From theologian Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century to the Reformation in the 14th to 16th centuries, respect for creation increased but human dominion over it was stifled. The root of the problem was that Aquinas’ writings had cultivated an undue regard for Aristotle, whose physics of energy and matter seriously blocked scientific progress.
Aristotle had spoken of a single ‘god’ but not the Infinite Personal Creator of the bible. He had attributed purposes, goals and ends to material things themselves, rather than to God who had created all things for His purposes.
For example, Aristotle presupposed that the earth was the centre of everything. On that basis he asserted that things fall to the ground because they have a “natural tendency” to fall to their “natural place” around which all things move.
Aquinas had interpreted the bible through an Aristotelian mindset and his work obtained strong papal backing. So Aristotle’s faulty physics became embedded in a revered but unbiblical ‘natural’ theology.
To contradict that theology, as Galileo did, was to contradict its supporters in the then powerful Clergy, which they viewed as an attack on God. Acceptance of papal supremacy shielded unbiblical ‘natural’ theology until the Reformation.
After the Reformation, when people again accepted the bible as the supreme authority in matters of belief and behaviour, papal doctrines based on Aristotle were challenged. Scientific discovery flourished at an unprecedented rate, especially in England where increasingly biblical government protected scientists from persecution by papal forces.
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