Medieval Catholic Europe and its great contribution to science

In the anti-Catholic world of today, where a bronze-age inspired moon cult fascism named Submission, is lauded as 'religious', the revisionist history of Atheists and Secularists – resplendent in ignorance especially in English speaking countries – is being dismantled, by facts and history. The glory of the Catholic Church, as well as its errors, sometimes corruption, mistakes and infirmities, is being brought into focus, during the past 100 years [starting with Duhem, an apostate from the Atheist-Marxist revisionist school].

No longer is there a 'dark age', from 500-1000 AD, but an age of survival against the Moslem Jihad, the Viking-Moslem slave trade, the Viking raids, the Magyar-Hun irruptions; and the turmoil associated with the transition from the debilitated and deformed Roman world, to the modern [History Channel and other panegyrics to the 'glory of Rome' notwithstanding]. Gone is the idea that nothing happened, nothing was invented, and science and math did not exist. Only the wretchedly uneducated believe in such fairy tales.

In a very interesting book, 'Galileo goes to jail, and other myths about Science and Religion', there are chapters devoted to the mendacity that there is a conflict between science and faith; or that religion retarded inquiry. The opposite is of course true. Without the Catholic Church there is no modern world – from dissecting the human body and religion; from calculus to the cosmos; from optics to higher math; from blast furnaces to cathedrals; the poorly named Middle Ages were full of social, political, intellectual and scientific creation – all in the name of God and understanding the wonders of his design. In this vein there is no 'science', today the cult of warm, Darwin, monkeys to men; and other apocrypha all serve, and all are viewed through the prism of naturalism. There is no independent scientific establishment.

We know for a fact that the Church was the biggest financier of science in history until modern times. From 'Galileo goes to jail and other myths.....'

“Catholic church has been probably the largest single and longest-term patron of science in history, that many contributors to the Scientific Revolution were themselves Catholic, and that several Catholic institutions and perspectives were key influences upon the rise of modern science.”

Newton was not a deist, but a profoundly religious Christian:

“...philosophes of the eighteenth century created their own view of Newton as the apotheosis of the kind of secular reason that they advanced to replace Christianity, and an active God did not fit into their picture...”

“The notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God, as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker; is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends, (under pretence of making God a supramundane intelligence,) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world.”

“Newton was well read in Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and other mechanical philosophers, who sought to explain phenomena in terms of matter and motion. He was a mechanical philosopher himself, but he found Descartes' specific picture of the world as nothing but matter and motion theologically dangerous-where was there any room for free divine activity...”

Another example of mendacity: the Jesuits did not obstruct Galileo or any of the other 'scientists' of the 16^th or 17^th century, quite the contrary:

“Jesuits (officially called the Society of Jesus). Formally established in 1540, the society placed such special emphasis on education that by 1625 they had founded nearly 450 colleges in Europe and elsewhere. Many Jesuit priests were deeply involved in scientific issues, and many made important contributions. The reformed calendar, enacted under Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and still in use today, was worked out by the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christoph Clavius (1538-1612). Optics and astronomy were topics of special interest for Jesuits. Christoph Schemer (1573-1650) studied sunspots,... “

Likewise the 'fat' friars and monks were indispensable to preserve, than extend science:

“...during the Scientific Revolution, Catholic monks, friars, and priests in missions constituted a virtual worldwide web of correspondents and data collectors. Information on local geography, flora, fauna, mineralogy, and other subjects as well as a wealth of astronomical, meteorological, and seismological observations flooded back into Europe from far-flung Catholic missions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The data and specimens they sent back were channeled into natural-philosophical treatises and studies by Catholics and Protestants alike. This massive collection of new scientific information...”

Universities – a Catholic invention – soon built up specialized skills and created academies or organizations to reflect that focus. An example is the scientific focus of the Catholic university of Paris:

“Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, founded in 1666 and probably the most stable and productive of all early scientific societies, had a majority of Catholic members, such as Gian Domenico Cassini (1625-1712), famed for his observations of Jupiter and Saturn, and Wilhelm Homberg (1653-1715), a convert to Catholicism and one of the most renowned and productive chemists of his day. Four of the early members were in orders, including the abbe Jean Picard (1620-1682), a noted astronomer, and the abbe Edme Mariotte (ca. 1620-1684), an important physicist.”

From the Middle Age milieu of inquiry, faith, reason and honest assessment of facts and observations, we have the rise of modern science:

“...catalog of Catholic contributors to the Scientific Revolution would run to many pages and exhaust the reader's patience. Thus it will suffice to mention just a very few other representatives from various scientific disciplines. In the medical sciences, there is Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), the famous anatomist of Brussels; while another Fleming, Joan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644), one of the most innovative and influential voices in seventeenth-century medicine and chemistry, was a devout Catholic with strong mystical leanings.' In Italy, the microscopist Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694)... Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), was not only Catholic but in Holy Orders as a cathedral canon (a cleric charged with administrative duties). And lest it be said that he was simultaneously persecuted for his astronomical work, it must be pointed out that much of his audience and support came from within the Catholic hierarchy...”

Copernicus famously stated that he waited so long to publish his heliocentric work, due to the howling madness of academics invested in the Ptolemy's geocentric model. He was right. The Catholics were in the main happy with heliocentricity since it lifted the earth from the center, which according to scripture is dirty, unworthy and full of refuse, into an enlightened plane, further justifying faith and the belief in man's unique planet and creation. The problem with Copernicus was that his math did not support elliptical orbits – a fact that Jesuit astronomers had proven. It was another Christian Kepler who provided the math [not Galileo, who maintained weirdly that tides proved heliocentricity....]

In any event a list of Catholic scientists does indeed run to many pages. But of course Atheists and Moslems will invent Moslem and Arab names, link them to Cordoba of the 9^th or 10^th century, and state emphatically with no proof, 'without Islam, there is no Catholic scientific revolution...' Whatever.