"There is a Template"

By Stephen Barr @ On the Square:

There is a template that many books on science or science history follow when they touch upon the relations of science and religion: Bold Scientist Persecuted by the Church for Thinking New Thoughts. The Galileo case does to a large extent fit the template, but few if any other cases do. Darwin was not persecuted by any church and was buried with great honor in Westminster Abbey. Giordano Bruno was not burned at the stake for believing in a plurality of worlds, as suggested by countless books on astronomy. Teilhard de Chardin was not disciplined by the Church because he believed in evolution. (The June 30, 1962, monitum of the Holy Office explicitly said that that it was “prescinding from a judgment about those points that concern the positive sciences.”) On and on goes the list of manufactured martyrs to scientific truth at the hands of bigoted ecclesiastics.

However, we religious folk deserve a lot of the blame for the distortions of scientific history, because we have allowed the real story to go largely untold, when we ought to be at the forefront in telling it. Most people, including most scientists, do not realize that the majority of the great founders of modern science, up until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, were religious believers and often very devout. This includes such giants as Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Lavoisier, Faraday, Maxwell, and Pasteur. Even less well known is that many important scientific discoveries were made by clergymen....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/01/06 07:04:36 AM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.