The Church set science back centuries, writes Timothy Ferris, and “the proud earth was hammered flat; likewise shimmering in the sun” while the heavens were wheels, pushed by angels in the courses of their perihelion.
I tracked down the source for this. What Ferris actually wrote was:
Boethius was executed in 524, and with the extinguishing of that last guttering lamp the darkness closed in. The climate during the Dark Ages grew literally colder, as if the sun itself had lost interest in the mundane. The few Western scholars who retained any interest in mathematics wrote haltingly to one another, trying to recall such elementary facts of geometry as the definition of an interior angle of a triangle. The stars came down: Conservative churchmen modeled the universe after the tabernacle of Moses; as the tabernacle was a tent, the sky was demoted from a glorious sphere to its prior status as a low tent roof. The planets, they said, were pushed around by angels; this obviated any need to predict celestial motions by means of geometrical or mechanical models. The proud round earth was hammered flat; likewise the shimmering sun. Behind the sky reposed eternal Heaven, accessible only through death.
Did such churchmen exist? Cosmas Indicopleustes would appear to be one such.
[Addendum: on closer examination, it would appear that Cosmas Indicopleustes was an extreme exception, rather than a representative example. This means that, whilst it can be argued that Ferris’ statement is technically accurate, it can also be argued that it was misleading. Unfortunately Patterson did not make that latter argument.]
Is Ferris’ representation of the interaction between First Millennium Christianity and Science a fair one? I don’t know. But I would say that Peterson’s characterisation of Ferris’ statements appears to be less than charitable.
Addendum:
I eventually tracked down the source for the “best–selling history of science text” claim that I was looking for before. It turns out that the claims Patterson mentions aren’t merely alluded to by the source but made (sort of) by the source itself. It is in fact a pop science book not a “history of science text”, and written by a scientist, rather than a historian of science. Also it does not attribute the “main culprit in this debacle of the human spirit” (Patterson’s words not Gleiser’s) as being the Church, but rather attributes this "redirect[ion] in “worries” to “the ascendancy of the Church and the decline of Rome” – i.e. to more generalised historical forces. A subtle difference, but I think an important one. I should not have been surprised, it would have been somewhat out of character for a pro-religion scientist like Gleiser to have indulged in gratuitous Church-bashing.