WAS THE CHURCH ANTI-SCIENCE? YES BUT ONLY SELECTIVELY: THEY WERE AGAINST LITERACY AND INDEPENDENT THOUGHT IN THE LAITY.
It was all well and good if science (natural philosophy as they understood it) was produced and captured by the church whose members feared for their livelihood and often their lives if they contradicted the faith. And outside of the church’s political influence, the europen home was still a religion of the hearth(pagan) – the church participants then were similar in status to the woke bureaucracy today – in fact almost identical. So the state wias still military, technological, and legalistic in operation with the church responsible for ‘the little people’ – more so in western europe and less so in eastern.
So:
(a) A common mistake: the Church was captured by the aristocracy (second and third sons under primogeniture) as a land-holding corporation for each local manor – and the church, as an extension of the manor, desired an ignorant, pliable, and cheaply governable labor force (peasantry).
One of the reasons the Byzantines organzied and forced christianity on the west, and prevented the restoration of the aristocracy and destroyed the arts, letters, institutions, schools, and killed or outcast the philosophers, was because Rome and Constantinople had lacked the population to administer and enforce rule of law (truth) and had learned from the middle east that while the aristocracy could rely on reason and empiricism, the dumb ignorant underclasses of the middle east were (are) intellectually incompetent for anything OTHER than superstition and mythology (lies). (European IQ ~100, and Semitic IQ ~84, meaning more than half of the middle eastern population the byzantines were governing, and only about 15% of europeans were that dumb).
(b) Ergo the church’s ambition was rule and control by maintaining popular ignorance. So the only anti-science they demonstrated was whenever it challenged church dogma or authority sufficiently to threaten to disempower them.
This is why religion rapidly collapsed among the literate after the invention of the printing press, and why luther was so determined to give people a bible in their own language and to spread literacy – to end the corruption of the church that held the people in virtual serfdom (half of the land in europe was under the church).
We can’t often imagine that Rome had faced a labor shortage, ad upon the fall of the roman state, and the loss of the legions, that meant feudalism(self-defense by alliances of warrior landlords) was the only possible means of maintaining any economic survival.
Economics = Incentives. Writen prose is just the excuses we tell to justify what we’re doing about it. That’s history. And that’s why historical explanation was difficult before we began to understand economics. It’s obvious why empiricism, enlightenment, economic productivity, legal precision and testimony, resulted in histories we now understand were fairly accurate representations in at least the pre-war period. And slightly better now, with Yuval harari and Howard Zin the laggarts. 😉
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation
Reply addressees: @CrastoMervin @OtonielFilho5