Echoing Gould on biology, Harari asserts that “if we could rewind history and replay the fourth century a hundred times, we’d find that Christianity will have taken over the Roman empire a few times only.” But the frozen accident of Christianity had far-reaching consequences. For one, monotheism encouraged a belief in God the creator, with a rational plan for the created world. It is hardly surprising, then, that when twelve centuries later modern science finally emerged in Christian Europe, the early scientists regarded their investigations as a sort of religious pursuit, setting the scene
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