Article: The Christian Origins of Modern Science

JAMES HANNAM

There has been no great conflict between science and religion: on the contrary, Christianity was an essential factor in the rise of modern science.

Modern science stands as one of the great achievements of Western civilisation. And despite what you have heard, it is an achievement of the West, not of Islam, China or even ancient Greece. Historians of science are still reluctant to admit this. I think this is because they have always suffered from an inferiority complex in relation to their colleagues in the history faculty. This has meant that the fad of post-modernism bit them hard and refused to let go. Historians have developed a habit of praising Arabic and ancient Greek science as successful in their own terms but have lost sight of the fact that, objectively, they were quite false.

I have boundless respect for the early Greek and Islamic philosophers who struggled to comprehend the world. But most of what they taught, through no fault of their own, was woefully inaccurate. To take just one example, pre-modern medicine was an unmitigated disaster, far more likely to kill its patients than cure them. Luckily for us, today we can be much more confident that doctors really can cure us of many diseases. So the history of science should really be the story of how we went from being fundamentally wrong about the natural world to being, in large part, right. In fact, science as we know it today, with laboratories, experiments and a professional culture, is a recent phenomenon that did not appear until the nineteenth century. We usually look for its origin in the period of the 'scientific revolution' but Galileo and Newton did not appear in a vacuum. To understand why modern science arose in the West, we have to travel right the way back to the Middle Ages.

First of all, though, we need to dispose of a couple myths about scientific progress. A popular misconception is that religion has held back science at every opportunity. Many people still believe that science has advanced by fighting superstition and making the world safe for rational enquiry. It's true that certain religious doctrines contradict some scientific discoveries. The creation/evolution controversy is a case in point, but such quarrels have been surprisingly unusual. Even the infamous trial of Galileo, the other example of conflict most often cited, was a rare aberration in the Catholic Church's usual supportive attitude towards science.

On the other hand, the problems with the thesis that science and faith are locked in a historical conflict are formidable. For a start, the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century coincided with the period when Christian belief in Europe was at its strongest. Only after science had triumphed did religion start to suffer any sort of decline. If Christianity really had tried to hold back scientific progress, the chances are that it would have succeeded. Modern science would not have arisen in Christian Europe at all.

As it happens, much of the evidence marshalled in favour of the conflict thesis turns out to be bogus. The Church never tried to ban zero or human dissection; no one was burnt at the stake for scientific work; and no educated person in the Middle Ages thought that the world was flat, whatever the Bible might imply. Stories about popes excommunicating comets or banning lightning conductors on churches turn out to be fiction. Zealous Victorian historians did find occasional examples of ecclesiastical stupidity; but mostly the evidence was lacking, so they simply made it up.

In medieval Europe, things were different. Aristotle's faulty method was struck down by the Catholic Church, which allowed previously forbidden ideas to flourish.

Another myth about the rise of science is that westerners only had to pick up the baton from the ancient Greeks, or, as has been more recently alleged, the Islamic caliphate. In reality, modern science is qualitatively different from the natural philosophy practiced by the likes of Aristotle or Avicenna. Aristotle started from the passive observation of nature and then built up a system based on rational argument. This had two enormous disadvantages: compared to controlled experiments, passive observation is usually misleading; and not even Aristotle's powers of reason could prevent blunders in his arguments.

Aristotle's discussion of motion is a case in point. He observed that everyday objects tend to stop when nothing was pushing them. From this observation, he deduced the principle that all moving objects must be moved by something else. He elevated this principle to the status of a logical certainty and then used it to explain other kinds of motion. He even thought that it successfully proved the existence of God. If the universe as a whole is full of movement, he argued, it requires an exterior unmoved mover, that is God, to keep it going. But of course, Aristotle's initial observation was just a specific instance without any general applicability. We now know that objects do not stop when there is no force on them. They tend to keep going in a straight line: a principle enshrined as Newton's First Law. Other observations led Aristotle to decree it certain that a vacuum can never exist; that heavy objects fall faster than light ones and that the earth must occupy the centre of the universe. All wrong. Aristotle, alas, was mistaken about almost everything. This was not because he was a fool but because he was practicing a natural philosophy that could never lead to true theories. His scientific method led to madness.

There was one towering exception to this rule. Both the Greeks and Arabs excelled in mathematics. This was because pure rationalism works a treat when it is restricted to geometry. The imams had plenty of uses for maths as well: the Moslem calendar follows the moon and not the solar year, while mosques had to be orientated towards Mecca. Both these religious problems required mathematical solutions. It's said that the complicated rules of Islamic inheritance made algebra indispensable. Even our word algebra is a corruption of al-jabr, the name of an Arabic textbook widely used by Christians.

In medieval Europe, things were different. Aristotle's faulty method was struck down by the Catholic Church, which allowed previously forbidden ideas to flourish. The Church also made natural philosophy a compulsory part of the course that it required theologians to follow. So, unlike in Islam, science had a central place in Christian centres of learning. And surprisingly, Christianity itself provided a worldview which was especially compatible with experimental science.

In 1085, the great Islamic city of Toledo in Spain fell to Alfonso IV, King of Castile. Christian forces captured the magnificent library intact and word soon spread about the fabulous riches contained therein. Europeans were well aware that they had lost much of the learning of the ancient world after the fall of Rome and they were keen to reacquire it. The resulting movement to translate Arabic and Greek scholarship into Latin meant that by 1200, Christians were back up to speed in science and mathematics. Initially, some churchmen were suspicious about all this new knowledge and feared that it would be misused to challenge the faith. When a nest of heretics was found in Paris and its environs, the resulting panic led to a temporary ban on Aristotle's natural philosophy. Scholars were furious and demanded that the forbidden books were reinstated. So, after a decent interval, the Pope rescinded the ban and Aristotle took his place at the heart of Christian education.

This gave Christians good reason to believe that science was a practical venture; that nature did follow fixed laws that could be discovered. It was also a theologically righteous path to pursue.

As we have seen, the danger of Aristotle was in his method. It was bad enough that several of his conclusions contradicted revealed theology. But, the problem went deeper than that. Because he had tried to deduce results deductively, Aristotle made them seem logically necessary. His admirers did not just claim that he was right, they said he had to be right. God himself was bound by what Aristotle thought because, despite his omnipotence, medieval theologians were agreed that even the Deity could not defy logic. But Aristotle was wrong about most of his natural philosophy. Science could go nowhere until the dead hand of the Greek sage was lifted from it.

The Church had to deal with this, even though it was primarily interested in theology and not science. The bishop of Paris, with papal approval, issued a list of opinions, drawn from the work of Aristotle and his medieval followers, which he declared heretical. The effect was paradoxically liberating. All of a sudden, European philosophers were freed to think outside the Aristotelian box. No longer could they assume that the Greeks were always right. Vacuums were no longer impossible. There could even be more than one universe. Now they could speculate on all sorts of things previously ruled out of court. The result was that the fourteenth century became a scientific golden age when much of the groundwork was laid for ideas that later ended up in the books of Copernicus and Galileo.

The Church still had to be convinced that natural philosophy could be bulwark and not an obstacle to theology. The job of persuasion was carried out by the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas. In his massive work Summa theologica, Thomas carefully explained how faith and reason could be reconciled. He provided rational arguments for the existence of God and used logic to defend the Christian faith. Thomas's efforts meant that philosophy was made safe in the eyes of the Church and it cemented its position as a compulsory part of the course that doctors of divinity had to follow. As the new universities churned out graduates, there was a massive increase in the number of people who had knowledge of science and mathematics. And because the universities had to teach natural philosophy, they also provided a home to many professionals who could devote their careers to it.

Given today's perceptions of a conflict between science and religion, it is surprising to find that Christianity proved to be uniquely accommodating to the study of nature. While there is little in the Bible that could be called science, the book of Genesis is very clear about where the universe came from. Contrary to Aristotle's view that it is eternal, the Bible says that the world was created by God at the beginning of time. Christians believed that the world was created ex nihilo, out of nothing. God did not have to work from pre-existing material that resisted his purposes. This meant, as Genesis affirmed, that the creation turned out 'good' and as God wished it to be. Christian theologians held that He had also allowed the world to develop freely through natural laws which He had ordained. The order of nature followed these laws rather than God personally having to manipulate each atom. This is in contrast to a Muslim doctrine, often called occasionalism, which held that Allah was the sole source of cause and effect. There was no need for natural laws, only the direct will of Allah.

Another feature of the Christian God was his reliability. He was not capricious like the Olympians of ancient Greece or entirely beyond human comprehension, like Allah. This meant that natural philosophers knew that they could depend on the laws that He had laid down. Nature itself should reflect her creator by obeying His commandments. This gave Christians good reason to believe that science was a practical venture; that nature did follow fixed laws that could be discovered. It was also a theologically righteous path to pursue. Nonetheless, because God was free to do as he pleased, it was impossible to work out the laws of nature from rational analysis alone. The only way to discover His plan was to go out and look.

It was within this Christian milieu and the continuing tradition of medieval natural philosophy that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo worked. But their discoveries were just one important chapter in the history of western science, the only science which has consistently produced true theories of nature.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

James Hannam. "The Christian Origins of Modern Science." from God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (London: Icon Books, 2009).

This article is reprinted with permission of the author, James Hannam.

THE AUTHOR

James Hannam has a physics degree from the University of Oxford and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. He writes on the pre-modern and early modern history of science and religion. His first book God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science was published by Icon in 2009 (appearing in the US as The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution) and his articles have appeared in several publications including the Spectator, the Mail on Sunday,History Today and First Things. He has also contributed to various academic journals. Dr Hannam is a member of the Science and Religion Forum and the British Society for the History of Science.

Copyright © 2012 James Hannam

Editor's Note: It was a good run!

Hi all:

It may not have been clear to me on the impact of the Catholic Metanarrative since May 2005. I'm sure that these almost 7 years gave some of its readers some food for thought, hopefully leading to that conviction to be better human beings, even better Catholics.

In most of those years, Catholic Metanarrative selected the finest articles and news from different sources in order to promote that "habit" of being intellectually sharp in defending the dignity of the human person through the teachings of the Catholic Church. We have tried to balance the posts with purely theoretical discussions and practical analyses.

However, it has been decided -- with a heavy heart, no less -- that we will need to end the run Catholic Metanarrative. The team (of 1 mostly) could not sustain the efforts any longer, considering the content is sourced from somewhere else. It might be better to simply lead our readers to these sources instead. To share, Catholic Metanarrative gets its content from mainly two sources: ZENIT (www.zenit.org) and CERC (www.catholiceducation.org).

We will go on a soft shutdown between now and May 2012 (a symbolic 7th anniversary celebration). There might be some posts here and there until that time, but we are only looking at reaching that milestone of 1,500 posts since its inception. Once that number is reached (even before May 2012), we will no longer make more posts.

The site, on the other hand, will continue to exist, unless Blogger/Google decides to shutdown the blog.

It has been a very good run! Thank you for the supporters! Please pray for all of us.

Omnes cum Petro ad Iesum per Mariam!

Chipi Buenafe

Article: The Mythical conflict between science and Religion

JAMES HANNAM

The conflict between science and religion as a hypothesis has been rejected by practically every scholar in the field. Why is there such a rift between academic opinion and popular perception? And what has been the real relationship between science and religion?

Introduction

Newspaper articles thrive on cliche. These are not so much hackneyed phrases but rather the useful shorthand for nuggets of popular perception that allow the journalist to immediately tune his readers to the right wavelength. Yesterday's cliches are, of course, today's stereotypes as any perusal of earlier writing will show. The conflict between science and religion is an acceptable cliche that crops up all over the place. In the episode of The Simpsons in which the late Stephen J Gould was a guest voice, Lisa found a fossil angel and events led to a court order being placed on religion to keep a safe distance from science.

Articles in magazines and on the internet all assume that a state of conflict exists between science and religion, always has existed and that science has been winning. Most popular histories of science view all the evidence through this lens without ever stopping to think that there might be another side to the story. But let us turn from popular culture to the academy where we find a rather different picture.

Let's have a look at the comments of a few leading historians of science.

John Hedley Brooke was the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is a leading historian of science in England and the author of Science and Religion — Some Historical Perspectives (1991). In this book, he writes of the conflict hypothesis "In its traditional forms, the thesis has been largely discredited". David Lindberg is Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of many books on medieval science and also on religion. With Ronald Numbers, the current Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the same university, he writes "Despite a developing consensus among scholars that science and Christianity have not been at war, the notion of conflict has refused to die."

Steven Shapin is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He writes "In the late Victorian period it was common to write about the "warfare between science and religion" and to presume that the two bodies of culture must always have been in conflict. However, it is a very long time since these attitudes have been held by historians of science." Finally, we come to the dean of medieval science, Edward Grant, Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University who writes of that most slandered of periods, the Middle Ages, when faith was supposed to have snuffed out all forms of reason "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason [the 18th century], they were only made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".

So, as a theory believed by working historians, the conflict hypothesis is dead. In this article, I want to examine two questions that follow from this. Firstly, if the conflict hypothesis has been rejected by practically every scholar in the field, why is there such a rift between academic opinion and popular perception? And secondly, what has been the real relationship between science and religion?

The conflict hypothesis

Science is the triumph of Western civilisation which has made all its other achievements possible. The enormity of this triumph has very often been reflected onto the historiography of science to produce a story akin to a triumphal progress. From Copernicus onwards, we are told, each generation built on the discoveries of their forerunners to produce a parade of successes with barely a backwards step. This history has been built on two assumptions: that there is something epistemologically unique about science and that reason and rationality are what causes progress in science. Scientists themselves have generally been keen on these ideas and been happy to promote them. Such has been status of science in modern society that this self description, promulgated by writers like Carl Sagan and Jacob Bronowski, has generally been respected by the general public who have been less interested in the more nuanced views of historians.

Hence using anachronism and claiming obscure figures were in fact influential, he is able to manufacture a conflict where none exists.

The myth of conflict first really got going during the Enlightenment (itself a description intended to derogate earlier eras) with the fiercely anti-clerical French philosophes. In hisDiscours Preliminaire, Jean d'Alembert paints a picture of men of the Renaissance finally throwing off the shackles of church domination so that rational enquiry can at last begin. This idea was carried through the nineteenth century with historians like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.

White was the most famous and successful exponent of the conflict hypothesis. He is commonly quoted at the start of modern books on science and religion as representing the soon-to-be-debunked traditional view. It is worth briefly examining whether White was being entirely honest in his work as no one doubts that Draper was engaged in nothing more that polemic. Neither of them were professional historians and both did seem to sincerely believe in the warfare theory they were expounding. Unfortunately, this meant that they set out to prove what they already believed rather than take their conclusions from the facts.

White is quite explicit about this when he writes how he felt before he began his research, "I saw... the conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought — the theological and the scientific." Any such statement should immediately set off alarm bells which grow louder as we look at his work The Warfare of Science with Theology. His usual tactics are to scour the sources for some stick-in-the-mud reactionary and claim this represents the consensus of religious opinion and then find another thinker (who is usually just as faithful a Christian as the reactionary) who turned out to be right, and claim that they represent reason. Hence using anachronism and claiming obscure figures were in fact influential, he is able to manufacture a conflict where none exists. A detailed critique of his work from Lindberg and Numbers can beread here but I would like to point out a few errors in the specific area of religious persecution of scientists.

White's examples of actual prosecution are few and far between which is not very surprising as the only scientist the Christian Church ever prosecuted for scientific ideas per se was Galileo and even here historians doubt that was the major reason he got into trouble. This is an embarrassment for White as he thought that in the Middle Ages especially, the Church was burning freethinkers left, right and centre. The lack of any examples of this at all is a serious problem so he is forced to draft in non-scientists or else to claim that prosecutions on non-scientific matters were scientific persecutions after all. Here are some examples:

	Roger Bacon has been a popular martyr for science since the nineteenth century. He was a scholastic theologian who was keen to claim Aristotle for the Christian faith. He was not a scientist in any way we would recognise and his ideas are not nearly so revolutionary as they are often painted. In chapter 12 of his book, White writes of Roger "the charges on which St. Bonaventura silenced him, and Jerome of Ascoli imprisoned him, and successive popes kept him in prison for fourteen years, were "dangerous novelties" and suspected sorcery." This is untrue. As Lindberg says "his imprisonment, if it occurred at all (which I doubt) probably resulted with his sympathies for the radical "poverty" wing of the Franciscans (a wholly theological matter) rather than from any scientific novelties which he may have proposed."
	In chapter 2, White informs us "In 1327 Cecco d'Ascoli, noted as an astronomer, was for this [the doctrine of antipodes] and other results of thought, which brought him under suspicion of sorcery, driven from his professorship at Bologna and burned alive at Florence." Cecco D'Ascoli was indeed burnt at the stake in 1327 in Florence. He is the only natural philosopher in the entire Middle Ages to pay this penalty and was executed for breaking parole after a previous trial when he had been convicted of heresy for, apparently, claiming Jesus Christ was subject to the stars. This is not enough for White who claims, entirely without foundation, that Cecco met his fate partly for the scientific view that the antipodes were inhabited as well as dishonestly calling him an 'astronomer' rather than an 'astrologer' to strengthen his scientific credentials.
	In the same chapter White claims "In 1316 Peter of Abano, famous as a physician, having promulgated this [the habitation of the antipodes] with other obnoxious doctrines in science, only escaped the Inquisition by death." We have no good evidence that d'Abano was under investigation from the inquisition at his death. However, he did gain a posthumous reputation as a sorcerer when spurious works were attributed to him. This may have led to the reports of his bones being dug up and burnt after his death. There is again, no evidence whatsoever that the antipodes debate or science had anything to do with the matter.
	It is hard to confirm some of White's victims existed at all. "The chemist John Barrillon was thrown into prison," he says in chapter 12 "and it was only by the greatest effort that his life was saved." The great historian of science, George Sarton, with a better knowledge of the sources of anyone before or since, says this episode is 'completely unknown' to him. Needless to say, White gives no reference.
	Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy, is also held up as a martyr to science. White explains in chapter 13 "Vesalius was charged with dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world... His death was hastened, if not caused, by men who conscientiously supposed that he was injuring religion." The trouble is that hardly a word of this has any basis in historical fact. Vesalius did go on a pilgrimage and was drowned on the way back. But there is no hint he was ever prosecuted and the idea his death was hastened by those who supposed he was injuring religion is simply wrong.
	Discussing the heliocentric system, White goes on "Many minds had received it [the doctrine of Copernicus], but within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds." In fact, we do not know the exact reasons Bruno was prosecuted but modern scholars like Frances Yates suggest it was because he was a magus who was trying to start a new neo-Platonic religion. He did believe the earth revolved around the sun but this was purely for religious reasons as he effectively worshipped it. In any case, it was incidental to his fate as were his other pseudo-scientific ideas.

One would like to take the charitable view that White really believed his theory and was not making up evidence to support a position he knew to be false. Instead, he skews the evidence by accepting that which agrees with his hypothesis while being sceptical of what does not. This means that he has included falsehoods that he would have noticed if he had taken a properly objective attitude towards all his evidence. The points given above together with Numbers and Lindberg's criticisms noted in their article are sufficient, however, to prove White's work as utterly worthless as history. Draper, with no footnotes or references cannot even claim to give an illusion of scholarship. Colin Russell, in a recent summary of the historiography of the alleged warfare, sums up the views of modern scholarship, saying "Draper takes such liberty with history, perpetuating legends as fact that he is rightly avoided today in serious historical study. The same is nearly as true of White, though his prominent apparatus of prolific footnotes may create a misleading impression of meticulous scholarship". But even today, historians who should know better, like Daniel Boorstin, Charles Freeman and William Manchester, have produced popular books that wheel out all the old misconceptions and prejudices.

Another reason for the myth of conflict continuing is because at the moment there is undoubtedly a conflict between one wing of Christianity and modern science. This is the battle over evolution. Although the Catholic Church and mainline protestants long ago reconciled themselves to Darwin's theory and modified their theology accordingly, many conservative Christians remain deeply suspicious about evolution and its alleged metaphysical implications. Unfortunately, many who are defending evolution try to widen the gap between religion and science and use it to push non-scientific but anti-religious philosophical agendas.

This can be seen clearly in the work of Richard Dawkins and many writers on the internet. Some observers would claim that now science holds the whip hand it is being no less intolerant of dissent as the church supposedly once was. This would not be an accurate view as instead the argument over evolution is carried on vehemently by a small number of extremists on both sides while the rest of the community looks on rather bemused. Occasionally, it spills over in a public arena such as when pressure groups gain control of previously obscure bodies that set school curricula, but in general it does not have the slightest effect. Most of the occasions when there have been conflicts between science and religion were caused by someone seeking publicity and fame when the problem could much more easily be sorted by patient discussion. This is the case both of Galileo publishing his inflammatory popular tracts that provoked the church and John Scopes volunteering to be charged with teaching evolution. Even so, Galileo himself blamed jealous scientific rivals and professional spite for his predicament.

The reasons for the continuing popular belief in the historical conflict can probably be summed up as follows:

• God's Philosophers by James Hannam

  The writings of an earlier generation of historians have yet to be eclipsed by modern scholarship;
  
• Some popular writers of today continue to recycle the old myths rather than using up to date researc
  
• A few famous events have given a misleading impression to people unfamiliar with their context;
• The idea of a conflict makes for a better story than more multi-faceted truth.

The real historical relationship between science and religion

Throughout history the real situation has been complicated and changeable. It has not proven possible, and nor is it ever likely to, for a single theory to explain the interaction of all forms of science and all forms of religion. It is certainly true that certain science (say, neo-Darwinist theory) is in conflict with certain kinds of religion (say, literalist Christianity) but even in an environment where both are present the effect is pretty negligible. For all the sound and fury over the teaching of evolution it is difficult to make any sort of case that science in the US has been adversely effected by creationism. If it means that scientists need to explain the theory of evolution better to suspicious laymen (which is something they are usually poor at doing), creationism could even serve an occasionally useful purpose.

Conversely, cosmology has found itself agreeing with religion rather more than some anti-religious thinkers would like. A hundred years ago nearly all non-religious thinkers took it for granted that the universe had always existed and always would. Despite the opposition of theologians claiming a real infinite in time was logically impossible (sometime called the Kalam cosmological argument), atheists seemed quite happy with an uncreated, eternal universe. When the Big Bang model was first suggested by the Jesuit priest Georges Le Maitre, it was greeted with a certain amount of scepticism and the atheist Fred Hoyle coined the phrase 'Big Bang' intending it to be derogatory.

Most of the occasions when there have been conflicts between science and religion were caused by someone seeking publicity and fame when the problem could much more easily be sorted by patient discussion. This is the case both of Galileo publishing his inflammatory popular tracts that provoked the church and John Scopes volunteering to be charged with teaching evolution.

His atheism also blinded him to the inadequacies of his steady state theory which one suspects he only came up with to avoid the uncomfortable metaphysical implications of a universe with a beginning. Atheist scientists have now come to terms with the big bang and adjusted their metaphysics accordingly, much like most Christians, after some debate, accepted evolution and twiddled their theology. However, it is interesting to hear today's atheists declaring that God must have a creator when their predecessors were quite happy for the universe not to have one. All this seems to demonstrate that when it comes to science, both sides find things they do not like and both sides argue against them until the evidence becomes impossible to deny.

Today popular histories do try and recognise this variety. The people we want to eulogise as the great heroes of science rarely had such clear cut views as was once thought. This has led to what I call the 'examination' school of historical writing that can sometimes read like a series of end of term report cards where the figures of the past are praised or scolded according to how much the modern writer thinks they got right. A good example of this approach is John Gribbin's recent Science: A History 1543-2000 (published as The Scientists in the US) which is really just an entertaining collection of anecdotes covered in a positivist gloss. But at least he largely avoids the conflict myth and admits that neither Giordano Bruno nor the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus can be described as martyrs for science.

Full-on confrontations between science and religion are reasonably rare. Even when such encounters occur, they are usually arguments between co-religionists with shared concerns about how new discoveries affect faith. We find this during the debate that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species where Christians such as Asa Gray defended both the theory of evolution and Christianity's accommodation with it. Another cause of confusion is when people seeking to attack religion seek to co-opt science onto their side. For instance, whether one is pro-life or not has nothing to do with science, but is often portrayed as such. Concerns about experiments on stem cells also arise from ethics.

This leads us straight to the real conflict which is between religion and naturalism. And here the warfare is real enough. Science is partly characterised by methodological naturalism which was used by natural philosophers of the Middle Ages and fully approved by the Church. They realised, as modern naturalists do not, that it is an error of logic to assume that because science assumes naturalism to simplify and explain, it follows that science shows naturalism is true. It is not the purpose of this article to attack the naturalistic fallacy, merely to observe that many of the alleged battles between science and religion are actually being fought by proxy between naturalism and religion, with science as the weapon of both. And, as the defeats of naturalism over the big bang and spontaneous generation showed, the traffic is by no means all one way.

Most academic historians, while rejecting outright conflict, would refuse to be drawn on whether or not the contribution of religion to science was broadly positive or negative citing the enormous amount of data that would have to be assimilated to give a sensible answer. Most are happy to say that the relationship has been positive in some ways and negative in others with an overall effect that is probably too subtle to be measured. While I respect that cautious view, I believe it is wrong and that a very strong case can be made for the Christian religion be a specific factor in the rise of modern science in Western Europe. This is one of the ideas that I address in my new book God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

James Hannam. "The Mythical conflict between science and Religion." from God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science.

This article is reprinted with permission of the author, James Hannam.

THE AUTHOR

James Hannam has a physics degree from the University of Oxford and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. He writes on the pre-modern and early modern history of science and religion. His first book God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science was published by Icon in 2009 (appearing in the US as The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution) and his articles have appeared in several publications including the Spectator, the Mail on Sunday,History Today and First Things. He has also contributed to various academic journals. Dr Hannam is a member of the Science and Religion Forum and the British Society for the History of Science.

Copyright © 2007 James Hannam

Article: The Obvious Truth of Purgatory

POPE BENEDICT XVI

Today people have become used to thinking: what is sin? God is great, he knows us, so sin does not count; in the end God will be kind to us all.

It is a beautiful hope. But both justice and true guilt exist. Those who have destroyed man and the earth cannot suddenly sit down at God's table together with their victims.

God creates justice. We must keep this in mind ... Purgatory ... for me is an obvious truth, so evident and also so necessary and comforting that it could not be absent ...

A great many of us hope that there is something in us that can be saved, that there may be in us a final desire to serve God and serve human beings, to live in accordance with God. Yet there are so very many wounds, there is so much filth. We need to be prepared, to be purified. This is our hope: even with so much dirt in our souls, in the end the Lord will give us the possibility, he will wash us at last with his goodness that comes from his cross. In this way he makes us capable of being for him in eternity ...

Therefore, we must also speak of sin and of the sacrament of forgiveness and reconciliation. A sincere person knows that he is guilty, that he must start again, that he must be purified. And this is the marvelous reality which the Lord offers us: there is a chance of renewal, of being new. The Lord starts with us again and in this way we can also start again with the others in our life. This aspect of renewal, of the restitution of our being after so many errors, so many sins, is the great promise, the great gift the Church offers but which psychotherapy, for example, cannot offer ... We can be healed. Souls that are wounded and ill, as everyone knows by experience, not only need advice but true renewal, which can only come from God's power, from the power of Crucified Love. I feel this is the important connection of the mysteries which in the end truly affect our lives.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Pope Benedict XVI. "The Obvious Truth of Purgatory." from an address by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the clergy of the Diocese of Rome(February 7, 2008).

Reprinted with permission of Liberia Editrice Vaticana.

All publication rights to this material belong to Liberia Editrice Vaticana and may not be reproduced without written permission from them.

THE AUTHOR

Pope Benedict XVI is the author of Jesus of Nazareth, Vol II,Jesus of Nazareth, Vol I, Caritas in Veritate: Charity in Truth,Saved in Hope: Spe Salvi, God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est, The End of Time?: The Provocation of Talking about God, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, Salt of the Earth: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church at the End of the Millennium, God and the World: Believing and Living in Our Time, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, The Spirit of the Liturgy, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church,Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Introduction to Christianity, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, Behold the Pierced One, and God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life.

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Article: Are the Gospels Myth?

CARL OLSON

So, are the four Gospels "myth"? Can they be trusted as historical records?

January 11, 49 B.C. is one of the most famous dates in the history of ancient Rome, even of the ancient world. On that date Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, committing himself and his followers to civil war. Few, if any, historians doubt that the event happened. On the other hand, numerous skeptics claim that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are myth and have no basis in historical fact. Yet, as historian Paul Merkley pointed out two decades ago in his article, "The Gospels as Historical Testimony," far less historical evidence exists for the crossing of the Rubicon than does for the events depicted in the Gospels:

There are no firsthand testimonies to Caesar's having crossed the Rubicon (wherever it was). Caesar himself makes no mention in his memoirs of crossing any river. Four historians belonging to the next two or three generations do mention a Rubicon River, and claim that Caesar crossed it. They are: Velleius Paterculus (c.19 B.C. – c.A.D. 30); Plutarch (c.A.D. 46-120); Suetonius (75-160); and Appian (second century). All of these evidently depended on the one published eyewitness account, that of Asinius Pollio (76 B.C.-c. A.D. 4) which account has disappeared without a trace. No manuscript copies for any of these secondary sources is to be found earlier than several hundred years after their composition.(The Evangelical Quarterly 58, 319-336)

Merkley observed that those skeptics who either scoff at the historical reliability of the Gospels or reject them outright as "myth" do so without much, if any, regard for the nature of history in general and the contents of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in particular.

The Distinctive Sign

So, are the four Gospels "myth"? Can they be trusted as historical records? If Christianity is about "having faith," do such questions really matter? The latter question is, I hope, easy to answer: Yes, it obviously matters very much if the narratives and discourses recorded by the four evangelists are about real people and historical events. Pope Benedict XVI, in his bookJesus of Nazareth, offers this succinct explanation:

For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this earth. The factum historum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, but the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnates est — when we say these words, we acknowledge God's actual entry into real history. (Jesus of Nazareth, xv)

Christianity, more than any other religion, is rooted in history and makes strong — even shocking — claims about historical events, most notably that God became man and dwelt among us. Of course, some Christians of a less-than-orthodox persuasion are content to discard large chunks of the Gospels as unnecessary (or even "offensive") or to interpret as "mythological" or "metaphorical" nearly each and every event and belief described therein. But such is not the belief of the Catholic Church (or of the Eastern Orthodox churches and most conservative Protestants). As the Catechism of the Catholic Church flatly states: "Belief in the true Incarnation of the Son of God is the distinctive sign of Christian faith" (CCC 463).

It is, ultimately, this distinctive sign — the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was and is truly God and man — that is the focal point of attacks on the historical credibility of the Gospels and the New Testament. Over the past few centuries many historians and theologians have sought to uncover the "historical Jesus" and to peel away the many layers of what they believed were legend and theological accretion. Many abandoned hope that any historical (never mind theological) fact could be extracted from the Gospels.

A Work of Fiction

There were many complex reasons for this state of affairs, one of them being the Enlightenment-era doctrine that purely scientific, objective history could not only be found, but was necessary. Empirical data became for many scholars — men such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes — the key to all scholarship, including the study of history. It became the accepted wisdom that supernatural or miraculous elements could not be considered scientific and truly historical and that they had to be rejected. Anything outside the realm of empirical data was liable to be labeled "myth" and "legend."

Fast-forward to our day. The results of this approach are all around us, both in the scholarly and popular realm. Not long ago, a young filmmaker named Brian Flemming produced a documentary titled The God Who Wasn't There. Its purpose, he explained in an interview, is to demonstrate that the "biblical Jesus" is a myth. Asked to summarize the evidence for this stance, Flemming explained:

It's more a matter of demonstrating a positive than a negative, and the positive is that early Christians appeared not to have believed in a historical Jesus. If the very first Christians appear to believe in a mythical Christ, and only later did "historical" details get added bit by bit, that is not consistent with the real man actually existing . . . I would say that he is a myth in the same way that many other characters people believed actually existed. Like William Tell is most likely a myth, according to many folklorists and many historians. Of course, [Jesus] is a very important myth. I think that he was invented a long time ago, and those stories have been passed on as if they are true. (David Ian Miller, "Finding My Religion," www.sfgate.com)

Here "myth" is synonymous with "fiction" or even "falsehood," reflecting the Enlightenment-era bias against anything bearing even trace amounts of the supernatural. "All I'm saying," remarked Flemming, "is that [Jesus] doesn't exist, and it would be a healthy thing for Christians to look at the Bible as a work of fiction from which they can take inspiration rather than, you know, the authoritative word of God."

"Serious Unicorns"

Thus the Gospels, according to skeptics such as Flemming, are compilations of "nice stories" or "silly tales," just like stories about unicorns and the Easter Bunny. Some skeptics mock Christians for holding fearfully onto childish tales while the truly mature people (self-described by some as "brights") go about the business of making the world a better place. "Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology," stated well-known atheist Richard Dawkins in column in The Independent (Dec. 23, 1998), "as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns." Fellow God-basher Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea,wrote,

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight — that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether. (18)

Smarter than Thou

Such rhetoric rests both on the assumption that the Gospels are fanciful myth and that the authors of the New Testament (and their readers) were clueless about the difference between historical events and fictional stories. There is an overbearing sense of chronological snobbery at work: We are smarter than people who lived 2,000 years ago. Yet the Second Epistle of Peter demonstrates a clear understanding of the difference between myth and verified historical events: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Pet. 1:16). The opening verses of Luke's Gospel indicate that the author undertook the task of writing about real people and events:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Luke 1:1-4)

And the fourth Gospel concludes with similar remarks:

This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did: were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:24-25)

These quotations do not, of course, prove the historicity of the New Testament. Rather, they suggest that the authors, far from being knuckle-dragging simpletons, set about to write works depicting real people and events — especially since they believed the narratives they recounted had meaning only if they really did occur. As such, their historical content should be judged not against tales of unicorns and Easter bunnies, but against other first-century works of history and historical narrative.

What Is a Gospel?

The word gospel comes from the Greek word euangelion, meaning "good news" and refers to the message of Christian belief in the person of Jesus Christ. There has been much scholarly debate about the genre of "gospel" and how it might relate to other forms of writings found in first-century Palestine and the larger ancient world. Obviously, they do contain biographical details, and some scholars have argued in recent years that the gospels are as biographical in nature as anything in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

These quotations do not, of course, prove the historicity of the New Testament. Rather, they suggest that the authors, far from being knuckle-dragging simpletons, set about to write works depicting real people and events...

"The majority of recent specialized studies," writes Evangelical biblical scholar Craig L. Blomberg in Making Sense of the New Testament, "has recognized that the closest parallels are found among the comparatively trustworthy histories and biographies of writers like the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides" (28). In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Catholic theologian and biblical scholar Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:

We must conclude, then, that the genre of the Gospel is not that of pure "history"; but neither is it that of myth, fairy tale, or legend. In fact, evangelion constitutes a genre all its own, a surprising novelty in the literature of the ancient world. Matthew does not seek to be "objective" in a scientific or legal sense. He is writing as one whose life has been drastically changed by the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. Hence, he is proposing to his listeners an objective reality of history, but offered as kerygma, that is, as a proclamation that bears personal witness to the radical difference that reality has already made in his life. (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. II: Meditations on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, 44)

Many early Christian authors, such as Justin Martyr, referred to the Gospels as memoirs of the apostles. Blomberg has used the descriptive "theological biographies," which captures well the supernatural and human elements found within them.

The Historical Evidence

Those supernatural elements — especially the miracles of Jesus and his claims to divinity — are, as we've noted, why skeptics call the Gospels "myth" while remaining unruffled about anything written about Julius Caesar and the Rubicon by Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian. Yes, Suetonius did write in his account (Lives of the Twelve Caesars) about "an apparition of superhuman size and beauty . . . sitting on the river bank, playing a reed pipe" who persuaded Caesar to cross the river, but it has not seemed to undermine the belief that Caesar did indeed cross the Rubicon on January 11, 49 B.C. But, for the sake of argument, let's set aside the theological claims found in the New Testament and take a brief look at the sort of data a historian might examine in gauging the reliability and accuracy of an ancient manuscript.

First, there is the sheer number of ancient copies of the New Testament. There are close to 5,700 full or partial Greek New Testament manuscripts in existence. Most of these date from between the second to 16th century, with the oldest, known as Papyrus 52 (which contains John 18), dating from around A.D. 100-150. By comparison, the average work by a classical author — such as Tacitus (c. A.D. 56-c. 120), Pliny the Younger (A.D. 61-113), Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17), and Thucydides (460-395 B.C.) — has about 20 extant manuscripts, the earliest copy usually several centuries newer than the original. For example, the earliest copy of works by the prominent Roman historian Suetonius (A.D. 75-130) date to A.D. 950 — over 800 years after the original manuscripts had been written.

In addition to the thousands of Greek manuscripts, there are an additional 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands of additional manuscripts in Syriac, Aramaic, and Coptic, for a total of about 24,000 full or partial manuscripts of the New Testament. And then there are the estimated one million quotes from the New Testament in the writings of the Church Fathers (A.D. 150-1300). Obviously, the more manuscripts that are available, the better scholars are able to assess accurately what the original manuscripts contained and to correct errors that may exist in various copies.

When Were They Written?

That means, simply, that there exist four accounts of key events in Jesus' life written within 30 to 60 years after his Crucifixion — and this within a culture that placed a strong emphasis on the role and place of an accurate oral tradition.

Closely related is the matter of dating. While debate continues as to the exact dating of the Gospels, few biblical scholars believe that any of the four works were written after the end of the first century. "Liberal New Testament scholars today," writes Blomberg, "tend to put Mark a few years one side or the other of A.D. 70, Matthew and Luke — Acts sometime in the 80s, and John in the 90s" (Making Sense of the New Testament, 25). Meanwhile, many conservative scholars date the synoptic Gospels (and Acts) in the 60s and John in the 90s. That means, simply, that there exist four accounts of key events in Jesus' life written within 30 to 60 years after his Crucifixion — and this within a culture that placed a strong emphasis on the role and place of an accurate oral tradition. Anyone who denies that Jesus existed or who claims that the Gospels are filled with historical errors or fabrications will, in good conscience, have to explain why they don't make the same assessment about the historical works of Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Julius Caesar, Livy, Josephus, Tacitus, and other classical authors.

Secondly, historical details are found in the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. These include numerous mentions of secular rulers and leaders (Caesar Augustus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Felix, Archelaus, Agrippa, Gallio), as well as Jewish leaders (Caiaphas, Ananias) — the sort of names unlikely to be used inaccurately or even to show up in a "myth." Anglican scholar Paul Barnett, in Is The New Testament Reliable?, provides several pages' worth of intersections between biblical and non-biblical sources regarding historical events and persons. "Christian sources contribute, on an equal footing with non-Christian sources," he observes, "pieces of information that form part of the fabric of known history. In matters of historical detail, the Christian writers are as valuable to the historian as the non-Christian" (167).

Then there are the specifically Jewish details, including references to and descriptions of festivals, religious traditions, farming and fishing equipment, buildings, trades, social structures, and religious hierarchies. As numerous books and articles have shown in recent decades, the beliefs and ideas found in the Gospels accurately reflect a first-century Jewish context. All of this is important in responding to the claim that the Gospels were written by authors who used Greek and Egyptian myths to create a supernatural man-god out of the faint outline of a lowly Jewish carpenter.

Pay Dirt

Various modern archeological discoveries have validated specific details found in the Gospels:

• In 1961 a mosaic from the third century was found in Caesarea Maritima that had the name "Nazareth" in it. This is the first known ancient non-biblical reference to Nazareth.
• Coins with the names of the Herod family have been discovered, including the names of Herod the king, Herod the tetrarch of Galilee (who killed John the Baptist), Herod Agrippa I (who killed James Zebedee), and Herod Agrippa II (before whom Paul testified).
• In 1990 an ossuary was found inscribed with the Aramaic words, "Joseph son of Caiaphas," believed to be a reference to the high priest Caiaphas.
• In 1968 an ossuary was discovered near Jerusalem bearing the bones of a man who had been executed by crucifixion in the first century. These are the only known remains of a man crucified in Roman Palestine, and verify the descriptions given in the Gospels of Jesus' Crucifixion.
• In June 1961 Italian archaeologists excavating an ancient Roman amphitheatre near Caesarea-on-the-Sea (Maritima) uncovered a limestone block. On its face is an inscription (part of a larger dedication to Tiberius Caesar) that reads: "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judaea."

Numerous other finds continue to demolish the notion that the Gospels are mythologies filled with fictional names and events.

The External Evidence

Third, there are extra-biblical, ancient references to Jesus and early Christianity. Although the number of non-Christian Roman writings from the first half of the first century is quite small (just a few volumes), there are a couple of significant references.

Writing to the Emperor Trajan around A.D. 112, Pliny the Younger reported on the trials of certain Christians arrested by the Romans. He noted that those who are "really Christians" would never curse Christ:

They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. (Letters, Book 10, Letter 96)

Third, there are extra-biblical, ancient references to Jesus and early Christianity.

The historian Tacitus, in his Annals — considered by historians to be one the finest works of ancient Roman history mentioned how the Emperor Nero, following the fire in Rome in A.D. 64, persecuted Christians in order to draw attention away from himself. The passage is noteworthy as an unfriendly source because although Tacitus thought Nero was appalling, he also despised the foreign and, to him, superstitious religion of Christianity:

Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. (Annals, 15:44)

Robert E. Van Voorst, author of Jesus Outside the New Testament, offers a detailed analysis of scholarly controversies about this passage, and then states, "Of all the Roman authors, Tacitus gives us the most precise information about Christ" (45). This includes Tacitus's understanding that "Christus" — not Paul or someone else — was the founder of the Christian movement. He notes that Christ was executed under Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and that Judea was the source of the Christian movement. All of which further confirms the historical reliability of the Gospels.

Conclusion

As Pope Benedict XVI noted in his book on Jesus, there is much that is good about historical-critical and other scientific methods of studying Scripture. But these approaches have limits. "Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature" (Jesus of Nazareth, xx).

The Christian apologist should not be embarrassed to admit that he has a certain bias when it comes to reading and understanding the Gospels. He should point out that everyone has biases, and that the skeptic's bias against the supernatural and the miraculous shapes how he reads and understands history, especially the historical data found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Christian, in other words, should have no problem with an honest historical examination of the Gospels. But why do so many skeptics shy away from a candid examination of their philosophical biases? That is the question apologists should pose and demand (politely, of course) to be answered.

Further Reading:

Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels by Craig A. Evans

The Gospels and the Jesus of History by Xavier Leon-Dufour, S.J.

"The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church," Pontifical Biblical Commission (March 18,1994; available online at www.ewtn.com)

Is the New Testament Reliable? by Paul Barnett

The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd

Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI

Making Sense of the New Testament: Three Crucial Questions by Craig L. Blomberg

Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss the Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Cultureby J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Carl E. Olson. "Are the Gospels Myth?" This Rock vol. 19 no. 3 (March, 2008).

This article is reprinted with permission from Catholic Answers Magazine and the author, Carl E. Olson.

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THE AUTHORS

Carl E. Olson is the editor of IgnatiusInsight.com. He is the co-author of The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code, The Da Vinci Hoax: DVD and author of Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"? He has written for numerous Catholic periodicals and is a regular contributor to National Catholic Register and Our Sunday Visitor newspapers. He and his wife, Heather, have two children. Their conversion story appears in Surprised by Truth 3. Visit his personal web site at www.carl-olson.com.

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