The Catholic Church Never Suppressed Science

Physicist Brian Keating interviews the world famous economist:

Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI's real productivity gain is an order of magnitude smaller than the industry claims. The bigger danger is not the machine. It is that a handful of people are deciding how it gets built.

Acemoglu is most famous for collecting a lot of data to supposedly show that wealthier nations succeeded by better institutions. The Economist magazine recently called his theories oddly unconvincing.

Keating: you know I study uh for for a lot of the research I do in astronomy I follow in the try to follow [4:04] in the footsteps of my great mentor you know Galileo Galilei

Acemoglu: Amazing guy.

Keating: here's a guy finger puppet of him now he worked in an extremely illiberal you know kind of autocracy also that the Catholic church was every bit as totalitarian as any of their worst fears and yet science flourished in the Renaissance and and in fact he he had many permissions that were granted by these illiberal you know forces as long as he didn't teach it, he could study it.

Acemoglu: So right, there were there were restrictions and there were some possibilities. Galileo was actually very good at navigating these things. Copernicus and Kepler much less. So their work was delayed. This dissemination was delayed by about a century. And some of Galileo's works remained banned until the middle of the 19th century.

I wonder how educated scholars could say things so ridiculous.

No, the Catholic Church was not totalitarian. It did not run the government. Europe at the time was controlled by monarchies, not the Church.

The works of Copernicus and Kepler were not delayed. Kepler published in a mostly Protestant area, and it was crucial for Newton in England about 50 years later.

Copernicus published with the endorsement of the Church. The Church later said that nine sentences need to be corrected, but the book was never banned.

Christian Europe was the freeest and most intellectually enlightened place in the world. Christians built the world's only universities. Science and other intellectual activities were developing faster and better in Europe than the rest of the world, by far.

Yes, I know Galileo was punished for breaking his deal not to contradict official Bible interpretations, and ordered not to publish. But in fact he got a generous pension and continued to publish scientific works.