joedad

NOGO,

Concerning Bede's above quote, do you see paganism as being a necessary precondition for the rise of civilization? I see this question as identical to Bede's question about christianity and science. It might be interesting to hear Bede's take.

And one could also form an equally strong argument along the lines that science, loosely defined, begets civilization, and easily working a larger form of humanism into such a view.

Now if we want to talk about theism more generally, one could also make a convincing argument that it is contained both within a larger humanism and a larger definition of science.

I think the basic difference between Bede and most others here is that Bede appears to see everything, including science, nested within his particular theistic beliefs, and goes about looking for ways to demonstrate such a bias. My bias is the opposite, as it is clear to me that any and all theistic forms are demonstrably contained within the larger human experience. There are certainly many theologies and myths and stories existing within that human experience, and asserting precisely the opposite, and Bede's merely happens to be one of these. It's quite clear that gods and bibles are contained within that larger experience, and not vice versa.

The difference between an actual precondition and a necessary precondition - or cause - is an enormous difference. There are perhaps many of both associated with the invention of the wheel, agriculture, the use of fire, metallurgy, writing, movable type, navigation, art, architecture, simple machines, et al., none of which I might add have anything to do with anything demonstrably christian, and all of which are most certainly necessary preconditions to the rise of science in Europe. But Bede's blind attachment to theism and his theology prevents his seeing things otherwise. At this point anyway, and in comparison, all other influences on his conclusions are unfortunately being rendered moot.

Sauron

So basically you're saying that while many philosophies and/or religions might have some of these seven characteristics you listed, only Christianity (and perhaps Judaism) have them all.

Which means you're back to your previous argument that Christianity was a necessary precondition for science in Europe.

1. If it takes all seven of these characteristics for science to sprout, and
2. If only Judeo-Christianity possesses all seven, then
3. Judeo-Christianity was absolute requirement in Europe, before any modern science would be developed.

Correct?

Family Man

Bede --

Now I think you have a interesting thesis. I'm not sure I buy it, but this I'd be willing to consider as a serious possibility.

I don't think you can establish this on a message board. You'd need to do a comparative study between Christianity and, say, Islam at the time and establish that Christianity had all of these characteristics while Islam did not -- and establish that this is on e of the reasons why the Islamic East did not move into modern science while the Christian West did.

I've never seen an argument like this, and if you could establish it I would think it would be a major original work. And since it is certainly beyond anything I know about, I'll wish you luck.

NOGO

Bede,

And you again avoided THE Question!


Sometimes you make astonishing statements like this one:

"if Ptolemy had started with Cop's axioms he could have done the same thing"

A jewel.

I just wonder which axioms you are thinking of here.
If Ptolemy had started with Einstein's axioms then he would have come up with relativity. Riiiiiiight!

Copernicus had a brilliant idea, repeat brilliant.
Since all the celestial bodies had one motion in common, nameely the 24 hour rotation, perhaps it is the earth that turns and not the whole universe. Brilliant!

I would venture that no one had this idea before Copernicus.
But why him and not Ptolemy.
Ptolemy was not Christian, of course!

Sauron

This is rather incomplete and misleading.

To take Bede's portrayal of Islamic science, one might walk away from his above paragraph thinking that Muslim scientists never bothered to investigate the cause for any event. After all, what would be the point? If they already knew (or believed) that God was the cause behind ALL events, then why go to the trouble of investiating? It would be pointless since the cause was already known, up front. In fact, what's the point in having scientists at all? I mean, they're just going to shrug their shoulders and say that for whatever effect you observe, God must be the cause, right? The reality is that things were more complex and subtle than that. Inquisitive people still found ways to conduct science - if they had to bend the rules on religion a little bit, or get creative about the interpretation of scripture. Free-thinkers exist in every society, even Islamic ones.

[1]
In the first place, Islam has the same bifurcation that Christianity does; i.e., a division between:

(a) those who think that God is in control of everything, even the choices we think are freewill; and
(b) those who think that God has one will, but that secondary causes play a part.

Even though the (a) and (b) examples above are strictly connected to matters of theology, the question of "first cause" and control of events extended to the natural world as well. If man is subject to the will of Allah, then how much more is nature subject to his will?

[2]
There was an entire school of thought that explored secondary causes, both in their theological implications as well as in teh natural world. Britannica:

But this viewpoint was not without challenge.:

[3]
There was an entire philosophical effort launched, with several schools of thought on this matter -- primarily as an effort to answer Christianity. It was known as kalam:

http://www.kalam.org/papers/kamali.htm
The first thing to note here is the obviousness of the concept of secondary cause, and how indispensable it is, to the running of daily life and society. A society without the concept of secondary cause could not punish criminals, diagnose diseases, etc. So the claim that Islam had no concept of secondary cause doesn't even pass the "sniff" test - the ramifications of such a belief are so extreme, that no Islamic civilization could have ever been established in the first place.

The second thing to notice is that -- even in this formulation that I quoted above -- notice that the abstract concept of secondary causes is not ruled out. It is merely demoted, and re-classified as an outcome of some primary event (however many years ago) that Allah initiated. Like a series of billiard balls - Allah is the guy with the cue stick, and he performs the "break". There can be numerous secondary and even tertiary causes - balls bouncing off each other, ricocheting off the wall, etc. As long as Allah is acknowledged as the First Cause, then all other events can be viewed as merely outcomes of the First Action. Religious orthodoxy is preserved, and science can still continue - as long as the scientist recognizes that whatever cause he is examining - secondary, tertiary, quaternary, etc. - ultimately can trace its genealogy back to some First Event that Allah himself initiated. If you go upstream far enough, you'll find that God did everything - a viewpoint shared by Deists and many liberal Christians today, actually. For Islam, it was a matter of perspective and correct attribution - but it did not obstruct the conduct of science, per se.

[4]
In summary, Bede's description above matches *one* of the schools of thought, the strict Ashariyah. But:

1. even the Ashariyah found ways to preserve their religious viewpoint and still conduct science; and
2. Bede overreaches when he tries to make the strict Ashariyah viewpoint the official view of all Muslims, or the doctrine of all Islam.

Quote:

The Ash‘ariyya denied the Aristotelian notion of causality and provided an alternative version of their own which may be summarised as follows: The world which means everything other than God, consists of transitory elements, atoms and accidents, created and recreated from one instantaneous period to the next. The world is thus not only created ex-nihilio but it is kept in existence by a process of continuous recreation out of nothing, with God’s power and will being the only cause and explanation for its continuity. What we normally think of as causes and their effects are really creations out of nothing which do not persist after their creation.[28] There is consequently no connection between one moment of creation and the next and therefore no horizontal nexus between things. The Ash‘arites thus atomise matter, space, and time as a result of which the universe becomes a domain of separate and disconnected entities. There is harmony in nature only because it is created and governed by God. Since all things are attributed to God there is no recognition of horizontal or secondary causes.[29]

NOGO

Show me where in Christian doctrine is this stated.

The very concept that nature has "laws" is a Pagan concept.
It was started by the Greeks.
The best thing that you can point to on the Hebrew side is the book of Enoch. But clearly this book does not treat the motion of celestial bodies as being guided by "laws". It is more like "this is how God wants it". The whole thing being under the supervision of an angel.

There something fundamentally at odds here.

If natural laws drive the universe then God does not.

The Bible is full of examples where Yahweh interfers in the world according to whether his people behave or not. There is no concept of natural laws here.

In the Godpels we find the idea that people are sick blind or cripple because of sin. They have offended God or their parents have offended God and God has punished them. No laws of nature here either.

Even today the basic objection to evolution is that it leave no place for God. Natural laws and God are on opposite camps.

Christian is based on the idea of a relation of God and his people. None of it can be derived from any law of nature. In fact it can be stated that all of what Christianity claims is outside the laws of nature. From the existance of God, to the miracles all the way to salvation and the Kingdon of God, one cannot in any way associate any of these to the laws of nature. Christianity is a myth.

Vorkosigan

Great post, Sauron!

Vork's post shows he cannot conceive of science except as a thing in itself.

This does not constitute an attempt to address anything I said, nor does it refute anything I've said. Insults like this are simply dodges. This is especially true considering the numerous errors in your presentation:

This gave rise to the idea that progress was possible and provided, most famously to Francis Bacon and thence the Royal Society a further motivation for studying nature.

The idea of progress was not stimulated by the Christian faith, but as Needham demonstrated in a long section on this very topic in Sci and Civ, by Westerners appreciating the influx of Chinese inventions into their culture, and concluding that they had things better than the Greco-Romans.

The world is mathematical
The neo-platonist were right here but in a way that made the maths far too hard. When Kepler put Robert Fludd in his place he explained the difference between a world that can be described by maths and one where number has deep mystical significance.

This is too vague. There is no connection between math and Christianity; Christianity inherited its numerological traditions from earlier and other philosophies. Mathematical modeling of the world is not a specifically Christian trait, but also occurred in other cultures (like China, for example).

The world was the creation of an omnimax God who was known to be lawful.
This was essential because it gave men a reason to expect certain things in the world even if they were not apparent.

Bede, the lawfulness of the world is built into us by evolution; people obey the idea that the world is stable and regular even when the profess that they do not believe so. Ditto for this statement:

God has purposes
The world is teleological. When you see something you know there is a reason behind it.

No kidding. Teological reasoning is built into humans and other animals so that they can make predictions about the world and operate effectively in it. Perhaps you can refine these points a little more clearly so that they actually mean something.

Ending of course, in a major confusion of cause and effect:

But a metaphysical system, that really only a religion could provide, was a necessary cause of science.

These metaphysics went more than a millenium without causing science. The cause of science was not a particular metaphysics, but vast complex of social change and discovery, particularly rising capitalism, technological influxes from Arabia and China, the fragmented nature of Europe's political scene, the discovery of the New World, the expanding reach of European Colonialism, and so on. Christianity's role in the growth of science was largely ancillary and negative.

Perhaps key advantage of Christianity lay in its essential meaninglessness; early proto-scientists could claim that the world was designed by God and things in it reflect divine images, later scientists could claim that its machinelike functioning without God was a sign of His divine plan. Any scientist could find whatever intellectual rationalization he needed in his religion. For example, the triumph of the mechanical philosophy represented the triumph of Boyle over Puritans and other theologians, who had differing visions of how God related to the universe. It is ironic to read the early arguments of the religious mechanicians, such as Glanvil, who noted that the new mechnical philosophy promoted calmness, modesty, charity and prudence in differences of religion (just what atheists say science does today). it is also interesting to note that to combat the obvious atheistic tendencies of the mechanical philosophy, major figures like Charleton and Boyle argued that god was responsible for the "efficiency of every physical agent" by which he meant that God animated everything, essentially the same argument of his non-mechanistic forebearers. To get the universe they wanted, the Mechanistic Philosophes simply reconfigured god. Christianity could not be a cause of anything if it is constantly changing as our knowledge of the universe changes. Rather, Christianity, and God, is a reflection of what we know....

Vorkosigan

lpetrich

A perhaps more interesting question is how science got started in ancient Greece. Those Olympian deities seem almost too goofy to take seriously, but Bertrand Russell argues in A History of Western Philosophy argues that there was a sort of religious connection for some of it: from a sect called Orphism to Pythagoreanism and Platonism. The idea here was that mathematics is some gateway to Higher Truth and Mystic Enlightenment; Pythagoras had founded a sort of mystic cult that featured belief in the magic properties of numbers, reincarnation, and the wickedness of eating beans.

To use Bedian arguments, does this mean that to be good at mathematics, one must believe in reincarnation and refuse to eat beans?

Bede

Familyman,

Thanks for your post. You are right and I'll go away and try to work the argument through with quotes and comparisons. This thread has run its course and I'll be back at a later date with some more focused views. Perhaps, by then, NOGO will have found out just how many people, Christians and pagans, considered the rotation of the earth before Copernicus did.

Sauron's post is actually quite good and is a warning that whether we are talking about Islam or Christianity we cannot be too dogmatic about what everyone believed. That said Toby Huff and others have stated that occasionalism did have a profound influence as an explanation while the Caliphate was being hammered in all directions. But Sauron, don't use Britannica as an authority. It just looks bad. Glad to see you have become just a fan of Islam - join the club.

Vork, you were not insulted. I said you were wrong and didn't understand the issues. I stand by that. You frequently say the same to me.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Sauron

If that is what you take away from the post, then you've missed the lion's share of the content. Actually, the point of the post was to show that you and your sources jumped the gun badly by:

1. assuming that the Ashariyah viewpoint represented all of Islam, when clearly it did not;

2. assuming that there wasn't a vigorous "enlightenment-style" examination of the causality in the natural world during the medieval Islamic period (i.e., the Mutazilites);

3. assuming that even the strict Ashariyah point of view somehow excluded secondardy causes as an explanatory tool. By not probing deeper into how Islam rationalized the momentary conflict between:

(a) God as first cause and
(b) the need to run society and conduct science

you and your sources arrived at a totally preposterous conclusion: that Islam had no concept of secondary causes. Had you stopped to think about the ramifications of that supposition, and realized how often secondary causality comes into play in our daily lives, it would have become obvious to you that no human society in any age or time could function without the idea of secondary causes. Without such a belief, society isn't even possible. The sheer ridiculousness of that conclusion should have been a warning sign that you were heading down a totally bogus side alley. Yet you plowed ahead, oblivious to the preposterous conclusion that you were proferring to the rest of us.

I assume you mean the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. If so, then you'll need to draw the connection between external invasions and the rise of occasionalism - and you'll need to draw it tight and hard, with explicit A --> B causality, not mere coincidence, or cross-pollenation of thought as a result of exposure to new ideas brought in by the invaders.

Here's another quotation for you to examine:

http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H005.htm
This is a question, of course, which touches every religious tradition which avers the free creation of the universe by one God: how does the first cause relate to other causes? Indeed, can there even be other causes in the face of a sovereign 'First'? The response of kalam thinkers to this question was complicated by their commitment to an atomistic metaphysics, which seemed designed to remove all causality other than the divine from the realm of nature: this is the celebrated 'Islamic occasionalism'. Later, however, the question was debated by al-Ghazali without reference to any such metaphysical theses. Rather, the terms were those introduced by 'the philosophers', turning on the necessity of the connections between events in nature, specifically between those which we recognize as causes and their effects. Clearly these connections could not be akin to logical necessity, or there would be no room whatsoever for miracles like the 'descent' of the Qur'an; yet if the universe is the result of God's free action and not of necessity, the creator will continue to be free to act within creation. Thus the account given of causal agency in general, and of personal agency in particular, will have to allow for just that: a kind of agency proper to creatures, yet always subordinate to the influence of a free creator. al-Ghazali responds to this challenge by comprehending created causes under a patterned regularity of the sunna Allah, action willed by God: creatures do indeed contain such powers, yet always subject to the will of the One who so created them. In this way, a key Islamic religious thinker such as al-Ghazali can simultaneously insist that God alone is the only agent and yet, by God's power, others are agents as well. Thus causality can be attributed to creatures, but not causal connections of the quasi-logical sort demanded by the emanation scheme.


No, I don't think it does. The authors who contribute articles to Britannica are leaders in their fields. It's a respectable first source, and since it's widely available to a large number of people, that makes it easily verifiable. And it's succeeded in stopping several of your claims dead in their tracks, so I suppose that Britannica does the job for which I intend it.

*Sigh*. A "fan of Islam" - as opposed to what, Bede?