How does the 19th-C view that religion, particularly the Christian religion, was antagonistic to the development of science stand up in the light of an actual look at pre-modern science? This course, focused upon Antiquity and the Middle Ages, provides the background needed to understand the complex history of thought that led to Modern science.

It asks, What are the major ideas in science and how have those ideas evolved? What are the common misconceptions and myths about science and the attitude of the Christian Church toward science? What led to the emergence of genuine science? And how have reason and faith worked together in the development of science?

All human cultures possess forms of technology, which reflect the human response to the problems of survival: problem-solving may produce technology, but does it generate science? Early medicine was a mixture of incantation, empirical remedies, and crude surgery, but to this day animistic cultures remain hard soil into which to plant scientific ideas.

We shall examine the flowering of abstract mathematics and the great cultural insight of the Hippocratic physicians, and then the decline into the uncritical encyclopaedic cataloguing of the Roman period. Following the rediscovery (via the Muslim world) of the scientific works of Aristotle, the 13th and 14th centuries, rather than the Enlightenment, turn out to be a critical turning point, permitting the later revolutions of modern scientific thought.