The history of Christianity and Science

One of the charges frequently leveled against the church is that it was broadly anti-intellectual—that the leaders of the church preferred faith to reason and ignorance to education. In that, this Is a major distortion. Although Christianity seems at first to have appealed to the poor and disenfranchised, it soon reached out to the upper classes, including the educated. Christians quickly recognized that if the Bible were to be read, literacy would have to be encouraged; and in the long run Christianity became the major patron of education in the Latin West and a major borrower from the classical intellectual tradition. Naturally enough, the kind and level of education and intellectual effort favored by the church fathers was that which supported the mission of the church as they perceived it. But this mission, interestingly, did not include the suppression of scientific investigations and ideas. [David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (2nd ed.; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 2007); 148-9]

If we compare the early church with a modern research university or the National Science Foundation, the church will proved to have failed abysmally as a supporter of science and natural philosophy. But such a comparison is obviously unfair. If, instead, we compare the support given to the study of nature by the early church with the support available from any other contemporary social institution, it will soon become apparent that the church was the major patron of scientific learning. Its patronage may have been limited and selective, but limited and selective patronage is a far cry from opposition.

However, a critic determined to view the early church as an obstacle to scientific progress might argue that the handmaiden status accorded to natural philosophy is inconsistent with the existence of genuine science. True science, the critic might maintain, cannot be handmaiden of anything, but must possess total autonomy; consequently, the “disciplined” science that Augustine sought is no science at all. In fact, this complain misses the mark: totally autonomous science is an attractive ideal, but we do not live in an ideal world. Any many of the most important developments in the history of science have been produced by people committed not to autonomous science, but to science in the service of some ideology, social program, or practical end; for most of its history, the question has not been whether science will function as handmaiden, but which mistress it will serve. (p. 150)

The monasteries served as the transmitters of literacy and a thin veneer of the classical tradition (including science or natural philosophy) through a period when literacy and scholarship were severely threatened. (pp. 156-7)