Post #4023349

2026-07-23 00:57 UTC

It's a little appreciated fact that "Western" #science grew up in concert with Christianity. European universities existed first for the purpose of training up people to make better priests and clerks and lawyers; only later did universities come to be seen as seats for teaching all academic and technical subjects. Many of the earlier scientific investigators were Christian priests for these persons were likely to be the best educated and have the greatest accessibility to resources (not to mention free time for study and research.) But then came the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which was prompted chiefly by the war of authority between the established Church and secular rulers who didn't like that the Church had grown into a storehouse and arbiter of scientific knowledge, as one sees in the fight over defining the Solar System. (cont'd)

Replies (1)

@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 01:06

The Church for obvious reasons had become the timekeepers of Europe, and keeping track of the passage of time required some understanding of the Solar System. That made the fight between the stale and increasingly clumsy geocentric model (which preserved the sense that Earth was primal and central to cosmic affairs) and the heliocentric model an inevitable and nasty thing. The Church lost the battle for the European mind and destroyed the old idea that the Church was the guardian of all human knowledge and not just a religious organization--a Christian church, soon to become a whole constellation of churches, whose statements and rulings were of importance only to practicing Christians. But Christians have never forgotten how much power and authority they used to have, and thus Christian reactionaries have in modern times waged an ugly, no-quarter battle to regain that old sense of universal authority. (cont'd)

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