The “Dark Ages” are pure myth, like so many other slanders that try to discredit Christ and His Church. Still the gullible are unable to see the wood for the trees.
catholicleague.org/research/catholicism_and_science.htm
Catholicism and Science by Rodney Stark (from Catalyst 9/2004)
“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.
“These tales are rooted in books like
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, an influential reference by Andrew Dickson White, founder and first president of Cornell University. White claimed that even after Columbus’ return “the Church by its highest authority solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray.”
“The trouble is, almost every word of White’s account of the Columbus story is a lie. All educated persons of Columbus’ day, very much including the Roman Catholic prelates, knew the earth was round.”
Just been reading the last page of this thread. As a layman, not compromised by any compulsory indoctrination to obtain degrees in science or faith, I took an interest in the subject of faith and science some twenty years ago. In order to know that White was an anti-Catholic bigot in the propaganda business, one had to do a deep study of the history of faith and science throughout the ages. The first conclusion I came to was the following:
Having reconciled Aristotle’s metaphysics with Christianity, it was then time to cleanse other ideas of the Greek scholar’s in the light of Christian Revelation and dogmas of the Catholic Church, the understanding that everything presupposes the Creation by God. This occurred in 1277AD, when Bishop Étienne Tempier of Paris banned 219 propositions of Aristotle’s from the University at Sorbonne, the leading school of learning at the time. For example, Aristotle, aware ‘it is impossible to make something out of nothing,’ reasoned that the universe must always have existed. The Old Testament however, reveals that the world had a beginning in time when God created it. Here then, in 1277, the theology of the Church began to assert itself over the rational ideas of man. Other metaphysical beliefs shared by all the major pagan cultures including the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Hindus, the Chinese, as well as the Greeks, were then eliminated from the Sorbonne, myths like Animism (that the world is an animal); Pantheism (that the world and God are the same thing); Astrology (that the movement of the stars influence happenings and people on earth), and Cyclic History (that all events in history repeat themselves exactly in time). It was the removal of these heresies that opened up the doors to natural science. For example, Pantheism holds that God and the world are the same. How then could nature be investigated objectively? But a world created by God offered intelligibility in creation that could be examined. This of course led to discoveries in many fields that showed an interacting world working according to natural laws.
Catholics on this -and all other related threads however believe it was happy Catholic science ever after, naming Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton as their Christian champions of science. Not so, for these four men were directly responsible for handing science back to paganism. To understand how the Devil overcame - yes you atheists, I totally accept the existence of the Devil, and I now know he is far cleverer that Catholics are taught to believe - the move by Christianity in 1277 to construct science in accord with the truths of faith, a path where neither could put a foot wrong, one ought to read books like
Talisman,
Rheticus, etc., where one can find the roots of modern (natural) science. For example, where did Copernicus get his inspiration for heliocentrism from? What did he discover that led to the world of science going down the road of heliocentrism as the true path of science? Once installed this heliocentric ‘science’ led inevitably to Big Bang evolutionism, the ideology that now controls and directs all the natural sciences today, sciences that have convinced millions belief in a deity is no longer necessary.
The fact is that I could not find one single scientific discovery that can be attributed to Copernicus. Not one single star, one new cosmic movement, nor one sighting that added to the progress of astromomy up to that time.
A further reading shows that Copernicus and Kepler obtained their inspiration from reading the
Hermetica, the books of ‘wisdom and knowledge’ handed down from the god Toth to Hermes Trismegatus, paganism at its best when the sun was GOD, the creator of all life. Indeed the Renaissance (Rebirth) is but another name for the rebirth of these pagan ideas rediscovered after 1000 years and distributed throughout Europe in the 1400s and 1500s.
So clever was the Devil that for centuries, not only lay people, scholars, philosophers and scientists today, but the popes themselves, think and boast of the great legacy of science given to the world by Christianity when in fact Lucifer is falling around laughing at Catholics trying to adjust Catholic theology and even dogmas to keep up with the paganism he planted back in Europe in 1543.
