Can you imagine how far along technology and science would be if the church didn't hold train of thought back?

Question

Literally for 1000's of years the churches clutches on society has held back mankind. Can imagine if kepler, galileo, and other great minds weren't persecuted and banished for being right? Think how many great thoughts over the thousands of years men and women have had, but had to remain silent. Or if they did speak their mind these people were banished from towns or even sentenced to jail or death.

Mankind is literally just getting rolling with technology and science. The world would be totally different. Probabaly be much more peaceful too, but that is another subject.

Answer 1

Are you talking christian churches or all religions? Given that 80% of the world's population were not influenced by christianity, they had the chance to go ahead but didn't.

In fact, christianity drove research in a strange way - the church really wanted to get the date of easter right. This required a lot of astronomical and mathematical research, the foundation of science today.

And the church are not the only culprit. 'Cold fusion' became a dirty word in scientific circles, and has impeded investigation into a phenomenum that undoubtedly exists (there have been hundreds of experiments since then that have had unexplained outcomes - unfortunately no-one seems to be able to set up a system that reliably replicates it). It may not be cold fusion but then again it may be - but while the stigma exists, serious scientists are going to shy away from it.

Answer 2

Not all churches held us back, and not all the time. In general, the Catholic Church has had a large number of what we would have called 'scientists' working for it.

Galileo was not persecuted for his astronomy. Even during the 'trial', the Jesuit astronomers were still verifying his observations and giving him credit for his discoveries.

Galileo was, let us say, feisty. He did not mind having heated public debates (emphasis on public). He even stated (in writing) that the truth comes from 'reading the book of nature' (i.e., making observations, not by reading the Bible). Unfortunately for him, a group of Northern Europeans were separating from the Roman Church at about that time and their main argument was that nature contradicted the Church's interpretation of the Bible.

Bad timing, Galileo.

Also, what Galileo was offering as proof of Kepler's system was no proof at all: seeing moons around Jupiter was no proof that everything orbited the sun. At best, it might have been an indication that the solar system was centred on Jupiter.

Answer 3

May be you are partially right when it comes to oppressive religion.
But on the other hand a true Christian belief (free of any Roman Catholic or other "christian" religion) is a forward-driver.
I'm aware that most people can not see a difference between a religion and true christian faith without the constraints of church power.
Take the (positive) example of Isaac Newton. He was a free thinker and choose to believe in the wisdom of the Bible he was humble enough to see that his own wisdom was inferior to God's wisdom. Through this philosophy he was able to discover several natural laws and was an outstanding scientist.
Another example how true Christian faith was a forward driver of scientific and industrial success. Starting right after reformation in Germany and England, people were free from old superstitious beliefs and fears and free of the slaving doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The result were positive work ethics and a life without fear.
Compare this to the area of the Arab nations and parts of Asia where the are still centuries back in development, mainly through the constraints of their religions which teach superstitious beliefs and fears.
So don't blame any "church" in general - and try to see, through all the 'smoke', the clear advantage some true christian belief has brought to many nations in the last 300 years.

Answer 4

Our tech level has to be held back because we don't have the legal,and moral understandings to properly use such great technology. It's like giving a suitcase nuclear device to the princes of old Italy,or a vial filled with a deadly virus offered to Ghengis Khan and telling him all he has to do is break it on a rock inside of the city he wishes to capture! They have no idea what the repercussions will be! They will use it regardless! Imagine our world with the capability to travel inter-galactic distances within days,or communicate over the same vast distances in the blink of an eye! Can you possibly conceive what it would be like to have the ability to create lifeforms custom designed to your specifications right down to the last atom? Building things atom by atom and the computing power to keep it all accountable. The power to be so prescient that you can predict the future with reasonable accuracy! But a society also needs the same level of compassion,and understanding otherwise they are nothing more than cold intellectual insects operating on instinctual levels! We are just not ready for such wonders,and it's getting more doubtful as time progresses that we can change!

Answer 5

An excellent question.
The christian church is just one of a long line of egomaniac cretins that have held back knowledge.
The Emperor Ming destroyed the library of Confucious because the stupid toerag thought that he was the most important person ever born, so he eliminated everything that referred to the times before he was born.
The Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire when Alexandria was sacked. another victim of megalomaniac conquest. This library contained much of the work by Aristotle and his students, not to mention treatises by early mathemations.
The human race has unfortunately never learnt that some psychopaths should just be sealed in a bag and thrown into the sea. Ming, Caligula, Genghis Khan, St Peter, Napoleon, Hitler and the Bush's come readily to mind .
Without those buttholes we can safely say that the human species would either be much more advanced or extinct.

Answer 6

My opinion is that we would be a millennium ahead if we did not have the "Dark Ages" which lasted a millennium. I think we would be traveling in space at warp speed right now. We would have better means of traveling. Maybe we would be transporting ourselves to other parts of the world. Who knows? We will never know. Maybe there is another world that was very similar to ours up to the point of the Dark Ages and technology continued so they skipped the Dark Ages. We would be more technologically advanced than we are now for sure.

Answer 7

Agreed. Copernicus' revolutionary 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium,' published in the 16th Century, was banned by the Catholic Church for 250 years. Evolution of course, was the great contraversy. Darwin was not the first to propose Evolution, but he was the boldest to make his findings publicly known in wide circles.

Still, I think that technology has probably not been greatly hindered by Religion. War, primarily, drives that forward.

Answer 8

We would be maybe 500 years ahead but, as mentioned, europe weren´t the only ones doing science. We made a lot of scientific gaines as other more advanced civilization brought innovations to us. The muslims and the chinese helped europe advance. Willingly or not. Arrigation, blackpowder and various buliding techniques as well as our numbersystem are all imports. So if it hadn´t been for other non christian civilizations we would have been much more backwards and if it hadn´t been for the church we would have landed on the moon 250 years ago.