We are told that there was a 'revolution' in the 17^th century in science. The implication is that science, or our modern understanding of it, just suddenly popped up, rising out of the mud and superstition of a 'dark age'. This sounds more like propaganda and claptrap than a real history of science. Most 'breakthroughs' are built on the careful accumulation of change and experimentation. Most 'revolutions' are firmly rooted in past events and precursors. Very little erupts at once, caused by a singular combination of events and energy. It stands to reason, as two of the more famous Christian scientists one could name out of 200 Newton and Copernicus admitted, that great insights stand on the shoulders of those who have laboured before.

Atheist-marxist-positivist histories of science either ignore or denigrate the achievements of medieval natural philosophers and scientists. These types studiously ignore the creation of algebra [Diophantus 2^nd c AD], physics, calculation of the earth's sphericity, motion theorems, mean speed theorems, advanced geometry [see Descartes], objective experimentation [11^th century], the University system [11^th c or earlier], engineering [Gothic cathedrals], and the hundreds of inventions from optics [glasses, 13^th c], to modern pants, to water milling wheels and the blast furnace. It seems rather odd that modern atheist academics wearing glasses, pants and reading books, would be so inclined to hate the medieval period.

A key objection that 'Enlightenment thinkers' had against the Christian Medieval period was its supposed faith in Aristotle. This is simply untrue [see here]. There were major groups within Christendom that either totally or partially rejected Aristotleian theorem in the natural sciences [Augustine, Siger et al]. Most of Aristotle is utterly wrong and medieval man knew this. His philosophical writings were in the main more compatible with the Christian view and since Aristotle represented the thought of the ancient world, it seems only fitting and rational that the Christian era would attempt to both understand and reconcile ancient Greek philosophy with medieval science. The supposedly rational 'Enlightenment' did not understand this, and such a fact only highlights its bigotry.

Apparently the 'Enlightenment' did not know that Aristotle's writings were condemned in 1277 as being contrary to scripture and observable evidence [Aristotle believed in many phenomena which were simply disproved by science]. The famed history of science philosopher Pierre Duhem, who in the early 20^th century pioneered the investigation into medieval science, believed these condemnations of 1277 implied the rejection of the idea that the universe had to be the way Aristotle thought it had to, and the birth of the realisation that the workings of the universe had to be empirically determined. In other words they were a step forward for science. We see this evidenced in the neo-Platonism of Copernicus and Kepler – again in opposition to Aristotle - had developed in Italy through the late Middle Ages while the insistence on an intelligible and rational universe is found throughout scholastic natural philosophy, embedded within an independent University system.

Historian James Hannam, himself not that sympathetic to the Catholic Medieval viewpoint admits that science, in whatever method it arrived [a sudden leap, or a slow transformation], did present itself only in Christian Europe. Surely this must confound the modern Marxist and Atheist:

“Despite the huge volume of modern scholarship on the scientific revolution, there is no agreed answer to the question of why it happened in Western Europe in the seventeenth century and not elsewhere or earlier. Some theories include: sociologist Robert Merton’s suggestion of Puritanism provided the conditions for science, Thomas Kuhn’s system of normal science and revolution, Frances Yates claiming credit for hermetic magic, Duhem and Stanley Jaki for Catholic theology and Lynn White’s contention that the driving force was provided by technological change. No single theory has proved entirely satisfactory or convincing, as they tend to look either at internal or external causes rather than a combination. For the external environment, the medieval contribution might have come from the institution of the university, the reception of Greek and Arabic thought and the worldview of a rational creator God. Internal to medieval science, there is the work of developing, criticising and discarding hypotheses begun by scholastic natural philosophers and still ongoing.”

The only theory that makes sense when describing the rise of European science is cultural. Culture is king and only in Christian Europe did modern science, medicine and mathematics arise.