Wads4

"Again, some Christians, yes. But even for evolution, some Christians never had a problem once it became accepted. Do you know of where the Church officially opposed the advance of science, except for Galileo?"

I wonder if Giordano Bruno would consider that his scientific speculations had been opposed by the Church, considering how he was burned at the stake by it.

Johann_Kaspar

Well, I already mentioned Bruno and Servet, but our xians have problems dealing with the facts when they do not go along their prejudices.

Lucretius

I think it is rather simplistic to say the science & knowledge were either discouraged or encouraged by the Catholic Church.
The deeper reasons for the Dark Ages were that the "Classical Civilisation " in the Western World (including the Near East) was effectively destoyed by constant invasions by "barbarians" Goths ,Ostrogoths ,Visigoths ,Vandals ,Huns etc, etc.etc.
This was the prime cause for the lack of knowledge and scientific advances purely the fact that the Roman Empire and it's citizens just did not have the "leisure time " to enable science to advance.
Once the Empire had effectively ceased to exist in the West the Catholic Church did to an extent fill the vacuum left and did preserve a lot of classical texts,which were later to be used to "kick start " the Renaissance.
However it is a mistake to class the Dark Ages as some sort of uniform historic period (like we do with the decades the 60's or the 70's) we are here talking about a time period of hundreds of years, which cannot truly be considered homogenous ,at times science did advance and at other times it stagnated both due to a greater or lesser extent to the influence Catholic Church.
As an example of science and knowledge being frustrated you only have to look at the archaeology of where I am in the UK after the Romans left in the A.D 400's and the Anglo Saxon invasions began you can see that the sophisticated Roman style villas are soon replaced by Saxon style houses of a much simpler design and this had nothing at all to do with Christianity but more to do with the invaders ,who were generally also Non Christian.
The surviving Eastern Empire was generally engaged in conflicts with the Muslim world as well as incursions from the "Barbarian Hordes" and again was not in a position to make many scientific advances.

I admit that in this post I am also guilty of over simplification but to cover the whole of this time that we call the Dark Ages would take much more time and effort than is right in forums such as these (as can be seen by the many history books on the subject)

andrewcriddle

Bruno (probably) and Servetus (certainly) suffered ugly deaths for their religiuos/philosophical ideas rather than their scientific studies.

Servetus is a straightforward case his researches on the circulation of blood have little or no connection with the denial of the Trinity for which he was killed.

Bruno is a more complicated case but his pantheistic Platonism seems to be more a form of what we would now call 'New Age' thought than Science as normally understood.

(NB: I am not justifying either execution, on the contrary I condemn their killings, I am merely questioning whether they were persecuted for their scientific studies.)

Andrew Criddle

lpetrich

I wonder when the school of apologists represented by Bede, GakuseiDon, etc. will someday start to claim things like:

* Evolutionary biology is an outgrowth of Xianity and supports Xianity and no other belief system.

* Xianity teaches physicalist theories of mind, and the idea that it teaches mind-body dualism or a separable soul is a straw position invented by Xianity-haters.

* Xianity implies metaphyical naturalism and metaphysical naturalism implies Xianity, as one can plainly see from reading the Bible.

Chris Weimer

Bede - where do you get that Vesalius was not attacked by the Inquisition? Furthermore, I did find your silence on why the "Renaissance" that you attribute to Christianity didn't explode until after the Reformation and church divisions? Kind of funny, huh?

To the moderators: this thread doesn't belong in BC&H but S&S.

Bede

Chris,

The Renaissance started with Petrarch in the fourteenth century. It's generally said to end with the Reformation which started in 1517. Still you can argue about beginnings and ends. No one thinks the Renaissance was caused by the Reformation (or that it 'exploded' because of it, whatever that means) but some say the Reformation was caused by the Renaissance.

Vesalius: C Donald O’Malley ‘Andreas Vesalius’ Pilgrimage’ Isis 45:2 (1954)

This thread is history and belong right here. We've had this discussion before. BC&H means Biblical Criticism and (all) History.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

trexmaster

Well, how do you think that the "myth" of anti-scientific Christianity came to be endorsed in the first place?

Philadelphia Lawyer

I am not impressed by your amateurish historical scribblings attempting to debunk the obviously true statement that the Church has opposed science every step of the way from the Renaissance to the current day. As for the lightening rods, here's what White says:

White goes on to show that the Church was slow to use to use the lightning rod. But that's not really the point. Christianity had an established view that lightning, and bad weather in general, was directly caused by God or evil spirits or some such thing. It had a whole regime in place for attempting to avoid or ameliorate bad weather. This regime consisted of bell ringing, praying, burning incence, processions, and so forth. The scientific explanation for lightning, and the invention of the lightning rod, refuted the Christian explanation and obviated the need for the Christian regime of grovelling before "God". True, in mid-eighteenth century America, no Christian church had the authority to ban outright the scientific expanation and invention, but the churchmen did use their remaining authority to discourage their acceptance and use, as the above quote shows. Once the churchmen were proven wrong, they accepted the invention. Now, Christians disavow their previous explanation (and its associated regime), and claim the whole thing was never a part of "true Christianity", but only a holdover from paganism, as the article I linked to in my last post shows.

In your article, you provide a link to one scholar. Here's what he says about evolution and religion.

Here we see the process of totalitarian, Orwellian rewriting of history, that I described in my previous post, at work. Under the revisionist view, Christianity was never opposed to evolution. No, it simply questioned the rigorousness of Darwin's theory, just as any good scientist would do. What's left out is the reason for Wilberforce's criticisms in the first place. Why the fuck does a bishop care what a biologist says? Because it challenges Christian theology. Would a bishop invest the time and energy in attempting to refute a new scientific theory, if it had no impact on traditional Christian dogma? Of course not. Wiberforce, like any "good" Christian apologist, starts with the notion that Darwin must be wrong, because his theory contradicts Christian idealogy. Wilberforce explicity makes theological arguments. He ridiculed Darwin with what was to become a standard Christian cheap shot: that Darwin claimed that humans were descended from "apes". Sure, Wilberforce was willing to throw in some spurious "scientific" objections as well, if he thought they would help his case. The same thing is done today by creationists and "intelligent design" advocates. So what?

The state of play with regard to Christianity and evolution is very instructive. After having attacked and ridiculed evolution for a hundred years, Christianity has now retreated to a "compromise" position. This position consists of admitting that evolution has happened, but that "God" set the whole thing in motion, or that there was a special dispensation for humans, or some similar, untenable theory. When this falls, as it inevitably will, Christianity will say that it was always in favor of evolution, that many of evolution's leading advocates were Christians, that there is nothing in "Scripture" that is contrary to evolutionary theory (Genesis is only a myth. Didn't you know that? Every "true Christian" knows that, and has always known it!), and that anything to the contrary in the historical record is simply a misunderstanding.

We see this last process at work in the scholar you linked to with respect to Wilberforce. According to this view, it wasn't theology that motivated the bishop (oh no, never that), he simply questioned the science.

This kind of garbage has been attempted with Gallileo. Google heliocentrism and the Church and you will find a million apologists attempting to show that Gallileo wasn't persecuted for his views, that heliocentrism didn't challenge Christian theology, that Gallileo was a Christian, that the Church sponsored science, etc., etc.

At least I'm not citing my own website as an authority!

The Church opposed dissection; it opposed surgery; it opposed vaccinations.
There appears to be quite a few things that you don't know of.

Yeah, that's great. Besides standing in the way of the "hard sciences," Christianity has attempted to obstruct advances in the social sciences and humanities as well: philology, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, etc., etc., etc.

Philadelphia Lawyer

I guess you didn't look very hard. The articles cited show lots of instances of scientists being persecuted, being forced to recant, etc. I "know" that the Church opposed these things because it banned the books, it preached against them, it attacked the scientists, etc.

By the Church, I mean the Roman Catholic church, which opposed astronomy, medicine, geology, biology, etc.

Classic revisionism. Some Christians "never had a problem" with evolution, once it became accepted. Sure, after fighting tooth and nail to prevent it from becoming accepted, and having been beaten down by generations of scientists unafraid of their ignorance, stupidity, and superstitousness, some Christians now gracioulsy "accept" evolution. According to you, that means Christianity accepted it all along. We were never at war with East Asia, we have always been at war with Eurasia. . .

They didn't stop it. They tried to stop it because it refuted their idiotic and superstitous beliefs. And, always point to the few exceptional Christians who were willing to discard the traditional beliefs without too much prodding rather than the majority who refused to accept the scientific advance and in fact preached against it.