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Thomas Carlyle is famous for the quote "The history of the world is but the biography of great men". This theme, known today as the "Great Man Theory of History", was very popular in the nineteenth century. It fell out of favor amongst historians because it was considered naive to ignore important changes that can occur because of sociological, technological and other factors. This holdover from the Victorian age of hero worship is not dead however. You often see it dominating discussions on the history of science and the church. Our modern view of the relationship between the church and science, which assumes the church is supposed to be in conflict with science, is also a holdover from the same Victorian age. The same problems that caused historians in other areas of history to move beyond the "the Great Man Theory" a century ago apply today to many discussions of the Conflict Thesis. It might be time to look beyond the biographies of a few great men. The result might be a more ambiguous but richer view of the relationship.

One problem with the "Great Man" approach is that the choice of great men is arbitrary. Who do we choose and who do we exclude? You will not find a discussion of the history of church and science that does not discuss Galileo. But one can imagine scenarios where we might ignore a man even if he had developed the design that would dominate telescope manufacture for 300 years, and gave us our modern view of planetary motion and whose work was the anchor of Newton's most important work, the Principia Mathematica. This is possible even if that man's career was intertwined with his contacts in the church. In fact, no imagination is necessary. The man described above was not Galileo; it was Johannes Kepler. One can see how important Galileo's contemporaries, Kepler and Tycho Brahe, were to Newton from the citation cloud (see wordle.net) of references to scientists in Newton's Principia Mathematica. These contemporaries rarely get a mention in discussions of church and science.

Word Cloud-Newton's Principia:Role of Kepler,Galileo,Tycho

Kepler is the not the only contemporary of Galileo who is ignored. When the great English scientists of the late seventeenth century were wrestling with the philosophical issues of scientific inquiry they borrowed more heavily from Pierre Gassendi's philosophical works than from any of Galileo's works. Gassendi was a Catholic priest who was a contemporary with Galileo. Riccioli, a Jesuit priest, was another important scientist of Galileo's day who, based on experimentation, was responsible for the first accurate estimate of acceleration due to gravity.The citation cloud below represents the 22 most referenced scientists listed in a collection of major scientific reference works from 1758 (see Wroblewski-1.3 Meg PDF). Scientists in the cloud from Galileo's day include Gassendi, Riccioli and Descartes but not Galileo himself. It would be a great mistake to assume that the science, events and scientists that are considered important to modern discussions of church and science are the science, events and scientists that were actually considered important by early scientists. For this we can be thankful. Musschenbroek and Nollet, hardly discussed today, were early investigators into electricity and had conducted important early work on thermal expansion, diffusion of liquids and osmosis. The invention of the pyrometer is attributed to Musschenbroek and the electroscope to Nollet. The citation cloud includes several priest scientists besides Gassendi and Riccioli including Gaspar Schott, Jean-Antoine Nollet, Claude Francois Dechales, and Franciscus de Lanis (also known as Lana-Terzi). DeLanis, who is prominent in the citation cloud, made early speculations on the use of lighter than air vehicles and described a tactile reading system for the blind more than a century before Louis Braille.

Science Citation cloud from 1758

Important scientific ideas or inventions do not have to be spawned from great men. Sometimes the time is ripe for an idea and even those who are not "great" can put together the final pieces in the puzzle. Johannes Kepler, the man who proposed the telescope design that dominated the first 300 years of the history of the optical telescope was a great man. Laurent Cassegrain,the man who proposed the design that dominated the construction of large research telescopes for the last 100 years, was actually the object of scorn by the scientific elite of his day. Laurent Cassegrain was a Catholic priest and a teacher in a lycee (high school) in rural France. Interestingly,neither man is considered in most discussions of the history of the church and science. Kepler, because of the arbitrariness of the Great Man approach, and Laurent Cassegrain, by default, because he would not be considered a "Great Man".

The "Great Man" approach also ignores the large-scale but often slow changes in society and technology that enabled science. Then, as now, universities played a critical role in enabling science. For example, given the sophistication of Isaac Newton's work, it would have had a very limited effect if there had not already been a wide network of universities so that his work could be taught competently (see Medieval Universities). This extensive network had taken centuries to produce. The church had helped develop the organizational structures and procedures for universities that are still used today. This model for advanced education is used not only in Western Europe but throughout the world. The focus on a few great men will miss this contribution. The importance of technology is also missed. In the late seventeenth century, when Giovanni Domenico Cassini seemed to have a monopoly on important astronomical discoveries, he had a not-so-secret weapon, his technologist. Cassini had preferred access to the work of the best telescope maker of the seventeenth century, Giuseppe Campani. But Campani himself was the beneficiary of centuries of anonymous incremental improvements in glass-making and lens-making and the more recent improvements in the design of the lathes used to produce the lenses.

Any discussions focused on personality are prone to distortion. Many church and science discussions often revolve around two historical figures, Galileo and Bruno. The main disciplines covered in these discussions do not cover a broad spectrum of science, or even a broad spectrum of physics, but a small niche, called cosmology. The narrow focus of these discussions is highlighted by scientometric studies of modern science. The map of modern science shown below illustrates the relative contributions of the different disciplines of science (more information on the map is available at Eigenfactor.org). Cosmology does not even show on the map; it represents a small part of the Astronomy and Astrophysics bubble. The arrows in the diagram are just as important as the bubbles. They indicate how much the different disciplines reference journals from other disciplines. As can be seen from the map, Astronomy and Astrophysics has very limited effect on other disciplines, and Cosmology has even less. The biggest bubble is that of Molecular and Cell Biology. This field has considerable affects on modern medicine as shown by the arrows connecting Cell Biology and Medicine. It is impossible to understand Cell Biology without an understanding of osmosis and the diffusion of liquids across membranes. These two important concepts were discovered by the Catholic priest, Abbe Nollet. Abbe Nollet's work is largely ignored in history books and is completely ignored in church and science discussions.

If scientrometrics shows a disconnect between these discussions and the practice of modern science, a scan through any room in a modern office or home, or a walk through any modern public space will show a disconnect with the impact of science on the modern citizen. We really do live in a world of watts, volts, amps and ohms. Three of these electrical units are namesakes of scientists that had very deep connections with the Jesuits. Alessandro Volta and Andre-Marie Ampere were trained by the Jesuits, and the Jesuits funded the sabbatical for Georg Ohm which resulted in the publication of Ohm's Law. Ohm's law is certainly one of the scientific laws that most deeply affects our modern society. These three scientists are rarely part of the discussion.

Electricity isn't the only important discipline that is ignored. Modern genetics is a discipline that has a similar influence on our daily lives. Mendelian genetics has enabled scientific plant breeding which has made food much more affordable and more available. But genetics as a discipline has a much broader affect on other disciplines than even electricity. That is because a knowledge of genetics is critical in biology, medicine, veterinary science, agriculture, crop science and ecology and evolution. The modern view of evolution (known as the modern synthesis) owes as much to Gregor Mendel as it does to Charles Darwin. Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian monk. It was the Augustinians who arranged for Gregor's education at a prestigious university in Vienna and allowed him the time to make the 17,290 crosses between carefully selected pea plants and even arranged for the construction of a greenhouse to aid in Mendel's experiments.

This site presents a critique of the traditional view of the history of the church and science. This view assumes that the two institutions are inherently opposed and relies heavily on the histories of only a few "great men". These discussions often simplify or completely ignore how science is conducted today. This site not provide a complete treatment of the history of science and the church since that would require thousands of pages. Hopefully, it will help broaden the discussion by including more disciplines, a greater span of history, and discussions of scientific practice.

This site is an e-book organized around 6 sections. Although there are many articles, most of the articles stem off the theme articles. Science:Beyond Method and Modern Times discusses the actual workings of science as a background to discussing Science and the Church. Cooking History discusses how complete eras in history and some very important scientific developments are ignored. Fathers of the Telescope discusses the important role that church scientists played in the development of the telescope. Galileo's Battle for the Heavens looks at the Galileo incident as a soundbite and provides a wider view of the incident by looking at related events that occurred before, during and after Galileo's life. Finally, Duhem:The DaVinci Code discusses bias and censorship amongst historians, focusing on the censorship of Pierre Duhem. This site also has a Telescope Timeline and a Classical Mechanics Timeline. This site is a work in progress. More articles and perhaps more themes may be added in the future. Feedback is appreciated and can be emailed here.

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