

I worked in a rural county where there were roads so bad, so riddled with potholes, that you could barely drive more than 5 mph. Undulating speedbumps and you’d have to zigzag to avoid the holes large enough to catch your wheel entirely.
The county’s solution to poor response times from 911 calls? Cops bought a humvee.
That wasn’t quite it. The church believed the natural sciences fit within a framework of metaphysical doctrine. The church engaged in all sorts of research and experiments because they believed it would prove the truth. People like Darwin and Copernicus and such were all commissioned by the church to develop and research their work.
What happened was there became a growing body of work that did not align with the church that could not be reconciled. They did the science, they were just subject to the demands of political power of their time.