In a post on science in Genesis, there is a link to Eric Snow's article on www.rae.org:
“Christianity a Cause of Modern Science?: The Duhem-Jaki and Merton
Theses Explained”. In this is a fascinating quote from a 14th century
scholar, John Buridan.
The remarkable thing here is that, as I
read it, Buridan [Perhaps the most influential Parisian philosopher of
the fourteenth century, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy] starts his reflections on the created world with God’s
revelation: he therefore uses Genesis 1 directly as a ‘scientific’
textbook. By this Buridan made the great break away from paganism and
opened the path to the development of modern ‘natural’ sciences. Note,
the Bible is directly used to illuminate this break and make the created
world intellectually available for rational examination!
““The
first key steps in totally discarding Aristotle's physics were done
by…the medieval Christian Catholic [Jean/John] Buridan, [who] in a
crucial passage, anticipated the idea of inertia...through his
discussion of impetus. Notice the reference to God not directly making
the laws of nature operate:
Also, since the Bible does not
state that appropriate intelligences move the celestial bodies, it could
be said that it does not appear necessary to posit intelligences of
this kind, because it would be answered that God, when He created the
world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving
them He impressed in them impetuses which moved them without His having
to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby
He concurs as a co-agent in all things which take place; 'for thus on
the seventh day He rested for all work . . .' [Gen. 2:2] And these
impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased
nor corrupted afterwards, because there was not inclination of the
celestial bodies for movements.
Also note this additional statement as a nascent form of the idea of inertia:
But
because of the resistance which results from the weight of the
[waterwheel of the] mill, the impetus would continually diminish until
the mill ceased to turn. And perhaps, if the mill should last forever
without any diminution or change, and there were no other resistance to
corrupt the impetus, the mill would move forever because of its
perpetual impetus.
While these passages are only halting
steps on a long road to repealing Aristotle's physics, they do show a
move to break out of his conceptions of how moving bodies move. These
men show that the Church never uncritically accepted the Greek classics
as many in the Islamic world had done earlier. True, it tied itself and
lent its authority to the Greek classics excessively, which set the
stage for its eventual disaster resulting from it using force that made
Galileo recant his belief that the earth moved. With the later
discoveries of Galileo, Hooke, Kepler, Torricelli, Boyle, Newton, and
others, Europe's science took a vast qualitative leap, but we should not
overlook its origins and these men's predecessors in the Middle Ages.””
