Inevitably, this fundamental modification of perception aroused the fear and anger of conservatives. Inevitably, conservatives attempted to use the Church to prevent the change, by arguing that this altered perception violated fundamental principles of the Church. The battle that began then -- as a conflict between two religious views of nature -- continues even today, couched as a conflict between science and religion.
“Science and religion, religion and science, put it as I may they are two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two, focusing together, reveal the truth.” [Buck, 1962]
The enemy of science then and today is not religion, any more than the enemy of science during Plato’s day was democracy. Both the Christian religion and democratic laws had seemed threatening when they were introduced. Later, each became the weapon wielded by conservatives to protect themselves from the fear engendered by scientific change. Unlike the conservatives and religious zealots, scientists greet claims of ‘absolute truth’ with skepticism. Revelation is eventually seen as naïveté, for all understandings evolve and improve.
The status quo will always be used to challenge scientific change.
***
At about the same time that the School of Chartres was rediscovering Greek knowledge with their own pitifully small library, Europeans encountered the entirety of Greek and Arab scientific knowledge on several fronts. In Spain the long civil war between Christians and Muslims led to capture of Muslim cities, and the Christian king Alfonso VII established a center in Toledo for the study of Islamic science. The Crusaders also found libraries rich in Greek manuscripts, particularly during the capture of Constantinople in 1204. When the emerging European spirit of scientific enquiry encountered potential answers in the form of Greek and Arab scientific writings, translators were kept busy for more than a century.
Eight hundred years later as I write this, war between Western Christians and Arab Muslims has flared again, and the Arab gift to the west of practical applied science is returning to Iraq in the form of high-technology weapons.
Much of the Arab science was not fully absorbed by the Europeans for centuries. Scientific knowledge was only a part of the Islamic gift to the Europeans. The Islamic pleasure and curiosity in observing nature’s diversity spearheaded a 12th-century cultural and scientific renaissance of intellectual and sensual liberation [Goldstein, 1988]. This renaissance was exemplified by Robert Grossteste (1175-1253), once chancellor of Oxford, and his student Roger Bacon (1214-1294 A.D.). Grossteste gave the first relatively complete description of modern scientific method, including induction, experimentation, and mathematics [Crombie, 1953]. Bacon argued that it is necessary to combine mathematical analysis with empirical observation and that experiments should be controlled. More than two centuries before the technological insights of Leonardo da Vinci, Roger Bacon [~1270 A.D.] foresaw the potential technological results of scientific method:
“Great ships and sea-going vessels shall be made which can be guided by one man and will move with greater swiftness than if they were full of oarsmen. It is possible that a car shall be made which will move with inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any living creature. . . A device for flying shall be made such that a man sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause artificial wings to beat the air after the manner of a flying bird. Similarly, it is possible to construct a small-sized instrument for elevating and depressing great weights . . . It is possible also that devices can be made whereby, without bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river.”
