bang theory can only earn acceptance when it accords with the belief of a Creator invented universe (although many quantum physicists today think that the Big Bang didn't serve as an absolute beginning and probably never had one). These religious excuses use God-of-the-gaps thinking which, if you think about it, has as much relevance to factual knowledge as do Tinker Bell and Captain Hook.
And who represents the best and most honorable person of charitable medical care that religionists love to point to? Mother Teresa, of course. Unfortunately once one looks closely at her brand of care-giving, the idea of proper medical care goes out the window. Mother Teresa's donated income went mostly to religious institutions, not the poor and suffering. Moreover, she wanted to keep the poor in poverty because of her faith of "Christ in the broken body," and that to come close to Jesus, the poor must suffer like Jesus. Even more damaging, her Church belief that condoms and birth control went against God, allowed the poor to get infected with the HIV virus and other sexually transmitted diseases. More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.
Unfortunately, Christian church authorities and Christian political leaders today, continue to place barriers against science. Many fundamentalist Christians reject modern biology, geology, and physics. Many deny global warming, birth control, stem cell research and other scientific advances that could save millions of people, if not the entire human race. It shouldn't surprise anyone that George W. Bush's administration which kowtows to the Religious Right has reduced scientific research in place of faith based initiatives. Many fundamentalist Christians want to eliminate Darwin's theory of evolution and replace it with theological Creationism. Some have even succeeded in using political means to change school boards across America to ban evolution from biology books and to teach Intelligent Design (an oxymoronic euphemism for Creationism) in its place.
Christian faith healers still go around the world preaching that their god can immediately cure hidden diseases, blindness, arthritis, and many other disorders (except, oddly, for the visible ailments such as compound fractures, amputations, or even a simple pimple). When modern medicine does happen to cure them, they thank god instead of the doctors who actually saved them. Devout Christians believe in miracles over modern science.
I don't know about you but when I search for a doctor to cure me, I don't want one who believes in superstitions, miracles, or divine intervention (for how could I ever know if he resorts to his faith rather than his medical training?). I want a doctor who uses the best scientific medical knowledge and that means a doctor who doesn't hold Christian or any religious beliefs. When I want to understand how nature and the universe works, I read from scientific literature, not holy scripture. Scientists reveal the workings of nature, not priests, ministers or shamans.
The graph* above represents an approximate graph of the advancement of science through time.
The Christian Dark Ages represents the only time in the history of Europe where scientific advancement not only halted but went backwards. The hole left by the Dark Ages bears the imprint of scientific intolerance. Imagine where scientific advancement would stand today if not for the scars left by Christianity.
During the Age of Enlightenment, people began to wake up. Many freethinkers and scientists rejected orthodox religion and replaced it with unitarianism, deism, or non-theistic philosophy. During the 1800s and after, scientists no longer had to fear religious persecution in any form. As never before in the history of mankind, scientists began to reject theocracy entirely. And what happened as a result of the freedom from Christian influence? Science literally exploded with new discoveries! Since the early 1900s, the majority of the world's productive scientists held no theological beliefs, and the percentage of nonbelievers continued to rise every decade.
The idea that Christianity founded modern science and medicine comes from pure arrogant myth. Christianity, by its very biblical nature, represents the antithesis of science.
* Note about the graph: No doubt some will argue about the starting and ending dates of the various periods and yes, the Eqyptian, Greek and Roman periods overlap, but the intent of the graph aims to show an approximate relationship through time. The scale of scientific advancements show no numbers because we have no numbers to go by. The graph shows a relative scale of scientific advancement compared to other periods. Historians, for example, would agree that the Romans in the first few centuries CE had more knowlege about nature (science) than the Greeks of 400 BCE, and that the Age of Enlightenment built on the scientifc discoveries made during the Renaissance. Feel free to adjust the scale to your liking, but regarless of how you adjust the graph, it will do little to change the fact that scientific knowlenge (or the loss of it) fell dramatically during the Christian Dark Ages.
Further Sources:
Leading Scientists Still Reject God
New Survey: Scientists "More Likely Than Ever" To Reject God Belief
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, by Christopher Hitchens
Penn & Teller on Mother Teresa [video, 5 min.]
Sir Isaac Newton on the Bible by Dr. A. Zahoor
Christianity, llike Islam before it: back to the dark ages [video, 4:39]
Beyond Belief (short video clips from a few scientists)
Ancient Rome Is Rebuilt Digitally A look at how advanced the Romans were before the Christian Dark Ages.
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