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But it was also clear that this body of writings (especially those by Aristotle) contained theological land-mines.

Aristotle believed in the eternity of the world.

He also judged the world to be deterministic, with no room for divine providence and divine action.

And Aristotle's philosophy was set within a rationalistic framework that maintained that true knowledge could be achieved only through observation and reason—thereby ruling out revelation as a source of truth.

Now one of the most durable myths about science and religion is that the church responded to these theologically dangerous teachings by suppressing Aristotle's writings and the rest of the ancient Greek scientific tradition.

What really happened?

Medieval scholars (university professors, including theology professors) were confronted by a terrible dilemma. They were not prepared to compromise the central doctrines of Christian theology. But they also recognized that the classical sciences had great explanatory power.

They preferred peace to warfare, so they looked for ways to accommodate this powerful tradition. They corrected the ancient sources where that seemed necessary, and on occasion they reinterpreted theological doctrines. And they argued vigorously for the usefulness of the classical sciences.

There were certainly skirmishes, including several cases in which a university scholar was condemned for teaching doctrines judged dangerous, but most of these were local and temporary. And there was never anything approaching intellectual warfare between theologians and scientists.

Roger Bacon, an outstanding scientist of the thirteenth century, is a good example of some of these developments. Borrowing a theme from St. Augustine, he argued that the classical scientific tradition could be the faithful handmaiden of theology and religion.

Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great also contributed to this enterprise. They worked their way through Aristotle's writings line by line, looking for ways to reinterpret him or revise Christian theological doctrines to make them consistent with each other.

The point is that in the end, Christendom made its peace with the classical tradition. Aristotle's writings became the centerpiece of medieval university education, and the church became their greatest patron.

What guided medieval scholars as they worked out this accommodation?

St. Augustine (354-430), the most influential theologian of the Middle Ages, gave them their principal tool. Augustine had cautioned that Christians should not make fools of themselves by reading their astronomy from the Bible. Don't embarrass the Christian faith with half-baked science.

Here's what Augustine wrote in his Literal Commentary on Genesis:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as certain from reason and experience.

"Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people reveal vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh that ignorance to scorn."

The result of Bacon's work, and Aquinas's, and Albert's, and that of many others less well known, was a Christianized Aristotle and an Aristotelianized Christianity.

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