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The oft-repeated refrain goes like this: Christianity is an obscurantist religion that has consistently hindered scientific progress. Indeed, historian and cofounder of Cornell University (New York), Andrew Dickson White, advocated this thesis in his famous work. However, this is a misconception that stands at the opposite end of reality, and very few scholars (if any) take White’s thesis seriously today (for instance, he claimed that the Catholic Church believed in a flat earth, yet there is no evidence to support this assertion). The objective here is to systematically dismantle this erroneous perception.
The Bible, Catechism, and Knowledge
Given that Christianity is a heterogeneous entity, we will focus on Catholic doctrine, as it has the largest following among Christians, without negating the contributions of Orthodox, Protestant, or Muslim thinkers. Let’s start with a verse from the Bible frequently cited during the Middle Ages, Wisdom of Solomon 11:20, which states that God “ordered all things by measure, number, and weight.” This highlights the order imposed by mathematics in the universe.
But how can knowledge be acquired? In Catholic thought, truth can be discerned by observing reality and reasoning. Thus, reason and faith are not contradictory. It is not surprising, then, that Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method still used today, was a Christian (although Robert Grosseteste, a Catholic priest, had expressed similar ideas to Bacon’s well before him). Even today, scientists follow this approach, first by observing reality, then by formulating hypotheses, and finally by conducting scientific experiments to discard erroneous hypotheses.
The First Economists
Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), is often touted as the father of economic science. Yet, Joseph Schumpeter, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century (or even of all time), stated in his extensive History of Economic Analysis (1954) that Adam Smith had not said anything original, and that all his ideas were first discovered by the Catholic Spanish scholastics of the School of Salamanca (the real founders of economic science, according to Schumpeter) during the Renaissance.
Indeed, thinkers from the School of Salamanca explored numerous economic questions, particularly regarding the concept of private property, value, and the “just price.” For them, private property was a natural right, as well as the cornerstone of economic development and prosperity. Value is subjective and depends on individual preferences (this may seem obvious, but neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx after him grasped this simple yet crucial idea), and the “just price” would be any price agreed upon by the seller and buyer. It could be said that the thinkers of the School of Salamanca, influenced by the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, were proto-liberals, or even “proto-Austrians” (from the Austrian school of economics).
Moreover, even going back before the School of Salamanca, one finds Nicole Oresme, a priest and great scholar of the 14th century who wrote a rigorous treatise on monetary theory, completed between 1356 and 1360. Oresme condemned the abuse of power by princes who manipulated the composition of coins to have more precious metals (formerly qualified as currency) at their disposal, to the detriment of the people. Instead of minting coins purely composed of precious metals like gold, sovereigns introduced other metals, like copper, into the coins.
Alas, the ideas of these early economists fell into obscurity for some time but were rediscovered in the 1870s by Carl Menger (the founder of the Austrian school), William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras, probably unbeknownst to them.
Titans of Science
What about Christianity’s contribution to the development of natural sciences? The Church has always funded science. This is evident when one looks at the thousands of schools, universities, and hospitals founded and funded by the Church. John Heilbron, a science historian and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, asserts that for six centuries, the Catholic Church provided more financial and social support to the study of astronomy than any other institution. This is not surprising considering that Nicolaus Copernicus was a devoted Catholic monk. John Agnew, a geographer and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, highlights that the Catholic Church is the world’s largest non-governmental provider of education and healthcare.
But doesn’t the Galileo affair prove that the Church is a regressive institution? Not when one realizes that Galileo, like Copernicus, was devout, though more combative than the latter, and that the Galileo affair was in fact a personal quarrel between the astronomer and the pope.
There is also a whole legion of Christian scientists whose work continues to be significant. Nicolas Steno, the father of geology and a precursor to evolutionary theory, was a Catholic priest. So were Gregor Mendel (the father of modern genetics), Roger Joseph Boscovich (the father of modern atomic theory), and Georges Lemaître (known for his discovery of the Big Bang). Dimitri Mendeleev, an Orthodox priest, revolutionized chemistry. Other Christian geniuses include Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonhard Euler, Louis Pasteur, Bernhard Riemann, Lord Kelvin, and Francis Collins, among others. Approximately 65% of Nobel Prize laureates are either Christians or of Christian origin.
The Science of Law
Long before General Clausewitz, Christian thinkers dedicated thoughts to the morality of war. Saint Augustine, a lucid pacifist, was the first to identify criteria that make a war “just,” forming a coherent theory of war, and even an entire school of thought. For Augustine, as for any other coherent Christian thinker, peace is necessarily good (as “those who live by the sword will die by the sword,” according to Matthew 26:52). Humans should not immediately resort to violence to resolve their conflicts. Alas, sometimes war, despite its horrors, is a necessity to preserve peace. However, if Augustine saw the crusades launched by Hezbollah, he would turn in his grave, as Hassan Nasrallah insists on forcefully imposing his abhorrent ideas in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, or even Argentina.
Christian thinkers have transformed law into a true scientific discipline. Hugo Grotius, a 16th-century Protestant jurist and diplomat, laid the foundations of international law. For Grotius, as for Thomas Aquinas before him and Samuel von Pufendorf after him, there are universal and objective political truths, against which all states and interests should be judged as good or evil.
