Wasn't the church always against science?
The church taught that the earth was flat, persecuted Galileo for saying the earth goes around the sun, and has resisted scientific progress at every turn. Religion and science have always been at war, and religion has always lost.
Historians of science today reject the idea of a constant war between Christianity and science. The church founded the universities, medieval Christians knew the earth was round, and many pioneers of modern science were devout believers. The Galileo affair was real and the church's handling of it was wrong, as the Catholic Church itself has acknowledged. But it was a tangled episode of science, politics and personalities, not proof that faith and science are enemies.
What Scripture says
2Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them.
God's works are 'studied by all who delight in them'. Medieval and early modern scholars took this as a mandate for investigating nature.
1The LORD reigns! He is robed in majesty; the LORD has clothed and armed Himself with strength. The world indeed is firmly established; it cannot be moved.
'The world is established; it shall never be moved.' One of the texts used against Copernicus; most interpreters read it as a poetic statement of God's stable rule, not astronomy.
12On the day that the LORD gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the LORD in the presence of Israel: “O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.” 13So the sun stood still and the moon stopped until the nation took vengeance upon its enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? “So the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.” 14There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man, because the LORD fought for Israel.
The sun 'stood still'. Galileo's critics took this as proof the sun moves; Galileo argued Scripture speaks in the language of ordinary appearance.
22He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth; its dwellers are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.
God sits above 'the circle of the earth'. Like 'sunrise', this is everyday description, not a cosmological model either way.
20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
Creation reveals its Creator, a key reason Christians historically valued the study of nature.
The case
Where the "warfare" story came from
The idea that science and religion have been locked in perpetual combat became popular through two nineteenth-century books: John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Both were written partly as polemics, and both contained significant historical errors.
Since then, historians of science, believers and unbelievers alike, have largely abandoned this "conflict thesis". The essays in Ronald Numbers' Galileo Goes to Jail (2009), written by specialists of many viewpoints, examine and correct the most common myths. The real story is more complex and more interesting.
What the church actually did for science
- Universities. The great medieval universities, such as Bologna, Paris and Oxford, grew out of church schools and were staffed largely by clergy. Natural philosophy, the ancestor of science, was a core subject.
- Medieval natural philosophy. Thinkers such as Robert Grosseteste (on optics and method), Jean Buridan (on motion) and Nicole Oresme (on mathematics and the earth's rotation) were churchmen. Historian Edward Grant argues that they laid foundations later scientists built on.
- Astronomy. Historian J. L. Heilbron documents that the Catholic Church gave sustained financial and institutional support to astronomy for centuries, even turning cathedrals into solar observatories to fix the date of Easter (The Sun in the Church, 1999).
- Motivation. Many early modern scientists, including Kepler, Boyle and Newton, explicitly saw their work as studying the handiwork of a rational Creator.
The Galileo affair
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is the case everyone remembers. Here is what happened, briefly.
- 1610: Galileo's telescope reveals moons orbiting Jupiter and, soon after, the phases of Venus. These discoveries undermine the old earth-centered system of Ptolemy.
- 1615: In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo argues that Scripture and nature cannot truly conflict. He quotes a churchman (probably Cardinal Baronius) who said the Holy Spirit intends to teach us "how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes."
- 1616: The Congregation of the Index suspends Copernicus' book "until corrected". Cardinal Bellarmine instructs Galileo not to hold or defend the Copernican view.
- 1632: Galileo publishes his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which strongly favors Copernicus. The arguments of Pope Urban VIII, a former friend and admirer, appear in the mouth of a character named Simplicio. Many historians think the pope took this as a personal insult.
- 1633: The Inquisition finds Galileo "vehemently suspect of heresy". He recants and is sentenced to house arrest. He was not tortured or thrown into a dungeon, and he continued writing, publishing his Two New Sciences in 1638. He died at his villa near Florence in 1642.
Why it was more complicated than "faith versus facts"
| Factor | What it shows |
|---|---|
| The scientific evidence was incomplete | Tycho Brahe's hybrid model also fit the phases of Venus. Stellar parallax, a key prediction of a moving earth, was not measured until 1838. |
| Galileo's own proof was flawed | He argued the tides proved the earth's motion, which was wrong. |
| Many churchmen supported him at first | Jesuit astronomers confirmed several of his telescopic discoveries. |
| Politics and personality mattered | The Counter-Reformation climate, the authority of the church to interpret Scripture, and Galileo's clash with the pope all played a role. |
None of this excuses the church's actions. Using church authority to settle a scientific question, and silencing a scientist under threat of punishment, was wrong. In 1992 Pope John Paul II acknowledged that Galileo's judges had erred, partly because they confused a particular reading of Scripture with the faith itself.
The real lesson
The lesson of Galileo is one Galileo himself, a sincere Catholic, drew: the problem was not Scripture but a mistaken interpretation of it. Texts like Psalm 93:1 and Joshua 10:12-13 describe the world as it appears to an observer, just as we still speak of "sunrise". Both the Bible and the natural world are God's revelation, and when they seem to conflict, the honest response is to look harder at both.
Why it matters
The church has not always acted wisely. But the story of science is, to a remarkable degree, a story of Christians who believed the world was worth studying because a faithful God made it. Christians have nothing to fear from truth. And the God of truth calls every person not merely to study his works, but to know him through his Son.
“But what about…?”
Didn't medieval Christians think the earth was flat?
No. Educated medieval Europeans, including churchmen, knew the earth was a sphere. The idea that Columbus had to prove otherwise to the church owes much to nineteenth-century popular writing, including Washington Irving's romanticized biography of Columbus (1828). Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces this myth in Inventing the Flat Earth (1991).
What about Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600?
Bruno's execution was a terrible act. But historians generally note that he was condemned mainly for theological heresies, such as denying the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, rather than for his cosmology. He was a philosopher and mystic, not an experimental scientist. His death is an example of religious coercion, which Christians should repudiate, more than of a war on science.
Hasn't the church opposed things like evolution and stem-cell research?
Some Christians have opposed evolution, and some still do on scientific or biblical grounds, while others accept it (see the evolution entry). Ethical objections to certain research, such as destroying human embryos, are moral disagreements about how science should be done, not rejections of science itself. Many secular ethicists raise similar concerns.
Didn't the church only apologize to Galileo in 1992?
In 1992 Pope John Paul II received the report of a commission he had established to re-examine the case, and acknowledged that Galileo's judges had erred. It was slow. But the Catholic Church had removed general prohibitions on Copernican books from the Index by the nineteenth century, long before 1992.
Where Christians differ
Go deeper
- book · 2009Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and ReligionRonald L. Numbers (ed.)
- book · 1989The Galileo Affair: A Documentary HistoryMaurice A. Finocchiaro
- book · 1999The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar ObservatoriesJ. L. Heilbron
- book · 1991Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern HistoriansJeffrey Burton Russell
- book · 1996The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle AgesEdward Grant
- ancient · 1615Letter to the Grand Duchess ChristinaGalileo Galilei
Sources (6)
- Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
- Decree of the Congregation of the Index, 5 March 1616
- Sentence of the Inquisition against Galileo, 22 June 1633 (in Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, 1989)
- Pope John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October 1992
- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874); Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)
- Friedrich Bessel's measurement of stellar parallax (61 Cygni), 1838
Related questions
Hasn't science disproved God?
Science studies how the natural world works; it cannot, by its own methods, show whether nature is all there is. That is a philosophical claim, not a scientific result. The God of the Bible is not one more cause inside the universe competing with gravity or chemistry. He is the reason there is a lawful universe at all. Modern science grew up largely among people who believed exactly that, and many working scientists still do.
Does evolution mean the Bible is wrong?
Christians who fully trust the Bible hold several different views on how Genesis relates to the scientific account, from a young earth to an old earth to God creating through evolution. What they share is what Genesis most centrally teaches: one God made everything, the world is good, humans bear God's image, and sin has broken our relationship with him. Evolution as a biological theory cannot disprove those claims. Only the philosophical add-on that the process was unguided and purposeless conflicts with Christianity, and that is not a scientific finding.
Aren't miracles impossible because they violate the laws of nature?
Laws of nature describe what happens when nothing outside nature acts. They cannot tell us whether something outside nature exists or ever acts. If God exists, a miracle is not a broken law but a new cause entering the system. Hume's argument assumes experience against miracles is 'uniform', which is the very thing in question. Whether a miracle happened is decided by evidence, not ruled out in advance.
How did life begin without a Creator?
There is no agreed scientific explanation yet for how life first arose from non-living chemistry. Researchers have made real progress on pieces of the puzzle, but building a self-replicating, information-rich cell remains an unsolved problem. Christians should not rest their faith on that gap. The deeper point is this: even a complete chemical pathway would not explain why the universe has laws and chemistry capable of producing life. Scripture presents God as the giver of life, however he brought it about.
This entry is a draft and has not yet been theologically reviewed.