Science, Eastern Orthodoxy, and World Religions.

The history of Orthodoxy and science invites contrasts with other religious traditions. In contradistinction to the Latin West, for example, Eastern Orthodoxy throughout its history embraced the “pagan” scientific achievements of ancient Greece. Also unlike in the West, where ecclesiastical institutions often supported scientific activities, scholars in the East—in both the Byzantine and Ottoman periods— relied primarily on temporal sources to sustain their investigations of nature. Islam, with its strenuous resistance to any assimilation of the human to the divine, provides another contrasting example, as does the later Protestant justification for science grounded in the need to restore a fallen world through the application of experimental research. Not surprisingly, Eastern Orthodox believers seem to have paid little attention to non-Christian faiths, with the exception of Islam and Judaism, until well into the twentieth century.