GlytchMeister wrote:What Middle Ages are you talking about?
Granted, I’m not exactly a history buff but there was this one dude called Galileo who had some problems with the whole science vs the church thing. And that’s just one dude, I thought he was just the famous case and there were all manner of clashes where the church said “nope, bible’s right, you're wrong, shut up, or I’ll excommunicate/execute/assassinate you.”
The relationship between science and religion has always been rather complex (to put it mildly). There have been many,
many times when, for example, the Roman Catholic Church (or at least individual officials in it) moved to block certain avenues of scientific inquiry. They'd also decree that declaring specific ideas as facts were big no-no's (such as the University of Paris' list of proscribed beliefs published in 1277), and that you could get in serious trouble for trying to spread those ideas as truths.
But at the same time as it was controlling and filtering it, the Roman Catholic Church was also the main supporter and spreader of scientific inquiry in Western Europe. The Church provided funding, established schools, and copied manuscripts. In general terms, it was believed that science was a tool that would help the Church. For one thing, it could lead to new ideas and inventions that would make life easier.
Also, a basic knowledge of how the universe works is essential for identifying miracles and debunking false ones. Miracles, by definition, go against the natural laws. If you don't know what the natural laws are, then how can you recognise a miracle when it happened? All cynicism aside, most of these people truly did believe in their religion, and this sort of thing was important to them.
There's also the matter that, according to their beliefs, God created the world. It is the direct handiwork of the Creator. By studying the Bible, you're looking at something written out by a person on pages made by a person, translated by a person who copied the words of some other person. There was an understanding that the Bible was somehow divinely protected from getting too corrupted, but it was still at best a second-hand connection with God. Interpretations could go screwy. Looking at nature and natural laws skips the middle-man and gives you a direct view of God's work. Studying nature (and thus science) gives you a closer understanding of God. As Hugh of St. Victor wrote back in the 12th Century, the world around us that we can perceive with our own senses is basically a whole extra Bible given to us directly by God.
Members of the Church investigated the writings of the Classical Greek and Roman pre-scientists, and winnowed out a lot of the stuff that just didn't work (Aristotle and Plato and the rest were pagans, of course, but Christianity was often willing to accept the parts of pagan ideas that actually seemed to work). By the end of the 13th Century, the Roman Catholic Church had helped to introduce into Western Europe systems and tools for accurate measurement and time-keeping (without which Science couldn't happen), a new number system, the notion of describing the natural laws of the universe using mathematics and graphs, and a lot of important fundamentals of chemistry, biology, and physics (such as the Mean Speed Theorem). They were also starting to get the idea that, hey, maybe running experiments to test thing might be a good idea! The Middle Ages is really where Science first started to truly take form, and the Roman Catholic Church was a big part of that.
So the Church was generally in favour of investigating the world and its properties, so long as it was done in a proper and organised manner.
And that's where the difficulty came in. Heresy was something that the Church did not appreciate. The conflict came on the rare occasions where the Church made a definite point of doctrine on some matter, and then Science came up with something that seemed to go against that specific point of doctrine. The Church was actually usually very relaxed about hypothetical scenarios that involved heretical points, but if you wanted to state as a definite truth that some matter of Church doctrine was wrong then you'd better have some
really solid proof.
That's where Galileo got tripped up. He was actually well after the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance. By that time, the Church had gotten a bit more prickly on the subject of heresy and disobedience due to that whole little matter of the Protestant Reformation and the European Wars of Religion and Church vs. Monarchy tensions and other such details. Galileo started publicly spreading his idea of heliocentricism as an established fact. The Pope of the time had actually been a friend of and fan of Galileo for many years, and he did apparently do a lot to cut Galileo some slack. But it ended up all becoming a big mess, and the Church decided it had to take official action and put Galileo on trial. Even during the trial, it wasn't so much a case of Religion vs. Science, since the prosecutors in the case included some people who are still recognised today as important scientists themselves. But Galileo had broken Church Law in Church lands, and so they demanded that he provide proof. And he couldn't (partly because his theory, while closer to correct than the accepted geocentric model, was still substantially wrong). So the Church ruled against him, and came down hard on his theory to make an obvious example of how heresy wouldn't be accepted.
So that shut down a whole area of scientific inquiry in Roman Catholic controlled lands, which was a big loss.
But in spite of that, Science continued and eventually developed modern leg braces, so yay!