Addressing some Myths or Misconceptions about Science and Religion, and One about Superstition in the ‘Middle Ages’

A Misconception of the ‘Middle Ages’

Myth: The Middle Ages is an age of superstition.

The myth here is not that the so-called Middle Ages was largely superstitious,  but that it is somehow substantially different from the superstition of today, or the frequency in which people are indeed superstitious. 

It should be understood that educated medieval thinkers complained about the degree of superstition present within the lay community, just as many modern thinkers do today. Examples of such medieval thinkers are plentiful:  Agobard of Lyon, Aelfric of Eynsham, Rudolph Glaber and Geoffrey Chaucer. What is more, the people of today are comparably just as superstitious as they were then. 

The reputation of the Middle Ages being an age of irrational behavior is largely the baggage of Renaissance and Modern thinkers projecting their hostility and ignorance into a time poorly understood. 

A Misconception in Mechanical Philosophy and Early Modern Science

Myth: The Advent of Early Mechanical Philosophy Moved its Thinkers Away from God and Natural Theology

I can picture a ‘new atheist’ saying this while drunk on the powers of science and secular reasoning, it’s an eye roller. But it is a silly one.  Many thinkers of mechanical philosophy or/and modern science were deeply religious and quite concerned with God; of the Catholics, the most famous were Mersenne, Descartes and Gassendi.  Other thinkers include these men: Walter Charleton, John Wilkens, John Wallis, Robert Boyle (he retained notions of teleology), John Ray and Isaac Newton.  This was indeed a time wherein writings of science and religion, particularly natural theology, were quite close, if not downright intimate. God was often seen as the sustainer of the so-called natural laws, the mathematical laws which governed a mechanical world, or the spark which generated the world machine.

The fulcrum of this theistic understanding of a mechanical world rested on a substantial difference between matter and spirit.  If the latter is denied, as Hobbes later did, and so many after him, or at least deemed unnecessary, then ground would be conceded to irreligion and atheism.

A Misconception about Kant, Faith and Reason

Myth: Kant himself said that faith is contrary to reason and science.

Kant is a weird one. His point was this. Our mental apparatuses structure our experience; and hence we have no direct line to things themselves. What we have a line to is just the world of experience—the phenomenal world. The laws of the natural world are not laws of the things themselves, but our understanding; and hence what we have here is a sort of psychologism.  We are forced to think causally—it is a precondition of our understanding. Thus, the phenomenal world is deterministic—nothing happens without a cause; and hence there can be no freedom of choice or otherwise. But, we do have freedom, and that freedom is intimate with moral responsibility (and religion). Thus, infers Kant, the world of choice, freedom, moral responsibility and religion cannot be of the phenomenal world.

Thus, here we have the divorce between science and religion. They can offer each other nothing since they are of different categories. Thus, nothing of science can support religion and vice versa. Thus he says that he finds it necessary, in matters of religion, to deny knowledge (scientific knowledge and the like) to make room for faith. This does not suggest that faith is contrary to reason in the sense that it is irrational. 

Misconception about Darwinism and Christianity

Myth: Christians rejected Evolution—Wholesale!

I am sure that some Christians doubted Darwin’s theory of evolution, but not all. Some Christians embraced moderate forms of evolution wherein the idea that every living thing but man himself were the products of strictly blind evolutionary processes. This idea was not exclusive to Christians. The agnostic and Darwinist Thomas Henry Huxley believed that the gulf between humans and non-human animals was too great to be thought to be the product of mere evolution.

Other Christians, particularly Catholics, were reluctant to follow the dictates of mechanical philosophy, nor the preference to look at evolution as non-teleological, they were loyal Thomists. Instead, Catholic thinkers such as John Zahm and George Mivart produced an understanding of evolution which embraced teleology, or at least left room for it. 

For these men, the debate is not such much whether man evolved, but whether the process is or can be teleological or in some way guided by God. Today many if not most scientists believe that there is no conflict between Christian theism and human evolution, and it appears that most Christians, at least those of the educated sort, do not see the two as incompatible.