Richard Carrier

Atomism was an ancient scientific theory, if that's what you mean. Though it was not developed by scientists in our sense (and thus didn't come "from" science), it was universally adopted by all ancient scientists for largely empirical reasons. Though these reasons fell far short of the empirical standards of modern science, they were closer to scientific reasons than any other reasons one could have had at the time for adopting a theory (like religious, social, or ideological reasons).


Not the near future, no. But, yes, if any person or group out there can fly me over and provide a shower and a bed, I'll make an appearance.


I'll reply in that thread, but in general, there may well be several things in that movie I don't agree with. It should never be expected that everyone interviewed for a documentary agrees with everything else in that documentary. As long as when I am quoted my views are not misrepresented, and nothing grossly false is surrounding it, I have no quarrel with what a documentarian does--the same as for a journalist writing an article, for example, that quotes or cites something I've said or argued. I don't think the Flemming film says anything grossly false. Though it does say things I would take issue with or even argue with, none of those things are attributed to me.


lpetrich's subsequent story sounds correct to me, and reflects some of the differences between ancient and modern science, but I wouldn't call ancient ancient atomism mere fashion or hand-waving--were it only that, it wouldn't have been so remarkably prescient as to the actual physical facts underlying a wide and diverse array of phenomena (see, for example, my article Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed).

Atomism was also not an intermittent fad. 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.

Though most ancient scientists rejected the absolute atomism of Epicurus, all ancient scientists incorporated the fundamentals of atomism into their physical theories. Strato, for example, was an atomist who added fundamental natural forces in addition to atoms, thus he rejected the Epicurean notion that the only things that exist were atoms, motion and void, but he was still an atomist--just one who believed in atoms, motion, forces and void. Moreover, Strato and other scientists didn't adopt this view because it was fashionable (outside the sciences, it actually wasn't fashionable). They adopted it because it made more intelligible sense of observations with the fewest undemonstrated assumptions, when compared with all the competing theories known at the time. They just hadn't gotten around to the idea of figuring out how to test the fundamentals of atomic theory the way moderns did. That's why we call it an element of ancient science rather than modern science.

In a way you can equate ancient atomism with modern Superstring theory: a plausible but as yet untestable theory that is remarkably attractive for its explanatory power and relative simplicity. In other words, like Superstring Theory now, atomism then was a plausible but untested scientific theory that outperformed all competing theories in explanatory power and simplicity. That puts it somewhere in the middle between "scientific discovery" and "mere hand-waving fad."

But there were actual scientific discoveries in antiquity--quite astonishing ones at that. So atomism is not among what we would call "the scientific advances of antiquity," but falls into a lower category of "impressive scientific speculations of antiquity."

Toto

I'm unsticking this. Did anyone attend? Any comments?

lpetrich

Some people seem to think that modern science is somehow a branch of Xianity; their favorite argument is to claim that its origin is from medieval philosophy and theology. They also point out the theological preoccupations of many early modern scientists, like Isaac Newton. Not surprisingly, such people often end up disparaging ancient science, even though modern science owes much more to ancient science than to the Bible or early Xianity. One would have to do some rather extreme proof-texting to argue otherwise.

And making Isaac Newton a hero because of his religious beliefs strikes me as rather strange, because he was a nominal Anglican who rejected the Trinity and never went to church, and who wrote volumes of attempted interpretations of Biblical prophecies like those in the Book of Daniel, as well as on Biblical chronology and trying to find the time of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts.

Also, I think that Galileo had invented Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria with his argument that the Holy Spirit tells us how to go to heaven, now how the heavens go.

How so? Some ancient scientists, like Aristotle, had rejected atomism.

I'm not sure that I'm as impressed -- pre-Dalton atomism seems too handwaving to me. Although I do think that that article makes an excellent point about imaginative interpretation of ancient books.

Richard Carrier

All true. This refers to what is commonly called the Jaki thesis. Though he didn't invent it he has long been its leading defender. Others who have advanced versions of it include Rodney Stark, Nancy Pearcey, and Charles Thaxton. They almost always begin from completely false premises or conclusions about the ancient context, and often even rely on false premises or conclusions about the early modern and premodern periods as well.

Just to complete the example you picked, all ancient scientists also had theological preoccupations and most were creationists. There is therefore no plausible argument to be made that Christianity added anything new--and if it did, it wouldn't have taken a thousand years for the cause to have its effect. Even the economic argument doesn't wash, because the Eastern Roman Empire remained swimming in cash over most of those thousand years and still the cause didn't have the effect. Thus, Christianity can't have been the cause of the Scientific Revolution. If anything, it was holding it back--until Christianity as a political force became too weak to prevent it any longer.


You are right, I forgot about that--Aristotle remains the lone exception to my knowledge. We don't know what the position of Theophrastus was. But by the time Strato took over Aristotle's school, atomism in one form or another became standard even among the Peripatetics. It's simply assumed in Galen and Ptolemy, for example. However, this is not to confuse the matter with Epicureanism. Few ancient scientists believed that everything could be explained solely by atoms, motion, and void. Rather, most believed that everything could be explained by appealing to some sort of atoms, motion and void plus one or another set of fundamental forces or qualities. Atomism should thus be contrasted with, for example, fluid theorists (like Anaxagoras), whose alternative never caught on among scientists, probably because it had so little explanatory power.

However, among exceptions to the embrace of atomism among scientists, perhaps I should also add to Aristotle those medical researchers who rejected metaphysics altogether, though we know so little about their thinking. The one we do know a lot about, Sextus Empiricus, appears to have been comfortable with a flexible atomism as a working hypothesis, and shows no affinity for alternatives like fluid theory. But I have not adequately examined that case to be sure (since his extant works are not on his science as such).

Richard Carrier

I'll just contribute the observation that I ended up speaking far too long (I hadn't adequately timed my material), but most seemed to enjoy it.

Bede

I've been asked to drop in on this thread.

On atomism, I would be very interested in hearing the sources for Carrier's statement that Christians abandoned atomism "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."

If Christians really thought like this they would never have accepted Aristotelianism either. In fact, after plenty of debate they took his philosophy over hook, line and singer. Reactions against atomism seem only to appear after Aristotle had been canonised in the thirteenth century (and are tied up with the Eucharistic doctrines).

On the larger question of why modern science arose in the Christian west, I fear things are not as simple as Ipetrich and Carrier would like to believe. Certainly, you'll be hard pressed to find many historians today who still believe Christianity held back science. Conversely, nor do many pay attention to Jaki (a theologian) or Stark (a sociologist). Among historians the arguments are a good deal more subtle.

Carrier's reply seems to assume that Christians and ancients had the same theology and hence anything Christianity could achieve, paganism would do just as well. This is untrue, of course. Christianity was most unlike most paganism. Although you can probably find pagans who followed each aspect of Christian doctrine, hardly any shared the full Christian worldview. And despite the big variations in Christian thought, they still had more in common with each other than your average intellectual pagan. So, it is valid to ask if Christian theological ideas were conducive to science. It is very likely that they were.

Furthermore, the institutional support afforded to natural philosophy by the Catholic Church dwarfed anything available in the ancient world. The medieval universities were a new invention that gave scholars unprecedented levels of independence and security.

The most serious counterargument is Byzantium, as Carrier points out. Whether or not the Eastern Empire was swimming in cash, it never enjoyed the kind of security from exterior invasion that the West enjoyed from about 950AD. Nor did it have the sense of cultural inferiority that allowed the West to absorb the Greek and Arab achievements so readily. But most of all, it appears to have had a fundamentally different theology that never opened itself to rational study. Catholic conclusions about nature were, in large part, the result of logical deductions about God. Without the doctrines of secondary causes and divine subjection to logic, natural philosophy could go nowhere.

Best wishes

Bede

[http://www.bede.org.uk]Bede's Library - faith and reason[/url]

Richard Carrier

Aristotelianism was creationist, even when infused with atomist ideas, and therefore did not have the problem I was referring to. That is, assuming Aristotelianism was as successful as pure atomism in providing plausible explanations (no need to debate that now), you then have two systems: one that succeeds in explaining the phenomena with God, the other that succeeds as well in explaining the same phenomena without God. That is why the latter was rejected by Christians, e.g. in Gregory's panegyric of his teacher Origen he describes Origen's curricula as including a survey of natural science except anything written by atheists (i.e. atomists). Similar attacks on atomist science can be found in On the Natural Philosophers by Victorinus, the Institutes of Lactantius, and so on. Of course, there were also attacks on other systems, too, not just those of the atomists. But there is a reason Galen was preserved while Strato and Erasistratus were not: Christians approved of Galen's creationism, and disapproved of the atheism of the atomists Strato and Erasistratus, despite both of them making considerable scientific accomplishments.


I disagree--I find they ignored and altered a lot of what Aristotle said (for example, Aristotle denied any sort of afterlife)--but that isn't a debate relevant to the present issue.


Then why am I reading them in Gregory, Lactantius, Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine...?

Maybe this is just a confusion caused by my failure to qualify what I meant, between atomism as such and systems that only adopt elements of atomism. Hence I should have qualified, as I did elsewhere, by distinguishing systems that incorporate a modified atomism, and systems purely atomistic. If that is the problem, then I apologize for creating the confusion.


I never said they were simple.


Actually, the converse is the case in my experience. But that's just a polling argument, and I'm sure we could each wheel out long lists of names to no avail. Ultimately, there is a difference between a rejection of the conflict model and an embrace of the Jaki thesis, and I hope you are not confusing the two. I am not asserting the conflict model but a middle position in agreement with most contemporary historians of science, like Ferngren and Lindberg.


I agree. Yet more people read Jaki and Stark, hence their ideas are more rapidly becoming the "lore" among laymen around the country.


I disagree, at least insofar as you are implying certain Christian ideas conducive to science were ideas absent from antiquity. But that's a debate for another day.


As an expert on ancient science, I have yet to observe any actual difference in effect. Hardly any significant advance responsible for ushering in the Scientific Revolution was funded by the Church, but conducted privately by independently wealthy individuals, just as in antiquity. And regardless of how much money was spent on them, medieval universities did not offer a superior education to what was available to Ptolemy or Galen, until after the Scientific Revolution had already begun.

Of course, we must distinguish early from late medieval conditions. Far more amazing scientific advances were made between 300 BC and 300 AD than were made between 300 AD and 1300 AD, despite the lack of public institutions of science. And what happened after 1300 AD can't have had "Christianity" as the cause, or else the effect would have been felt a thousand years earlier. Clearly, something else had to be involved. And all that achieved was to return education to the level that had already been available before 300 AD.

I am sure you will balk at all of this and wish to debate every point, and sadly I have no time to debate any of this now. Reject my every claim if it pleases you. All I ask is that some caution be taken before "proclaiming" something to be a cause, when the effect is nowhere near in time to the cause, or insisting something was "different" when it actually wasn't, or that something had an effect that we actually cannot trace thereto.


This is an example of what I am talking about. Where is the evidence that invasions had any effect on the application of resources to intellectual enterprises? The Byzantines spent vast outlays on marvelous works of architecture, churches, mass book production...there is no reason this same money could not have been partly or wholly diverted to the sciences. No reason other than they didn't want to or it didn't occur to them.


You mean the Greek achievements that came from Byzantium? I am also not aware of any evidence the Byantines "rebuffed" any Arab achievements, for this or any other reason.


I doubt there is sufficient evidence to support this charge, though even if true it means Christianity is not the cause of anything, but something in addition to it was, which is exactly my point. It would then become a question of whether that "something else" was actually absent in antiquity. For example, there is no case to be made that "being open to rational study" was absent from antiquity.

In actual fact, science continued longer in Byzantium than in the West, John Philopon perhaps being the last scientist worthy of the name (compared, say, to Isidore, one of the greatest intellectuals of the West, who is an intellectual embarrassment by comparison). The use of superior ancient medical and architectural treatises and ideas continued in Byzantium even after that, and was still around to be picked up by and influence Islamic culture after that. In short, though I see nothing much to be proud of in Byzantine science, I don't see how it can be claimed it was in any way less favored, or conditions for science any less favorable, than in the West during the same period.

We are, remember, talking about a thousand years here. That's a long time for nothing significant to happen.


I assume you mean vis-a-vis Eastern Christian theology, not vis-a-vis pre-Christian natural philosophy. The belief that the natural world was orderly and rational and not only capable of being understood but ought to be studied for that very reason, was universal among natural philosophers in antiquity. Therefore, it cannot be said we needed Christianity to supply the idea. But if you mean Eastern Christian theology was so messed up that they couldn't make any scientific progress as a result, that's a bold claim that I doubt there is adequate evidence to support. Both East and West chose to divert resources (both public and private) more and more away from science and toward nonscientific intellectual institutions and efforts. This was not a product of some intellectual blindness caused by a kooky worldview. It was a product of a value system that had far less place for the ideals of science than the ideals of salvation and social control.

Both East and West were cultures wherein a hundred life's savings would be spent to copy and preserve a hundred volumes of Jerome's boring letters, but not a single dime to preserve a single treatise on the scientific study of gravity, which we know contained experimental evidence for gravitational laws and the principle of inertia (both Strato and Hipparchus, arguably two of the greatest scientists in the ancient world, wrote such treatises--both lost). You can't make scientific progress if you are busy actively forgetting most of what's been accomplished by scientists before you.

That's why the Scientific Revolution happened when there was a major shift in these values--not in the whole culture, but among a sufficient number of intellectuals--so that some people started getting interested again in past scientific progress and seeking to build on those shoulders and looking for sound methods by which to do so, and then making this one of the most important aims of their lives. There is nothing in the Bible or Christian theology, East or West, that shows any tendency to produce such a shift in values--ancient Christians harangued against exactly such a shift (Tertullian, Lactantius, Victorinus, etc.), and medieval Christians did nothing to produce it for a thousand years. It therefore cannot be said Christianity caused the Scientific Revolution. If it had within it the causes of such, then the Scientific Revolution would have happened long before. Something else caused that shift in values. And that's what we need to be looking for.

Bede

If you have no time to debate these matters, then that is fine. I doubt I do either. I do, of course, disagree with much of what you say (not least that any laypeople are reading Jaki!). I fear your greatest error is to discount the fall of the Western Empire when comparing say, Isodore with Philoponus. The early Middle Ages were never going to pick up where the ancient world left off. The barbarians did cause a six hundred year hiatus that ended in 1000AD or so. Also, I cannot understand how you can call Aristotelianism (if that means what Aristotle thought and not his Christian adaptations) 'creationist'. He was a teleologist, true, but the world was eternal, was it not? Nobody created it.

Anyway, my research is on the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and I claim no expertise of ancient science. To some extent, then, we are talking past each other. For instance, you still have a layman's attachment to the 'scientific revolution' where I have little idea of the achievements of Strato and others.

I would be very grateful if you could point me towards some secondary literature on the early Christian attitudes to atomism. I'm rather beholden to Lindberg's various articles which are much more general than your claims (he has been recycling the same quotes for a decade or more now). If the work on Gregory, Lactantius, Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine etc is your own, is there a draft you'd be willing to let me see?

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

lpetrich

Rodney Stark seems to have gone off the deep end of evangelism lately; in a recent book, he's been sort-of claiming that Xianity is the cause of everything good about our society.

And I wonder if advocates of this thesis are eventually going to claim that evolutionary biology was a triumph for Xianity and a proof that (their favorite sect of) Xianity is the One True Religion.

Any examples?

I wonder how they'd qualify; many ancient philosophers believed in the eternity of the Universe, though they believed that the Universe was always much like it is today.

St. Augustine mentions that belief in Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World’s Past, The City of God, Book 12, Chap. 10.

Interestingly, Augustine believed that God had created the Universe instantaneously, and that the creation durations in Genesis were allegorical -- and also that the Universe is around 6000 years old. He had followed Eusebius, who had calculated 5611 years from the creation to the conquest of Rome by the Goths; Eusebius in turn had used the Septuagint's chronology. Since that conquest happened in 410 CE, that implies that the Universe had been created in 5202 BCE.

And one certainly doesn't see Jesus Christ or Paul discussing various pagan philosophers' views in gory detail.

And often preferred bickering over minute details of the Trinity, like homoousia vs. homoiousia (The Father and the Son: same essence vs. similar essence). And whose main objection to the Germanic barbarians who overran the Empire that they had been converted to the wrong set of Xianity -- Arianism (the Son is subordinate to the Father rather than being co-equal with the Father). And the eastern and western churches split over 1. whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father, and 2. the authority of the Pope. They also got into arguments as to whether the Virgin Mary ought to be called Mother of God or Mother of Christ.

This is a totally hokey argument that suggests a remarkable amount of ignorance about medieval history, because western Europeans were fighting among themselves the whole time. If anything, it was the Byzantines who were relatively safe; their prosperity suggested that they were not exactly going broke protecting themselves from invasion.

i'm not sure how that might be, but it's interesting that science developed faster in mostly-Protestant northern Europe than in Catholic southern Europe.

(Aristotelianism vs. atomism...)
Any references?

(medieval Scholastic philosophy as Aristotelianism...)
Aristotle also believed in the eternity of the Universe and three kinds of soul (vegetable, animal, and rational).

And consider the recently-discovered Archimedes manuscript. Like many other ancient documents, it was preserved because its parchment was recycled by cleaning it off so something else could be written on it, in this case a prayer book. And what was overwritten was often prayer books and hymn books and a favorite genre of fiction: saint biographies. Not exactly scientific literature.

Morgana

I can't believe I missed this! I was even in Berkeley that day.