According to his website, Kenneth Keathley is “Director of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture and Professor of Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBT) in Wake Forest, NC “. Like many Southern Baptists, he appears to be a creationist, but an old-earth creationist. (That puts him only 90% of the way to Crazy Town.)
In the 5½-minute video below, Keathley is interviewed by Jamie Dew—professor of history and philosophy and Dean of the College at SBT—about the relationship between science and Christianity. The title of the brief interview, given on the site Between the Times, is “Are science and theology enemies?” Keathley clearly thinks not—in fact, he thinks that Christianity was essential for the rise of science.
He rejects the “warfare” hypothesis of the relationship between science and religion, originally promulgated by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White (see the first chapter of FvF), saying that those authors had an “agenda”. Well, White (the founder of Cornell Unversity) surely didn’t: he was a believer and discovered through extensive reading that some (but not all) elements of Christianity had opposed scientific advances. His aim was actually to make religion stronger by purging it of its anti-science “dogmatism.” While some of his White’s facts were wrong, many weren’t, but accommodationist scholars like Ronald Numbers continue to use these errors to debunk the entire “conflict” hypothesis. But these scholars have their own agenda: they are determined to show that science and religion can live in harmony. That’s why they try so hard to pretend that the Galileo affair didn’t really have much to do with religion—an argument that is palpable nonsense.
What these scholars seemingly don’t understand is that while some church authorities promoted science, many others opposed the progress of science (e.g., anesthesia, vaccination, and even lightning rods!). More important, the method of ascertaining truth through science is completely inimical to the method of ascertaining religious “truths” (i.e., stuff that is made up). In that sense, then, the “warfare” hypothesis remains, for when scientific truth opposes religious dogma, more often than not believers side with dogma rather than science. Keathley, after all, is an old-earth creationist who rejects evolution. Isn’t that a prime EXAMPLE of the warfare between his Baptist superstitions and the findings of science?
Keathley imputes the rise of science in Europe to the following influences of Christianity (as opposed what he calls those other “pagan polytheistic religions”): the ideas that nature is real and has a value and an order that can be discerned through laws. Further, the search for laws, according to Keathley, came though the Christian notion of a Great Lawgiver, and from the belief that humans were able to think God’s thoughts after Him, and so could find those laws.
This, of course, is simply post hoc rationalization: a way to discern harmony between irreconcilable ways of finding “truth” by claiming that the only real way to find truth was in fact the offspring of Christian superstition. Of course it’s possible, even likely, that some people were motivated by their religious beliefs to study and understand nature. But it’s just as likely that elements of the church inhibited that search for truth.
And one has to consider this, too: the Church held sway over Europe during the Middle Ages—for ten centuries beginning about 500 A.D. Western science as we know it is a fifteenth-century production. Why the big delay if Christianity was so important in promoting science? And didn’t the ancient Greeks (and early Muslims) also begin doing science, but science not promoted by religion? Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes—did they do their work because they wanted to emulate the Mind of Zeus, the Great Lawgiver? I think not: it was simple human curiosity.
And that curiosity would certainly have resided in the early European scientists as well. Yes, they were virtually all Christians, but everyone was a Christian then. If you give credit to Christianity for science, then you must do so for nearly everything that arose in post-medieval Europe, including the printing press.
In the end, we simply can’t make a convincing argument that without Christianity, science would have started later, or would have been slowed in its progress. We have no control group—no ability to rerun the course of history to see whether, in a heathen Europe, science would have started up later. We just don’t know.
But what we do know is that, at present, religion is not a force for scientific progress. It is only an impediment. I can’t think of a single bit of progress in understanding the world over the last 200 years, for instance, that was promoted by religion. (I’m sure readers can name one or two bits, but ALL scientific progress has come from rejecting the supernatural.) We have left our childish superstitions behind, and, as Laplace said, “we don’t need that hypothesis.”
And if Keathley is so sure that science and theology aren’t enemies, is he willing to give up his antiscientific old-earth creationism? He is a living example of why his own thesis is wrong. Remember, 40% of Americans are young-earth creationists, at least as far as humans are concerned, and virtually all of those are motivated by religion. Many of these try to impose their creationist nonsense on public-school biology classes. If that’s not a war between science and superstition, I don’t know what is.
h/t: Bob F.
Curiosity was crucial. Christianity was prevalent. Mox nix.
My thought exactly.
Christianity instrumental? Galileo laughs.
I find it curious why more theists don’t promote a much more likely hypothesis: that adherence to dogma and authority, the hallmark of religion, likely held us back at least a thousand years. It just might make the subsequent garbage argumentation they produce just a little more palatable to the more enlightened co-religionists.
As it is, it just comes off as petulant heel-digging.
I’ll even take it one step farther.
Why did we adhere to dogma and authority for so long?
Faith!
People felt, and many still do, that a world without dogma and authority would be an unpleasant one; ergo, according to faith, dogma and authority are essential.
Faith boils down to, “Should; therefore, is.” And that’s what’s at the heart of all that’s fucked up in the world…and, honestly, at the heart of most personal shortcomings and angst as well….
b&
I’ve heard Christians say that it’s a good thing we were held back by religion, because God was waiting until humanity had the morality to handle the scientific advances. It didn’t seem to dawn on them that the problem with morality was the influence of religion, and it’s the gradual abandonment of it since the Enlightenment that has seen so many advances in things like human rights.
God being an asshole again. And as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, he let humans suffer for thousands of years from the first hominins until Christianity showed up on the scene. If the Christian god exists, he’s a psychopath.
That Uncommon Descent thread is chock full of God as Asshole in Chief, in every flavor you can imagine.
How they don’t recognize it, why they think his Assholiness is lovable…that’s the true mystery….
b&
Nope, they can’t say that as it goes against everything that they teach.
“Adherence to dogma amd authority” is a feature, not a bug.
My understanding is that Christianity did indeed have an element in it which allowed science to form in its presence: the ability to get out of the way.
An envy of Greek philosophy had fused with mideastern mysticism and resulted in a bifurcated view of reality. There was the City of God – and then there was the earthly city, the City of Man in conflict with what was Higher. But the two worlds didn’t need to conflict. By studying Nature, God’s creation, they would harmonize.
What this cashed out as was that it was okay to reason from nature. The Church could leave you alone. Purely mystical belief systems tended to see nature as a trap and delusion, leading away from revelation. But the more the Christians tried to frame Aristotle as one-of-them, the less problematic acting like a philosopher became — and this allowed engagement with the world.
If “getting out of the way” is a religion’s unique virtue, then that’s not really much of a credit to the religion itself, I think.
The main difference between the City of God and the City of Man is that the City of God wasn’t about to be sacked by the Vandals.
Agreed that Xtianity can claim to have helped in some sense by being Not As Bad As The Others.
I wouldn’t characterize it as ‘envy’ but yes, I thought it was fairly uncontroversial and well accepted that medieval academic practice generally emphasized looking back to what previous philosophers and theologians had said about something, rather than going out and testing it via empiricism. They had a ‘golden age’ mentality where they thought the ancients knew a lot more than they did, so they often preferred to try and recover that information rather than uncovering how nature behaved.
The approach had both good and bad sides. The bad was obviously that it placed too much (in modern opinion) emphasis on ancient authoritative assertions about nature. The good side was that they probably found and maintained a lot of ancient writing that might otherwise have been lost. So, the medieval method was probably a real boon to our study of history; not so much for our study of science.
But in any event I guess I was wrong. This is yet another mainstream understanding that is rejected by creationists.
It feels almost unfair to medieval scholars. I rarely think of them as ‘poor scientists’ because that wasn’t really what they were even trying to do. I think of them more as ‘great archivists’, and IMO we should acknowledge them for that. In Keithley’s hurry to sweep their faults under the rug, he sweeps their likely accomplishments under the rug too.
Hmmm, that was me ‘eric’. Typo in my name field. Sorry.
Looking back and discarding those things that didn’t necessarily fit their current dogma. Lots of stuff got lost in the middle ages because of this practice, including, it is suggested by some, many medical advances (Galen), later reacquired via the Muslim world.
I’ve never understood why, when backed into a corner, so many theists pull this argument from their pocket. It’s kind of like third graders fighting and one says “Oh yeah? Well you wouldn’t even have science if it weren’t for Christianity…” So what? We’ve got it now and evidence ain’t on your side. And when they start reeling off the names of famous scientists through the ages who were ‘Christians’ I remind them that the alternative was the burning stake or tower prison.
Indeed, and to claim that we wouldn’t HAVE science at all without Christianity is sheer nonsense. Do people think that humans were born without curiosity and a desire to improve their circumstances?
Today we are celebrating Cardinal Robert Bellarmine who is considered a saint!! WHY?!! He was implicitly involved in the GALILEO AFFAIR and the burning at the stake of GIORDANO BRUNO, an early proponent of the HELIOCENTRIC SYSTEM. Give me a break!! I was once told by a religion cosulatant that the GALILEO AFFAIR was due to GALILEO’S mathematics!!!? Someone is going to have to explain that to me!! Where would we be w/o religion? Probably riding on a beam of light !!
Galileo’s contributions to mathematics (as opposed to physics and astronomy, where he will be remembered for as long as we do these fields) are as far as I can tell pretty minimal. This is implausible on its face if only for that reason.
The one “cryptic” interpretation of what happened to Galileo which I have seen that makes any sense (i.e., instead of taking the matter at face value and making it about astronomy) is that Galileo was a commited atomist. This is incompatible with the (bastardized) peripatetic understanding of the Eucharist, so there’s some who claim he was in trouble for that reason.
(I don’t buy the argument that *merely* being willing to “play theologian” and interpret the Bible for himself was enough, nor the “he was a jerk” thesis.)
We wouldn’t have had the moon landings in the 1960s without Nazi rocket scientists. Eventually, yes, but probably not as fast given that that regime placed a lot of emphasis on that development.
This in no way implies that all the scientists involved were racists or that Nazism was good. What it does illustrate is that an ideology being a historical contributor to some positive thing doesn’t make that ideology valid or even worthy of respect. Ghenghis Khan replaced a lot of nepotism with meritocracy; that doesn’t want to make me think an imperial dynastic Khanate is a great form of government. So even if we accept for sake of argument that Christian institutions and thought contributed strongly to the enlightenment, well, that doesn’t give me any reason to think God or that theology is true, and it doesn’t make me think injecting more Christian thought into government would be a positive.
And we wouldn’t have the internet (and consequently this conversation) if we didn’t have the Cold War.
You basically hit all the high points. Just one addition.
I thought it was uncontroversial – even among theologians – that during the early middle ages, educated people (including church elders) put a far greater emphasis on reading the classics than empirical observation. If you wanted to know something about how the world worked, the preferred methodology was ‘read Aristotle,’ not ‘go out and do the experiment.’ While not necessarily an argument from religious authority (given Aristotle was a pagan), they did have a ‘golden age’ mentality where they looked back to earlier thinkers for answers.
This had some positive effects – they probably uncovered and preserved a lot of Greek and Egyptian philosophy that might otherwise have been destroyed – but certainly had the effect of downplaying the importance of empirical observation compared to argument from authority.
Indeed, but if the church was really such an inspirational force for people to figure out God’s plan and God’s laws, that should have obtained during the Middle Ages as well. Why did those motivations begin only during the fifteenth century? I suspect that the growth of rationalism had something to do with it.
And my apologies for the anonymous posting (and subsequent repeat). That was me ‘eric’. I’m having trouble with my connection today it appears; it keeps dropping keystrokes.
I agree that the enlightenment had more to do with it than medieval thought. I think the same can be said for political reform: fundamentalists sometimes assert that our modern government is a Christian invention, ignoring the thousand-year period of Christian support for monarchy AND ignoring that early political reforms occurred contemporaneously with the Age of Reason.
I’ve had that problem with the connection losing my name, too.
It is certainly possible to point to the creation of the Royal Society which essentially allowed certain well-endowed members of the elite to perform experiments without risk of death (by the church who would see them as sorcerers) because Charles I saw technology as a way of beating the Dutch in the wars that were taking place. It was his desire to maintain his place that motivated him to sanction science – it certainly wasn’t the church. And when the church sometimes sanctioned science, it was in the “safe” belief that the findings would wholeheartedly support the christian narrative which they “knew” to be true.
Inquisitive, rich men – like Newton and Boyle – were performing heretical experiments which would have led to their deaths if discovered. Only when political “businessmen” like Charles I understood the worth of this type of work did it become possible for limited numbers of people (limited in deference to the church) to do it without risk.
What you describe there is the state of the late middle ages. During the early middle ages, Aristotle wasn’t available in the West, and needed to be rediscovered via transmission through Muslim Spain and Sicily.
From what I read, the early church did have a pretty ambivalent relationship to philosophy: On the one hand, they needed ethics and logic for their theology, and borrowed heavily from the writings of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics; on the other hand, critical thinking was incompatible with their dogma, so philosophy (and with it early science), contrary to theology, was relegated to the side table.
Yes, it was always about finding things that fit your dogma not trying to solve problems using any kind of scientific process.
I suppose the other very broad and indirect sense in which Christianity may be said to have fostered the development of science was that in the Middle Ages the church was essentially the only bastion of literacy. Even kings often could not read or write and had church scribes to do it for them. So insofar as literacy is a sine qua non of any intellectual development, the church may be said to have played its part.
But was the church the only bastion of literacy because literacy could not, or would not have been fostered by any other segments of society for all those hundreds of years? Or was it because the church actively worked to keep literacy to itself?
Priests may have been literate but the church didn’t promote literacy (or if it did, it did a really crappy job of it). The majority of the European population was not literate through the entire middle ages, 500-1500. Can you guess when literacy rates took off in Europe? I will give you a hint, it rhymes with enblightenment.
So this is really a third example of the same fallacy (not made by you or specifically by Keithley, but sometimes by people like Keithley). They cite some social positive as coming from Christianity, when in fact Christianity was established for a thousand years before the social good really took off, and they ignore the much stronger temporal correlation between that social good and the enlightenment.
Eric, with the greatest respect, on the subject of fallacies, this is just interpreting the past from the perspective of the present. Are you saying that back in 11th century Europe, there was a bunch of Galileos and Copernicuses and Keplers, all having the enlightenment squeezed out of them by the Catholic Church? It is conceivable that some of the “heresies” destroyed by the church might have led to an earlier enlightenment, but we are in no position to know. And there are other ways to define “social good”. Go to modern-day Nigeria: every village is home to half a dozen Protestant sects, teaching stupidity, but at the same time providing a measure of order in a corrupt and violent society. Come to the country where I live, Ethiopia: the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is not so different from the mediaeval Catholic Church, preaching hell and damnation, dominating social life, but at the same time providing a kind of structure for people whose survival horizon is governed by the timing of the next rains…
Of course the mediaeval church essentially educated people to become mediaeval churchmen, in the same way that MIT trains people to become scientists. What else would it do? If I had to make a guess at why the enlightenment occurred when it did, I would say that it was to do with economics, the opening up of the New World, the riches brought back, political competition to become the next great patron, whether in the arts or the sciences. I would say that the church started to clamp down at this point, when it realised that its influence was failing, especially with the religious reform movements like Lutheranism and Calvinism, and with the invention of the printing press… Before all that, it was the only game in town.
I’m not a big believer in the ‘great man’ model of history, so I think I’d say instead that the Church encouraged the collective effort of thousands of smart people to understand the world by reading Aristotle rather than doing experiments, and this was probably not as fruitful in advancing science and medicine as the experimental option.
AFAIK you are not making the claim that Christianity is main cause of democracy, literacy, and the rise of science in Nigeria. That is what people like Keathley are claiming in regards to the history of Europe, and IMO that’s wrong. Christianity ruled in Europe for about a thousand years when democracy and literacy did not markedly increase, and increases in scientific understanding are debatable. But all three rose rapidly in a comparably very short period (less than 100 years) during the Enlightenment. So IMO it makes absolutely no sense to link this rapid increase to the 1000 years and not to the Enlightenment.
Yeah and ask Cromwell &mTyndale how easy it was to get a translated bible into the vernacular! Many burned at the stake just for having such things.
Compare with modern Islamists universally insisting the Q’ran can only be properly understood in the original Arabic….
b&
I think a convincing argument can be made that without the Christianity which did obtain in Europe at the time that science would very likely have started progressing again earlier than it did. Of course, I may be hopelessly biased, but the known history really does make it seem fairly convincing to me.
The advent of science in Europe is in my opinion a consequence of the devastating reformation wars when the Catholic Church and Christianity in general lost their status as a moral authority and people were freed from authoritarian religious dogmas. What followed was the Age of Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, analytical thinking and individualism.
Since we can’t reset history and tinker with the parameters, I don’t see that we can know with any confidence whether or not Christianity was necessary for the rise of science.
The more important question to me is “So what if it were true?” Science quickly became Frankenstein’s monster and we know how that ends. Their claim simply doesn’t lead to the conclusion they hope for.
Exactly. Even supposing the premise is true, religion is clearly a negative for science now. All sorts of historical accidents might have been useful for the rise of science, wars for example, but it’d be foolish to suggest that we should perpetuate those conditions to keep science going.
And science is clearly a negative for religion if you turn science on religion. Approach the existence of God or the truth of the New Testament with the rational, skeptical, analytical mindset of an investigating scientist and watch what happens.
That may help explain why they keep doing this. It seems to me that Christians seem to think that if they can show that science had its origins in Christianity, then this puts up some sort of wall where scientific investigation can not go ‘back’ and question any of its foundations, lest it fall too. There’s some sort of hierarchy of authority or logical necessity which can be invoked to keep people from pointing out that, say, evolution undermines the Argument from Design.
No. Even if they were right and science could never have risen had scientists not believed in a “rational universe” or whatnot, it wouldn’t work like that. You can always look back and question a hypothesis. Science is a method, not a conclusion grounded in metaphysics.
Actually, it *has come to its own metaphysics*, which is one of the reasons why it is fought.
For example, this metaphysics includes a resolute materialism.
Keathley is full of it. Besides the creationist vs science faux pas, he has some serious historical and religious cherry picking going on when he claims that the christian branch of abrahamism is not one of its many “pagan polytheistic religions”. I think Ben has a lot to say on its religious notions of ‘monotheism’ and its historical notions of independence from greek pagan synchretism.
I think the greek and muslim world are excellent controls.
Sagan describes in “Cosmos” how Plato’s religiously inspired mysticism buried the greek experimental school. And as far as I know the rising colonialist power of the early muslim world is described as starting 2 centuries of science, and its later burial by – you guessed it – its theocratic rule. Even today the muslim world can’t accept that a fellow mohammedanist – Mohammad Abdus Salam – recieved its only Nobel Prize:
“Salam was buried in Bahishti Maqbara, a cemetery established by the Ahmadiyya Community at Rabwah, Punjab, Pakistan, next to his parents’ graves. The epitaph on his tomb initially read “First Muslim Nobel Laureate”. The word “Muslim” was later obscured on the orders of a local magistrate, leaving “First Nobel Laureate”.[106] Under Ordinance XX,[107] being an Ahmadi, he was considered a non-Muslim according to the definition provided in the II Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan. Eventually, Pakistani government removed “Muslim” and left only his name on the headstone.[108]” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam ].
If Keathley can explain first his creationism, then the actions re Salam of those following the theocratic Constitution of Pakistan, he could be forgiven his verbal outpourings. Because somebody has to wipe that dross away.
Actually, another Muslim won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, namely Ahmed Zaweil, an Egyptian. The real message is that both men spent their entire productive careers in the West, Salam in various British universities and his own institute in Trieste and Zaweil as a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
Ah! I noticed that the ineffable God who we can never understand has made our minds capable of following His thoughts. That would be a miracle.
Personally, I think that the rise of science had more to do with geography than with religion. (see Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel.) When human technology advanced to the point of allowing free access from country to country in the graphically diverse Western end of the Eurasian compliment, people could just flee across the nearest border to a more friendly or tolerant political atmosphere. In one view, religion was nothing more then another tool that the powerful used to retain that power. It had its costs as a tool because it required human sacrifice of anyone who doubted the dogma on which the church based it’s only hold on power. Science naturally leads to the examination of dogma. That is what it is.
If the “Christianity was necessary” thesis is correct, then *why is it that almost to a man, all of the greats of the scientific revolution were heretics*? Moreover, the orthodox include Boyle, who, if you examine his writing, is *terrified* that he’ll be branded a heretic. Why?
Case in point, Isaac Newton who was an Arian who kept his religious views secret during his lifetime. They were only discovered when some of his writings were found some 150 years after his death.
Richard Carrier, an historian who specializes in ancient science, has an excellent take-down of the “Christianity was necessary for the scientific revolution” argument.
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medieval-christianity.html
Yes, I cite this in Faith Versus Fact.
Theists make those arguments about everything, math, science, music, art. Anything that will make it appear religion is a force for good. As though none of these things would have happened without it.
While it seems tentatively plausible that a generic theism may have inspired some scientists (notably Isaac Newton) to figure out the universe, seeing that it seemed designed and guided, etc., I’m not sure what specifically Christianity had to do with it. Newton may have thought he was uncovering “the mind of God”, but he was not a particularly conventional Christian. He was a Unitarian.
Even Alfred North Whitehead who argued the Christianity to science thesis fairly elegantly (in “Science and the Modern World”) I don’t think states Christianity is necessary to the rise to science.
The two posts above about the “golden age” mentality among medieval scholars are quite on target, I believe.
Actually, Newton was an Arian.
Unitarians claim Arians as a subset of themselves, but that is I suppose debatable. The label Unitarian I believe did not exist in Newton’s day. Point taken.
Newton was a unitarian, but not a Unitarian. (Capitalization matters.)
I should add that although Whitehead argued that Christianity helped give rise to modern science,he was not himself particularly conventional in his religious views.
No evangelical Christian or Thomist Catholic would recognize themselves in Whitehead’s “Religion in the Making”
The Church helped in so far as it held a veil of ignorance over those who were getting too curious about the universe.
Like smelling a piece of pizza but having a four year old cover your eyes not allowing you to grab hold of it and let you eat. Unlike most four year olds, the Church would let you starve before you got the pizza.
The Galileo affair has as much to do with the clash between science and religion as the American Civil War has to do with the clash over slavery and non-slavery.
Funny that both truths are circuitously resisted by the same variety of people.
Excuse me, are you claiming that the primary cause of the Civil War was not slavery? Perhaps, like Internet troll Don Williams, you think it was due to a fight over the ownership of coal mines in West Virginia.
I suspect that the greatest value Christianity provided science early on was a certain cultural stability which made many technical advances possible, from the iron plow to the printing press, and monasteries where education was possible. The organizational framework the church provided may have helped early farmers and craftsmen to push forward steadily without having to constantly worry about chaotic political forces. Other than that, their philosophical influence was probably a significant drag. It was a drag on Copernicus, Galeleo, Bruno, and many others. I strongly suspect that the influence of the Church on Newton was to cut his productive life short. After a most productive beginning, it made it possible for him to waste the rest of his life on superstitious nonsense.
Considering that Newton’s Arian religious views would have been considered heresy by the C of E had they become known in his time, it is a considerable stretch to claim that his scientific productivity was due to the authority of that church.
Perhaps not the authority of that church, but the influence of Christianity.
Well, at least religion.
I’m also reminded of Nicolas Steno, the father of Geology, who renounced all of his scientific findings after he converted to Catholicism. Many brilliant minds have gone dormant on the edifice of religion.
Let’s not forget how christian cults sought to destroy the written texts of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. It was the Arabs in the 9th century and onwards who revived Greek mathematics and invented algebra and, unfortunately, also some things which would have been better left in the dead past. So the christians have the muslims to thank for the reintroduction of much of what we consider to be the classic Greek and Roman literature as well as Greek mathematics – works which the christian cults actively sought to destroy through many centuries.
Greek (proto)physics too – there was some work in optics (for example) that was analyzed, improved, etc. by Arab-writing thinkers.
(Seems to be an example of desperately trying to create a technology in the proper sense – the motivation seems to have been opthamology, but …)
I think an important point is the influence translation of old works from other cultures had on the progress of science in Europe. There was a brief flourish of science in the 12th and 13th centuries (think Roger Bacon) and it was in large part due to the translation of works that had been recovered during the Reconquista. European scholars were finally able to read arabic and greek natural philosophy and began studies themselves.
Another major translation effort occurred after the fall of Constantinople. Many scholars fled west bringing more ancient works with them. Again, this influx of new knowledge caused European scholars to begin scientific studies.
If Christianity was responsible for any part of the scientific revolution, it was in allowing scholars to question accepted knowledge without immediately burning them at the stake.
A good overview of the origins of the scientific revolution is given in H. Floris Cohen’s How Modern Science came into the World.