andrewcriddle

Hi Richard

I'm uncertain exactly what you're claiming.

Are you saying a/ that Ancient Christians rejected atomism of all kinds and descriptions or b/ that they only rejected overtly atheist forms of atomism ?

In your earlier posts I got the impression that you were claiming a/ and was dubious though without the detailed knowledge to challenge such a claim.

In this post you seem to be claiming b/ I'm sure claim b/ is correct but it would IIUC have been common ground within very large sections of the ancient world, and not a distinctive Christian position.

Andrew Criddle

countjulian

Hi all. I've been absent from BCH for a while, off in the political forums and elswhere arguing about Islam (those fanatics are really out of control, something needs to be done... but I digress).

A site actually devoted to promoting Epicureanism today, here http://www.epicurus.net/ , has the relevant portions of Lactantius

Bede

The trouble is that Lucretius was a notorious atheist. Carrier claimed that atomism was rejected because it led to atheism rather than because atheists held it to be true. He claimed: "Atomism in one form or another became fundamental to all ancient science and was only abandoned under Christianity--largely because it was so successful at explaining observations without appealing to the divine, hence it was seen as a temptation to atheism and its advocates were thus suspect."

Besides, Lactantius's objections are perfectly valid and Lucretius's ideas seriously half-baked. As I said, I would be very interested in seeing Carrier's rather strong remarks backed up (although he may well be right, it does need to be demonstrated). To find Christians attacking an atheist is no surprise.

Best wishes

Bede




Best wishes

Bede

EthnAlln

An interesting contrast between the two styles, so different that one might well be called "natural philosophy" and the other "true science" is provided by the work of Aristotle and Archimedes on the principle of the lever. Aristotle (or rather, whichever of his pupils wrote the "Mechanics") used some rather occult properties to account for the principle of the lever, arguing for example that rotational motion was a sort of dialectical contradiction, since the center of rotation was not actualloy in motion. He argued that the fixity of the center of rotation exerted a retarding influence on the motion of other particles, and that the retardation was proportional to the distance of the point from the center. Hence the law of the lever: Force x distance from center is the same for two forces that balance and cause no rotation. His "retarding influence" doesn't add anything to the observation that points father from the center are moving faster. It's a sort of verbal band-aid put over ignorance, as I suggested in another thread, like saying that opium makes people sleep because it has a dormitive virtue.

Contrast that with Archimedes' elegant symmetry assumptions and geometric proofs of the law. Here you see a mathematical model, that amounts to theoretical physics worthy of Newton.

EthnAlln

Jaki is an interesting character. I knew him when I was a graduate student (even, as a good Catholic at the time, confessed to him once or twice). He lost a vocal chord to some illness (I'm not sure what) and once gave a lecture in which he mentioned that during the recovery from this illness, he had sought to learn physics in order to find a watertight proof of the existence of God. He concluded the lecture by saying that he came to realize that physics could not provide what he wanted. He and I had a common scorn for another local, the pseudo-scientist Velikovsky. I thought that he, being a Hungarian, would be interested when Imre Lakatos came to town, but he didn't show up at the lecture. (He later told me he was afraid he might "say something untoward" if he did. I don't think he was serious.)

There is a good case for Medieval Christian roots of modern science. The series by Marshall Clagett on Archimedes in the middle ages shows how much interest there was at Oxford and other universities in recovering the ancient Greek texts. It of course wasn't modern science. They had many assumptions that turned out to be common-sense prejudices. Nevertheless, the general idea of law was important. Science has classical, Islamic, and Christian roots. But most modern science is so far beyond its origins that those roots are essentially irrelevant to modern practice.

Malachi151

This is a fat load of nonsense.

There are no roots of science whatsoever from Christianity or Islam.

All that the Christians and Muslims did was inherit texts and knowledge that had been developed by others.

For the most part they destroyed science, and then, only hundreds of years later, some people who were in institutions that held the ancient texts started to re-evalute them.

To claim that "Christianity" contributed to scientific thought is like claiming that Soviet Communism contributed to free market theory.

Were their members of the Communist Party who worked in Soviet institutions who persued the study of free market theory during the 1970s and 1980s?

Yes, absolutely.

To claim that their persuits were "the product of Soviet Communism" is completely absurd however.

Muslims have been attributed with all kinds of scientific advances that are not really theirs because they simply held the knowledge when the Europeans came in contact with it, but it didn't origionate from them or from Islamic thought.

The Muslim world inherited knowledge that was the product of both Indian and Greek materialists, whose works made their way to the Middle East when their cultures were overtaken by religious zealots. In Greece this was the Christians and in India the Hindus.

In all of these cultures, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, they were very much like Soviet Communism, i.e. centralized, uniform dictatorships, where everyone had to be a member of "the party" in order to be allowed to exist or to have any work.

All of the institutions were run under the banner of the dominant organization, i.e. the Catholic Church, the Islamic Caliph, and whoever dominated the Hindus.

Yes, there were individual "heroes", whose work trancended the institutions and thinking of their culture and the religious framework in which they existed, and these people had to navigate the social and political structures to keep themselves out of harms way and allow their work to proceed, but in every case these pioneers, mostly of engineering since it was practical and didn't present obvious theological threats, were working against the tenants of the popular theology, not through it.

In all cases only materialism has produced any kinds of results.

All that one has to do to see how the Christian destroyed science in read the works of the early Chrsitain fathers, its all their plain as day in black and white.

They denounced the concept of atoms outright, they denounced naturalistic explanations for anything, they claimed that all knowledge came from god, and that they ounly source of knowledge that they needed was "Jesus" e.g.:

Regardless of how precisely correct various ancients were about the specifics, they were certianly more correct than the Christians about anything, but most importantly they didn't construct mental obsticals to further inquisition and refinement of knowledge.

I have two large sections about this in my paper on evolution:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...nst_Naturalism

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...stic_Worldview

Then this nonsense mentioned earlier about how its not really "Christianity per se" that hurt science, just Catholic Christianity, because science advanced under Protestantism, is also nonsense.

Science advanced in the Protestant regions because Protestatism broke the back of state control over thought and action, thus the Protestant areas had weaker control over free speech and free inquiry. It wasn't that Protestants were doing the advances, it was that materialists had more freedom in Protestant areas, not because Protestants wanted to give it to them, but because the Protestanst were fractured and politically and instutionally weaker.

And, also, many people who remained Christians in name nevertheless began persuing material explanations for phenomena.

All advance really can be attributed to materialism. Even when religious instutions sponsored advances in science or engineering the advances came through materialism, not prayer, not scripture, not divine revelation.

lpetrich

I'm not sure how far I can accept Malachi151's version, because St. Thomas Aquinas and others were willing to do what Tertullian had objected to; Aquinas had produced a "mottled Xianity of Aristotelian composition", to paraphrase Tertullian. But Malachi151 is likely correct about the early Church Fathers; many of them had little interest in science, and pagan philosophy in general.

As Richard Carrier notes in Was Christianity Too Improbable to be False?, section 17. Did the Earliest Christians Encourage Critical Inquiry?, Paul's idea of method is not rational argument or assessment of evidence, but instead receiving revelations from the Holy Spirit. Celsus, an early critic of Xianity, noted that inquiring about Xian doctrines would often lead to "do not question, just believe!" The theologian Origen, our only source on Celsus, quotes that -- and defends that policy!

RC noted that Celsus advocated that one should "follow reason and a rational guide, since he who assents to opinions without following this course is very liable to be deceived." And that there is nothing like that in the Bible.

But I wonder when some Xian apologist is going to construct some "mottled Xianity with metaphysical-naturalist composition" -- or has already done so.

And I'm not sure how much I can accept EthnAlln's dichotomy between "true science" and "natural philosophy", though I agree that Aristotle's understanding of the lever law is much more fumbling than Archimedes's.

Malachi151

I explain why Aristotle was nominally accepted by Christians in my article on evolution.

Aristotle was an anti-materialist, teleologist, who refuted Democitian atomism, Epicureanism, and evolution.

Aristotle said that all things in nature are designed by a divine intelligence.

Aristotle and Plato were the last pre-Christian Greek thinkers to be cast out of the Christian paradigm, and the first to be reaccepted back into it during the Renessance.

This was the case because their views were so close to Christianity, and, of course, wrong and inferior to the materialists.

Richard Carrier

Just very briefly and then I'll sign out here:

(1) Since Savior of Science has been cited or quoted to me by laymen several times, but none of those who mention it had ever heard of Lloyd or Sarton, or Lindberg or Ferngren, I conclude more laymen are reading Jaki than the more mainstream or traditional historians of science. Stark, Thaxton, and Percey were all clearly influenced by Jaki, and their books are hitting popular audiences (Stark especially and most widely, Thaxton and Pearcey mainly among Christians interested in apologetics). I accept as a given that hardly anyone reads anything about the history of science, but those who are reading in the field who are not in the field themselves, seem to be reading Jaki or Jaki-influenced authors far more frequently than is warranted. Make of that what you will.

(2) When I said Aristotle was a creationist, I did not mean a proponent of creation-ex-nihilo, but an anti-evolutionist, i.e. God made animals and man, by whatever mechanism (Aristotle I imagine would have been a fan of "guided evolution" today), though certainly he was also in favor of God being the agency behind cosmic order as well, again by whatever mechanism. And most Aristotelians agreed with this even before Christians took up the cause. Exceptions, like Strato, were not preserved and thus proportions might be biased by the medieval selection of texts, but a big sell for preserving Ptolemy and Galen was that they were Aristotelian creationists: Ptolemy believing the solar system was a divinely ordained mechanism; Galen writing his magisterial treatise On the Use of the Parts specifically to prove intelligent design of the human body through detailed anatomical study (and Galen railed viciously against anti-ID anatomists like Erasistratus).

(3) Though my dissertation is not specifically on Christian attitudes towards atomists, it will touch on the most relevant expressions of Christian attitudes towards natural philosophy, up to Eusebius, and I will be publishing my dissertation as a book, so you can all read about that then. For now, any electronic search of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (and the Nicene Fathers, both collections I believe can be found online) for atheist and Epicur will give you a picture of how Christians responded to atomistic natural philosophy. However, I do think we need to distinguish atomisms that were effectively atheistic (Epicurus, Strato, Erasistratus, possibly Hipparchus, Aristarchus, etc.) from atomisms that were effectively creationist (Galen, Ptolemy, etc.), though the latter were rarely if ever purely atomistic (Galen, at least, embraced qualitative theory, and employed atomist principles only so far).

(4) I think it is clear to anyone who reads Christian polemic in antiquity widely enough, that what bothered Christians most about atheists were the principles they used to justify that atheism, and those principles invariably involved atomism ("the elements of this world"). Pure atomism is entirely incompatible with Christian theology, and Christians knew it. Atomism and atheism thus came to be treated as either synonymous or causally inseparable: atomism was seen as inevitably leading to atheism--not the other way around. You never see Christians in antiquity arguing that someone started an atheist and then "reasoned from" their atheism that atomism was true. You do see Christians claiming on occasion that one who wants to be an atheist will seek a system supporting that, and atomism was "the" system such people flocked to, but as an already-existing doctrine, not something they figured out on their own. Thus, atomism was treated much the same way as idolatry (and in some cases the comparison was made explicitly), as an alluring temptation to sin that Christians had to be protected from. Hence Origen specifically did not allow his students even to read atheist natural philosophers--not because they argued "for atheism" (hardly any treatises in antiquity did that), but because they argued for principles (i.e. atomistic principles) that led to atheism. For example, Origen didn't prohibit his students from reading Epicurean treatises on theology. He prohibited them from reading Epicurean treatises full stop.

(5) How Christianity held back science should not need explaining: Christianity practically invented the idea of "heresy" and used it from very early on as a tool of oppression and compulsion to conformity, conditions under which scientific revolutions are impossible, because scientific thinking requires the ability to question and deviate from authority (experimental philosophy by definition requires making observations authoritative, which implicitly refuses the authority of any Church to decide what we will believe). To an extent Christianity borrowed this idea from the Jews (and Stark is right at least about this: all monotheism has this outcome as an inevitable consequence), but the Jews under Greece and Rome had no power to suppress heresies and thus had to live with an open intellectual society, and heresies thrived happily. But then Christians got the power the Jews always wanted, and that was the end for any significant science.

When Christian power was successfully broken a thousand years later and it thus became possible for many "heresies" to exist and defend themselves (the many heresies of Protestantism being the chief example--I know it's not popular to call Lutheranism or Calvinism or Anglicanism "heresy" but by any definition employed up till then, they were--they were just heresies with armies), only then did science have a chance, and not an assured one at that, but at least the soil was watered--it then depended on the flowers not getting stomped. But that simply recreated what had already been the case before Christianity came into power: free and open dissent and debate was the pagan norm and under it science flourished reasonably well, and might even have hit upon the scientific revolution had the social system and economy not collapsed in the 3rd century (which was not Christianity's fault, and I've written on this point several times now), or had Julian's effort to create an open society in the late 4th century not failed (which was Christianity's fault, though perhaps not consciously so). In the end, social and political conditions forced Christianity to tolerate science and thus allow the scientific revolution to happen (though not without attempts to stomp a few flowers), but Christianity as such was never a cheerleader. Individual Christians, of course, were cheerleaders (since it was effectively illegal for anyone not to be a "Christian") and these cheerleaders certainly (out of obvious necessity) mined Christian ideology and rhetoric for "safe" and socially and politically persuasive ways to cheer, but that is not the same thing as Christianity being conducive to science. It was more like trying to make a square peg fit a round hole. That several very clever men succeeded at forcing the fit doesn't warrant praising the round hole for being so accommodating.

Malachi151

Do you have a reference for this?

Thanks