Lew Rockwell's weekend edition has an interview with Thomas Woods. Link. Excerpt:
Chapin: It's ironic that so often religion and science are thought to be polar opposites, yet, in your latest book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, you illustrate the way in which the Catholic Church has influenced the development of western science ”“ indeed, seismology was regarded as "the Jesuit science." Why do you think so many commentators continue to regard religion as being incompatible with science?
Woods: I can think of two main reasons. The first is that the alleged incompatibility of religion and science has been rammed down most people's throats practically from birth. One would have to read fairly substantially in the scholarly literature on the history of science to have doubts about this view. In fact, for the most part the scholarly literature itself began to have sustained and serious doubts about this view only in the twentieth century, with the work of the (largely unappreciated) Pierre Duhem, and then with a much broader array of scholars in the latter half of the century.
The second reason is that there is a superficial plausibility behind the alleged incompatibility of religion and science. After all, isn't religion based on faith and science based on reason? I get this in email correspondence all the time. My science chapter ”“ the book's longest ”“ argues that the matter is not so easily resolved.
The scientific method itself takes certain features of the natural world for granted. The scientific method cannot work unless experiments are repeatable, and experiments are repeatable only if the universe is orderly. If I cannot expect to get the same results when I perform the same experiment multiple times under identical conditions, it becomes impossible for me to do science.
The idea of an orderly universe operating according to fixed natural laws is more likely to develop in some civilizations than in others. It flourished in the Christian West largely because God's orderliness had been taken for granted for so long as a sign and feature of His goodness and reliability. St. Anselm was not alone among theologians in distinguishing between God's potentia absoluta and His potentia ordinata ”“ His absolute power and His ordered power. In other words, although God possessed the sheer power to bring about such anomalies as starlight without stars, or to govern the universe whimsically, in practice He would not exercise such power, since it did not befit His nature to behave that way.
Moreover, the Christian world was especially sympathetic to the idea that the universe could be understood quantitatively, which is an essential ingredient of modern science (if perhaps one that, as Anthony Rizzi notes, has been taken to unreasonable extremes). Already St. Augustine is conceiving of God as a great geometer, and making fruitful use of Wisdom 11:21, which notes that God has made all things in measure, number, and weight. That has been called the most quoted biblical verse of the entire Middle Ages. Twelfth-century scholars at the renowned cathedral school at Chartres made particularly good use of it since it was they, according to Thomas Goldstein, who really set about to try to understand the universe at least partly in mathematical terms.
But there is more to all this than simply the conviction that the universe was orderly and could thus be understood mathematically, important as that insight is. Stanley Jaki, in his work on the history of science, has quite a profound discussion of the subject of why, for instance, pagan cultures failed to develop the concept of inertial motion, while the Christian civilization of the West did. I touch on this point as well in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
Now it will be objected that these ideas could have developed independently of Christianity. Perhaps. The point is that it was within a Christian milieu, in which such ideas had become second nature to scholars who lived in such a milieu, that they did develop in a serious and sustained way.
