The Popes and Science; The History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time - Tapa blanda

Excerpt: ...It is almost needless to say to anyone who knows anything about the history of modern science--even nineteenth century science, that there is absolutely no foundation for this prejudice. Most of our greatest investigators even in nineteenth century science have been faithful believers not only in the ordinary religious truths, in a Providence, in a hereafter, and in this life as a preparation for another, but also in the great mysteries of revelation. I have shown this amply even with regard to what is usually considered so unorthodox a science as medicine, in my volume on the Makers of Modern Medicine. Most of the men who did the great original work in last century medicine were Catholics. The same thing is true for electricity, for example. All the men after whom modes and units of electricity are named--Galvani, Volta, Coulomb, Ampere, Ohm--were not only members of the Church, but what would be even called devout Catholics. A second and almost as important a reason for the superstition--for it is a supposed truth accepted without good reasons therefor--that somehow the Church was opposed to the inductive or experimental method, is the persistent belief which, in spite of frequent 283 contradictions, remains in the minds of so many scientists, that the inductive or experimental method was introduced to the world by Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Bacon himself was a Protestant; he did not do his writing until the reformation so-called had been at work in Europe for nearly a century, and somehow it is supposed that these facts are linked together as causes and effects. The reason why such a formulation of the inductive method had not come before was because this was forbidden ground! Nothing could be less true than that Lord Bacon had any serious influence in bringing about the introduction of the inductive method into science. At most he was a chronicler of tendencies that he saw in the science...