Gene Callahan regards that story as largely mythical. Those knowledgeable about the past are invited to toss in their two cents.
UPDATE 05/25/2019: Historian Mark Koyama agrees:
August 21, 2013
Was there really rampant persecution of scientists by the Church?
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[19] Comments
Entitled to an Opinion 
August 23, 2013 at 3:09 pm
It’s an outright falsehood. Most early Western science was funded and founded by the Church. Scholasticism began in monastic orders and evolved into the concept of the university.
Grosseteste (early idea of experimental control), bishop
Roger Bacon, Franciscan friar
William of Ockham (Occam’s Razor), Franciscian friar
Jean Buridan (early work on mechanics of objects in motion), priest
Bradwardine, one of the Oxford Calculators (early kinematics) became the Archbishop of Canterbury
Vesalius (post-Galen anatomy), died during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (modern sources indicate it was a falsehood that this was at the order of the Inquisition)
Copernicus’ uncle and patron was a bishop; he dedicated his work to the Pope. Copernicus’ theories were supported by the Jesuits and accepted by the Catholic Church; Protestant opposition led to his work being banned, which popular sentiment was followed by Catholic laypeople (but not officially by the church).
Kepler taught math at seminary; his work was rejected by fellow protestants but supported by Jesuits
Pascal’s “provincial letters” attacking casuistry were part of a legitimate debate internal to the Church; though condemned by the Church at the request of the French King, Pope Alexander privately agreed with many of Pascal’s conclusions and later enacted some of the proposed reforms
Boyle (Chemistry) Irish Catholic, promoted and funded missionary work in Asia
Heisenberg (uncertainty principle) awared Guardini prize from Catholic University of Bavaria
Lemaitre (Big bang theory), priest
Mendel (genetics), Augustinian friar
That’s just a few; there is an entire Wikipedia page called “list of Roman Catholic cleric-scientists”
In post-reformation Britain, of course, as in Germany “the Church” didn’t have much of a role, but a huge number of early British and German scientists were devoutly Christian and/or funded by their respective national churches, for example:
Christopher Wren, (a founder of the Royal Society), rebuilt St Paul’s and many other churches
John Wilkins (another Royal Society founder), clergyman and bishop
And again, in the 20th century the fact that some prominent scientists (Watson and Crick) are atheists doesn’t mean the Church suppressed or opposed them or their work.
The idea that an institution with entire monastic orders devoted to the pursuit of knowledge “persecuted” scientists is absurd.
Many of the modern pop-culture falsehoods of this type derive from the typical modern lack of knowledge of history or philosophical/theological understanding. For example, Galileo _did not_ prove heliocentricity; the instruments necessary for measurement did not exist. He proposed a _theory_ of heliocentricity. However, Galileo insisted on teaching this theory as a fact and in specifically contradicting certain passages in the Bible. There was no need to interpret these passages about astronomy as literally true, but Galileo insisted on interpreting them as such and on then arguing that he had proved them wrong. He was told to stop practicing theology without a license and go back to arguing scientific theory. His friend, a Jesuit, later got him a meeting with a new pope and Galileo was commissioned by the Pope to write a new work on heliocentrism, as long as he stuck to discussing scientific theory and not reinterpreting theology. Instead of sticking to science Galileo insulted the Pope and disobeyed the injunction against false preaching. For this he was – horrors- Imprisoned By the Inquisition – in the personall villa of an archbishop, with a staff of servants to see to his needs.
In the modern anti-clerical view, anytime the Church opposes anything scientific it must be because the Church is engaged in a diabolical conspiracy scheme to suppress knowledge. Whereas for the most part it’s because someone like Gaileo was a consummate asshole who kept trying to play Church politics (or, in other cases, it is a Church official, perhaps even a Pope, playing politics – which isn’t the same as “the Church”). The Church, and especially her priests, bishops, cardinals, and Pope, is the only institution and set of offices which are expected by outsiders to always behave perfectly and without fault. We don’t expect this of doctors (nor of scientists).
As it turns out Galileo was wrong anyways, as would be proven when the necessary instrumentation was invented to test his theory. The Church now accepts the actual, proven facts regarding the physical organization of the solar system.
August 23, 2013 at 3:11 pm
Edit: paraphrasing Callahan, I would challenge anyone making the absurd statement that the Church “persecuted” scientists to name a single example.
August 25, 2013 at 8:34 am
Pretty much everyone in western Europe except the Jews (who didn’t do much science before emancipation) was Roman Catholic before the Reformation. Listing Catholic scientists isn’t that interesting, although ones who actually held a position in the church is given how much more rare that combination is today.
September 11, 2013 at 9:32 pm
Perhaps not, but the enormous amount of patronage for what we would call science by The Church doesn’t exactly cohere very nicely with the conflict thesis.
August 28, 2013 at 8:05 am
The Church punished exactly one scientist.
One and that’s it, in 2000 years (and even then Galileo would have been able to safely uphold his views hadn’t he acted so arrogantly).
There is no pattern here, just an isolated event.
The idea of an eternal clash between church and science is the silliest canard out there.
September 21, 2013 at 5:31 am
I’d say it’s a mixed case. The Church did fund many scientific investigations and achievements. Yet the same is true of the modern bureaucratic state. This is just a result of intellectuals seeking power and position within the officially-accepted ideological apparatus. The church can not really be credited with scientific discovery, as it is premised on irrational, arbitrary authority, dogma and the deliberate foreclosure of rationality (Thomas Aquinas is very frequently full of shit and basically talking nonsense, for all his ‘Aristotilian’ pedigree).
Enlightenment liberals and their Progressive offspring are a species of Christianity, which is why they have such a vested interest in stamping out their sister heretics and blaming them for everything in the Universe. The real case is much more complex, and both the liberal Enlightenment heresiarchs and Catholic reactionaries are missing the point: their ideologies are largely parallel examples of the same religious tradition. Catholicism is just inconsistent on it, which is no surprise, given that they owe their existence to social quietism and anti-radicalism.
October 3, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Be sure to make a distinction between natural philosophers and scientists. There were no scientists at all until the 1800s. Newton wasn’t a scientist. Galileo wasn’t a scientist. They helped establish what would eventually become the scientific methodology, but it hadn’t been defined when they did their work, and it was not defined when they finished.
The particular findings of science and the particular doctrines of any given religion are irrelevent: the methodology of science is incompatible with the methodologies of religions, Catholicism included. You can’t use the former until you’ve excluded the latter from your work.
A better question would be: did the Church try to stamp out the critical thinking which eventually became the scientific method? And the answer is a resounding yes.
October 3, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Could you expand on how science became differentiated from natural philosophy?
October 15, 2013 at 10:07 am
Perhaps the most relevant shift was the rejection of rationally unsupported claims. Traditionally alchemists accepted claims about the nature of the physical world, and strove for specific results, which were accepted as premises without demonstration. When chemistry arose, chemists explicitly rejected the assumption of those principles on faith, concerning themselves with what had been observed, what could be further observed, and explanations generated to handle only those observations.
For example, the ancient belief that alchemical processes could change lead into gold was never supported by evidence of any kind, yet was widely accepted. We now recognize that no chemical process is capable of that, and it would be extremely difficult even with nuclear processes.
Scientific skepticism arose when rational skepticism was systematized. Individuals such as Newton did not practice scientific skepticism – he was a fervent believer in certain heretical forms of Christianity, and in fact missed some important implications of his data because he could reconcile inconsistencies in them by asserting they were signs of the necessity of divine intervention in the natural world.
October 15, 2013 at 11:56 pm
Something about your story strikes me as fishy. In hindsight we can say “You can’t turn lead into gold (without some sort of nuclear reaction)”, but it’s not clear to me there was that dramatic a shift from alchemists to early “chemists” as we would refer to them. I’m likely less knowledgeable about Newton, but since he’s known for his theory of gravity I might as well mention that the earliest heliocentrists also had flawed models based on assumptions they didn’t even realize needn’t more substantial support, at least before Kepler (and yes I am just echoing Kuhn here). Were they not scientists?
October 17, 2013 at 3:16 pm
The concept of ‘scientist’ had not yet been defined. Newton was a ‘natural philosopher’ – which is why he spent so much time rearranging the Old Testament looking for secret messages. Same principle: the claim that the entire hebrew scripture was a gigantic anagram was held on faith by certain esoteric mystics the same way the alchemists held lead could be turned to gold.
Those individuals working on heliocentrism lived before the scientific methology was formulated, just as Newton was. And, as it happened, they didn’t follow it any more than he did. Some of them got it right some of the time – it was the paying attention to how people were acting when they managed to explain and discover, and comparing with how they were acting when they just spun their wheels, that lead people to recognize what worked and what didn’t.
There’s nothing wrong with coming up with hypotheses based on subjective senses of elegance, beauty, or simple personal preference. Which is what motivated many of the early heliocentrists – a sense that circles were what the planets “should” move in. That turned out not to be the case (‘elipses’, the correct answer is ‘elipses’), but the point is that they disliked the complexity of the epicycle system.
What’s special about those heliocentrists isn’t that they were right (they weren’t, really) or that their thinking was notably clearer (it wasn’t). What’s special is that they were defying convention and hundreds of years of consensus. They were, to a somewhat limited but very important degree, rejecting past authority and taking a fresh look at the matter. That’s why they’re relevant. They were no more scientists than Aristotle was. It wasn’t until various bits and pieces of insight were unified into a single method that investigation into the nature of the world ‘took off’.
October 17, 2013 at 7:15 pm
You’ve said there were no scientists before the 1800s. Are there any people in particular you would identify as among the earliest genuine scientists?
October 18, 2013 at 1:52 pm
Antoine Lavoisier is usually considered one of the first scientists in the modern sense; certainly one of the most successful, he’s not called “The Father of Modern Chemistry” for no reason.
Newton certainly wasn’t. Not only had the method not been formalized, he didn’t follow it anyway. At one point he even handwaved oddities in his observations of planetary motion by saying God must intervene to keep the solar system functioning – oddities that lead later astronomers to discover new planets whose gravitational influence was disturbing the orbits of the known worlds. Bits and pieces of his investigations are compatible with science, but his method as a whole was not.
There’s possibly a shorter, more effective way of dealing with this question. A major feature of the scientific method is that scientists are not permitted to have “pet hypotheses” – if evidence is against a proposition, no matter how strongly the scientist favors it, it must be discarded; a scientist must always be prepared to re-evaluate and even discard a belief if new evidence arises against it.
That principle is incompatible with not just every religion, but the concept of religion itself – the religious methodology is to create doctrines and then keep them free of doubt and skepticism. The scientific methodology is to constantly apply doubt and skepticism to the teachings of science.
If you apply the same standards of evidence and reasoning to the doctrines of, say, the Catholic Church, what happens? We’re forced to regard them as unsubstantiated at best and incorrect at worst, and then discard them. This is precisely why those standards are constantly being rejected – at best, the Church tries to get its followers to make a special exception for its teachings.
You can’t follow two masters, but you can sometimes have them not demand inconsistent things for a time. Not the case with science and religion – their basic demands are incompatible.
October 18, 2013 at 4:41 pm
Yes, I could just link to privileging the hypothesis. But I think that is far too common even in “normal science” to make that much of a dividing line. I mean, if you assert with 100% probability that your hypothesis must be true, that’s extreme enough to be out of bounds. But explaining away evidence, even “defying the data” can be compatible with good science. Bryan Caplan would insist that it’s being a good Bayesian/common sense thinker!
October 23, 2013 at 3:26 pm
Certainly you shouldn’t start rethinking your stance on the conservation of matter merely because you’ve attended a David Copperfield performance. But there are serious limits to how much contradictory information can be ‘explained away’ – if the person is actually performing science, which many ‘scientists’ do not. I’m afraid there will always be cases of people in white coats not following the standards of rationality as long as humans are humans. But the standards are still there.
Science doesn’t absolutely forbid taking as working hypotheses premises that aren’t derived from direct observation… but it looks down on the practice. With an unlimited number of potential hypotheses, we can’t test everything. The principles that we’ve developed to evaluate hypotheses before testing aren’t compatible with religious belief; the tests we’ve developed for hypotheses definitely aren’t.
October 23, 2013 at 9:34 pm
I can buy science as a sort of “ideal type” which is not necessarily simply “what scientists do”, but it should be something characteristic of scientists.
October 24, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Interesting anecdote on Coleridge and the coining of the term “scientist” rather than “natural philosopher”.
December 24, 2013 at 9:27 am
If Galileo’s crime was “practicing theology without a license”, then shouldn’t we hand out subpoenas to all these people practicing Intelligent Design without a Science license?
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