joedad

Diamond seeks to answer this very question in Guns, Germs And Steel – The Fates of Human Societies. An excerpt from his epilogue:I think you would find the book worth having read.

Nomad

Two things about joedad's post.

First, I certainly do not believe that race played any role in the success of Europe, nor in the beginnings of the Age of Science. Had all Europeans been black, and Africans Oriental, and the people of East Asia Caucasian, little could be expected to change historically.

Second, history is hardly a march of the inevitable. What happens in real history is not only a matter of impersonal forces and environment, but is also determined in large measure by the actions of certain individuals who "meet the moment" as it were.

So, on the one hand, I agree with what joedad has quoted above, but on another level I disagree very strongly. Human beings are much more than cogs in the machinery of history, and mere victims of the environment into which they are born.

Peace,

Nomad

NOGO

Sorry, but this is a load of crap.
According to your way of thinking science existed from the start of creation and man discovered it in the 17th century. The definition of science that you profess is man made creation which evolved.

Ptolemy modeled the solar system and planetary motion with geometry. His model correctly predicted where planets would be in the future. As such it is a scientific achievement with all the elements that you speak of. It has a theory. Planets move in circular motions. Yes that is not the case but Newton's model of the world was also proven wrong. You can make prediction based on the model. The prediction were not very accurate but Newton's laws only give approximate results as well. I can go on but I can see that you are not receptive.

Science would have gotten nowhere with mathematics. That you cannot deny.

But why stop at science. Let's look at music.
There is no doubt that Europeans have elevated music to a fine art quite distinctive from anywhere else. No doubt that some musicians were inspired by their faith. So why not claim that Christianity is necessary for music. We can then define music in such a way as to relegate all other people's efforts in this area as irrelevant. And there you have it.

Why stop there. How about dance, drama, painting, sculting. You name it, Christianity is to be credited for everything.

Are you saying that all these people are incapable of doing what Europeans have done or are you saying that they lacked Christianity and that is why they did not do it.

My claim is that Europeans would have done it with or without Christianity. The basis for this assertion is that the Greeks made a good start which Christians ignored for 1000 years. Only when they picked up where the Greek left off did the Europeans get anywhere.



Sorry but this is no argument. You are basing yourself on today's view of science. Ptolemy was a pioneer. He took a step in the direction which you now recognize as a good method. Copernicus and Kepler based their work on Ptolemy's. Surely you can understand the concept of progress. Tell me what would Copernicus and Kepler have studied if the Greek had not put together all that math and astronomy. Nothing!


Nonsense. The burden of proof is squarely on your shoulders.
I will put the question to you since Bede refused to answer.

In ancient times the Greeks and Jews live side-by-side.
The Jews had the Christian God and the Greeks did not.
The Greek came up with Geometry, algebra, astronomy, etc. and the very crucial idea that the world can be modeled with math.
Compared to that what did the Jews do in the field of science?
Nothing!

How do you explain this?
Since your theory is that belief in the Christian God did it you need to have a good explanation for this one.

Also explain why it took Christians 1000 years before getting started and then only after the Greek documents were reintroduced in Europe.

Nomad

No, man has demonstrated the ability to reason from the beginning of recorded history. That is not in dispute. But something of a qualitatively different nature happened on or about the 17th Century.

Right now I am trying to found out why all the brainy types didn't buy it for eons after Ptolemy had died. Scientifically demonstrated theories hold up under scrutiny, and personal bias cannot knock them down. But Ptolemy was not convincing, so what happened later that caused us to embrace a heliocentric galaxy? My understanding is that it was demonstrated by way of a telescope, or somesuch, that allowed us to actually verify Ptolemy's ingenius calculations.

Let me put it this way. If Aristotle had turned out to be right, and the universe really was made up of only four elements, would his discover be called scientific when he made it? I consider it to be a product of brilliant deductive reasoning, and he just happened to be wrong. Ptolemy was right, but that was hardly because he could prove it in a scientific way.

Right. But weren't Ptolemy and Newton just doing the same thing, and only later was science actually able to test the two theories and show which was right?

Of course. And it could have gotten no where without human reason either. But mathematics was pretty common, as was literacy and deductive reasoning. But none of the cultures that shared these features still did not produce science as we know it today, excepting the Western European one, of course..

I'm pretty certain everyone has had music. We need to stay focused on things that are sufficiently different from everything else, and are therefore in need of explanation. Music goes together with the human appreciation of the sublime, as is the case with arts of all types as well.

I am only saying that no other culture excepting Western European did not develop science. The question left is why not, and in asking this question we look for unique factors that may have contributed to the development.

Yeah, I know. Most people here seem to think that, but they do not have any evidence to support them.

I would say that they picked up where the Scholastics, Reformers and Counter-Reformers left off. After all, the Greeks and Romans had what the Greeks had for hundreds and hundereds of years, and never went any further with it. Aristotles answers seemed to satisfy everybody, and Ptolemy was written off as something of an eccentric. It was Christians who later discovered the two thinkers in the later Middle Ages that began to apply what these men had thought in new ways, and science came from their efforts.

I have no problem saying that science builds on the work of others that come before it. But the scientific method is different, and forces people to think in new ways about old ideas. People also tend not to be satisfied with the answers they get, and continue to refine and test old ideas against new data. I do not recall the Greeks or Romans acting like that.

But none of this was called science at the time. Moreover, the Jews were a small people that had enough trouble just surviving. The Greeks, on the other hand, went on to conquor the known world, and then to dominate the Romans culturally. I admit that Jewish thought did not explore mathematics or astronomy, and focused itself instead on monotheistic theology. Moreover, I have already noted that the Orthodox did not master science, even after Aristotle was rediscovered. So it was only the Catholic and Protestant worldviews that seems to have led to science. This fact would then become another part of the puzzle that the historian would then seek to solve.

This is not my theory. It is Stark's, and I do not know how he develops his idea. Some of your points and questions are good ones, and ones that I believe he should address. Hopefully he does. I entered this thread largely because there seemed to be little interest from the sceptics who had posted in exploring the question, and that puzzled me. After all, one can always state one's prejudice, and then declare oneself satisfied, or one can explore more deeply, and see if there is a better explanation. The scientific method would cause us to do the latter, and I have understood that most sceptics consider themselves to be scientifically minded. The near universal lack of curiousity about what happened at the dawn of the Age of Science, then, seemed odd.

Good question. It would seem that it took a combination of the two, since where the discovery of the Greeks did not happen (i.e. Orthodox Europe) there was no rise in scientific knowledge. Likewise, where the Greeks were discovered by Islam, it had no appreciable impact on their scientific mind set, and they continued to consider life as the Greeks did, as a philosophical puzzle to be thought about, but not much more.

I noted much of this previously in my last post however.

If you are satisfied in your personal belief, then so be it. Many people are content with their beliefs and see no reason to explore further.

Peace,

Nomad

Toto

Alexander the Great conquered the known world because he used Greek engineering and scientific techniques, such as they were.

The Orthodox were ruled by the Ottoman Turks during this time, in an entirely different economic and political system.

Nomad, this complaint is getting tiresome. Several of the posters here have indicated that they will read the book. You are mischaracterizing your opposition.

contracycle

Sure. Watching the mental contortions made to rationalise this claim might be amusing, but only briefly.

contracycle

Nomad wrote:
A hopelessly fatuous claim, IMO. Considering that the church - and I only mean formally, no personal commitment required - was the only real venue of literacy, its no surprising the people who took this step were nominally "christians" - but so what? After heavy borrowing from the Arabs, how can this be seen as symptomatic of some christian scientific spirit? What was significant is that they VIOLATED christianityes presumption of waiting for divine revelation, and employed a research-based METHOD.

I vigorously disagree. I can only recommend some reading of Jean Bottero's work on Mesopotamian society; quite clearly, while not developing rigorous science as we use the term, they WERE engaged in a very honest enquiry into the natuire odf the world in which they find themselves. Bottero goes on to argue that it is this legacy of methodical investigatiuon which the Greeks inherit and which they then transform. Nomad's claim is prima facie untenable.

Vorkosigan

Yes. So for me the issue is more complex than "Christianity." I think it is possible that the assertion "Christianity was indispensible for the rise of science in the west" to be true in a significant way. What I don't see, when I look at the recent writing on it, is the right focus.

I think Bede and the writers he works with mis-identify the role of Christianity. The approach is overly philosophical, and the things Bede lists are inherent in human cognition and not really in Christianity. For me the key role of Christianity is institutional and practical, for example, in fostering informed debate and intellectual exchange. Did orthodoxy have an intellectual life like western Christianity?

Yes, I can see this. For me the printing press was an even bigger factor than Christianity. No other thing increased interactions like it did. I am currently in the middle of Eisenstein's now-classic The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Fabulous.

Another thing I read lately was Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies which is about agent based modeling of human societies. The writers rely on the concept of evolutionarily stable strategies to explain how interactions among actors (agents) in a social situation, can lead to optimax strategies even in complex situations where thousands of agents interact without any knowledge of the overall system. One of the articles is about the subak system in Bali, where small groups of rice farmers form cooperatives to distribute water from irrigation systems. Over thousands upon thousands of fields, all with different kinds of rice and different microclimates, farming families, etc, nevertheless, these small cooperatives manage to achieve optimum water distribution against three factors of water supply, labor supply (if farmers all want water at once, then demand too great, labor bottlenecks develop) and pest control. The system is mediated by links formed in temple festivals and rituals. In this situation, agents move toward optimum because they informally exchange information on field states, labor situation, and pest situation in large festivals (in addition to formal meetings).

How does this relate? When you think about it, such a situation resembles Europe after printing, with a sudden rise in interactions among different actors. Thanks to printing, large printing families mediated links between many different kinds of intellectual groups. Eisenstien notes that many families hosted translators and other literary and scientific types in their homes, and formed informal but farflung communities. I sometimes wonder if the rise of science is overexplained by historians, and whether simple interaction systems like this can explain its rise. <shrug>

Careful! When the history of science bug bites, it bites hard!

Vorkosigan

NOGO

First I would like to congratulate you on your debating skills. You seemed to have avoided all the points that I threw at you and it hardly shows. Obviously you have a lot of experience.

It is not just the ability to reason but to reason in a structured way. Deductive reasoning is structured. Ptolemy's work is structured. In fact the idea that one can model the world using math is a far greater step than the scientific method you speak about.

I do not buy the idea that the scientific method suddenly appeared in the 17th century and I certainly do not buy that Christianity had anything to do with it. But let us be more precise what exactly did Christianity contribute to the scientific method?

Chrisitanity's focus is on salvation, on God, spirituality and the afterlife. Where and when did Christianity ever care about trying to predict the trajectory of a rock? Science is too mundane. Science is of this world and as Jesus says he is not of this world.

So please explain how does one go from salvation to the scientific method? What precisely is the Christian contribution?


There is a lot of what we call science today which cannot be verified using the scientific method. Much of astronomy is like that. We cannot make a star explode in the lab. Geology, paleontology and many others are almost completely unverifiable by the scientific method. Evolution is much debated for that very reason. What was much debated in the 18 hundreds was whether the earth was flat and whether it revolved around the Sun or not. This debate is ofcourse over. So you see nothing has changed. The scientific method did not change people, it but a tool among others.


You are splitting hair. What I am saying is that the Greeks made significant progress in trying to understand the world based on observations and deductive reasoning. It is easy to see how this would lead to a more "pure" type of method of investigating the world and how it works. Christianity on the other hand bases its thinking on inspired truths. That is a million miles away from the scientific method. Do you see the difference? One can never lead to the other. They are opposite, contrary and get into each other's way.

The Greeks made a significant step toward structured investigation and science by the use of mathematics in their modelling. What is extraordinary about Ptolemy is the fact that he modelled the solar system using math. This, in my opinion, is the greatest and most important step in the structured method of investigating the way the world works. Far greater than the scientific method itself. But again it is easy to see the link. You, like Bede, are trying to break this obvious link.


Sorry but I cannot agree with this black and white view of when this magic thing called science started. You obviously need this to hold the opinion that you have but I just don't see it that way.

I believe that Galileo, Kepler and Newton were reaonably sure that they were correct and it was not the scientific method which proved that they were.

It way it works is rather different. People who formulate a theory and create a model do so based on observation. The more they use the model the more they have confidence that the model can be used to predict results. Where the model is right or wrong is matter for philosophers. Newton's F=ma was wrong. We know that now but in a limited way it is still correct and is still used to predict trajectories of missiles and other things. Ptolemy's model is also still correct in a limited way. It can be used to predict the position of the moon (as seen from earth) etc.
They are both right and they are both wrong. What has changed is that today we have far better measuring instruments that permit us to refine our models.


Again you avoid the issue. Modelling the world using mathematics is a key element on the way to modern science. You want to see a big transition where there is not. Ideas evolved.


Again you side step the point that I made.
My point is that the case which you making can also and perhaps even better be made with music. Let me put it another way. You ask why science started in Europe? I ask why did all the other disciplines also have known trmendous progress in Europe more than elsewhere? I am just betting that you will not be able to make a case where "real" music suddenly appeared in Christian Europe in the 17th century.

Music is very structured quais mathematical as Pythagoras theorized. It is related to wave theory and again it was the Greeks who showed the way.


No you are saying far more than that. You are saying that only Europe had one essential ingredient which would have prevented all other people from ever developing science.


And what does Chistianity have to do with this?

Refining of ideas is based on need. Industralization and exploration of the planet created needs which pushed people to refine ideas that they had. For example the need to navigate led to the creation of a better clock which can then be used to measure time more accurately etc.

But what does Christianity have to do with any of this?

It is claimed that 10% of the population in the Roman empire of the first century were Jews. Not exactly a small people.

Copernicus was Polish. Was Poland a big nation in the 16th century?

I debated Bede on this subject before.
I am satisfied that you and Bede have not been able to show a link between science and the Christian faith. However my satisfaction pales compared with yours and Bede's satifaction with the belief that death of a man 2000 years ago saved us all.
So when are you going to look at that with the save critical attitude that you preach in the paragraph above.

You are extrapolating based on too little information.


Right! But a Christian is not in a position to preach on this point.
I see not reason to explore further not because I am satisfied in my beliefs but because neither you nor Bede have given me any reason to doubt. At any rate it is you who are making the claim.

Now if you can tell us precisely what the claim is, as I requested above, and show us evidence, then perhaps we can have a real debate.

edited by Toto to fix quote tag

Nomad

I suspect that the theory needs modification and tightening up, though like you I accept that it is too much of a coincidence that Western Europe was Catholic/Protestant, and it both triggered and led that Scientific Revolution that has produced such astonishing technological and scientific advances in the last 3 or 4 centuries.

I would have to see what you mean by an "institutional (framework)" and "practical" (practical what?), though I suspect that you might be on the right path. From the time of the beginning of Scholasticism (c. 9th-10th Century) the Catholic West and Orthodox East began a radical departure in ways of thinking. The West embraced rationalism as a means of studying theology and philosophy, and eventually nature or naturalism. This movement went largely unnoticed in the East, and later was actually condemned, especially after the Great Schism of 1154. To this day many Orthodox theologians will not grant that some of the greatest scholars of the Scholastic movement, like St. Anslem and St. Aquinas are actual saints, and their work is widely rejected. As a result, the East continued with what is traditionally called the "Patristic" worldview first exemplified by the Early Fathers (late 2nd to 7th Century). The intellectual focus of the East remained theological and mystical rather than rationalist and systemic. Works like Aquinas' Summa Theologica were unknown to the Orthodox, or condemned.

I would recommend a reading of the article I cite above, as it will help to give a brief overview to the intellectual development of the Scholastic movement. It lead, I believe to both the Reformation, and later to the Enlightment, and in between, helped to make the scientific method widely embraced by intellectuals throughout the West. Keep in mind that the article is written as a kind of apologetic against both the Orthodox, and also Catholic mystics who view rationalism with considerable suspicion, if not outright hostility.

I think that this period is one of the least studied, and least understood, of modern times, which is most unfortunate. Secularists look to the Enlightment and its aftermath, while Protestants and Catholics tend to focus on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, together with selective interest in the Early Fathers. The Scholastics then seem to fall through the cracks of historical inquiry. I admit that I am not personally very familiar with the men of this period, and their works. But as the interest in them grows, and we learn more about what they did and thought, I suspect that we will unlock some of the answers to the questions being posed in this thread.

Without a doubt the printing press stands as one of the great inventions of all history. Without the ability to produce books in huge numbers and relatively cheaply no great leap in knowledge could have ever been possible. Not only did it make the Age of Science possible, but it also helped to bring democracy to the West.

Hmm... do I detect traces of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand at work in the fields of Bali?

I suspect that the record is going to show a highly complex convergence of circumstances that will prove to be intellectual, cultural/theological, technological, social and political. One caution against putting too much weight just on the printing press is the fact that moveable type originated elsewhere, did it not? I think it was in China. Regardless, several societies do appear to have had some of the contributing factors, but only one had all of them.

Maybe it is what amounts to the "perfect storm" of human kind's intellectual/philosophical/theological worldview meeting up with the technological tool (the printing press) that made the scientific revolution possible.

Thanks for the interesting thoughts and exchange Michael. I think I am going to have to go out and buy Summa Theologica, and read it in its entirety now. Until now I have contented myself with reading only pieces of it, together with commentaries from others. Considering the $200Cdn price tag, I hope that I can be forgiven the procrastination.

Peace,

Nomad