Flynn's Pile of Boners

I've finished reading James Hannam's book God's Philosophers, which I'll probably start blogging about next month. But in the meantime I'm overdue to comment on a much screwier exchange on the same subject online. I'll do that now, to whet your appetite for my discussion of Hannam's much more careful and informative treatment.

Mike Flynn (in "The Age of Unreason") levels many correct and valid criticisms of Jim Walker's wildly erroneous "The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine (And the Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages)" (and that despite the fact that I'm sympathetic to Walker's point, and even make the same argument, albeit correctly, in the forthcoming anthology The Christian Delusion, about which I'll blog as soon as I've seen the galleys). Walker responded to Flynn's critique ("Mike Flynn Discovers the Dark Ages"), this time getting a lot more right (particularly in his discussion of technology), but he still gets enough wrong (or still makes too many claims with greater certainty than is warranted), that I can't recommend it. That aside, both Flynn and Walker's main essays are shot through with so many mistakes of fact they can only miseducate, and thus have no value (even worse than no value, since reading them will only spread their error further). So I don't recommend reading either. Here I'm going to try and correct the damage by dispelling the myths Flynn repeats.

I do recommend reading my précis of this same subject several years ago, which simultaneously calls out some of the most common errors of the Walkers and the Flynns of the world ("Science and Medieval Christianity"), which in particular explains what historians now mean by the Dark Ages (and thus why the term is here to stay, despite apologetic attempts to replace it with doublespeak). Here I'll just focus on what Flynn gets wrong, because it's so egregiously wrong, while the rest you can count as already a valid criticism of Walker, so I won't bother addressing Walker's errors myself (except a few in passing).

Flynn issues a long series of total boners that are so appallingly ignorant I can't count the number of times I bowed my head in exasperated shame. I'll just stroll from each to the next...

The Romans Had No Interest in Science (NOT!)

As Brian Stock commented in "Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Middle Ages" [in Science in the Middle Ages (Lindberg, ed.)] the Romans thought that nature could be imitated (via engineering), placated (via prayers and sacrifices), but not understood (via science).

There is absolutely zero evidence the Romans ever thought any such thing. To the contrary, from the writings of Latins like Seneca and Pliny, the assumption was not only that nature could be understood (especially through science) but that it was our moral obligation to seek to understand it. And when they did, they usually wrote in Greek. Ptolemy, Hero, Dioscorides, Menelaus, and Galen, some of the greatest scientists in antiquity, were all Romans. There were many more.

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Very little of Greek mathematics, for example, had been translated into Latin, beyond what was needed for accounting (of loot), surveying (of conquered lands), and architecture; and almost nothing of Archimedes or of Aristotle's natural philosophy.

This is a statement built on abject ignorance: all well-educated Romans were bilingual. That's why Greek science wasn't translated into Latin: they didn't need it. They were reading the stuff in its original language. Aristotle was undergoing a new craze of popularity, the Romans reissued a new edition of his complete works. The Roman engineer Hero praises, quotes and expands on the works of Archimedes, and Archimedes' science was used extensively by Roman technologists, in ship hull design, aqueduct design, the use of the water screw, and more.

Galen was lecturing to Roman audiences in Greek, performing public scientific demonstrations, and referencing Greek scientific classics from the works of Archimedes to Hipparchus to Herophilus. Plutarch discusses numerous Roman dinners at which sophisticated questions in Greek science were discussed, from Hipparchan optical theory to Seleucan theories of universal gravitation to advanced harmonic science, precisely focusing on the effort to understand nature as a central and popular concern. In fact, Dio Chrysostom describes a veritable craze among Roman audiences for popular lectures in the sciences. These would typically be delivered in Greek, even to Roman audiences.

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The Latin West never lost its Greek heritage because it never had it to begin with.

This is false: the Latin West had entire wings of their libraries (almost every city had one) stocked with Greek treatises, and Latin scientists spoke and read Greek. Even private libraries in the West were once well-stocked in Greek texts (like the one we've been excavating in Herculaneum). During the Dark Ages (500-1000 A.D.) the Latin West largely forgot how to read Greek, and gradually threw away almost all its Greek books out of disinterest, making little attempt to remedy the loss by translating them into Latin. That was a conscious choice. Indeed, since contact with the Greek East was never broken, they had every opportunity to remedy that loss. They didn't.

It is also common for amateurs not to know simple facts like that Marseille (very definitely a Western city), just like Sicily and Southern Italy, were predominately Greek. Archimedes was a Sicilian and worked for Rome (until his last days when Sicily rebelled). Roman Marseille was famous for its engineering schools. There was a very Greek heritage in the West that was very definitely lost.

Still, Flynn is right to say that Christians didn't actively abandon this heritage. It was destroyed by the largely unrelated collapse of society and the ensuing barbarian invasions. All the Christians did was lose interest. Hence they made little effort to preserve or recover what was lost, quite simply because it provided no demonstrable benefit to salvation, and was often a suspect fuel for heresy, while other goals were deemed far more worthy of devoting time and resources to (like copying and preserving devotional literature). And what they did try to keep they often kept incompetently, incompletely, or only in shallow outline.

As Clement of Alexandria describes the proper Christian attitude toward these things, which became all too common in the Middle Ages (emphasis mine):

It is necessary to avoid the great futility that is wholly occupied in irrelevant matters... [so instead the knowledgeable Christian] avails himself of the branches of learning [only] as auxiliary preparatory exercises, in order for the accurate communication of the truth, as far as attainable but with as little distraction as possible, and [only] for a defense against evil arguments aimed at destroying the truth. He will then not be deficient in what contributes to proficiency in the curriculum of studies and in Greek philosophy--but not principally, only necessarily, secondarily, and as a matter of mere circumstance. For what those laboring in heresies use wickedly, the knowledgeable will use rightly.

That's from the Stromata 6.10.(82.4-83.1). I could produce similar quotes from all the early Christian fathers. Such attitudes could not inspire progress in the sciences, nor even their preservation (other than minimally, selectively, and superficially).

Christians Diligently Preserved Ancient Science (NOT!)

[The Christians] preserved and copied an enormous amount of Greek mathematics, technical writings, and natural philosophy.

Actually, no, they didn't. They copied only a tiny fraction of it, and that only barely, and much of it incorrectly. Nearly everything that survives only survives in one or a few manuscripts, widely scattered and poorly kept. We are lucky anything made it to the age of printing. By contrast, the Bible, and Christian writings about God and theology and other religious matters, were widely copied and preserved, thus demonstrating they had the means to do far better on science than they did, they just chose not to. Only a very few Christians thought it worth the bother, and for only a very few treatises. And Eastern Christianity did most of this, and yet in a thousand years made no advances in the sciences of any kind, instead the topic became antiquary and obscure, as fewer and fewer cared to even bother preserving it. By contrast, Western Christianity abandoned and lost almost everything very quickly, and had to recover the ancient scientific heritage from the East a thousand years later. But since even the East preserved so little, what the West inherited was hugely distorted and riddled with gaps.

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For example, of the estimated ten million words of classical Greek that have come down to us, about two million comprise the medical works of Galen -- a full fifth of the entire surviving classical Greek corpus.

This actually illustrates how poorly science was preserved: of hundreds of crucial scientific authors, Galen alone received this treatment, and yet even of his works only a large fraction was preserved. Indeed, if Flynn is right (I'm skeptical of his numbers, but let's believe him, since they make his case worse), Galen constitutes fully a fifth of all ancient Greek preserved, which should shock and horrify us all: there were thousands of Greek authors, tens of thousands of books written, and yet so few were preserved that just one guy's opus makes up a fifth of what remains!?

A comparable analysis follows if we limit the sample to treatises in science, which I have personally verified. For my dissertation I counted some 200 or so scientific treatises preserved, in any field whatever, more than half of which are Galen's, and that from the single field of medicine. So it's actually worse than Flynn's numbers suggest. Even with his numbers, if an incomplete collection of writings from a single scientist comprise a fifth of all Greek texts preserved, clearly the Christians preserved next to nothing of ancient science. For then a complete corpus from a hundred scientists (and there were more than a hundred important scientists in antiquity), even if Galen (by some strange quirk of his) wrote five times as much as any other scientist, would still exceed the entire surviving body of Greek literature four times over. The Christians thus preserved less than 5% of ancient science. Flynn is therefore flat out wrong to claim "the Christians focused on preserving the scientific and medical writings." Historians of science like myself so often shake our heads in sadness at all the scientific treatises we know existed but can't read now, that it has become a common point of commiseration over stiff drinks. It only adds to the misery that we know there were many more books than we know about.

Nevertheless, Flynn is quite right to say the Christians did not set out to deliberately destroy scientific works. They just showed little to no interest in them, and thus let them rot and vanish, sometimes even scraping them off and writing over them with hymns to God, as happened to the Archimedes Codex. This was not because of any hatred at Archimedes or desire to suppress his work. It was just because of a complete disinterest in that work, and a greater preference for preserving hymns to God instead. Such represents the pervasive attitude of medieval Christianity, even in the East, where this terrible "deliberate" destruction of the work of Archimedes occurred.

Flynn attempts to invent an excuse for this...

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At the time that parchment was reused, as we know from references, the complete works of Archimedes were in circulation and so there was no big deal in re-using a scratch copy.

There is actually no good evidence for this assertion. The evidence we have actually suggests the contrary. As discussed in The Archimedes Codex, at the time this palimpsest was made (in the 13th century), his works were so rare there may have been only two other codices in the world with Archimedean works in them, neither of which contained all the works erased in this one (much less all the works of Archimedes).

Even if there were other manuscripts, there certainly were none in the monastery where this palimpsest was made, so the decision was not based on the monks' belief that there were plenty of others. The monks just didn't care about the texts they were erasing. And that's why those texts were almost all lost (until we were able to recover them from this palimpsest using modern technology, a gift of mere luck). So both Flynn and Walker are wrong: the text wasn't erased by an attempt to 'suppress calculus', but neither was it erased in the belief that the text wouldn't be lost. It was erased quite simply because no one cared anymore.

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Archimedes did not invent calculus.  The method revealed in the lost text was a refinement of the method of exhaustion that he had already written about.  You cannot invent calculus using nothing but geometry.  You need algebra, and that had not been invented yet.

That last generalization is incorrect. There is nothing you can do in algebra that you can't do in geometry. Algebra is simply a quicker method of notation and calculation. In fact, one of the most algebraic elements of calculus, the ability to specify particular curves and their properties, had already been entirely worked out geometrically by Archimedes' colleague Apollonius of Perge, without a single jot of algebra. Thus, you don't really need algebra to develop a form of calculus equivalent to the analytical calculus developed by Newton. Similarly, though our trigonometry uses a system of sines and cosines, exactly the same math was done in antiquity using a system of chords. In practical application there is no difference. It's just a different way of doing the same thing (though often one is quicker than the other).

However, it is correct that Archimedes did not invent the whole of calculus--so far as we know. It bears repeating that we lack almost everything he wrote, as well as almost all other ancient mathematics, yet based on what we've recovered that we once thought they didn't have, it is not unreasonable to assume a lot more existed that we don't know about, so calculus could be among those lost developments. For example, we know they developed combinatorics, yet not a single treatise on it survives, except a fragment of one by Archimedes in the very same codex Flynn and Walker are referring to (the one the Christian monks erased). So either Archimedes fully developed combinatorics or his immediate successors did (as it was already being employed by the time of Hipparchus a few generations later), and if that happened for combinatorics, it could have happened for calculus. 

In any case, what we can confirm Archimedes invented were principles of summation for actual infinitesimals, which is not a trivial extension of the method of exhaustion (which deals with potential infinities). The ability to do summations with actual infinitesimals is the core function of modern calculus.

Pagans Destroyed the Library of Alexandria (NOT!)

Plutarch, writing well before this time, states that it was a fire accidentally started by Julius Caesar's troops that destroyed the books [in the Library of Alexandria].

Claims that Julius Caesar destroyed the library have been thoroughly discredited by Robert Barnes, Luciano Canfora, Rice Holmes, and Edward Parsons: only some book warehouses on the docks were burned (as we know from a surviving fragment of Livy, writing a hundred years before Plutarch). It is not known when or how the main library was destroyed, but evidence of its survival extends well into the 4th and 5th centuries (a few examples follow). The daughter library in the Serapeum (a different quarter of the city) was burned by Christians in the late 4th century, but not because of the books inside (see my discussion in Weisz Is Hypatia). So again, both Flynn and Walker are wrong. Contra Walker, Christians didn't burn libraries (at least intentionally), but Flynn repeats just as egregious a myth in his attempt to dispel that one.

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There are no contemporary references to the Library after the reign of Ptolemy Psychon, when there was an anti-foreigner pogrom and the Greek scholars were driven from Egypt.

That's false. The expulsion was too brief. There is no evidence the library abated then, as the scholars had returned well before the arrival of Caesar. Cleopatra even patronized scholarship and the sciences extensively, producing a notable revival in Alexandria. After that, an extant inscription documents Tiberius Claudius Balbillus was appointed head "of the Museum and Library of Alexandria" in 56 A.D., Suetonius says Domitian relied on the Alexandrian library for copies to restock a recently burned library in Rome around 90 A.D., and a papyrus confirms Valerius Diodorus was ‘ex-vice librarian and member of the Museum’ in 173 A.D. (P. Merton 19). We have both kinds of evidence extending all the way past the 4th century.

We Should Believe the Bullshit in Martyrologies (NOT!)

In Julian's reign some Christian virgins of Heliopolis refused to surrender themselves for a night of sacred prostitution before their nuptials.

Since the institution of sacred prostitution has been refuted as a myth (see The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity), Flynn appears to have been duped by the wild myths of Christian hagiography. I doubt any such event occurred under Julian. Historians have long known that Christian martyrdom tales are wildly exaggerated and often complete fiction (the absurdities of the stories Flynn relates really ought to have given him a clue). Ironically, this makes Flynn a victim of the very "confirmation bias" he (rightly) accuses Walker of.

Medieval Christians Expanded Education (NOT!)

The cathedral schools of the early middle ages were open to all.  So were the universities that were Christian Europe's greatest invention. 

Flynn and Walker are again both wrong on this issue. The Church did not actively prevent the public from becoming educated. It just made no effort to educate them. Almost no one was privileged with acceptance in any schools, whether the very small and limited cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages, or the universities hundreds of years later. Only the ultra rich and ultra lucky got in, and of the latter almost all were officials of the Church (you almost always had to join a holy order, as a monk or priest, to gain subsidy for an education).

This rarity of access to education was not new. Education was more available in antiquity, but still at most only 20% of the population had access to basic literacy, and fewer than 10% or even 5% had realistic access to any more substantial education (based on the well-researched estimates of William Harris and Raffaella Cribiore). Though at least then you didn't have to be a professing, non-heretical Christian to get into a school. In the Middle Ages, even in the era of the universities (which only arose more than a thousand years after the advent of Christianity), the percentages would have been much smaller. This began to change perhaps by the late Renaissance. But by then we're no longer in the Middle Ages, and the Dark Ages are long past. Indeed, there were no "universities" in the Dark Ages (6th to 10th century), except the one Byzantine equivalent in Constantinople, nothing the like of which existed in Western Christianity at the time.

And science did not become a common part of university curricula until the Renaissance (c. 1300-1600 A.D.), a term which refers to the "rebirth" of classical art, literature, and values. A revival of interest in classical texts (including the scientific) had already begun in the late Middle Ages (c. 1000-1300 A.D.), but a wider embrace of the values they contained, transforming academic society and its intellectual aims and methods, took place during the 13th century.

Expansion of education was one of the novel aims of the Reformation Christians, and it is they who originated the polemic that the Church opposed such expansion. The reality was more complex. The Church opposed lay interpretation of Scripture, which an education inspired and made possible, and thus the Church had no motive to expand education, and every reason to be suspicious of such efforts, while the Protestants required a lay interpretation of Scripture, which made an education indispensable and its expansion paramount. But all of this transpired after the Middle Ages.

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Nearly every medieval theologian was first educated as a scientist.

This isn't true. That they were taught courses in science did not make them scientists, any more than college students today who take courses in science are thereby scientists. But it was even worse then than now. Only by the end of the Middle Ages did sciences enter any curriculum. And even then for centuries the science taught in universities was shallow, limited, and backward even by ancient standards, and in fact often false even by ancient understanding. And none of it involved an education in actual scientific methods. Very few students were taught how to use scientific instruments to make scientific discoveries or confirm scientific theories, none were taught how to perform exploratory dissections or experiments, and there were no schools of engineering, in which, as in antiquity, practical and applied physics would be taught.

Nor were there any true schools of medicine, as, unlike in antiquity, medieval university medical degrees were all based on antiquated and often erroneous book learning, not on advancing the field or conducting experiments or dissections. Even the ancient practice of compiling and learning from case histories was not taught, nor surgery or apothecary. Dissection and case-history methodology was only taken up again at the dawn of the Renaissance (13th century), and Vesalius was still complaining as late as the 16th century that no students, nor even their teachers, ever performed any dissections themselves. It's well worth quoting him on this point, as he was a contemporary describing the actual situation of his own time:

When all operations were entrusted to barbers, not only did true knowledge of the viscera perish from the medical profession, but the work of dissection completely died out. Physicians did not undertake surgery, while those to whom the manual craft was entrusted were too uneducated to understand what professors of dissection had written. So far this class of men is from preserving for us the difficult and abstruse art handed down to them, and so far has this pernicious dispersal of the healing art failed to avoid importing the vile ritual in the universities by which some perform dissections of the human body while others recite the anatomical information. While the latter in their egregious conceit squawk like jackdaws from their lofty professorial chairs things they have never done but only memorize from the books of others or see written down, the former are so ignorant of languages that they are unable to explain dissections to an audience and they butcher the things they are meant to demonstrate, following the instructions of a physician who in a haughty manner navigates out of a manual alone matters he has never subjected to dissection by hand. And as everything is being thus wrongly taught in the universities and as days pass in silly questions, fewer things are placed before the spectators in all that confusion than a butcher in a market could teach a doctor. I pass over any number of schools where dissecting the structure of the human body is scarcely ever considered; so far has the ancient art of medicine fallen from its early glory many years past. (Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body)

So the notion that medieval theologians were educated as scientists is simply not true. Which is why no advancement of the sciences occurred at any time during the Middle Ages.

Medieval Christians Invented Everything (NOT!)

Indeed, Roman technology in the late days of the Empire is not notably different from Roman technology in the late days of the Republic. [Brian Stock says] "The failure of Greece and Rome to increase productivity through innovation is as notorious as the inability of historians from Gibbon to the present to account for it."

This myth has been decisively refuted over the past twenty years (by the extensive research of such limunaries as K.D. White, Kevin Greene, Andrew Wilson, John Oleson, Örjan Wikander, Michael Lewis, Peter Rosumek, Tracey Rihll, Philippe Leveau, and more; e.g. Kevin Greene, "Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World," Economic History Review 53.1, 2000: pp. 29-59).

The Romans extensively employed innovation to advance productivity. They mechanized numerous operations (pounding, grinding, pumping, and lifting), and widely exploited watermill technology (far beyond what was previously believed). They also developed numerous innovations routinely overlooked: improved locks, ploughs, wagons, furnaces, cranes, presses, scientific instruments, and numerous practical innovations in architectural design and materials, in mining operations, agriculture and manufacturing, and a great deal else.

The pace of innovation in the Middle Ages (especially the Dark Ages) is dismal by comparison. Certainly, all those ancient innovations had been proceeding apace since the Hellenistic and all through the Republic. But there was no sign of abatement under the Empire until everything went to hell in the 3rd century A.D. (on which see my discussion in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 435-40). But the Christians are not to blame for that. They just didn't fix anything after it got broken. Thus the pace of technological advance largely stalled. The pace of scientific advance stalled completely, and in the West, actually went backwards, as an enormous amount of knowledge was lost and the ensuing gaps were filled with balderdash. Methodology suffered the worst, with all the gains having been made in antiquity, utterly abandoned in the Middle Ages.

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In no particular order [the medieval Christians invented]: watermills, windmills, camshafts, toothed wheels, transmission shafts, mechanical clocks, pendant clocks, eye glasses, four-wheeled wagons, wheeled moldboard plows with shares and coulters, three-field crop rotation, blast furnaces, laws of magnetism, steam blowers, treadles, stirrups, armored cavalry, the elliptical arch, the fraction and arithmetic of fractions, the plus sign, preservation of antiquity, “Gresham’s” law, the mean speed theorem, “Newton’s” first law, distilled liquor, use of letters to indicate quantities in al jabr, discovery of the Canary Islands, the Vivaldi expedition, cranks, overhead springs, latitudo et longitudo, coiled springs, laws of war and non-combatants, modal logic, capital letters and punctuation marks, hydraulic hammers, definition of uniform motion, of uniformly accelerated motion, of instantaneous motion, explanation of the rainbow, counterpoint and harmony, screw-jacks, screw-presses, horse collars, gunpowder and pots de fer, that there may be a vacuum, that there may be other Worlds, that the earth may turn in a diurnal motion, that to overthrow a tyrant is the right of the multitude, the two-masted cog, infinitesimals, open and closed sets, verge-and-foliot escapements, magnetic compasses, portolan charts, the true keel, natural law, human rights, international law, universities, corporations, freedom of inquiry, separation of church and state, “Smith’s” law of marketplaces, fossilization, geological erosion and uplift, anaerobic salting of fatty fish (“pickled herring”), double entry bookkeeping, and... the printing press.  (Yeah, some of the innovations are political and economic.).

Very little of this is true. In fact, not a single one of the items on this list was invented in the Christian Dark Ages. Only a few were invented in the Middle Ages, but either not before 1000 A.D. or not by Christians (and in some cases, neither). A handful weren't even invented until after the Middle Ages. The rest (in fact, most of the list) already existed in the Roman Empire. This kind of shameless conflation of periods and origins, and ignorance of ancient technology, all merely to fabricate a bogus claim of medieval Christian inventiveness, is a common disease among medievalists these days.

Laws of magnetism were not invented in the Middle Ages, but discovered during the Scientific Revolution, as were coiled springs. Smith's Law was invented after the Scientific Revolution altogether. Set theory (hence the definition of an open and closed set) was invented a whole century after that. Similarly, "separation of church and state" did not in fact exist until the First Amendment was ratified in 1791. Since far more religious freedom existed in antiquity than in the Middle Ages (politically and legally), "separation of church and state" is not a real invention of the Middle Ages. Despite repeated doublespeak, no such separation in fact existed: to the contrary, Church will was enforced at the political and legal level on an infamous and appalling scale never before seen.

Other items were not discovered by Christians, but Muslims (the windmill, the refractory explanation of the rainbow) or the Chinese (gunpowder, the compass, the stirrup, and the printing press), and then only drifted West, inspiring Christians to make gradual improvements on them.

Of the items on Flynn's list, only escapement clocks, eyeglasses, the elliptical arch, and the Mean Speed Theorem have any claim to being medieval Christian inventions, yet all are in fact from the Renaissance (all date to the 14th century; except eyeglasses, which are late 13th), and calling the Renaissance the Middle Ages is an act of semantic legerdemain I have little sympathy for. Possibly double-entry bookkeeping, the modern horse collar, screw jack, treadle, and certain novel definitions of motion might be medieval Christian inventions, too, but we lack the sources necessary to confirm that these didn't also exist in antiquity (i.e. we cannot construct a valid Argument from Silence in their case), and there is even some circumstantial evidence that they did exist, or something like them (indeed, as screw jacks are just Roman screw presses turned upside down, it's already far-fetched to assume they didn't use them; and the modern horse collar differs from the Roman yoke by a single attachment point). But even if we credit them as new, all of those were invented after 1000 AD (hence after the Dark Ages), and none was put to scientific use (not even the Mean Speed Theorem or any medieval definitions of motion) until the Scientific Revolution.

One could quibble over the details in some cases. The Romans had multiple systems of two-field rotation, and three-field rotation simply combines two of those systems, and works only in certain northern environments for which we have few surviving sources in antiquity, so it is uncertain even that three-field rotation was invented in the Middle Ages. But even if it was, it was not as significant an innovation as is usually claimed, since it merely adapted field rotation systems the ancients had already invented. And even then, we still can't count it as a Christian invention, because it was invented by Muslims. 

Likewise, symbols and systems for fractional arithmetic and algebra existed in antiquity (one treatise on them partially survives from Diophantus), but they were all forgotten and had to be reinvented in the later Middle Ages. Similarly, there were ancient equivalents of universities and corporations, they just differed in how they were organized. And Gresham's Law isn't really a law, just an observation that "bad money drives out good" which was certainly understood in antiquity (the Romans had been putting it to deliberate effect in Egypt since the time of Augustus), even if not clearly articulated in extant texts.

Likewise, although Muslims invented the windmill (in use as early as the 9th century), it was of such a different design from the Western that it can only have been the idea, not the design, the Christians inherited (the Muslim windmill used a vertical shaft, which requires no gears or transmissions). But the Christian model is an obvious combination of the Roman "windmill" (described by Hero in the 1st century, though in fact a wind pump, not a grain mill, but the sail design was identical) and the Roman watermill (the gearing and transmission was identical), so it looks like someone heard of Muslim windmills without actually seeing one or knowing many specifics, and then they drew up their own by combining existing pagan machinery. So Christians earn a quarter of a point for that (since reverse engineering a Muslim idea by combining two Roman machines is 3:1 non-Christian). But that was still not done in the Dark Ages.

Finally, I don't know what Flynn means by "pendant" clocks or "overhead" springs. The Romans had springs of many kinds. Flynn may have in mind suspension springs, which the Romans had incorporated into wagons by at least the 2nd century, or table clock spring motivators, which were invented in the 16th century and thus not the Middle Ages. And if by "pendant clock" he means pocket watches (originally hung about the neck), those are again a 16th century invention. But the Romans had pocket sundials of considerable sophistication (of cylindrical design), as well as portable geared calendar sundials. If he means "pendulum" clocks, however, then that's the escapement clock, which is what I assume he means by "mechanical" clocks (misusing the word "mechanical," since the escapement is not the only way to operate a mechanical clock), but that would be a case of padding his list by naming the same invention thrice.

So of 70 items Flynn lists, 44 already existed in the Roman era (in some equivalent form), 7 can't be confirmed as novel to the Middle Ages (horse collars, double entry bookkeeping, screw-jacks, treadles, and three definitions of motion), 7 were actually invented by Muslims (windmills, three-field crop rotation, explanation of the rainbow) or the Chinese (gunpowder, magnetic compasses, stirrups, the printing press), 6 were invented after the Middle Ages (laws of magnetism, open and closed sets, “Smith’s” law of marketplaces, coiled springs, pendant clocks, and the separation of church and state), 1 is unintelligible (I have no idea what he means by "overhead springs"), and 1 isn't real (separation of church and state). That leaves a whopping 4 inventions Christians can claim in the whole of the Middle Ages (escapements, eye glasses, elliptical arches, and the Mean Speed Theorem), not one of which was invented in the Dark Ages (600-1000 A.D.) or arguably even the Middle Ages (all post-date 1250 A.D.), and not one of which was given any scientific application in the Middle Ages. In fact, three of them are largely redundant, as the Romans had magnifying glasses (Seneca explicitly refers to using one in the Natural Questions and Ptolemy studied the refraction properties of convex and concave lenses), and accurate mechanized clocks, and were more than effective in their use of the standard arch and vault.

So compare one single unused innovation (the Mean Speed Theorem) with what the Greeks and Romans developed, and the Middle Ages look awesomely pathetic. All the more if you don't count the Renaissance as the Middle Ages, for then not even a single Christian invention remains. And that's just using items Flynn tried to steal credit for. His list could in fact be expanded numerous times over and still we wouldn't exhaust the inventions of Greco-Roman antiquity. But just from his list: the Romans already had watermills, camshafts, toothed wheels, transmission shafts, mechanical clocks (powered by water), four-wheeled wagons (and with suspension systems no less), wheeled moldboard plows with shares and coulters, blast furnaces (the employment of torsion bellows in furnaces is taken for granted in the 1st century Latin poem Aetna 555-65, and archaeologists have found hints of their use at Roman sites), steam blowers (Hero describes several in his Pneumatics), armored cavalry (known to the Romans, but unused because it is in fact a tactically stupid military armament), equivalents of the plus sign and the fraction and arithmetic of fractions, preservation of antiquity (the Greeks, after all, invented not only the public library, but philology, chronography, and empirical history), an understanding of “Gresham’s” law, the equivalent of “Newton’s” first law, distilled liquor (Roman alchemical treatises describe the process and several still designs), use of letters to indicate quantities (Diophantus), discovery of the Canary Islands (by the Roman client-king Juba), knowledge of West Africa (what Flynn means by the Vivaldi expedition, such expeditions are recorded by several ancient geographers), cranks, latitude and longitude (invented by the Roman scientist Ptolemy, using Alexandria instead of Greenwich for the meridian), the equivalent to laws of war and non-combatants, modal logic (developed by the Stoic logicians of the Hellenistic period), capital letters and punctuation marks (both are visible in ancient inscriptions and papyri; plus an entire system of textual mark-up had been developed by the Alexandrian scholars), hydraulic hammers (and saws as well), the equivalents of counterpoint and harmony (bagpipes and organs made polyphony a regular phenomenon, and depictions in ancient art of horns and organs being played together suggests musical troupes exploited it), screw-presses, the possibility of a vacuum (in fact, empirically proven by Hero in the 1st century, and possibly by Strato centuries earlier), the possibility of other Worlds (explicitly argued by Lucretius), the idea that the earth might turn in a diurnal motion (not only proposed by Aristarchus, Seleucus and other ancient heliocentrists, but there was a whole school of dynamic geocentrists as well), the belief that to overthrow a tyrant is the right of the multitude (sic semper tyrannis, a concept as old as Aristotle's Politics, cf. Leslie Goldstein,  "Aristotle's Theory of Revolution," Political Research Quarterly 54.2), the equivalent of the two-masted cog (in fact, by the Roman era ship technology was even more advanced than this), infinitesimals (developed by Archimedes in On the Method), the equivalent of portolan charts, the keel, natural law and human rights (developed by the Stoics), international law (just another name for laws established by treaty, unless Flynn is using it in the sense of "natural law" and thus padding his list again), the equivalent of universities and corporations, freedom of inquiry (it's quite Orwellian of Flynn to credit this to the Middle Ages, which engaged the full apparatus of the state to suppress many elements of freedom of inquiry for the first time in human history), fossilization (Theophrastus wrote a treatise on fossils; you know, one of those scientific books Christians didn't care to save), geological erosion and uplift (described already by Eratosthenes and quoted approvingly by Strabo), and anaerobic salting of fatty fish (garum was a Roman staple, and not the only thing they pickled in anaerobic brine).

I'll document much of this in a future book (The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). Until then, you can peruse the following works, yet they barely touch the tip of the iceberg of ancient technological achievements: John Oleson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (2008); Örjan Wikander, ed., Handbook of Ancient Water Technology (2000); and M.J.T. Lewis, Millstone and Hammer: The Origins of Water Power (1997). This isn't even remotely exhaustive. Suffice to say Flynn doesn't know what he's talking about.

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Guy de Chauliac, who was also the Pope's physician [:] After he contracted the plague, Guy heroically and meticulously recorded his obervations of his own illness; and it is to him that we owe our knowledge of the course of the disease.

Yet almost all ancient treatises documenting the courses of countless diseases (including the Bubonic Plague) were not preserved by Christians. This is actually a perfect example of the disinterest of medieval Christians in science, and of why the Renaissance (Guy lived in the 14th century) is not the Middle Ages: only in the Renaissance did Christians finally revive the ancient method of meticulously recording observations regarding the courses of different diseases. But by then, they had already thrown out almost all the same work already achieved by the Greeks and Romans. In other words, Renaissance Christians had medieval Christians to thank for having to reinvent the wheel and start all over again.

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It was also in Christian Europe that the first anatomical dissections were done, ever.  They quickly became mandatory at the medical universities.

Neither statement is true. Anatomical dissections using animals, to study the animal itself or as surrogates for people, were standard in antiquity, and dissections of human cadavers began under Herophilus in the Hellenistic period. Even the Roman physician Galen had the occasional opportunity to dissect a human cadaver, and refers to others of his time who had as well, and recommended every doctor pursue that opportunity, while dissecting animals as regularly as possible.

The Christians did not revive the practice until the Renaissance, long after the Dark Ages were over. And even then, once cadaver dissection was introduced in universities, it took centuries for the practice to spread and become mandatory, and even then, according to Vesalius, most doctors and medical students refused to do the dissections themselves and thus made little progress.

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Mondino de Luzzi published Anatomia, the first manual on dissection, in 1316.  Hugh of Lucca used wine to clean wounds and founded a school of surgery at Bologna in 1204.  John of Arderne used hemlock as an anesthesia; and “soporific sponges” for knocking out surgery patients date from XI century.  Henri de Mondeville pioneered aseptic treatment of wounds and the use of sutures.

All these treatments were already standard in the time of Galen (and had been for centuries). Anatomical literature was also commonplace in antiquity, and the first known instructional manuals on dissection were written by Galen (he composed several, the most extensive was On Anatomical Procedures, completely discarded in the West, only half of it survived Eastern Christian disinterest, the rest we had to recover from Arabic translations).

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What Vesalius gave us (which was a genuine advance) was the Renaissance invention of perspective in art applied to anatomical drawings.

Laws of perspective had been developed and were in use in antiquity. They may have even been used in anatomical texts (we have references to them), but since such drawings could not be copied faithfully (the woodcut press had not yet been invented, which is the only reason Vesalius' drawings have been preserved at all), ancient scientists tended not to invest in them (and we have ancient scientists on record saying essentially that). But whatever innovations Vesalius gave us, they are a product of the Scientific Revolution, not the Middle Ages (much less the Dark Ages). He wrote in the 16th century.

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But recall that the temples of Asklepios were not hospitals where you went to be cared for by nursing sisters.  They were religious temples where you went in the hope of getting a vision from the god in your sleep.

They were actually both. Doctors frequented the temples (sometimes medical schools were even associated with them), and temple attendants saw to the needs of supplicants as well. The true hospital (as an organized and scientifically engineered facility for surgery and in-patient care) was invented by the Romans. In fact the hospitals of the Roman legions were so advanced they were not rivaled until the Scientific Revolution. Those who did not have access to them frequented the healing temples, some of which were massive hospice enterprises not at all unlike later Christian hospitals. But a great deal of ancient health care was outcall: doctors would visit the sick in their own home, in many cases charitably for free or for fees scaled to means, and many cities had subsidized health care (public funds paying the salary of one or more doctors for the whole citizenry).

Of these, the Christian hospital looked far more like an adaptation of the pagan healing temples (combining spiritual with informally arranged medical care for the indigent, acting more as hospices than scientific medical facilities) and very little like the Roman legionary hospital. It cannot really be called an innovation.

There Were a Zillion Christian Scientists in the Dark Ages (NOT!)

In response to Walker's claim that no Christian scientists "lived during the Dark Ages" Flynn gives the following list:

Jean Buridan de Bethune.  Nicole d'Oresme.  Albrecht of Saxony, William of Heytesbury, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Bradwardine, Theodoric of Fribourg, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, Nicholas Cusa, John Philoponus, etc. etc.  (William of Ockham showed little interest in natural philosophy.).

Flynn evidently doesn't know what a scientist is. Not a single person on this list made any empirical scientific discovery or advanced the sciences in any important way. Even when they are supposed to at least have had a novel thought, in almost every case we can identify an ancient predecessor who already had the same thought, and regardless, none of them employed their novel ideas to advance science. 

For example, Buridan did nothing with his impetus theory. It would not be given scientific application for several more centuries. And Gerbert only rediscovered knowledge that had been lost from the ancients. Not one man on this list (except Gerbert) was even a practicing astronomer, doctor, botanist, zoologist, geologist, or engineer, much less a conductor of original research in any of those fields. There were, of course, many medieval Christian doctors, astronomers, and engineers, but they only practiced a degenerate craft. They didn't do any new research, and had forgotten almost everything the ancients had achieved in their respective fields. Only after the Dark Ages did this start to change, and only in the Renaissance did Christians catch back up with the ancient pagans (and started to surpass them in the Scientific Revolution). There were a few exceptions in the East (in Byzantium), but they gradually dwindled in number, and still made no advances, not even in a thousand years.

Flynn also seems chronologically challenged. Almost none on his list lived in the Dark Ages. Almost all of them are from the Early Renaissance (13th century or later), not the Dark Ages, a chronological confusion that many apologists for medieval Christianity seem suspiciously prone to. The only men on his list that are pre-Renaissance are Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, and John Philopon, none of whom was a research scientist, and only one (Gerbert) even practiced a science.

Worse, Flynn's few examples from the Dark Ages actually prove Walker's point. Thierry's only link to anything remotely close to science is that he wrote a commentary on Genesis using Plato's Timaeus, which isn't even remotely scientific behavior. To the contrary, it is almost in every way exactly the opposite of doing science, and thus in fact confirmation of what Walker was saying: this is what Christians had replaced science with in the Dark Ages. Thierry also wrote an encyclopedia of the arts, whose only science content was a lay summary of rudimentary knowledge of astronomy that actually exemplifies the decay of scientific knowledge and abandonment of original scientific research in the Dark Ages. William was a grammarian (!) who did even less than Thierry. Why any modern scholar would try to sneak these names into a list of Christian "scientists" is beyond me, particularly as these men actually confirm the point that citing them is supposed to rebut.

Gerbert at least showed some real interest in astronomy and instrumentation, but his treatises demonstrate he didn't even understand correctly how to build or use an astrolabe (despite the fact that advanced treatises on this had been written in antiquity), and his correspondence demonstrates his knowledge of astronomy was rudimentary by ancient standards, hence in fact confirming how much knowledge had been lost during the Dark Ages (as Gerbert had access to all the educational resources any European Christian could then claim, and thus his ignorance could only have been surpassed by everyone else). As even Hannam admits, "Although Gerbert knew more about science than any other Catholic in his day, he was still well behind the achievements of the ancient world" and his correspondence only confirmed "how little information" had survived for him to consult (God's Philosophers, pp. 31, 28). Exactly. That's why we call it the Dark Ages.