History of conflict between religion and science.

Factual Questions
1

I know that the on-going (for far too long) debate on evolution is not the first time religion has been opposed to scientific advances. I also know that Galileo and Copernicus advanced the idea that the Earth went around the sun and not vice versa, which the Catholic church tried to suppress.

Does anyone know of any other historical advances in science that were opposed by religious leaders at the time? How about religions other than Christianity? I’ve read in works of fiction where some preachers preached against vaccination and other improvements in medicine, but I have no hard facts about that.

2

I think you should distinguish between persecutions for heresy such as Galileo and things such as transfusions which are seen by Jehova’s Witnesses, IIRC, as being forbidden to them by the bible.

3

When people like Lord Kelvin began trying to determine the age of the earth by scientific means, there was a certain level of discomfort among the religious-minded. The same thing happened when Darwin and others first published their findings on evolution (of course, in some places, that argument is ongoing to this day).

4

Zyada Not meaning to be sarcastic here but I think the list would be shorter if you asked, What scientific advances didn’t religion oppose?
flight, if man was supposed to fly he’d have been born with wings
geology, the world’s only 6,000 years old
evolution, well you already said
astronomy, ditto
medicine, God heals all
creation
geography
fossil records
anything supernatural/metaphysical
equality of the sexes vs. adams rib=subservient
death and the afterlife
abortion
birth control
etc
etc

5

I think it’s a somewhat misleading oversimplification (although a very common one) to talk about religion perpetually “opposing” science. Religion has always had a tremendous number of variants and perspectives, and I doubt you’ll find any instance of serious social or intellectual change anywhere that wasn’t opposed by some branch of religion for some reason. On the other hand, other religious beliefs supported such changes. And some doctrines opposed and supported them at more or less the same time.

Look at even the classic example of the heliocentric hypothesis. Although Copernicus’ and Galileo’s endorsements of it were to some extent repressed by the Catholic Church, many members of the Church (e.g., in some Jesuit orders) were encouraged to do astronomical research based on it. The caveat was just that they had to treat it as a “convenient fiction” that made computation easier (the way navigators still treat the geocentric hypothesis), so as not to contradict the official Church repudiation of it. They could rely on it as much as they pleased, and were encouraged in their observations that ended up helping to confirm it, as long as they didn’t actually declare that they thought it was philosophically, factually true. Now, was that a case of religion opposing science, or fostering science, or some of each?

We could get into debates like that over pretty much any of the topics that t-keela mentioned. But since that would take forever and a half, I’ll just note a couple examples in response to the OP’s last question, about non-Christian doctrines and science:

  • Some religiously conservative Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians, also oppose modern geological and biological theories that conflict with Biblical accounts of creation.

  • Indian society in the sixteenth through nineteenth century experienced a good deal of tension between the traditional Hindu cosmology involving a flat earth and the ancient and modern astronomical models using a spherical earth. (For some reason this opposition doesn’t seem to have been such an issue in earlier centuries, even though astronomers used the round-earth model just as much then.)

6

I must clarify some things:

I am not asking this to do a “Religion is a terrible, horrible, no-good kind of thing” sort of writing, although I am enlarging on a thesis I have. (And y’all don’t know where I’m going with this, so don’t bother arguing with what you think I’m going to say. Cause that ain’t where I’m going :slight_smile: )

I’m looking for objective information, not debateworthy opinions. I would also like things that are firmly in history, i.e. scientific knowledge or advances that have general acceptance now (with maybe the exception of a few sects), rather than those things that are still debateable.

I certainly would distinguish between events where religious leaders taught their own congregations that certain scientific information or applications were sinful and events where religious leaders attempted to use their power to prevent the dissemination or use of scientific information.

I would also like specific names or other information that will allow me to research the events so I have a better understanding of them.

And in that light, another common fictional scenario is that people opposed the idea of microscopic creatures because “God wouldn’t make something we can’t see”. I’d really like a reference to where that happened in fact.

7

I suspect you’re also distinguishing between actual suppression of science (as in the prosecution of Galileo) and mere denial - virtually every scientific finding has no doubt been denied or opposed by some group or another, but it’s relevant to consider whether there was a church that had the power and support to suppress scientific advance and chose to use it; I’ve never heard, for example, of Jehovah’s Witnesses picketing hospitals that perform blood transfusions. And their are religions that might prohibit certain technologies only for their own members; I can’t think of any specific to Judaism, but it’s an example of a religion with laws that only apply to its own followers and aren’t considered relevant or necessary for outsiders.

And is this a matter of denying something - as in the Church denying heliocentric cosmology, and toothless southerners denying evolution - or opposing something, while admitting that it is in fact a real phenomenon, as in the opposition to stem-cell research nowadays?

8

Would the stem cell research issue be a modern example of suppression of science? I know Christianity itself is not supressing it, but it seems to me that the government is supressing on behalf of the religious community.

9

I suspect that the religion vs science fight is overblown, anyway.

Several of the “examples” provided, above, have either been re-written in popular history to exaggerate the religion/Science battle or have latched onto events while providing twisted versions of the actual points of debate.

This is not to say that religion has always been tolerant of science. Regardless whether Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered because she was a pagan champion of the moderate wing of Christians in the early fifth century or whether she was murdered for proposing non-religious views, it is clear that her persecutors were intolerant Christian monks.

On the other hand, Bishop Ussher’s dating of Creation to October 23, 4004 was not an attempt to stifle the geological presentations of James Hutton or Charles Lyell (both of whom flourished after Ussher died and neither of who were opposed by religious leaders so much as by older scientists who could not shift their thought patterns to review the new hypotheses).

I know of no religious opposition to manned flight.
The notion that religion has has impeded geography is absurd. (And if some cranky bishop or imam in some remote corner of the world is trotted out, I am going to simply laugh at that “example.”)
“Equality of sexes” is not a scientific, but a philosophical point.
I’m not sure how opposition to abortion or birth control have purportedly harmed Science. (The original Pill was actually developed as a spin-off study on the way to control the ovarian cylcle so as to allow infertile women to conceive.)
Death and afterlife is not a Scientific issue (although Science may be invoked when it crosses into ethical considerations of euthansia, or :right to die" issues, abortion, etc.)

The primary opposition both to Galileo and to modern anatomy was not religious, but Aristotelian. The tradition that the ancient Greek philosophers had already established Truth was a strong one at the beginning of the Renaissance and it took a while to overturn.

In the case of Galileo, some members of the Church used Galileo’s own impetuous nature to rail against him and have his individual works suppressed (for a fairly short period of time) but his mathematical treatises remained in print and his astronomical work was carried on (often by his philosophical opponents in the Church) even during the period when his writings were prohibited. (I do find it amusing to see the Catholic “opposition” to Galileo trotted out so frequently, while the Lutheran condemnation of Copernican and Galilean tracts always gets a pass. And, as often as the Galileo story has been rehashed on these boards, it is amusing to see it continually held up as an example of the “the Church” “suppressing” science–it is taking longer than we thought.)

Similarly, some of the efforts to overturn Galen’s stranglehold on anatomy were frustrated by the religious belief that a necropsy was an abuse of a corpse, but there were no religious tenets held up to prohibit other investigations into medicine.

Now, we do see a fair amount of religious opposition to selected scientific investigations, today. (And that would include the issue of stem cell research.) Most of those objections, however, are a closely interwoven pattern of recent (<200 years) developments. Geology, paleontology, and similar sciences began to take off in the European world at the same time that various philosophical schools began to challenge religious assumptions. This was soon followed by archaeological discoveries that began to offer challenges to many long-held Christian religious beliefs. As a result, a number of Christians (by no means all of Christianity) reacted by “closing ranks” behind Scripture and looking for ways to either deny, challenge, or reshape the findings of those disciplines. Among the popularizers of the anti-religious schools, it then became popular to rewrite history to cast the religious arguments of the past in the worst possible (and most obstructionist) light. (For example in the “popular” versions of this debate.) One of the best services that Stephen J. Gould performed (although he is rarely quoted from those essays) has been the debunking of myths in science texts regarding the mistakes and opposition of scientists and religious writers whose hypotheses or positions have been disproved or refuted.

While Science and Religion have butted heads over the years, there has not been constant strife and many of the “battles” have come to us in distorted versions intended to promote myths of their own.

10

[nitpick]
What Lutheran condemnation of Copernicus and Galileo would that be? I suspect you’re thinking of the sarcastic remark made by Luther about the former. However, that’s no longer given much weight by historians of science. For example, from this 1981 paper by Owen Gingerich:

That Luther had even heard of heliocentrism at the time when he is reported to have made the remark is probably a reflection of the fact that most of those involved in initially disseminating Copernicus’ ideas were close to him. Aside from their involvement in publishing De Revolutionibus, it was Philipp Melanchthon and his pupils who were the first to teach about it. They certainly didn’t accept all of what Copernicus was proposing (a matter discussed in detail by Robert Westman in his paper “The Melanchthon Circle”, Isis, 66 (1975), 164-93, which argues they imposed what he dubs the Wittenberg Interpretation on the theory), but they took it seriously and were particularly impressed by his technical innovations.
Gingerich’s “census” of all the surviving 16th century copies of De Revolutionibus bears this out. With one exception, all the 16th century readers who annotated their copies extensively were Protestants - see his recent, ironically titled, The Book Nobody Read (2004). Lutherans were taking the book more seriously than their contemporaries in the likes of the Italian universities. As individuals, they often did not accept heliocentrism as a realistic description of Nature on religious grounds, but they thought the book an important advance.

The other claim that’s often made, notably by Andrew Dixon White in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, that Calvin condemned Copernicus, seems to have even less factual basis to it. Nobody’s ever been able to locate the supposed remark. Though even Thomas Kuhn fell for that one.
That there was some sort of general condemnation of Copernicus by Protestant theologians, to mirror the Galileo affair, fits the prejudices of those who would follow White in seeing an age-old conflict between science and religion and so it’s often asserted without evidence.

[/nitpick]

11

Rebuilding The Matrix by Denis Alexander looks at the historical relationships between science and theology - I am about half way through, and it really is a good (if challenging) read. The author does not subscribe to a perpetual conflict theory, and recognises that most of the big issues were not about theology per se, but about approaches to science - the old theories making way for the new. Scientists can be just as dogmatic as priests.

Simon

12

bonzer, thanks for the clarification. I had read some time ago (don’t have a citation handy) that Malanchthon was bitterly opposed to Copernicus (which was why I said Lutherans, not Luther and did not include Calvin. In addition, there is the foreword written by Andreas Osiander that is frequently mentioned (correctly or incorrectly) as an attempt to deflect condemnation by the Protestant authorities in the regions it was first published.

13

As been mentioned, most modern resistance to new developments in science (especially paradigm shifting ones) come from other scientists holding on to the established worldview. Why would one think that that medieval and renaissance religious officials (who, at the time, were the scientists of the time, being the only learned ones around) would be any different?

The modern RCC embraces scientific inquiry (as long as its application is morally acceptable). The Pope held scientific consortiums on evolution… not whether there’s been evolution, but on issues of how.

Don’t forget that the Catholic Church was responsible for the University system in Europe. The monasteries kept classical knowledge alive during the Dark Ages. Mendel, the father of genetics was a monk. And don’t forget all those mysteries Father Brown solved.

Peace.

14

Yep. The Catholic Church has, over the years, done a heck of a lot of Good, and also some No-NO’s. I’m voting for you Guys. Hang In There!! :slight_smile:

15

There are one or two early, fairly dismissive references in some of Melanchthon’s letters that can be taken out of context to leap to the conclusion that he opposed Copernicus - Koestler did this in The Sleepwalkers. Westman balances these with other more positive remarks to argue that he came to see value in the new ideas as he learnt more about them. And there are just too many people closely associated with him (including a son-in-law) who were promoting Copernicus for it to be plausible that he was discouraging them.

Quite who Osiander was trying to mollify with the preface is indeed slightly unclear. It’s even possible that he was a Lutheran - though not necessarily a “good” one; he eventually fell out with Luther and Melanchthon - writing to placate Catholic theologians.
Osiander’s correspondence doesn’t survive. But Kepler did see some of it and quoted two passages in his Apologia pro Tychone contra Ursum: part of a letter to Copernicus and part of one to Rheticus, who was the guy organising the printing with Osiander. These are from parallel letters proposing the idea of including the new preface to them. But his reason for doing so is that it’s Copernicus who’s worried about “the peripatetics and the theologians whom you fear to be about to raise objections” (Nicholas Jardine’s translation). It’s what happened then that’s unclear, largely because we don’t know Copernicus’ reply.
It can be suggested - and has been - that Kepler had access to the entire exchange of letters. If so, then the matter’s straightforward, for he states in the Apologia that Copernicus reconsidered and decided to publish without any such caveats. But, as it is, we don’t actually know whether Kepler had seen any letter to justify this statement. What we do know is that two of Copernicus’ friends strongly objected to the preface after the book appeared. One of these, Rheticus, was Lutheran and the other, Bishop Giese, was Catholic.
The usual conclusion is therefore that the preface doesn’t reflect Copernicus’ intentions and is more Osiander’s personal bit of covering his own back with his Lutheran colleagues. It’s however possible that Osiander instead thought the preface was accommodating Copernicus’ fears about the reaction of his co-religionists.

16

This is all very interesting; however I still haven’t gotten a response that gives me what I have asked for (except in very general terms).

Please, if anyone knows of any specific historical incidents where a mainstream religion actively attempted to prevent a scientific discovery from being taught, I would really like to know about them.

17

About birth control: The first tests of the Pill were indeed claimed to be a way to help infertile women conceive, since it tended to increase fertility once the subject stopped taking the medication. However, it seems that the researchers were fully aware of what it was really for. The social climate at the time, particularly in the US, was such that it was impossible to test a contraceptive drug, and it might even have been illegal. Even when it was first prescribed, it was ostensibly offered as a fertility drug with the understanding that it would cause near-total infertility while it was being taken. Doctors and women seeking to take the Pill both knew what it was really for, but it would be some time before they could openly say it was a contraceptive.

Kimstu: Some Muslims agree with evolution and the Big Bang theory, even if they are quite conservative, because these have been offered as evidence for the veracity of the Quran. Along with passages describing what Muslims claim is a modern description of embryology, there are passages that vaguely refer to an expanding universe. This view is relatively recent, and some Muslims still support literal creationism. However, it may be worth noting that Muslims may believe in evolution or the Big Bang theory as part of this ‘scientific evidence in the Quran’ argument and not because of a general support for the scientific worldview. That is, they are free to support evolution even if they are very religiously conservative, while conservative Christians tend not to support evolution.

In general, I think the creation/evolution issue is the only significant one remaining where science and religion are in conflict. Religious authorities are effective at getting creationist ideas taught alongside evolution in biology classes because they can use a ‘tyranny of the majority’ to legislate their belief into classrooms in deeply religious areas.

The 20th century probably saw more secular oppression of science than religious oppression. Scientists themselves have only seen religious and ethical opposition to their study in a few narrow fields (stem cells, cloning, contraception, etc.). Secular totalitarian regimes have oppressed much broader fields. Consider the Nazi opposition to ‘Jewish science’ such as quantum mechanics and modern physics (as well as the support of eugenics and the racialization of biology), or the Stalinist support of Lysenkoist biology, which rejected the importance of genetics.

18

In those terms, the best US example is probably the state-by-state campaign in the 1920s to pass laws preventing high schools from teaching evolution. The complication is that this campaign arguably isn’t best though of as “a mainstream religion actively attempting” it. For the movement was a informal coalition of national figures, both religious and political, numerous different religious organisation and whatever individual legislators could be persuaded to vote for their measures. It wasn’t started by any particular church body deciding that evolution was wrong and then pursuing the getting of support for legislation. Even The Fundamentals - the large, widely read collection of articles by many different authors, which are usually taken as the start of 20th century American Protestant fundamentalism - don’t discuss evolution at any length and only one of its authors called for such action. It’s not even entirely true that the motivations of all those involved in the campaign were purely religious per se.
All this makes it difficult to generalise about exactly what the “mainstream religion” involved was, though one can easily point to examples of the religious organisations who endorsed the campaign and so became part of the movement. One can however say that the supporters were very, very overwhelmingly Protestant.

Edward Larson’s Trial and Error (Oxford, 1985) describes the 1920s campaign in detail, especially in chapter 2. His Summer for the Gods (Harvard, 1997) is also more specifically about the Scopes Trial, but has less about the origins of the movement.

19

Zyada writes:

> Please, if anyone knows of any specific historical incidents where a mainstream
> religion actively attempted to prevent a scientific discovery from being taught, I
> would really like to know about them.

Why would you like to know this? As people have already made clear, there isn’t any such thing as a general war between science and religion. Many of the famous incidents portrayed as being such are in fact personal conflicts or cultural wars masquerading as religion vs. science. What exactly are you trying to find out?

20

Like I said in my second post, I am not writing a “Religion is stupid” essay. Rather, I am writing a religious argument for evolution, which I do not really want to go into. This is GQ, not GD.

And yes, I realize that when you get into analysis, that all of these are going to be political in nature and not really about belief systems. After all, people in power often use that power to keep their comfort level steady, and science often forces people out of the comfort zone. But I’m not interested in reasons, analysis or arguments, I’m interested in facts. For instance, the facts are that the Catholic church did put De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus on the forbidden books list in 1616 and forbade Galileo from pursuing study on based on that book.
Cite

I do want things that are firmly in the past - namely previously controversial ideas (like the Copernican view of the universe) that are now commonly accepted. However, it’s looking like there wasn’t all that much real conflict between the times of Galileo and Darwin.