The puzzle
Course 1 ended with a paradox. The Greeks invented a science that was useless on purpose: geometry, number, harmony, and the stars, studied for their own sake as training for a free mind. Yet the science we live with today is the most useful thing humans have ever made. It gave us vaccines, electricity, jet engines, and the phone in your pocket. We are all bathed in the light of its usefulness.
So how did one become the other? Historians call the turning point the Scientific Revolution: the century and a half from Copernicus in 1543 to Newton in 1687, when modern science took shape in Europe. It’s usually told as a rebirth. The Renaissance recovered the Greek classics, and science took off.
That story, this course argues, leaves out the most important part. The Renaissance revived Greek science, and Greek science was useless learning. Revive useless learning and you get more useless learning. Something else must have turned knowledge pursued for its own sake into knowledge that remakes the world. The question for this course is: what happened in the passage from useless to useful?
The long relay
Start with what became of Greek science itself. Here is a sobering fact: science didn’t make the Greeks rich or powerful. Greece was conquered, and for most of the last two thousand years it was a poor corner of other people’s empires. We honor Greek culture not for its worldly success, but for the kind of mind it aimed at.
After Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, Greek learning spread across the lands he had conquered, from Egypt to Central Asia. Scholars call the next three centuries the Hellenistic age. Greek reasoning mixed with local traditions that, in this telling, valued practical results more. Then Rome absorbed the Greek world, and in 476 the Western Roman Empire fell. Latin Europe lost most of its Greek books and entered what many writers call a long night.
The texts survived in two places. The Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, kept them, though in this reading they lay dormant there. The real revival came in the Islamic world. From the late 700s, the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad sponsored a vast translation movement. Greek works on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy were rendered into Arabic, and scholars writing in Arabic extended them for centuries. Then, in the 1100s, Latin scholars went looking for this learning and translated it again, from Arabic into Latin. It was, in effect, Europe’s first revival of learning.
Follow the relay
Greek learning survived because it kept finding new homes. Drag the timeline to see where it lived, from classical Athens to the first European universities.
The map is a schematic, not to scale. Each era also had scholars working elsewhere. The point is how often the torch changed hands.
Another view
This course’s argument credits the Crusades with bringing Europe back into contact with this learning, and holds that limits within Islamic society kept Greek science from growing into modern science there. Historians put it differently. Most of the Latin translating happened in Spain and Sicily, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. In Toledo, Gerard of Cremona translated dozens of works from Arabic, including Ptolemy’s great book of astronomy, the Almagest, in 1175.
And Islamic science didn’t simply stop. Astronomers at Maragha in the 1200s and Ibn al-Shatir in Damascus in the 1300s built planetary models so advanced that Copernicus used some of the same geometric devices. Historians like George Saliba argue that talk of a “decline” hides centuries of real work. Why the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe, not in Baghdad or Cairo, is a real question. It isn’t answered by assuming the Islamic world stood still.
No Christianity, no modern science
This brings us to the course’s thesis, stated as strongly as possible:
没有基督教，就没有现代科学
Without Christianity, there would be no modern science.
The thesis of this course
That claim can startle a Chinese audience. Chinese schoolbooks taught generations that religion and science are mortal enemies. People are genuinely puzzled that Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of his age, was a devout believer. Did he do good science when he was young, then lose his way and fall into religion when he was old? This course calls that reaction a systematic bias built into modern Chinese education, and invites you to drop it.
The claim is precise. Christianity was not the only cause of modern science, and it didn’t make the discoveries. But it was, this course argues, a necessary condition: take it away and the Renaissance could only have produced more useless learning. Christianity supplied two things Greek science lacked. The first was institutions, a protected place where free learning could live for centuries. The second was a new set of ideas that pointed learning toward power and use. The next lesson covers the institutions; Lessons 3 and 4 cover the ideas.
Before weighing the case, it helps to clear away some popular stories about science and religion.
Myth or history?
Each of these gets repeated about science and religion. Decide which are myths and which are historical fact.
- Before Columbus, educated Europeans believed the earth was flat.A myth. Medieval scholars knew the earth was round. A standard university textbook, Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere from around 1230, said so. The flat-earth story spread in the 1800s, helped along by Washington Irving’s 1828 biography of Columbus.
- Isaac Newton wrote more about theology and alchemy than about physics.History. Most of his surviving manuscripts deal with the Bible, church history, prophecy, and alchemy.
- Copernicus was persecuted by the Church for putting the sun at the center.A myth. He dedicated his book to Pope Paul III and died in 1543, the year it was printed. The Church restricted the book only in 1616, “until corrected.”
- Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and spent his last years under house arrest.History. He was made to renounce the claim that the earth moves, and he lived under house arrest near Florence until his death in 1642.
- The medieval Church banned the dissection of human bodies.A myth. Public dissections were part of medical teaching at Bologna by 1315, when Mondino de’ Liuzzi performed one and then wrote a textbook of anatomy.
- Many founders of modern science, including Kepler, Boyle, and Newton, were devout Christians who saw their work as reading God’s creation.History. Robert Boyle even left money in his will for a lecture series defending Christianity, first given in 1692.
The “war between science and religion” is largely a story told in the 1800s, most famously by two Americans, John William Draper (1874) and Andrew Dickson White (1896). Historians abandoned it long ago. This course asks you to abandon it too.
What does this course mean by “without Christianity, there would be no modern science”?
Closer to home
Americans often inherit the conflict story from the other side. The 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” over teaching evolution in Tennessee, dramatized in Inherit the Wind, made science-versus-religion part of American folklore, and the arguments over evolution in schools haven’t ended. A Chinese American student can easily pick up the same story twice: from Chinese textbooks at home and from American pop culture at school.
The actual history is more tangled. The idea that became the Big Bang theory was first proposed around 1930 by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist who was also a Catholic priest. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and later ran the National Institutes of Health, writes openly about his evangelical faith. That doesn’t prove the thesis right, but it shows the question is worth taking seriously.
Another view
Historians who reject the conflict story also warn against the opposite myth. In Galileo Goes to Jail (2009), a collection that debunks popular myths about science and religion, Noah Efron’s chapter takes on the claim that “Christianity gave birth to modern science.” Christian belief mattered, he argues, but so did Greek, Islamic, and Jewish learning, the skills of craftsmen and instrument makers, printing, trade, and new states hungry for navigation and weapons. This course makes a strong claim. As you follow the case, ask what else would have to be true for it to hold.
What to keep
- The puzzle: the Renaissance revived Greek science, which was useless on purpose, so reviving it alone can’t explain useful modern science.
- Greek learning survived through a long relay: Athens, Alexandria, Byzantium, Baghdad, then Spain and Sicily, and finally Europe’s universities.
- This course argues that Christianity was a necessary condition for modern science, supplying both institutions and new ideas. Other historians see it as one factor among many.
Think it over
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Sources and further reading
- David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2007.
- Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad, Routledge, 1998.
- George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, MIT Press, 2007.
- Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, Harvard University Press, 2009.