hallq

His pretentious statement on the relationship between science and religion is amusing. Does he really think you need a historian to tell you whether or not there's a conflict? The fact that many religious claims are demonstrably false on scientific grounds, and the fact that religionists pour massive resources into discrediting scientific findings they don't like, is all the evidence anyone should need to see that there's a conflict.

Dr Rick

Bede doesn't just try to "justify" the Inquisitions; his arguments often distort and grossly underestimate the suffering and sheer numbers of those tortured and killed. They also attempt to diminish the Church's role in the horrors:

Llorente, secretary general to the Madrid Inquisition from 1789 - 94, estimated that from 1481 to 1517 there were 13,000 people burnt alive, (others put it at "only" 2000) with 17,000 condemned to other forms of punishment. Yet even that was just a fraction of the deaths attributable to the Inquisitions.

The whole way Bede has worded his question, "How many were executed by the Spanish Inquisition?" just sidesteps the real issue. Whether they were tried and executed or murdered in some other way, the real question is: "How many people were killed as a direct result of the Inquisitions?" The vast majority of people killed during the Inquisitions were not formally tried and executed, nor did they appear on any rolls. For instance, the expulsion of about 150,000 Jews from Spain as part of the Inquisitions resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands from exposure, starvation, and attacks.The tortures used during the Inquisition were not benign and could cause severe, permanent injury; even when death was not immediate, the tortures could easily be fatal. How many people died from torture we cannot know, but severely burned flesh (ordeal by fire) and ruptured body cavities (the pear) could easily cause death at a time when aseptic surgical debridement and antibiotics were not available.

Furthermore, crushed bones and multiple dislocations (from the stravaletto and the rack or strappado, respectively) would have greatly impeded a persons ability to eek out a living, increasing his chances of dying from malnutrition or starvation.We'll never know the exact figures, but huge numbers of Prostestants, Arians, Cathari, Albigensians, Jews, and other "heretics" were slaughtered during all the Inquistions and the campaigns they inspired.

Of course, numbers only tell part of the story. The fact that any institution would encourage such horrors on any scale is enough to condemn it.Two years after Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull allowing for the extermination of witches in Germany, the Dominican friars, Heinrich Kraemer and Johann Sprenger, published the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM (THE WITCH'S HAMMER) which became the authoritative encyclopedia on witchcraft for centuries to come. It claimed that "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable," and explained how witches destroyed crops, ate children, and caused plagues with evil spells. Naturally these were matters of great concern to secular governments, who took up the cause of hunting down and exterminating witches as the Church encouraged them to do.

When pressed in one of the threads alluded to in the posts above, Bede claimed ...which was/is little more than equivocation on Bede's part. The revisionists have re-computed the death toll from the trials of witches in that range, not the total death toll from the Inquisitions as Bede implied.

For instance, Brian Levack, author of The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe estimated that as an end result of approximately 110,000 witch trials there were about 60,000 women put to death. Ronald Hutton used different methods to come up with an estimate closer to 40,000.

But the killing of witches was only a small part of the carnage that arose from the Inquisitions.

Many of the deaths attributable to the Inquisitions were extra-judicial, and not all the trials were for accusations of witchcraft. Only a fraction of those Jews, Protestants, Arians, Cathari, Albigensians, and other "heretics" that were slaughtered during all the Inquisitions or who died in the mass expulsions were put on trial as witches.

Tangent

I agree with this.

Wads4

He is very keen on claiming the whole of Science for Christianity, ie that there would be no Science but for Christian monotheism

Potoooooooo

Is that a sound claim?

Toto

Let's just say that a lot of people disagree.

Gamera

Given that something like the scientific method predates Christianity in Greece, no, it's a ridiculous claim.

Now the fact is Hellenistic science hit a road block during the mediaeval period, where Christian culture had other concerns beside empirical descriptions of the world. Thus, the "bestiaries" of the time catalog the "meanings" of animals in Christian topology, rather than describing the actual habits and biometrics of the natural world. On the other hand, by the 12th century or so, you have Christian scholars like St Albertus Magnus (Aquinas' mentor) putting aside the spiritual interpretations of animals in favor of actual "field observations."

Modern science grew out of this scholarly interest, but to claim science was inextricably linked to Christianity is nonsense.

GakuseiDon

Who is claiming this? Bede? If so, can you provide a quote where he claims this?

From memory, his view is that science couldn't arise in a social environment where "fate" was believed to control events. It could best arise in an environment where the universe was believed to run on consistent set of rules, and that this belief gradually developed under a Christian monotheism which allowed for a "clock maker" God. So Christian monotheism allowed the belief to develop. Saying "no Science if no Christian monotheism" is putting it a bit strongly.

Gamera

This is a legitimate argument, but Greece by Aristotle's time had already been able to bifurcate daimon (fate) from the workings of the empircal world. Aristotle more or less followed the principle of making direct observations about the world in order to determine how it worked. His hypotheses were usually off, but his methodology was pretty good.

Aristarchus calculated the distance of the earth to the sun using impeccable logic. His initial facts were wrong, so he got it wrong, but his thinking was purely scientific. This was 300 years before Christ.

Toto

Bede on science quotes Rodney Stark with apparent approval