Y Safle

Time and again I am confronted with arguments such as this one:

Christianity is stupid in the way that most all religions are stupid. It is an enemy to science–and by science, I mean a broad science; not just those who wear lab coats, but those who question and test the natural world, in an effort to answer the venerable questions I’d described earlier with something better than peyote-fueled guesses. Science has eliminated polio, refrigerated chicken and taken mankind to the moon. Science seems to work well, and it’s a bad enemy to have. Yet, Christianity persists on being on the wrong side of scientific debate, not having learned its Flat Earth or Geocentric lessons.

http://donathos.livejournal.com/33308.html

Not only are such arguments highly selective, they are also just plain wrong. The writer makes two assertions about Christianity’s enmity with science. He asserts that Christianity opposed the round earth thesis, and that it opposed the Copernican view that no longer argued for a geocentric universe.

The Flat Earth

In my article on Christopher Columbus, I deal with the fact that the flat earth was never really under dispute in the Christian Church. That not only was the world known to be a sphere, but that there were some pretty good estimates, predating Christ, as to the circumference of the world.

Some might argue that this knowledge was known amongst a small elite, but unknown to everyone else, but it is plain as day in the writings of Christians through the ages.

Dante, writing in the early 1300’s, refers to the earth as a sphere, as did Thomas Aquinas in the opening section of the Summa Theologica. The venerable Bede makes the same point in the early 8th century, and so does Irenaeus in the second century.

Christianity has just never doubted this point, and the reason that atheists such as the writer of the piece above continue to assert this as fact is simply because they have been duped by the atheists Letronne and Irving. So whilst the flat earth argument does not say anything about Christianity and science, it does tell us that atheists (a few of them at least) are the enemies of history and truth.

The Geocentric Model

The writer’s second piece of evidence is the geocentric model. But Galileo aside (and Galileo needs a seperate post), this issue was not an issue of Christian enmity with science. We know that Nicolas Copernicus proposed that the Earth must revolve around the sun, to deal with anomalous results which indicated that the reverse was not true. What is less well known is that Copernicus was a canon of Frauenberg Cathedral, with interests in theology. He was trained in medicine and ran a free clinic for the poor. He also knew a thing or two about economics.

So here was a Christian who proposed a radical new view of the universe. He suggested that the world revolves around the sun. Did the rest of the Church oppose him?

By no means. Indeed his was not actually a completely novel idea. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the papal legate to Germany, and himself a careful scientist who demonstrated that plants grow by taking something from the air rather than the soil, had argued that “When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply that the earth is the point with reference to which man makes his observations of celestial phenomena.”

But Copernicus took astronomical measurements and use the heliocentric model to simplify and remove anomalies that were being observed. He wrote on the subject in his 1530 Commentariolus.

This was an age when the pope had to approve books for publication in the Catholic world. By today’s standards, we see such approval as unacceptable – freedom of speech and inquiry is so much a part of our culture that we know at once such approvals were wrong (but not so different from, say, Chinese attempts to censor what can be accessed on the Internet in that country).

But we nevertheless note that Copernicus was given papal approval for his Commentariolus. The Church *did* *not* oppose the heliocentric model.

What is more, Copernicus refined his work throughout his life, expanding his views into a magnus opus called De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium (The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies). This was printed just before his death in 1543 by a Lutheran pastor in Liepzig.

So Christians – rather than being enemies of the heliocentric model, were rather the very ones who devised that model.

Christianity is not the enemy of science, and so long as Christians are encouraged to further scientific enquiry, there is no reason why they should be.