The "Christian Dark Ages"

A notion thoroughly eviscerated by Mike Flynn here, with a recommended reading list given here.  Some choice excerpts:

...It is curious how many fundamentalist tropes show up in atheist writings. In this case, the "Constantine founded Christianity" trope, which was originally proposed by fundamentalists of the "secret church" persuasion. Their animus was directed against the Roman Catholic church, which was terribly unfair to the Eastern Orthodox. At the time of Constantine, there was not yet any distinction.
Further, as Walker ought to know, the Constantinid dynasty tried to establish Arianism, not orthodoxy and famously included Julian the Apostate, who tried to gin up a pagan church in imitation of the Christians. (We have many of his letters, so we know this was his purpose.)...

What evidence is there that "scientific investigation" stopped? What evidence is there that it had ever started? As Brian Stock commented in "Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Middle Ages," the Roman thought that nature could be imitated (via engineering), placated (via prayers and sacrifices), but not understood (via science). 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. Indeed, Roman technology in the late days of the Empire is not notably different from Roman technology in the late days of the Republic.

"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."-- Brian Stock, "Science, Technology, and Progress in the Early Middle Ages," in Science in the Middle Ages (Lindberg, ed.)...

...everything we know about the natural philosophy of the ancients comes from writings copied and preserved by the Christians. After all, these folks were the Greeks and Romans. They just got sprinkled, is all. And we read again and again in the writings of the Christians about the importance of such learnings. Granted, they had little use for Greek comedies and tragedies (they wrote their own, and had their own notions of what was tragic and comic) and they saw no need to imitate Greco-Roman architecture (again, they did their own thing), but they preserved and copied an enormous amount of Greek mathematics, technical writings, and natural philosophy...

The cathedral schools of the early middle ages were open to all. So were the universities that were Christian Europe's greatest invention. These universities were chartered, independent, and self-governing, had a standardized curriculum based on Aristotle, Galen, etc., degrees of attainment, etc.. Nearly two thirds of them carried Papal charters, and the bull Parens scientiarum [parent of the sciences], which ensured their independence, has been called the Magna Carta of the universities. The students went through a curriculum that was almost exclusively composed of logic, reason, and natural philosophy. To matriculate in the graduate schools of theology, law, or medicine, you first had to get this master of arts degree. Consequently, nearly every medieval theologian was first educated as a scientist.

How this prevented the public from getting an education is a mystery. It seems to be merely an article of faith, believed credulously without evidence...

Walker writes: "When Christianity took over Europe, scientific and engineering advancement virtually stopped."

In no particular order: 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.)...

There's more where that came from, and it's good stuff. Read up! Share with your friends and neighbors! Rediscover the Middle Ages as you've never seen them before!