The problem with the idea of the Church being opposed to "science," as the person mentioned asserts, is that in the Middle Ages the modern concept of "science" did not exist.
Scientia simply refers to the inquiry into knowledge, and there were many different fields and disciplines of of this type of study, of which theology was, naturally, the highest, being followed by metaphysics. During the so-called "Scientific Revolution," thanks to Descartes, who most likely would have abhorred this development but naïvely put forth his theories separating matter from spirit regardless, the sciences that dealt exclusively with the natural world were given pride of place to the exclusion of the higher sciences, which were (disgustingly, in my opinion) relegated to the category of the "humanities."
What is interesting to note about "science" since the mid-1600s is that it is always coupled with philosophical claims, specifically about how people can know things. The conclusion of those who say "I believe in science" and pit it against "religion" is that one can know things definitively only from sensible experimentation, whereas any discussion of essences, natures, the divine, or other invisible things, is entirely speculative and, frankly, useless. But the party of modern science destroys its fundamental assertion about what the role of the natural sciences is with this; by jumping arbitrarily from observations of the natural and finite to making claims about the invisible and eternal, they are exiting what they themselves claim is the exclusive province of science, putting the lie to their assertion that God's existence cannot be proved by observation of nature alone.
That is to say, they are ideologues -- sectaries -- and liars. They have turned the inquiry into the natural world into a closed system of man-made religious dogma -- with its patron saints and so forth -- and, lately, a death cult and, in some cases, a ѕυιcιdє cult.
Anyway, in the Middle Ages, the many sciences constituted the study of God in His divine reality and in His creation. The universities, which were exclusively for clerics (laity were excluded when the universities were first invented), were created by the inspiration of the Popes, who wanted to create learned bodies of clerics to combat the Mohammedan and Judaic scholars both in the Middle East and North Africa and the Iberian peninsula as well as in their incursion into Western libraries, namely through Averroës, Maimonides, and Avicenna. Aristotles, who was represented to the West most famously through Averroës, truly scared many clerics because of what he showed the mind without the assistance of grace to be capable of accomplishing. Specifically at the dawn of the great XIIIth century, many young clerics -- following the bad example of inordinate enthusiasm for book-learning of Peter Abelard -- became ardent Averroists after his works became more widespread. They dedicated long hours to sophistry, becoming fixated on such claims as that the eternity of the world could not be disproven as such or, most famously, monopsychism, which claims that all human beings share one single consciousness or one single agent intellect, being passive participants in the procession of the communal soul through time (or whatever).
The Popes encouraged the development of studia (houses of study) and their concentration in a single place (places of the study of all the sciences -- that is, universities) amongst the clergy in order to combat these wicked doctrines and in order to faithfully assimilate anything good or useful in Averroës and Aristotle, &c. This was a defensive effort in order to protect the Faith from those who claimed that philosophy or the natural sciences disproved certain parts of it. For instance, many Averroists claimed that while some things were certainly true by Faith, they were also proven to be false by logic and material reality, but that this did not make them any less true in the realm of Faith, though they did not abide in any experienced reality whatsoever (sound familiar ?). The universities were created to destroy these sophistries and strengthen the Faith by using its enemies' own medicine against them.
Of course, Paris being what it was at the time, it was the pinnacle and center of all of this action, and the University of Paris became the most important and influential center of theological study for four centuries, making Paris, in a way, the sort of second capital of the Catholic world. It was not until 1760, after the public infidelity of Louis XV when he brought his mistress to the front during the Seven Years' War, that Paris's culture as the most Catholic city in Europe was replaced with being the most worldly city in Europe.
Here is a summary of the Parisian condemnations of the propositions of the radical Aristotelians and Averroists :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condemnations_of_1210%E2%80%931277
Topic: The Church in the middle ages... (Read 1502 times)