[Perun]

Originally Posted by Cristoforo

As long as any religion maintains a dogma, it will NEVER be compatible with science.

Said this, I am not denying that ironically the Church may have been crucial to start something that ultimately disproved her "truth" but the trouble brilliant people like Copernicus (who ironically was a Priest) and Galileo had to face makes me look with suspect at any religion.

Hmmmn....perhaps you can give us another example of the Church supposedly persecuting science besides Gallileo?

"It was not the case that the dominance of the lay and clerical aristocracy had a merely negative, inhibiting effect on the field of technology, in some areas it needs and tastes favoured a certain progress. The clergy and above all the monks were obliged to have few contacts as possible with the outside world, including economic relations, and above all they desired to be freed from material tasks to have time for the Opus Dei and for properly spiritual occupations (offices and prayers), and for their work of charity, which obliged them to provide for the economic needs not only of their numerous familia but also for the poor and of wandering beggars by distributing foodstuff. This encouraged them to develop equipment of a certain technical standard. If one is looking for the earliest mills, water mills, or for the progress in farming techniques, one often sees the religious orders in the vanguard. It was not a coincidence if here during the early Middle Ages men attributed the invention of the watermill to a saint who introduced it into a region, for example St. Orens of Auch who had a mill setup at St. Gabriel on the Durancole in the 6th century….As we have seen, the Church encouraged improvements in the measurement of time for the needs of ecclesiastical computation. The building of churches – the first great buildings of the Middle Ages – gave a stimulus to technical progress, not only in building techniques, but also in the tools used, in methods of transportation, and in the auxiliary skills such as glasswork.”

--Jacques Le Goff Medieval Civilization 400-1500 pg. 198


Now thats just concerning the Middle Ages, which scholars have long refuted the notion that it was a time of scientific regression but was rather advanced for the day.


Then theres the book The Church in the Sun, which concerns the Church during the time of Galileo.

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASI...978999-8521903

The Sun in the Church by J.L. Heilbron is a provocative work of scholarship that challenges long-held views of the relationship between science and Christianity. Heilbron's main point is simple enough: "The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions." Despite the persecution of Galileo, Heilbron notes, the Church actively supported mathematical and astronomical research--often designing cathedrals that could also function as observatories--in order to set the precise date of Easter (a crucial endeavor for maintaining the unity of the Church). Heilbron's fluid, engaging style brings his detailed reconstructions of 16th- and 17th-century Church politics to life. And his argument that scientific knowledge was deemed both morally neutral and politically useful during the Reformation and beyond yields an unusually interesting, complex, and human understanding of Catholicism in the early Modern period. --Michael Joseph Gross