Monotheism does not really like the rational work of scientists. Clearly Islam embraces astronomy, algebra, mathematics, geometry, optics, but only to calculate the direction of Mecca more accurately by means of the stars, to establish religious calendars, to decree prayer hours. Clearly Islam values geography, but only to facilitate the convergence on the Kaaba when pilgrims from all over the world flock to Mecca. Clearly it prizes medicine, but only to avoid the impurity that mars one’s relation with Allah. Clearly it esteems grammar, philosophy, and law, but only to enrich commentary on the Koran and the Hadith. This religious instrumentalization of science subjects reason to domestic and theocratic uses. In Islamic lands, science is not pursued for its own sake today but for the improvement of religious practice…
From Christianity’s earliest days, in the beginning of the second century of the common era, paganism in all its aspects was condemned. Everything it produced was rejected, tied to false gods, polytheism, magic, and error. Euclidean mathematics? Ptolemy’s maps? Erasthosthenes’ geography? Aristotle’s natural sciences? Aristarchus’s astronomy? Hippocrates’ medicine? Herophilus’s anatomy? They were simply not Christian enough!….
Between the church’s rejection of the heliocentric hypothesis of antiquity and its contemporary condemnations of genetic laws, twenty-five centuries of wasted opportunities for humankind are heaped up. We scarcely dare imagine how swiftly the West would have advanced without such sustained brutalization of science!….
When Giordano Bruno died, burned by Christians at the stake on the Campo dei Fiori in 1660, he perished less for atheism—he had never denied God’s existence—than for materialism: he asserted the coexistence of God and the material world.
Bruno, who was a Dominican (!), did not deny the existence of the spirit. Sadly for him, however, he situated it at the physical level of atoms….
The same can be said about Galileo…. The legend focuses on the issue of heliocentrism, with the pope and the Inquisition condemning [him] because Galileo argued that the earth was a satellite of a sun located at the center of the universe….
In fact, things happened differently. What did the Vatican really hold against Galileo? Not so much his defense of Copernican astronomy—although this was a thesis that contradicted the church’s Aristotelian position—as his adherence to the materialist camp … Before the courts of the day, heliocentrism was punishable by lifelong house arrest, a relatively mild sentence. Defense of atomism, on the other hand, led directly to the stake!….
In its very earliest days, the church believed firmly in this miracle [of the transubstantiation of the wafer and wine of the Mass into the body and blood of Jesus]. It still does. The Catechism of the Catholic Church—in its twentieth-century incarnation—still insists on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (Article 1373)….
The explanation: Christ’s body is veritably, really, substantially—the official terms—present in the Host. The same holds true for the hemoglobin in the wine. For the bread’s essence disappears once the priest has spoken, whereas its perceptible characteristics, its accidents—color, taste, temperature—remain. Those characteristics are preserved in miraculous fashion by the divine will….
Therein lay the danger of atomism and materialism. It made a metaphysical impossibility of the church’s theoretical twaddle! By the standards of modern atomic calibration, there is nothing to be found in the bread and wine but what Epicurus predicted: matter….
In 1340, Nicolas d’Autrecourt was bold enough to propose an extremely modern (but atomist) theory of light. He believed in light’s corpuscular nature (modern science validates him), which implies [contrary to the transubstantiation "miracle"] an identification of substance with its characteristics…. The church at once forced him to recant, and burned his writings. It was the beginning of a persecution of all scientific research proceeding through atomism—which the Jesuits banned as early as 1632, maintaining the prohibition for centuries. Materialism (Articles 285 and 2124 of the Catechism) is still on the prohibited list of the contemporary church.