Not only is christianity not responsible for science, but it is, in fact, probably the worst enemy to science. Remember the Dark Ages?
No, I don't. I wasn't alive then.
The Dark Ages was a myth invented by Enlightenment era thinkers to help push their new secularist ideas. Historians debunked said myth decades ago.
I wasn't alive then, either but I can read. Amazing inventions, reading and writing. I think the Sumerians were the first....but they couldn't have been. They weren't Christians.
According to Islamic thought, "the dark ages" in Europe referred to the fact that Europe during the middle ages was quite literally dark, meaning lacking in light, as well as socially and culturally unenlightened. Europe was behind the rest of the world (India, China, North Africa and Middle East) in terms of collected knowledge, and what most people would consider "civilization".
If you were looking for organized, settled communities where long-distance trade, cultural diversity, learning and gentility were valued, you did not go to Europe between say, 500-1500 CE. You went just about any place else!
Muslim Spain, for example, was brightly lit by lanterns at night, with running water, clean streets, paved walkways, fountains and beautiful gardens. People used soap, sat on cushions, walked on carpets, slept on soft beds and wore colorfully patterned cloth.
The rest of Europe was crowded, cold, dank, smelly and dirty. People, even the wealthy, seldom washed. Shoes were a luxury. Mud and sh!t were tracked in and out of the homes. Clothes were made of coarse, rough cloth. Beds were hard slats covered with straw. European colonizers were shocked that, by and large, the people of the Americas and Asia--untouched by white civilization and lacking Christianity, did not also live in similar squalor and poverty, since they were savage barbarians and all.
The Middle East had wealth, beauty, delicious exotic foods like almonds, apricots and oranges, incredible cloth, and architecture the likes of which gobsmacked the oh-so-civilized medieval Christians who showed up to kill the barbarian infidel Muslims and Jews during the Crusades. Baghdad, Timbuktu and Cairo had enormous libraries and universities when monasteries in Europe were lucky to have a handful of books. Mughal India and the Aztec civilizations also dazzled the European Christians.
Christianity never demanded that people be educated, live well or in decent conditions; people were expected to remain ignorant, accept their lot and wait for their reward in heaven. Decent conditions did not produce the Inquisition, the colonizers, workhouses, debtors' prison or the Crusaders. Exactly the opposite. The living situations were not nice, and neither were the people.
As every group ever colonized by (the supposedly more advanced) Christian Europeans asked, if your civilization is so great and you have everything anyone could want in Europe, why do you need to come way over here to kill us and steal all our goodies?
I am not saying that Islam or other religions are better than Christianity. They are just as mythical and lacking in evidence. But you can't get away with claiming that Christian Europe was head and shoulders above everywhere else. Europe only climbed to the top after it became expert at enslaving and ripping off the rest of the world.
Okay, that last sentence was somewhat hyperbolic, but not by much. Europe's major wealth concentration-- growth of bustling port cities, banking, insurance and international business enterprises-- grew on the back of slave-based Triangle Trade and the domination of commerce by colonial institutions like the British East India Company.
Where did the diamonds, gold, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, cotton, sugar and of course, opium that built fortunes in Europe between 1500-1900 come from? Oh, yeah, all those useless, backward, un-Christian, uncivilized places around the world.
Over to you, 12 Monkeys
