Reddit reviews The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution

Those guys are horrible at history. I would recommend going to /r/badhistory for rebuttals, in the meantime I found some books that I think can really help out debunking this myth.

Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction

Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology

Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion

When Science and Christianity Meet

The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution

The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450

The Savior of Science

For the Glory of God

The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science

The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo

Yes this is a long list but that's because it's studied so often ;). I hope this helps.

Exhibit 1
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here are a few non-wikipedia sources that i had lying around:

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Cambridge History of Europe: Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 2006. pp. 389-390
>The most famous Inquisitions in early modern Europe, those in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, were in fact very lenient in their treatment of those accused of witchcraft: the Inquisition in Spain executed only a handful of witches, the Portuguese Inquisition only one, and the Roman Inquisition none, though in each of these areas there were hundreds of cases. Inquisitors firmly believed in the power of the devil and were no less misogynistic than other judges, but they doubted very much whether the people accused of doing maleficia had actually made a pact with the devil that gave them special powers. They viewed them not as diabolical devil-worshippers, but rather superstitious and ignorant peasants who should be educated rather than executed. Their main crime was not heresy, but rather undermining the church's monopoly on supernatural remedies by claiming they had special powers. Thus Inquisitors set witchcraft within the context of heresy and apostasy, and sent the accused home with a warning and penance.

...

Cantor, Norman F. Civilization of the Middle Ages. HarperCollins. New York. 1993. pp. 425-426
>Contrary to the widespread belief in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Inquisitors were, with few exceptions, not psychotic sadists who were insatiably seeking vengeance upon heretics through death penalties. The Inquisitors were normally well-trained canon lawyers and frequently Dominican friars or members of another religious order. Recent research has shown that they were sufficiently astute to be skeptical of the witchcraft craze of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to find the vast majority of the accusations against old women and similar marginal people who were alleged to be witches without substance. Therefore, the courts of the papal mandated Inquisition should never be considered in the same category as the Nazi holocaust or Stalinist purges. Surviving Inquisitorial records are sparse. But it is a good guess that even including the Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which in more Draconian fashion operated directly under the aegis of the Spanish crown rather than the papacy, the total number of people who died at the hands of all Catholic Inquisitions did not exceed five figures and probably did not total more than ten-thousand people.

...

Hannam, James. Genesis of Science. Icon Books Ltd, London. 2009. pp. 76-78
>With heretics growing in numbers and the common people taking matters into their own hands, something had to be done. While it accepted that unrepentant heretics deserved death, the Church was perturbed about not giving them a chance to return to the faith. It was clear that dealing with heresy required a new system. For this reason, a series of dynamic popes developed a legal process called inquisition. During the Middle Ages, there was no single monolithic institution that we can call "The Inquisition". Inquisitors were simply individual agents of the pope who travelled to areas afflicted by heresy and used their special powers to deal with it. They worked in conjunction with the local secular and ecclesiastical authorities. [...] What made the inquisitors novel was that they used the latest legal techniques to investigate heresy. This was a consequence of the new interest in Roman law at the University of Bologna [...]. Until the thirteenth century, most countries continued to use the old legal codes that they had followed for generations. In these codes, the legal process was started when a member of the public made a formal "accusation". When criminal accusations were made, the defendant had a number of ways in which he could demonstrate his innocence. One was to produce character witnesses who would demand an aquittal. Another was to undergo trial by ordeal. In neither case did real evidence have much relevance. Furthermore, the accuser was vulnerable to punishment for defamation if the defendant was aquitted. Someone with a bad reputation could never win a legal battle against someone who was generally thought of as honest. The Church frowned on trial by ordeal and banned the clergy from participating in it in 1215.
>With the new system of "inquisition", the "accusation" method of justice was eventually abandoned altogether. Instead, the authorities appointed a magistrate to investigate the crime, interview witnesses, examine the evidence, and reach a verdict. In the case of heresy, the magistrate was an inquisitor and appointed by the pope. The system was an obvious improvement over the old ways and slowly spread to secular justice too. In fact, it worked so well that it still forms the backbone of criminal investigation in continental Europe to this day.
>The inquisitors had to follow strict rules and reserved the most serious punishment only for heretics who were obstinate in their error or were repeat offenders. Everyone had a second chance. When an inquisitor arrived in an area, he began his mission by declaring that he would deal mercifully with all heretics who gave themselves up. He then followed through any leads that he had received, made arrests, carried out interrogations, and declared who he thought was guilty. While inquisitors had a special dispensation from the pope to use torture, this was rare. The popular image of dank inquisitorial dungeons equipped with a variety of imaginative means of torture is a later myth, popularized after the Reformation by Protestant writers. Someone found guilty of heresy by the inquisitor had an opportunity to recant and perform a penance. Most people took this option, and the resulting penances were often quite lenient. However, those convicted of heresy were on notice that the inquisitors would deal with a second offense much more severely. In that case, as relapsed heretics, they could face life imprisonment or worse. In the same boat as repeat offenders were those whom the inquisitor convicted but who refused to admit the error of their ways. In the most serious cases, the inquisitor would hand over relapsed and obstinate heretics to the secular authorities. Officially, the Church would not execute a subject, but inquisitors knew perfectly well what the fate of those they handed over to the secular arm would be. [...]
>The inquisitors of the Middle Ages have a deservedly poor reputation. There is no defense for subjecting people to an agonizing death over religious disagreements. Executions were uncommon (occuring in about 5% of cases in the surviving records) because when it came to the crunch, few people wished to be martyrs.

If you are really interested you can start with this book. https://www.amazon.com/Genesis-Science-Christian-Scientific-Revolution/dp/1596981555/ref=sr_1_1?crid=38PK23BSJZG35&keywords=james+hannam&qid=1559164047&s=books&sprefix=James+han%2Cstripbooks%2C153&sr=1-1

What I get really, really pissed off about is when some asswipe starts to claim that Christianity was the mother of science and human progress. This cocksucker (pardon my French) wrote a whole goddamn book about The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. One of the most hateful things about Christians is that at the drop of a hat they will lie their asses off in support of their evil hate-and-fear zombie cult.

This is not an ELI5 because a good answer involves a thorough understanding of 1. the history of philosophy of science, and 2 socioeconomic history, and 3. the history of Christian doctrine.
So, one must have a firm foundation in a lot of philosophy, science, socioeconomics, Christian doctrine and the history of all of them in order to be really grasp it.

The best ELI5 would actually sound like inane Christian propaganda, But I'll try to simplify without being reductionistic.


The basic answer is this: The industrial revolution was a consequence of the progress of philosophy in Europe which eventually produced the scientific outlook, and this process was inextricably related to, even based on both Christianity's social influence, and Christianity place in the mind of the major thinkers. Isaac Newton was a Biblical scholar and a spiritual mystic. Gallileo remained a devoted christian till his dying day, and a staggering number of other early scientists did their work not as a rebellion against religion, but as a fulfillment of their religion.

Medieval, Renaissance and later Western Christian thinkers and their dialogue with intelligent and influential dissenters is what brought about the scientific outlook which fed the needs of the industrial revolution, which was in fact occurring at the same time as the Enlightenment.

Christianity's philosophy of God and the nature of our place in it produced the scientific outlook in a way which ancient grecco-roman philosophy simply couldn't. (Yes, many non-christian's adopted it, and even used it against them, but that doesn't change the fact that only Christianity produced science.) The industrial revolution needed that scientific outlook in order to fully happen.

I have a good base in the history of European philosophy and religious history, which means I can tell you how the scientific outlook came about. I don't have as much of a background in the specific socioeconomic situations in Europe which made up the industrial revolution itself, so others will have to answer that.

source: mostly http://amzn.com/1596981555 but other things learned in my Religious studies classes.

Sorry--if I think of anything more straightforward I'll stick it on here. In the meantime, here's a book that claims to show how science arose from Christianity. I haven't read it but it looks interesting.

This book is good and should for the basis of an informed response. Or you could go around recommending it to people.

Thank you for your response.

> so we can ask how has faith in superior divine entities recently helped us in curing bone cancer

Well, the answer is a lot. We can just look at one example, St. Jude's Hospital which was started by Danny Thomas, a Maronite Catholic. I'll quote the rest from Wikipedia here... " When his first child was about to be born, he attended Mass in Detroit and put his last $7.00 in the offering bin. He prayed to St. Jude Thaddeus for a means to provide for his family, and about a week later, he obtained a gig that paid 10 times what he had put in the offering bin. After that time, Thomas believed in the power of prayer. He promised St. Jude Thaddeus that if the saint made him successful, he would one day build him a shrine. Years later, Thomas became an extremely successful comedian and built St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as a shrine to St. Jude Thaddeus to honor his promise." The institute, founded by a Christian because of Christianity has produced over 4,000 scholarly articles related specifically to Osteosarcoma.

Unfortunately, the anecdotes of Galileo and and a few others have shrouded the reality that "the ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed." nature.com

• Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus.
  
  
• By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world.
  
  
• It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away
  
  These days, the real discord between faith and science are just wedge issues - evolution and fetal stem cell research. Christians don't stand in the way of science in general, they oppose certain studies that they consider to be profoundly immoral (belief that embryos deserve human rights) or false (some forms of neo-darwinian synthesis). Given the small fraction of the sciences that this actually represents, it hardly makes the case that there is a deep divide between the two, or that Christianity is holding back science.
  
  If you are interested, I highly recommend you take a look at a few books...
  
  > Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism by Dr. Alvin Plantinga formerly of Notre Dame
  
  > Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by renowned atheist philosopher Dr. Thomas Nagel
  
  > The Genesis of Science by Dr. James Hannam
  
  There are plenty more, of course. But it leads to a striking question - who are more mislead, the Christians who are taught that evolution is false, or the Western world that is taught that the Church is an enemy of science?

I'm not sure why you're interested in theology per se when your question is epistemic, generally in the domain of philosophy of religion. Given the nature of your question, though, it seems you're looking for something that deals with preliminaries. In this case, I'd recommend Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism.

>This book investigates what it means, and whether it is coherent, to say that there is a God. The author concludes that, despite philosophical objections, the claims which religious believers make about God are generally coherent; and that although some important claims are coherent only if the words by which they are expressed are being used in stretched or analogical senses, this is in fact the way in which theologians have usually claimed they are being used.

If you're interested in the broader impact theology has had on the world, I'd recommend something like Hannam's The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. But that only deals with science.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Science-Scientific-Revolution/dp/1596981555/bedeslibrary

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundations-Science/dp/1848311508/

These may be available through your library..

> "And I count Christianity as the main offender here. Yes it was true to say that a millennium ago, the Muslim world was ahead of the christian west, but that doesn't say anything good about Islam, it's just a reminder of how terrible Christianity was. "

That jibe at Christianity doesn't make the comment better; it makes it worse. You can write entire books on what's wrong with Sam's point there (and some have), but here's a few:

1. It's true that (Western) Europe went through a politically and socially unstable time during at least part of the muslim golden age (the first half, broadly). To pin this on Christianity though, is insane. It was the collapse of the Western Roman Empire that plunged Western Europe into relative decline, and it took centuries for Europe to fully recover. But Christianity had nothing to do with the fall of the WRE (which was well into its decline by the time Christianity became state religion), and no religion (or lack of one) could have stopped the subsequent implosion.
   
   
2. Presenting Western Europe under Christianity (we can assume he's talking about the early and mid Middle Ages) as "terrible" or backwards is to buy into Victorian preconceptions. Yes, the Roman implosion hurt and it took much time to recover. But the Middle Ages was a fairly inventive time in the West as well, arguably more so than the mid and late Roman era. The Roman propensity for slave labor and general aversion to technology was not conducive to science; instead it was the Middle Ages that saw many advances in optics, architecture, metallurgy, agriculture, and so on.
   
   
3. Despite what we as atheists may think based on debating creationists, there is no evidence that Christianity slowed down the progress of science in the Middle Ages (and yes, I know about Galileo and Bruno, and no, they're not evidence of that). In fact, during the turbulence in Europe, the Christian clergy was one of the only institutions capable of preserving knowledge and expanding it. Which they did. And it's very arguable that without them, science and learning in Medieval Europe would have recovered slower than it did.
   
   Frankly, Sam's answer to that question was a rehash of several historical myths and a general embarrassment. Virtually every single one of his answer's sentences must be extensively unpacked for how wrong it is. It's one of the things I hope he would correct.