The standing question underneath every era: who may say what the world is like — asked of churches that once licensed cosmology, of states that licensed genetics, and of the markets that license research now.
Tagged: Catholic
Every era in this section is an episode of this flashpoint: who may say what the world is like, and on what warrant? The medieval university put the question in a curriculum; the Galileo affair put it in a courtroom; the modern research university answers it by professional jurisdiction — a settlement that holds until a science touches a doctrine someone is prepared to defend (origins, sex, death, the mind), when the older question reopens in the newer vocabulary of academic freedom, funding, and misinformation.
The page’s discipline is symmetry. States have policed science for atheist orthodoxies (Lysenko’s genetics, with its imprisoned and starved dissenters) as churches once policed it for theistic ones; markets police it daily without a single edict. A catalog that audits only one kind of authority would be taking the side it claims to describe, and this flashpoint exists to hold the catalog itself to account.
References
- Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (2015)
- Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail (2009)
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