A case for the last option was mounted by the historian Pierre Duhem. He suggested that Tempier unwittingly helped to pave the way for the rise of modern science by condemning certain ideas of Aristotelian science that actually needed to be rejected if progress was to be made. While Duhem’s version of this thesis is now usually seen as an oversimplification, there is still a plausible argument to be made in favor of his basic idea.14 The argument centers especially on the idea that God has the power to do things that are naturally impossible, even if He cannot bring about actual contradictions
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