The Church has persecuted or opposed almost every great scientist of the last 500 years.
The list of those who earned the wrath of the Church reads like a Who's Who of Science: Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Darwin, Hubble, even Bertrand Russell.
The Church has also been on the wrong side of the social sciences for over 1,500 years, actively promoting slavery, anti-Semitism, the torture and murder of women as witches, sexual repression, censorship and the Inquisition, Crusades and other aggressive wars, and capital punishment for misdemeanors.
This has given rise to a Christian field called apologetics, which attempts to defend the Church's errors, even claiming that science and Christianity are compatible friends, not enemies. But the atrocities and scientific errors were too profound, and stretched on for too many millennia, to be defended in any reasonable manner.
Most Christians will deny it, but there is a long tradition of warfare between science and Christianity.
The Absolute Truth that the Church proclaimed a mere 500 years ago included the following beliefs:
The earth was flat, in accordance with its many descriptions in the Bible. Catholic bishops warned Columbus that he would fall off the edge of the earth for his lack of faith.
The earth was also the center of the universe, and the sun and planets rotated around it, fixed in crystal spheres.
Comets were not celestial bodies obeying the laws of physics; they were fireballs thrown in anger from the right hand of God, and they were messengers of doom and despair.
The ordinary events of nature were not caused by routine laws of nature, like physics or chemistry. Instead, they were the result of magic, miracles, and angels or demons who actively caused and intervened in ordinary events.
Both disease and insanity were either a punishment of God or a possession by devils, and using modern medicine to thwart the will of God was a sin. When Dr. Zabdiel Boylston first inoculated his own son against smallpox in 1721, the Church immediately attacked him; they claimed that injecting someone with a weakened strain of smallpox was "poisoning," and that it was blasphemy "to infect a family in the morning with smallpox and to pray to God in the evening against the disease."
Lightning was also considered a punishment of sinners by God; when Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, Christians bitterly assailed him for "robbing God of his judgment".
Bad weather and ferocious storms that ruined crops and killed people were supposed to be the result of Satan's demons stirring trouble. These demons were supposed to be frightened off by the ringing of loud bells; that is why churches traditionally have bells in their steeples.
The European forests were supposed to be filled with witches, gremlins, fairies, leprechauns, dwarfs, ogres, incubi, succubi, and spirits of the dead. They were thought to range from friendly and mischievous to violent and dangerous, and they were blamed or credited for much unexplained phenomena. The Church, from the Pope on down, blessed various holy relics and prayers that could be used to ward off these creatures.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-sciencechristianity.htm
