Science and the Catholic Church

The relationship between science and the Catholic Church has included both extensive institutional patronage and support as well as periods of censorship and sharp conflict. In the Early Middle Ages, clergy were the leading scholars of natural philosophy in the Latin West. During the Middle Ages, the Church founded Europe's first universities. During the Renaissance, a high-ranking Church official - Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - proposed that the earth circled the sun. Historians of science have documented important continuities between pre-modern Christian ideas and the birth of modern science.

During the Scientific Revolution, the Papacy and the Jesuits initially promoted the observations and studies of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), but the Roman Inquisition later put him on trial and forced him to recant his views. Critics point to episodes like this, where the Church has opposed scientific findings that challenged its teachings, as evidence for a conflict thesis — the idea that there is an intrinsic and inevitable intellectual conflict between religion and science. The Catholic Church, for its part, maintains that science and faith are complementary, as expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which addresses this relationship.

Catholic scientists, both religious and lay, have been credited as fathers of a diverse range of scientific fields: Bl. Nicolas Steno (1638-1686) was a founder of geology, Fr. Angelo Secchi (1818-1878) helped launch astrophysics, Fr. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) pioneered genetics, and Msgr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) proposed the Big Bang cosmological model. Church patronage of the sciences continues through institutions like the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Vatican Observatory.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.