Madam, - John Gibbons (Opinion, September 11th) raises an important issue when he writes of "a medieval era of religiosity and superstition, where people such as Galileo were harassed by the church for daring to speak the heresies of factual, observation-based science". The myth of Christian obstruction of science seems to be an article of faith for many people, particularly among secularists and atheists, but is really nothing more than historical make-believe.
The extraordinary scientific advancements made by Western civilisation in the last millennium were in fact built on medieval Christian theology, reason and enquiry. This foundation derived from belief in a universe created by a rational being, and ordered by discernible laws.
A notable landmark was that 12th-century Christian contribution to civilisation, the university. In the following centuries the following exemplified the enormous role played by clerics in scientific discovery: the Franciscan Roger Bacon at Oxford, the Dominican St Albert the Great at the University of Paris, Nicolaus Steno (credited with setting down the principals of modern geology), and the Jesuits Athanasius Kircher (who contributed to the replacement of alchemy by chemistry), Roger Boscovich (the pioneer of fundamental atomic physics), Giambattista Ricciolo, and Francesco Maria Grimaldi. The latter pair produced a detailed diagram of the features of the moon in the 17th century. Cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were designed to serve as world-renowned solar observatories.
Galileo's case is about the only example given for the imagined church antagonism to science. In fact, he benefited from the support of high-ranking churchmen throughout his career. His difficulties arose because of a not totally unreasonable insistence by ecclesiastical authorities that he refrain from teaching the theory of Copernicanism as fact until he had conclusive evidence to support it. In the meantime, they were perfectly satisfied for him to teach it as a hypothesis.
Might I suggest that, instead of accepting the distortions and half-truths we are so often presented with, people approach the subject of Christianity's relationship with science in a spirit of enquiry and with an open mind? They might be surprised by what they discover. - Yours, etc,
LEO CLEAR,
Richmond Avenue,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.