Western science developed within the context of the Church itself

[struggle4progress]

Western experimental philosophy can be traced back to a monk, Roger Bacon. Copernicus was a churchman; his great work on heliocentrism was published with official Church permission; and it circulated freely for seventy five years before reactionaries within the Church launched a counter-attack, which led to a demand that a handful of minor sentences in the text had to be changed to express a view that heliocentrism was not an absolute fact but merely a convenient computational hypothesis. The great hero of scientific enlightenment, Isaac Newton, harbored many religious beliefs that most of us would regard as bizarre

When Heiberg, in 1900, famously found the text of Archimedes' letter to Erastosthenes -- describing how he actually discovered the formula for the volume of sphere, by decomposing it into lines and mentally weighing the lines on an imaginary lever -- it was easy to sneer, because the text had been idiotically overwritten in medieval times by a monk who wanted vellum for a prayerbook, so that Heiberg was reduced to reconstructing Archimedes' letter painfully, letter by letter. But the fact that monk found the text readily at hand, in a library he could access, means: someone had saved it there. Nor is it mere conjection to point out that Churchmen, even in medieval times, had been interested in such texts: the Benedictine monk, Adelard of Bath, had translated some Euclid from Arabic texts in the twelfth century

Similar remarks might be made about science and (say) Islamic civilization: classical Islam was not hostile to science, though one can certainly find anti-scientific zealots in Islamic history, just as one can find them in Christian history.