Amaleq13

How can a man defend Copernicus in debates yet not understand the science that supports the theory? How can a man defend Copernicus in debates yet not have an interest in or an understanding of the mathematics involved?

Buridan

History contains a lot of different influences, going on at the same time - economical, ecological, sosiological, philosophical and political as well as thorugh cultural contact/conflict etc..

To understand this gap you are talking about (which may be shortened by several centuries, e.g. looking av John Philloponus in Alexandria in the 6th Century), one has to consider at least the following inhibiting factors on science:

- The influence of Mystical world views such as the Neoplatonic, which was a hinder to science also in the Late Greek/Roman world (before Christianity had any influence) and in the Early medieval world
- Large pestilences in the Eastern empire - e.g. under Justinian - creating serious economical set backs
- The constant pressure in the East from attacks by e.g. Persians, Arabs, Vikings, Bulgarians etc.
- The deurbanisation of Europe following the Barbaric Invasions in the Fourth Century
- The Arab conquest of Alexandria
- The Black Death (the number of scholars in Europe had grown massively since the 11th Century, however it took about 150 years after the Plague before the number of scholars again was as high as in 1349, perhaps not coincidentally about the same time as Copernicus started his studies)

Just to mention a few aspects.

See e.g. the references and the figure on page 8 in this Magazine on Innovation Research http://www.telenor.com/telektronikk/...ge_005-025.pdf

The whole debate is about the comparative merit of different cultural influences, in relation to other influences. However, to be able to picture what really happened in the longer term, it is important to get one's facts more correct than not.

Buridan

Indeed, please inform me.

Buridan

To be more precise. I am not (as I am aware of) "slamming" Bruno. This is about what I thought was a well known fact about Bruno not being much interested in or aware of scientific, quantitative, geometrical details.

See here, e.g. note 33.

spin

I mean would you like to waste some time and read what Bruno said??

I don't think you'd be so sure, if you took notice of what he wrote.

I don't need to. As Bruno went around Europe advocating Copernicus's solar system, and I've given a few examples of this, your simple conclusion is based simply on nothing. Go and read La Cena and come back with another simple conclusion.


spin

spin

What is noticeable is that you require Bruno to have a PhD in astrophysics to be able to advocate a scientific breakthrough.

Amaleq13

I think you missed the point of the questions because they are for you to answer. They are in response to your stated conclusion.

As far as I can see, you either have to deny that he engaged in such debates or you have to answer the questions. That he engaged in debates defending Copernicus against presumably knowledgeable opponents would appear to require the assumption that, contrary to your conclusion, Bruno was knowledgeable about the mathematics as well as the general principles of science involved. I don't understand how else he would be capable of engaging in debate on the subject.

ecco

Late-Comer to this thread. I read the first page and skipped to the last page so, if someone has already posted this, my apologies.

Probably some other religion would have overtaken the Western World. Whether this religion would have been more or less restrictive is anyone’s guess. I think the OP is asking “What if Christianity and any other religion never existed?� My opinion:

Impossible – religions have always existed and probably always will.

OTOH I can dream:

Today there would be no cancer, Parkinsons, etc;

TV images would be 3D images emanating from the middle of my living room;

My car, automatically controlled, would be powered by a “gasoline� produced by nano-technology rather than sucked up out of the ground or by helium produced the same way and stored in “containers� made by nano-technology;

My cell-phone/computer would be all encompassing (eh, we’re getting close);

Houses along the Mississippi Gulf and Florida would be built of submarine quality components (get ‘em under a few feet of water – dry ‘em out and they’re as good as new) Ooops, better include New Hampshire;

And, most important, Christianity and Islam would have gone the way of Zeus and Thor and the people of the world would have embraced rationality instead of superstition.

John Lennon - where are ya when we need ya?

Buridan

What you "understand" is perhaps not the most important issue here. It is what Bruno did understand, what he wrote himself (I presented a link to one annotated work), and what kind of debates he was involved in - if the mere fact that he was invoved in some debates is your argument. Those debates may have been less scientifically than you think, at least on Bruno's part.

So please, tell me what specific evidence you have, apart from your "understanding" and "deductions". Where did Bruno especially show that he propagated, understood and was well versed in Copernicus' Geometry or other kinds of quantifiable, scientific methodology?

Sorry to ask, however I have been led to believe it is a major issue in this forum to base one's conclusions on evidence?

lpetrich

Lucretius raises the interesting question of whether some other equally dogmatic religion might have taken Xianity's place in the later Roman Empire.

Mithraism (also in this article) itself would have been unsuitable, since it was male-only and since one had to be initiated into it.

The worship of Isis and Osiris seems a more promising possibility, since it was broader-based. But that was apparently non-exclusive, and Apuleius in his Golden Ass makes Isis announce that she's worshipped under numerous other names. The Religio Aegyptiana, as it might be called, also could claim great antiquity, though Egyptian history was not often distributed in a form comparable to the Old Testament. Manetho's Aegyptiaca does not seem to have been very common. And in fact, a common early Xian apologetic line was that the OT goes back a long, long way, more than most other histories.

And I think that the absence of Xianity would have been beneficial, because the non-exclusive nature of most of its competition would have enabled more of pagan philosophy to have been preserved, especially philosophy that Xians disliked, like that of the Atomists and the Epicureans. The various philosophical schools would have kept on going, and they would have preserved much more of their inheritance of literature, at least in the eastern half of the Empire. And they could have continued to advance, at least as far as available technology enabled them to.

It's remarkable how much the Universe according to modern science much more closely resembles the views of the Epicureans and the Atomists than (say) anything in the Bible, as Richard Carrier has noted. So if pagan philosophy had continued to survive, then the Epicureans could also have survived. I may add that Richard Carrier has excellent credentials, including a master's thesis on Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Roman Empire.