Setting the Record Straight

Vague Talk of Medieval Science

There is a narrative coined by Enlightenment philosophes which presents the classical era of ancient Greece and Rome as the greatest golden period in human civilization.  The emergence of Christianity undermined this glory as a fifth column.  Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire largely blames Christianity and the Christian Church for Rome's rotting away.

In this fictional narrative the classical era was a profuse explosion of of science and mathematics, only to have it all snuffed out by the rank darkness of a benighted Europe labouring, in turn, under the superstitious ignorance of the Christian religion.  The Renaissance and the Enlightenment represents a throwing off of the cloak of religiously-enforced ignorance and an enlightened recovery of ancient scientific and technological knowledge.

It's a great story.  Imaginative fiction.  But profoundly ignorant of actual history.  But the story has one happening to give it the appearance of credence: the Western church's conflict with Galileo.  David Bentley Hart gives a more accurate and truthful account:

It is, needless to say, something of an embarrassment that Galileo was forced to renounce the Copernican theory and to end his days comfortably confined to a villa in the hills outside Florence, but not because of what this tells us about Christianity's relation to science.  A single instance of institutional purblindness and internal dissension, which was entirely anomalous within the larger history of the Catholic Church's relation to the natural sciences, reveals nothing significant about Christian culture or Christian history as a whole but demonstrates only how idiotic a conflict between men of titanic egotism can become. 

Rather the case is an embarrassment because, in serving for some as a convenient epitome of some supposedly larger truth about Catholicism or Christianity (despite being the only noteworthy example of that truth they can adduce), it has tended to obscure the rather significant reality that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics , and arrived at conclusions that would have been unimaginable within the confines of the Hellenistic scientific traditions. 

For, despite all our vague talk of ancient or medieval "science," pagan, Muslim, or Christian, what we mean today by science--its methods, its controls and guiding principles, its desire to unite theory to empirical discover, its trust in a unified set of physical laws, and so on--came into existence, for whatever reasons, and for better or worse, only within Christendom, and under the hands of believing Christians.  David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),  p. 62f.