In Church this past Sunday, they showed a series of new commercials centered around the theme of getting people to return to the Catholic Church. The commercials touted a lot of positive accomplishments made by the Catholic Church - which was fine. However - one caught my attention. Specifically, they made the claim that the Catholic Church invented the scientific method.
So here’s my question: What evidence is there, if any, to support the notion that the Catholic Church invented the scientific method? (I’ve searched and found lots of people aggressively arguing against the notion - but they all seem fairly biased - I’m hoping for something a little more independent)
The credit of this important invention usually is given to Western scientists such as Roger Bacon. However, the Muslims really invented it, perfected it, and presented it to the West. Al-Biruni (d. 1050 CE), * http://www.albalagh.net/kids/science/scientific_method.shtml
Don’t know, but it looks like a showdown between the Muslims and the Catholics on this one.
Well, it did make progress in the formalization of logical arguments, which does help in the scientific method, since the scientific method does have premises and conclusions.
Now, in the actual collection-of-evidence part, I’m not so sure about.
I wouldn’t give Aristotle much credit. From what I’ve seen, his method was more to ignore the observational evidence and just think really hard. Unlike Plato, he did at least acknowledge the reality of the physical world, but he still didn’t seem to get the notion that the way to understand the world was to observe it.
From what little I know of Aristotle, I’m afraid I’d disagree. I remember reading an article in either Scientific American or Physics Today in which Aristotle is purported to have concluded that the best way to see if Euclid’s famous axiom that parallel lines never intersect is correct is to measure the interior angles of a triangle. Since they appear to sum to 180, then we live in a Euclidean world. I also know that Alexander the Great sent reports and specimens back to Aristotle during his conquests. So, I think he’s close.
From what I know, the Catholic church can lay considerable claim to inventing or discovering the scientific method. Or at least one of them. Francis Bacon is usually considered the progenitor of the modern concept, and was certainly professionally Catholic. While I have listened to a few lectures on the history of philosophy (such as Great Ideas of Philosophy) in which Islamic thought is given some coverage, Francis Bacon gets the lion’s share of the credit.
I can’t imagine my ever becoming Catholic, but I do feel they get a bum rap with regards to science. On the whole, they have been pretty good about supporting science. Sure, they persecuted a great scientist and rejected the whole earth around the sun bit, but never a whole science like the Soviets (genetics). I think most people conflate American fundamentalism’s rejection of evolution with the medieval Catholic church rejection of a heliocentric universe. Somewhat ironic, given that they may have rejected heliocentrism in response to its Protestant adoption.
Just because person X was Catholic, it doesn’t seem right to credit Catholicism with creating X. Did Judaism create relativity? Yes Roger Bacon was a Catholic (as was most of western Europe in those days) and yes he is often credited with starting the western scientific method, but it’s not clear that his religion had much or anything to do with this.
In fact once he became a Franciscan Friar (after he’d been a master at Oxford) he didn’t write nearly as much because the Franciscans explicitly forbade publishing without prior approval. He was granted some dispensation as he was acquainted with Pope Clement IV who asked for some specific writings from him. But after Clement’s death, he was placed under house arrest by the Franciscans
I don’t think the Catholic Church has much of a claim on his impact on science.
I still say that the primary reason that the Church persecuted Galileo was that he was a jerk of the first order, who seemed to positively delight in pissing people off.
That is nonsense. For a start, Aristotle was dead well before Euclid produced his geometrical works. (I vaguely recall hearing that someone, I think Gauss, suggested or attempted something like this, but that would have been in teh 19th century, not the ancient world.)
On this point, however, you are quite right, and Chronos is mistaken. Aristotle, more than anyone else in the Ancient world, was interested in gathering empirical evidence and went to considerable pains to do so. Some of his works, such as the History of Animals, are largely compendia of natural historical observations (not all his own personal observations, and by no means all reliable, but empirical nonetheless). The notion that Aristotle just relied on “thinking very hard” is partly derived from the medieval schoolmen, whose method can be caricatured as “thinking very hard about Aristotle’s texts,” and even more from the anti-Aristotelians of the scientific revolution, who in their efforts to break away from medieval scholastic attitudes, found it necessary to slander not only the schoolmen themselves, but also their hero, Aristotle. They were somewhat unfair to the schoolmen (who deserved to some extent) and very unfair to Aristotle himself (who most certainly did not), but since they won, and we are still living in their world, their version of has stuck around in the popular mind and is still part of the folklore of science.
As for the scientific method: first of all, outside of undergraduate textbooks there is no such thing as a single, well defined scientific method, used always and everywhere in the production of everything that we count as genuinely scientific knowledge. No-one invented “the scientific method” because “the scientific method” (except as a vague commitment to being true to logical coherence) does not exist.
The complex of methods, attitudes, facts and theories that constitute modern science emerged over a very long period of time thanks to the work of a lot of people (some of whom have been mentioned in this thread already). Some of them were Catholics, many were not. It is certainly nonsense to say that Catholics invented the scientific method.
I would certainly count Aristotle amongst them. We would not have modern science if it were not for him, but on the other hand, he also most certainly was not (and, in his time, could not have been) a scientist in anything like the modern sense of the word.
If Aristotle had really been interested in gathering empirical evidence for his scientific inquiries he wouldn’t have had to invent his theory about why women have fewer teeth than men.
Like every other scientist who has ever lived, Aristotle did not have time to check every single possible fact relevant to his work, but relied on on his sources, which were not always correct. The silly game of going through the works an ancient writer to find errors that you can point and laugh at is a sure path to misunderstanding both the history and the nature of science. Do you seriously believe that every fact that any modern scientific publication relies upon has been personally checked by the author? Do you seriously think that the the scientific publications of today are not full of things that will not seem obviously wrong to scientists two and a half millennia hence? Does that make current science worthless or incompetent? Of course not.
But some empirical facts are far more readily testable than others. The typical number of teeth in a human female is surely one of the most readily checkable facts. I can’t see why we should NOT pour some scorn on Aristotle over this particular one.
I wonder how many authors of modern dental textbooks have gone and opened someone’s mouth and counted the number of teeth there before writing it down, rather than relying on their reference books (or their memory). If there is an error in such a book, who would criticize the author for failing to get his wife to open her mouth so he could count her teeth to check? No, we would criticize him for failing to check the right sources, or for failing to transcribe them correctly.
Anyway, the issue of “scorn” is a matter of tone and context. If you were to point out this “error” in the context of saying something like
As anyone who has ever truly studied his works and their influence will know, Aristotle was one of the most brilliant, intellectually deep thinkers of all time, and, in particular, one of the most empirically based theorists of ancient times without whom our modern scientific understanding of the world could not have developed (as, indeed, it did not develop in other long-civilized cultures such as India and China). Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we can now see that, like all great contributors to human progress, he got many things wrong, some significant, like the structure of the solar system (although we must recognize that on the the evidence available in his time, and for almost two thousand years after, the geocentric theory was by far the most reasonable), and others, like the number of teeth in the the human female jaw, trivial.
then you would be making a valid and worthwhile point about the historical development of western scientific thought.
If, on the other hand (as is nearly always the case) the error is pointed out more in the spirit of
Look at how this idiot got obvious, easy stuff wrong. If people had just used the proper scientific method™ in olden times instead of listening to jerks like Aristotle then scientific progress could have got going centuries earlier, and we could all have flying cars by now, and be living in colonies in space.
then it is promoting ignorance.
Thanks everyone for your responses - this has been very informative. I guess if I were to summarize - the best one could say about the Catholic Church is that, of the many people who contributed to development of the Scientific Method, some of them were Catholic. Is that about it?
I guess another question would be - are there any examples of the Catholic Church actively promoting scientific endeavors or research? And could those have contributed in some way to development of the scientific method? Most of what I can find discussing the Church and science focuses on how the Church responded to science, not promoted science. For example, how the Church responded to carbon dating, evolution, medical science/research, etc.
FYI - I’m not trying to support any agenda here. I’m just trying to figure out what the Church must be using to support it’s own position.
It’s possible I have confused Archimedes with Aristotle in my memory on this point. Certainly not Gauss, but then the author of the article could have been mistaken. It is also possible, though, for Aristotle to have known about Euclidean geometry before Euclid. The book on my desk right now is a book (FWIW, by a mathematician, not historian) that states “The Elements, in 13 books, is a magnificiant logical organization of classical Greek mathematics. Incorporating the newest work by Thaeaethetus and Eudoxus, Euclid forged the entire subject into a sound logical order…” [Both of the named mathematicians taught at the Academy, and based on dates, probably taught Aristotle and taught with Aristotle. I do not believe enough is known about who did what to state that Euclid knew more geometry than any of the three of them. All that is certain is that he wrote a very systematized presentation of it.