Exemplary physicist and science-historian Pierre Duhem traced the development of modern science and methods back to at least the 14^th century.  The Church’s role in the creation of science and mathematics was fundamental and crucial.  Father Stanley Jaki, the prize-winning historian of science with doctorates in theology and physics, has analysed Duhem’s work and the history of Catholic science.  Duhem and Jaki both prove that the Church was the main actor in the creation of real science (not to be confused with the modern world’s non-science or Scientism).

Catholics believe, premised on the Old and New Testaments, that the universe is orderly and rational.  God, the great intelligence, created the universe, the world and natural phenomena, in a perfect harmony, full of beauty, wonder, and order.  This universe is endowed with lawfulness, reason and purpose.  In Wisdom 11:21 God instructs man that he has “ordered all things by measure, number, weight.”  Christians have always sought to undertake a quantitative process of discovery and to measure ‘all things’.

No other civilisation has ever believed in a rational, ordered and non-cyclical universe.  All other systems including the Greek and Roman were irrational, usually circular, mystical, with some (Hinduism, Buddhism) even denying that there is a reality or a world of the 5 senses.  The birth of science, indeed universities and school systems, is a byproduct of a Christian worldview in which a rational creator has created ex-nihilo, a universe for humans to be lived in, discovered and understood.

This philosophical disposition allows Christians to pursue the functional of natural and physical laws.  Other civilisations simply viewed the Earth as a gigantic organism of nature, dominated by nature pantheism, many deities, and endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth.  This animism destroys rational pursuits of the physical and theoretical since it denies reason and order.  Created beings on the other hand, will use their own mind and wills to explore, discover, and understand fixed patterns and logic.

Christianity rightly and rationally rejects animism and pantheism.  God, his only begotten Son, and the Holy Spirit are immanent and universal.  Other cultures can and have of course contributed to the development of science, but never in a sustained and scientific manner.  Christian scientific inquiry stretched over 700 years – an unprecedented length of time in the journey to acquire knowledge and understanding. 

Ancient civilisations including the Chinese, Greek, Babylonian, were unable to believe in the laws of nature or the rationality of creation.  Aristotle, in a common ancient view for instance, ascribed the circular motion of planets as an ‘affection’ for that kind of travel.  For the ancients, all natural phenomena was personal, generated by a deity or deities.  For science to succeed, phenomena had to be de-personalised and the only group in history to do this was the Christian Schoolmen or Scholastics.

Scholastics believed in the rationality and reasonableness of God.  Saint Anselm (11^th century) for example maintained that God not only revealed himself and his moral order through Christ, but in nature itself has also shown that there exists a rational, logical universe.  God expects the human to investigate and understand this rational and physical universe.  As Saint Thomas Acquinas and many others expressed, God did not create a universe of chaos and incomprehension.  The world and our cosmos are predictable and intelligible and can only be discovered through rational inquiry and importantly, mechanical experimentation which was only developed and sustained in Catholic Europe.

Jean Buridan and many others in the 14^th century developed the laws of motion (inertia) which was picked up by Descartes, Galileo and Newton.  Without the ‘Paris school’ and other Catholici universities the creation of modern physics would never have occurred.  Contrary to myth therefore, our modern ideas of science can be found in copious writings and experiments dating back to the 1300s. 

It should be noted that Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and others took great care to ‘erase’ all references and historical actors from their notes.  Darwin, Einstein and many others have followed suit.  They believe that by effacing their progenitors they will claim credit and boost their own egotistical importance.  All they really claim is the appellations of fraud and plagiarism.  It should be noted that Darwin, Einstein and many others never performed physical experiments and are not scientists but philosophers.  Science took a wrong turn in the 19^th century when philosophy and maths triumphed over reality and experimentation.  We have never recovered from that colossal wrong turn.