worldling

Bede's raison d'etre seems to be to proclaim what ideal bedfellows are Christianity and science, and how the latter could not even exist without the former. Bede is also a member of the Catholic Church.

Could this be the same Catholic Church whose senior cardinal - the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family - claimed recently that the HIV virus was too small to be blocked by condom rubber? A claim repeated by priest, nuns, and archbishops around the world?

Christianity, eh? Where would science be without its benign influence?

lpetrich

"The Age of Reason ventured to doubt whether God really commanded that all males and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered, while the maidens should be preserved. The Bishop indignantly reported that the maidens were not reserved for immoral purposes, as Paine had wickedly suggested, but as slaves, to which there could be no ethical objection."

Bertrand Russell: The Fate of Thomas Paine, reprinted in Why I Am Not a Christian.

Online in this collection of quotes.

BR had also noted what happened to some bishop (the same one?) who, in responding to Thomas Paine, had conceded that some parts of the first five Bible books had not been written by Moses, and that some of the Psalms had not been written by King David. He got in some sort of serious trouble; I forget exactly what.

Hugo Holbling

Is there a possibility that anyone will read Stark's work and criticise it afterwards?

gregor

A somewhat minor quibble,

Bede challenged someone to point out where South Americans invented the calculus.

As to the calculus, I watched a very interesting Nova broadcast in late October mentioning that Archimedes discovered integral calculus in 220 B.C.E. However, his work on this subject was lost to the ravages of time until the 1800s [I think].

Bede

Of course, Archimedes wasn't a South American! I knew something about this. It comes from a Palimpsest that was recently sold and is now being examined. It tell us something about Greek science that although Archimedes was gropping towards calculus in 250BC (he didn't actually get there), his work was never built on by his fellow Greeks. Compare that to how fast Newton's work was accepted and built on in Christian Europe.

You don't just need an individual genius but also a whole milieu where ideas can take root.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

lpetrich

First, I wonder what Adora's South American stuff is.

Archimedes had not really discovered integral calculus; he had come up with a "method of exhaustion" for finding the value of pi. Essentially, one constructs an inscribed and a circumscribed polygon with some number of sides and makes that number go to infinity with the help of trigonometric half-angle formulas. Their circumference/radius and area/radius^2 ratios will then go to 2*pi and pi respectively.

Archimedes's method does have an element of the integral calculus in it, but it was not general enough to be called an almost-invention of it. That was to wait over a millennium.

And Bede seems to think that the only way one could possibly have developed calculus is to have believed in Jesus Christ. But why were Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, etc. able to get anywhere in mathematics even though they had never heard of Jesus Christ?

Applying Bede's and Stark's thesis to mathematics, one can plausibly conclude that one can only do mathematics if one believes in reincarnation and refuses to eat beans, as Pythagoras had done.

As to Rodney Stark's book, I might certainly read it some time, at least when Bede gets around to reading books like Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle and Richard Price's Deconstructing Jesus. I wonder how different it will be from other Xtian-apologetics books, however; how will it be much different from what our good friend Ed says here.

Finally, I think that Bede's style of argumentation is cherry-picking combined with misrepresentation of his selections as the whole package.

Bede

Ipetrich, Stark is a professional academic sociologist and his book is published by Princeton University Press. To accuse him of being an apologist when you haven't read his work is simply childish. Your mind is clearly sealed shut against ideas you don't want to hear.

B

Layman

On what basis do you classify Stark as a writing "Xtian-apolgetics books"? And what makes you think that Stark is a Christian apologist?

Apikorus

I haven't read Stark, but I suspect his and Bede's argument goes something like this: Monotheistic religion in general, and Christianity in particular, promoted a worldview in which the "mind of God" was revealed in his creation, Nature. Rather than viewing Nature as discordant - an erratic sequence of compromises between a multitude of irrational, conflicting powers - the greatest thinkers were instead focused on understanding and explicating Nature's divine harmony, all for the glory of God. Yadda yadda yadda.

This all seems plausible, and even probable. However, it doesn't rule out the possibility that the Greeks, who knew a thing or two, might have developed science and technology far sooner, had only their civilization survived. I imagine Stark must deal with the Greeks, and I'd be curious what he has to say.

I think it a stretch to conclude that Christianity was uniquely suited to the development of modern science. But on the other hand, the oft-heard claim that religion is necessarily antagonistic toward science is quite wrong-headed.

Toto

Stark does not appear to be an apologist. He has also written The Rise of Christianity which provides an explanation for the spread of Christianity that does not rely on the resurrection or believers willing to die for the faith or the hand of God.

It would also appear that Stark does not think a belief in Jesus is helpful for science so much as monotheism, and Christians were some of the biggest monotheists around.

One of the reviewers says that Stark gained insight into early Christianity through his study of the Moonies. I would like to read this, but so many books, so little time. . .