When Aristotle’s erroneous assumptions were cast aside, as historians Pierre Duhem, A.C. Crombie and Edward Grant have argued, the condemnations by the Bishop of Paris in 1277 forced thinkers to break out of the intellectual confinement of Aristotelian presuppositions, from the restrictions of Aristotelian science and to adopt new thinking to the physical world. While Fr Jaki states that the Greeks came closest to the development of modern science, they still fell very short.
Aristotle had denied the possibility of a vacuum, and the condemnations “seem definitely to have promoted a freer and more imaginative way of doing science.” (Dales,
The De-Animation of the Heavens in the Middle Ages, p 550).
Another condemned Aristotelian proposition was that “the motions of the motion of the sky result from an intellectual soul,” and prompted new approaches to the central question of the behaviour of the heavenly bodies.
(
How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Thomas E Woods Jr., Regnery Publishing, 2005, p 75).
As for the Arabs, while their translations of ancient Greek classics led to their dissemination in the Western world in the twelfth century, a profound development for Western intellectual history, any contributions of Muslim scientists “typically occurred in spite of Islam rather than because of it. Orthodox Islamic scholars absolutely rejected any conception of the universe that involved consistent physical laws, because the absolute autonomy of Allah could not be restricted by natural laws. Apparent natural laws were nothing more than mere habits, so to speak, of Allah, and might be discontinued at any time.” (
How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Dr Thomas E Woods, Regnery, 2005, p 79)
Even Friedrich Nietzsche (‘God is dead’) wrote: “Strictly speaking there is no such thing as science ‘without any presuppositions’… a philosophy, a ‘faith’, must always be there first, so that science can acquire a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist… It is still a metaphysical faith that underlines our faith in science.” (
Genealogy of Morals III, 23-24).
“The earlier technical innovations of Greco-Roman times, of Islam, of imperial China, let alone those of pre-historic times, do not constitute science and are better described as lore, skills, wisdom, techniques, crafts, technologies, engineering, learning, or simply knowledge.” (
For the Glory of God, Rodney Stark, Princeton University Press, 2003, p 125).
“First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science. Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been carefully nurtured by religiously devout scholastics. Granted, the era of scientific discovery that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was marvelous, the cultural equivalent of the blossoming of a rose. But, just as roses do not spring up overnight, and must undergo a long period of normal growth before they even bud, so too the blossoming of science was the result of centuries of intellectual progress.”
catholicleague.org/research/catholicism_and_science.htm, *Catholicism and Science *by Rodney Stark (from
Catalyst 9/2004)].
rtforum.org/lt/lt123.html
Anthony Rizzi, in *The Science Before Science *(Baton Rouge, LA: IAP Press, 2004, reviewed by Msgr John F. McCarthy:
“The progress achieved during the ‘Dark Ages’ was not merely technological. Medieval Europe excelled in philosophy and science. The term ‘Scientific Revolution’ is in many ways as misleading as ‘Dark Ages.’ Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a ‘Scientific Revolution’ has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Columbus and the flat earth.”
With the flowering of faith and reason through the Catholic Church, the foundations were built for the development of science and the moral use of medicine resulting in the great advances in somatic stem cell therapy and the right use of NBR. The restoration of the place of the family will result in a reversal of the birth dearth.
) comment I’ve ever read on this forum.
