---
title: "Christianity and science"
chunk: 7/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:43.006189+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, encouraged some values which may have been conducive to encouraging scientific talents.  A theory suggested by David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed indicated early Quakers in the US preferred "practical study" to the more traditional studies of Greek or Latin popular with the elite. Another theory suggests their avoidance of dogma or clergy gave them a greater flexibility in response to science.
Despite those arguments a major factor is agreed to be that the Quakers were initially discouraged or forbidden to go to the major law or humanities schools in Britain due to the Test Act. They also at times faced similar discriminations in the United States, as many of the colonial universities had a Puritan or Anglican orientation. This led them to attend "Godless" institutions or forced them to rely on hands-on scientific experimentation rather than academia.
Because of these issues it has been stated Quakers are better represented in science than most religions. There are sources, Pendlehill (Thomas 2000) and Encyclopædia Britannica, that indicate that for over two centuries they were overrepresented in the Royal Society. Mention is made of this possibility in studies referenced in religiosity and intellince and in a book by Arthur Raistrick. Whether this is still accurate, there have been several noteworthy members of this denomination in science. The following names a few.

=== Eastern Christian influence ===

Christian scientists and scholars (particularly Nestorian and Jacobite Christians) contributed to the Arab Islamic Civilization during the Ummayad and the Abbasid periods by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic. Over a century and a half, primarily Middle Eastern Oriental Syriac Christian scholars in House of Wisdom translated all scientific and philosophic Greek texts into Arabic language in the House of Wisdom. They also excelled in philosophy, science (Masawaiyh, Eutychius of Alexandria, and Jabril ibn Bukhtishu) and theology (such as Tatian, Bardaisan, Babai the Great, Nestorius, and Thomas of Marga) and the personal physicians of the Abbasid Caliphs were often Christians, such as the long-serving Bukhtishu dynasty. Many scholars of the House of Wisdom were of Assyrian Christian background.
Among the Copts in Egypt, every monastery and probably every church once had its own library of manuscripts.
In the fifth century AD, nine Christian Syrian Monks translated Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac works into the Ethiopian language of Ge'ez and organized Christian monastic orders and schools, some of which are still in existence today. By the sixth century AD, Assyrian Christians had begun exporting back to the Byzantine Empire their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. the literary output of the Assyrians was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language. In the field of medicine, the Assyrian Bukhtishu family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur in Iran. When Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur became ill and no physician in Baghdad could cure him, he sent for the dean of the medical school in Gundeshapur, which was renowned as the best of its time The Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum). One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of one of the oldest universities in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based. The first Mongolian writing system (which was first set down by assyiran monks) used the Assyrian Aramaic and Syriac alphabets, with the name "Tora Bora" being an Assyrian phrase meaning "arid mountain." The hierarchical structure of Buddhism is modeled after the Church of the East. The Assyrian Christian Stephanos translated the work of Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides into the Arabic language, and for over a century, this translated medical text was used by the Muslim states.