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Time Traveling with Science and the Saints
by George A Erickson
(Prometheus, $25.00, 177 pages, hardback; March 28 2003.)
The thesis of this short book is stated succinctly in its Afterword:
"History reveals that religion in general and Christianity in  particular
[have] retarded social and scientific progress and been the source of
immeasurable woe." The book is thus a staunch rebuttal, reinforced by
copious historical examples, of the commonly held fallacy that, despite
all the multitudinous evils committed in its name, Christianity has
overall been a civilizing factor.
Erickson begins his historical analysis by discussing the fate of Giordano
Bruno, the 16th-century freethinking cleric who was tortured and burnt
at the stake as a heretic for espousing and promoting the Copernican
hypothesis. And it is upon the Church's still continuing and often horrendously
bloody struggle to suppress scientific endeavour that Erickson, quite
rightly, chooses almost exclusively to concentrate; for science, despite
the frequently flawed behaviour of its establishment (as witness the
derision heaped upon Wegener for advocating the notion of continental
drift), is almost by definition ever in the vanguard of free thought,
and without the technology that science brings in its wake freedom of
thought must often be subjugated to the simple struggle to survive.
It is certainly the case that, as Erickson amply demonstrates, when
science ushered in the Enlightenment, the thinkers of that era were
merely picking up where the ancient Greeks had left off fifteen hundred
years earlier. And it is also certainly the case, as he again demonstrates,
that this 1500-year diaspora of indescribable misery and appalling brutality
was imposed upon the West by the doctrines of the Christian churches
and their imposition, often through the agency of secular tyrants, by
supposedly Christian establishments whose primary goal was worldly gain
and who had no interests in the teachings of Christ except insofar as
they could be perverted in order to facilitate that goal.
During that 1500-year-long nightmare there were of course the obvious
Christianity-inspired slaughters of the innocents: the Crusades, the
Inquisition, the witch-hunts, the Thirty Years' War. What go less generally
recognized are the other casualties caused by the repression of scientific
advance. The violence-enforced bans not just on medical experimentation
and research but also even on speculation killed countless millions.
The prohibitions on work in the physical sciences -- of which Copernicus's
seemingly pure-theory deductions were a part -- crippled engineering
and other life-saving technologies, thereby causing countless more millions
of unnecessary deaths. Deaths aside, the sheer human misery engendered
by the theistic tyranny is incalculable.
Erickson retains the full force of his rhetoric for the modern proponents
of religion-based ignorance and stupidity in the West. The final two
sections of his final chapter offer a devastatingly effective piece
of polemic directed against the modern forces of intellectual repression,
from Pope John Paul II and President George W. Bush on downwards, and
in defence of those who, often shamefully beleaguered, pursue freedom
of thought. He mercilessly exposes the nonsense of those who describe
Creationism as a "science"; of those who ban birth control yet take
no responsibility for the inevitably ensuing bastards, poverty, suffering
and starvation; of those who use the words of the Prince of Peace as
a justification for war and genocide; of those who make the laughable
claim that in order to preserve freedom of thought we must suppress
it. Here is Erickson on Ronald Reagan:
Ronald Reagan, perhaps the least intelligent man to ever
be elected president until George W. Bush, felt comfortable appointing
fundamentalist James Watt to be the Secretary of the Interior despite
Watt's apocalyptic belief that led him to advise Congress not to worry
over environmental issues because, "I don't know how many future generations
we can count on until the Lord returns."
It is shameful that we elect men like Reagan, who once inquired,
"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"
The "intellectual curiosity", one need hardly add, that led to the
development of the camera and motion pictures.
Though compulsively readable, the book is not without its flaws. Because
of its brevity it must naturally miss some highlights during its brief
trip through scientific and religious history -- although it does, to
its credit, cover all the major bases. On one or two occasions the text
seems slightly jumbled, as if Erickson had been interrupted a few times
while making his final revisions, so that a sentence seems to be in
the wrong place on its page. There's a bizarre tendency to use the spelling
"eigthteenth", and Sir Humphry Davy is described repeatedly as "Sir
Davy". Erickson says that Priestley, on discovering oxygen, called it
"phlogiston"; of course, Priestley called his new-discovered gas "dephlogisticated
air", believing that it had been deprived of the theoretical (in fact,
imaginary) substance phlogiston posited by Stahl a few decades earlier
to explain weight-change during combustion -- it was Lavoisier who,
being told by Priestley of the behaviour of "dephlogisticated air",
leapt to the correct conclusion that air is made up of more than one
gas.
And there's one real chronological howler:
In the end, the aging Copernicus entrusted his manuscript
to a liberal Nuremberg cleric named Andreas Osiander, who knew that
the Vatican theologian Cardinal Bellarmine had condoned, if not arranged,
the murder of Giordano Bruno for holding similar view.
Unfortunately for this statement, Bruno was burnt in 1600 while Copernicus
died over half a century earlier, in 1543.
It is to be hoped that such matters will be corrected when the book
reprints.
Erickson nowhere explains the title of his book, but I choose to interpret
it in the sense that we're being encouraged to participate in countless
mental voyages of time travel in order to ask the question, not so much
"what if?", as "what if not?" What if the Roman Catholic Church,
later enthusiastically joined in the persecution of free thought by
the Protestant churches, had not come to power -- even, had not
existed? It is almost incontestable that our civilization, for good
or evil, would currently be at a level 1500 years head of where were
are now. In this, of course, Erickson more than sufficiently makes his
intended rebuttal; as a side-effect, he has also given us a book that
serves as a possible source -- almost a blueprint -- for countless alternate
history stories. It would even be reasonable to assert, although Erickson
does not, that this book, through its depiction of the negative, itself
depicts an alternative history-that-never-was. That alas never
was.
Time Traveling with Science and the Saints can be recommended
not just for your own reading but as a book you might like to give to
any young adolescent of your acquaintance; it is easily readable enough
and short enough even for younger children, but some of them might be
seriously disturbed by the accounts of the antics of the Inquisitors
and others. Whether we like it or not, our young people are bombarded
at every turn by the seductions and indoctrinations of the religious,
whatever their sect; I can think of no better gift to ensure that a
youngster will at least be able to make up her or his mind rather than
listen only to the nonsensical and fundamentally dishonest quasi-history
and quasi-knowledge purveyed by the "wise".
Review by John Grant.
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