Religious persecution of scientists?

William Harvey

This summer, Jesús Lizcano published an article in El Imparcial entitled. A memory for the scientists persecuted in history (my translation). He classifies the persecuted scientists into three groups: a) persecuted for political reasons; b) persecuted for religious reasons; and c) persecuted for reasons of sexual orientation. Here I am going to refer to those in the second group, which I find debatable.

Of course, among the eleven scientists persecuted for religious reasons, according to Lizcano, Hypatia and Galileo could not be missing. They are mentioned once and again, often with obvious exaggerations, as shown by the fact that many people believe that Galileo was burned alive by the Inquisition, when in fact he was sentenced to house arrest, softened over time. But here I am going to talk about the other nine mentioned in the article.

First we must distinguish two different issues: on the one hand there is scientific debate, which follows most important discoveries, which of course can be influenced by religious, political, social and all kinds of issues, because a scientist is a man like everyone else; on the other hand there is persecution. Thus, for example, the article cites William Harvey, an English doctor who discovered blood circulation, whose ideas clashed with the religious beliefs of his time. I don't think so. I’ll quote my own dictionary of scientific biographies, 1000 Great Scientists, that points out in Harvey’s biography:

His discovery of blood circulation was revolutionary and much discussed, for it opposed the ideas of Aristotle and Galen.

Where is the persecution for religious reasons? It is true that Harvey was poorly regarded during Cromwell’s republic, but the reason was not religious, but for having been the personal physician of Charles I of England, executed by Cromwell. In other words, for political reasons, although in any case we cannot speak of persecution.

Darwin was never persecuted for religious reasons, as Lizcano asserts. Of course there was debate, and some Anglican bishops participated in it, such as Samuel Wilberforce, whose arguments were discredited by Thomas Henry Huxley, defender of Darwin’s theory. And there was no persecution by the Catholic Church. Although it took the Church a century to accept Darwin’s ideas, his works were never put in the Index of Forbidden Books.

There were famous scientific debates after Einstein’s theory of Relativity, and especially after Quantum Mechanics, with a very strong confrontation between Einstein and Bohr, with Einstein against the new theory. Should we also talk about persecution in these cases? Of course not.

Gregor Mendel

The case of Mendel is especially glaring. According to Lizcano, [his] laws of genetic inheritance were ignored for decades, due to the religious context and the non-acceptance of the molecular mechanisms of inheritance. The reason why Mendel’s Laws were ignored for 34 years was not religious, by a long shot. The problem was that Mendel published his discovery in a low-impact journal, the Annals of the Society of Natural Sciences of Brünn (Brno), which very few read and fewer understood. That there was no religious persecution is shown by the fact that Mendel abandoned his experiments with peas when he was named abbot of his monastery, i.e. he was promoted. A funny way of persecution.

I will now refer to two other paradigmatic cases, frequently abused by those who attack the Catholic Church: Giordano Bruno and Miguel Servet. The first, to whom I dedicated a post in this blog, did indeed die at the stake, but the main cause of his condemnation was not scientific, but theological: he denied the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. On the other hand, not being a scientist, but a theologian, he cannot in any case be considered a martyr of science. Lizcano considers him a philosopher and cosmologist, because in his work Dell'infinito universo e mondi (On the infinite universe and worlds, 1584) he defends, for philosophical reasons (but without proof), that there are infinite inhabited worlds. If that is enough to be a cosmologist, a large part of the current population of the world is made up of cosmologists. As for Miguel Servet, discoverer of the pulmonary circulation of the blood, he was executed by the Protestant Calvin, but not for scientific reasons, but for denying the Trinity of God, so he cannot be considered a martyr of science either.

As for the other four persecuted scientists, according to Lizcano, I am not aware of any of them being persecuted. They are the following: Johannes Kepler; Louis Pasteur; Marie Curie; and Francis Collins. It is true that Collins was criticized for his religious ideas, both from the atheist side and from the fundamentalist Protestant side. But criticizing is not the same as persecuting. 

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca