Reena

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...ternetinfidels

How the Catholic Church built Western Civilization

jjramsey

There's a long thread on the JREF forums about the relationship between Christianity and science: Is religion slowing us down?

The gist of some of the arguments on the thread is that the Greeks gave us a good start but also had some assumptions that held them back, such as the idea that the world around us could be determined by pure reason rather than investigating the outside world. Christianity, especially in its Latin (a.k.a. Roman Catholic) form, did not share all those assumptions. For example, Latin Christianity assumed that since God ran the world with consistent natural laws but that God could fashion them as he pleased, one had to do empirical investigation to discover those laws. The reason the "conflict thesis" is out is that it is too simplistic. Latin Christianity did much to foster science, and cases like Galileo's were unusual. The best way to describe the relationship between Christianity and science is as being complicated. The real war between Christianity and science has mostly been on the creationism front, which is relatively recent. As for Draper's book, it has roughly the same reliablity as Kersey Graves':

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.p...28#post1175128
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.p...81#post1162481
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.p...07#post1153207

Vorkosigan

Yes, given the direction of bias in his writing. it's pretty clear how he envisions his role.

Michael

GakuseiDon

That sounds reasonable, but the problem I have with that is that there is a good 1000 years from the time that Christianity came to the fore and the beginnings of modern science. That's a long time for any society to throw off those assumptions. Perhaps had another religion became dominant (or even atheism), the time may have been shorter -- there's really no way to tell AFAICS.

And even with that, a lot of Christians accepted evolution pretty quickly, even if many denominations didn't post an official position on the subject until much later.

jjramsey

True. If you follow the thread in JREF, it was the combination of Greek thought and the challenging assumptions of Latin Christianity that "broke the dam," so to speak. Neither one alone did it. IIRC, Aristotle's works and other Greek works were rediscovered around that 1,000 year mark. (The loss of those works, IIRC, had a lot to do with the invasion of the Germanic tribes, but my memory is hazy on this.) Also, some of the assumptions of Latin Christianity took time to evolve as well. The idea that God would keep his natural laws consistent and not change them arbitrarily was an assumption that came to be a part of Latin Christianity, but was not an assumption that could necessarily be derived from early Christianity.

Indeed. This is a far cry, though, from saying that the Greeks were simply slowed down by those awful ignorant Christians.

judge

Stanley Jaki has argued that certain ideas had to pemeate the whole culture before science could be established as a self sustaining enterprise.

I'm not going to argue that he is right but he does provide a detailed argument in Science and Creation.

Further info

The origin of Science

Vorkosigan

Still way too simplistic. One of the key differences between western science and previous forms of knowing was that western scientists worked with their hands building devices. Another is that they modeled the world as thought it were a machine -- machines became the model for nature, above all, the clock. Westerners also invented a social space called "science" where a designated social role, knowledge production, was played out. Westerners also invented new ways of representing reality visually, an important step. Further, rising capitalism meant that western scientists produced knowledge that was of practical use. Additionally, math was part of the way reality was modeled, unlike in other cultures where math had no or non-existent status. None of these has anything to with Greek thought or Latin Christianity. At best Christianity played only a minor positive role in the development of science. As my old teacher David Hess points out in Science {and Technology} in a Multicultural World, the scientific method came to the west from Islam, and flowed through universities such as Padua, where Galileo and Harvey were educated.

An additional problem with this whole discussion is that it views Christianity and other causal factors as positive stimuli -- their existence led to science, whereas stimuli are often negative. For example, the discovery of the New World did much to invalidate the Christian worldview and the hold of the Bible over intellectual life, because it wasn't mentioned in the Bible, and neither were the peoples or fauna and flora. The is an effect of having Christianity, but it is not an effect of Christianity, per se. Again, westerners were negatively stimulated by their dawning realization that everyone else was waaaay ahead of them, especially Asia. It's a problem of historical analysis that too much emphasis is placed on successful positive stimulus from relevant factors, and not enough on negative stimulus from failure and perceptions of lack.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Jaki. Yet another Christian apologist masquerading as a scholar.

Vorkosigan

judge

Jaki was a member of the prestigious Institute for the advancement of science at Princeton (Einstein was also a member), so I don't know if it is correct to say he is or was " masquerading as a scholar".

Has another scholar refuted his work?

Toto

Jaki edited to add: Jaki on Wikipedia