Sir Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller, 1689

You don’t have to search too hard on the internet to find people parroting the tired old refrain that religion—and in particular, Christianity—is responsible for all sorts of ills.  It’s blamed for everything from bigotry and closed-mindedness to war.

We’ll address the baseless claims above in future articles, but today we want to focus on another claim that gets quite a bit of play: Religion (especially Christianity) has historically stifled scientific advancement and if it weren’t for religion getting in the way, then we’d be out exploring the galaxy by now, cancer would be cured, and so on.

For anyone who’s studied the facts, the claim above displays a stunning ignorance of history, as well as an inability to think critically.  After all, it was the belief that God created an ordered universe operating according to natural laws that helped give birth to modern science in the West in the first place. Continue reading →