I’ve just finished a history essay on “how do medieval attitudes to time and space differ from modern ones?” It’s been very interesting to research and write, to be honest. In particular, I’ve enjoyed Allan Chapman’s book Gods in the Sky, which is about the history of astronomy, and in particular the impact of religion on its development. It does a lot of myth-busting – did Columbus bravely disprove the dogma of the Church that the world was flat? Nope, complete myth – it was well known since the time of the ancient Greeks that the world was a sphere.
But what about Galileo? Didn’t the church persecute him for challenging their belief that the Sun went round the Earth? Well, that’s a bit closer to the truth, but the real issue was not that Galileo said that the Earth went round the sun, but that he said the Pope was an idiot for still holding a geocentric view. Since there was already something of a history between Galileo and the Pope, this led to Galileo getting into hot water. Although the Pope acted badly, it was for personal and political reasons rather than scientific or doctrinal reasons.
Many people who are sometimes characterised as pioneers bravely taking a stand against a tyrranical and oppressive Church which was against scientific progress were in fact devout Christians and members of the church themselves, and sometimes their research into astronomy was even part of their official employment by the church. Check out the lives of people like Copernicus and Kepler if you don’t believe me.
It’s fascinating tracing the history and development of ideas through time. Since the roots of Medieval thinking lay in the ideas of the Greek philosophers, and the question asked me to compare Medieval attitudes to those of the present day, I had to consider pretty much the entire broad sweep of Western thought on time and space. Inevitably, for just a two-thousand word essay my reading only covered this vast topic very superficially, but it was really interesting.
In particular, it’s interesting that far from being opposed to scientific and astronomical research in the Middle Ages, the Church encouraged it, and modern science emerged from the basis of the Christian worldview. Whereas in pagan beliefs the heavenly bodies had been worshipped as divine, Christians viewed them as creative beings. Central to Christianity is the belief in a rational creator-God. It was reasoned that since God was a rational, orderly being, and that he had gifted mankind with the capacity to reason, then it is possible to examine his world to discern the orderly way in which he maintains his creation.
Greek philosophers had postulated the existence of a logos, an organising principle to the world, which had given them the basis which enabled their proto-scientific investigations of the world. But this logos was impersonal and unthinking, whereas Christianity made the incredible statement that “the Word [logos] became flesh and made his dwelling among us”. God isn’t just an impersonal force guaranteeing order in the universe, but someone who has a mind and personality of his own, even becoming human out of love for us. The Judeo-Christian ideas that man is made in the image of God, and God chose to die and rise for man, elevated mankind above any position we had occupied in any previous religions or philosophies in history. I’ve digressed a bit, but the point I’m trying to make is that the idea of an orderly universe had deduced prior the Christianity, but with Christianity was given a new and dramatic twist.
The development that really saw the emergence of modern science was the shift away from authorities and systems to measurement and investigation as the primary means of seeking the truth. But this didn’t just happen in science, but in religion, too. Just as Luther realised that people needed to go back to examine the Bible for themselves rather than relying on the authority of the Catholic Church and its systems of belief about God for spiritual truth, astronomers like Copernicus realised the need to go back to examine the heavens for themselves rather than relying on the authority of Greek philosophers and their systems of belief about the cosmos for scientific truth. There are other factors that contributed to the Renaissance and scientific revolution, such as the recovery of many classical writings on many subjects at the time, but the combination of ideas rooted in Christianity at this time were necessary to produce the scientific approach.
However, things have naturally changed a great deal in the intervening few hundred years. Secular science now commonly works on the assumption that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect. Everything is part of the same system of laws and they can neither be broken or interfered with from outside. This is different to the Christian worldview, which views the universe as an open system, with God on the outside who maintains his creation in an orderly way. (For more on this, read Francis Schaeffer’s excellent How Shall We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture).
Well, here ends the lesson for this evening. I need to get off to bed, and quick, before I repeat my entire essay, albeit in less formal terms! I’m not sure if I’ll be updating my blog for a while, since I’m off to the FIEC Conference at Pwllheli on Monday. I might fit in an update tomorrow, or it might be a week or so before I get back online.
(Oh, and I bet you thought from the title that this was another post about Doctor Who, didn’t you?!)
