Thank heavens that Columbus was able to convince the world that the earth was round. Except, as Chuck Colson explains in this classic BreakPoint commentary, Columbus didn’t have to convince anyone.
For well over a century and a half, secular intellectuals have promulgated the myth that when it came to understanding the natural world, medieval and earlier Christians were superstitious simpletons. As we mark Columbus Day today, sit back and listen to Chuck Colson as he debunks that pernicious fairy tale. Here’s Chuck.
To paraphrase the opening of a popular ESPN show, these four things everyone knows are true: Before Columbus’s first voyage, people thought the world was flat. When Copernicus wrote that the Earth revolved around the Sun, his conclusions came out of nowhere. Three, the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century invented science as we know it. And four, false beliefs and impediments to science are Christianity’s fault.
There’s just one problem: All four statements are false.
As Rodney Stark writes in his new book, “For the Glory of God,” “every educated person” of Columbus’s time, especially Christian clergy, “knew the earth was round.” More than 800 years before Columbus’s voyage, Bede, the church historian, taught this, as did Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Aquinas. The title of the most popular medieval text on astronomy was Sphere, not exactly what you would call a book that said the earth was flat.
As for Copernicus’s sudden flash of insight, Stark quotes the eminent historian L. Bernard Cohen, who called that idea “an invention of later historians.” Copernicus “was taught the essential fundamentals leading to his model by his Scholastic professors”—that is, Christian scholars.
That model was “developed gradually by a succession of . . . Scholastic scientists over the previous two centuries.” Building upon their work on orbital mechanics, Copernicus added the “implicit next step.”
Thus, the idea that science was invented in the seventeenth century, “when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it,” as it is said, is false. Long before the famed physicist Isaac Newton, clergy like John of Sacrobosco, the author of Sphere, were doing what can be only called science. The Scholastics—Christians—not the Enlightenment, invented modern science.
Continue reading BreakPoint – Columbus and the Rise of Science: We’ve Been Lied To
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