Vorkosigan

No, Bede was simply offering up an argument by authority.

NOGO

Perhaps one day we will be exploring space and discover other civilizations. If we don't I will be willing to believe that Yahweh created the world and that the death of one man saved us all provided we believe.

We may find people out there that have no inclination toward myth and religion.

Poor them they will never know science.

NOGO

You seem to ignore some simple facts.
The Jewish world view existed side-by-side with the Greek world view and it was the Greeks who invented the basis for all modern scientic thought. Greeks invented Geometry and Algebra and also the very important idea that one can model the world with math which is essential to modern physics, chemistry, astronomy etc.

For me that pretty much buries the idea that Christianity is an essential requirement to science.

That in itself is a slanted pointed of view. The idea that you are expressing and is so dear to Bede is that science appeared all of a sudden in Christian Europe and nowhere else. Science, like much of human thought, evolved.

It started in prehistory when man, the hunter, deciphered clues to where the hunted creture went. A broken twig, a smell etc were examined and analyzed. Ancient Egyptian certainly contributed to astronomy and math. The Greeks made a serious and critical step without any Christianity in sight.

Bede seems to base his conclusion on what Kepler (for example) may have written. Bede seems to think that Kepler was motivated by his belief in God. He wanted to discover the laws governing the world Yahweh created.

Yahweh gave his people laws and Kepler found the laws of planetary motion. Bede sees a link.

Well, I don't. The babyloninans had laws from their Gods too. Neither they nor the the ancient Jews ever came up with anything comparable to the ancient Greeks.

Ptolemy explained the motion of the planets using Geometry. Bede does not want to call it science because that would kill his theory right there. But it is obvious that the idea that the planets were governed by some mathematical rule was a well established fact in ancient Greece. So Kepler did not get this idea from Yahweh. He got it from Ptolemy. The math that he used was also from the anceint Greeks.

About Kepler and his motives. Christianity, like all ideals, so completely possessed its communities that noone would talk about any interest that they may have without relating it to the faith. Why? ... Fear ... fear of being accused of not believing or of offending God himself, or of thinking yourself superiod to God, or simply of not needing God in your life. Basically everything that people did had to be justified by religion. Kepler could not have taken interest in astronomy without linking it to his faith. The society in which he lived in would not have allowed him. Linking ones interest to the faith was a way of life. People did it automatically and often without really thinking about it. An automatic reflex.

So when Kepler wrote his books, all the religious hogwash he added is just that. It goes with the decor. What really motivated Kepler we will never know but why must it be any different than what motivated Ptolemy?

There is, however, one thing which Kepler worked on, where the motivation can be easily discerned.

One day Kepler was teaching about the five geometrical shapes of antiquity. All of a sudden he stopped speaking. A brilliant thought occurred to him. There were five shapes and five planets! Kepler believed that this idea had been inspire to him by God himself and he spent the rest of his life trying to make it work. Essentially the idea was that each planet orbit was delimited by a particular shape. So we have the sun then a cube, then Venus's orbit, then a triangular pyramid etc. Of course it never worked. Even after he wrote his paper on the laws of planetary motion he returned to the five shapes.

This is quite clearly the religious mind at work. The religious mind believes in direct divine inspiration for knowledge. The religious mind is not satisfied with mathematical models of orbits obtained with tremendous work collecting data and manual computation. Kepler return to his inspired thought and worked at it till his death. This is religious passion. The laws of planetary motion was just the result of hard work.

Kepler is perhaps a good example reflecting the change which was about to happen. People stopped wasting their time with inspired truths and turned to measure facts. Abandoning the heritage of myth for the heritage left behind by the ancient Greeks.

liquid

Bede,

way way back in the thread, you were given examples of several scientific cultures in the non-Xian/pre-Xian world. Now, since then you have redefined your use of 'science' from science to only western european science. An uncharitable observer would conclude this was because you were being soundly thrashed on your previous claims, but that's not why I am posting again.

In the last few posts, you were challenged to explain scientific efforts in the mayan culture. You rejected precise astronomical observations out of hand, despite the fact that accurate and mathematical prediction and testing of the timings of celestial event was being done. I would be interested to know what part of the scientific method (except perhaps a formalisation of the method) you think this lacks. I do not think you have properly dealt with this.

However, I would like to offer another example if you persist in ignoring the other one. I mentioned agricultural experiments in Peru. There is a nice picture of the site of Moray here. A few such sites are found in the old Inca empire - been there incidentally, amazing place.

The academic conclusion from John Earls, Anthropology researcher at the Catholic University of Peru in Lima, Peru is that this was used for agricultural hybridization experiments involving microclimates and selective breeding. Interesting it's a Xian university that came up with this by the way.

Just interested to see your response if you have one. Of course, if you are firmly sticking by your conveniently changed definitions then this isn't totally relevant but it is still interesting. What is also interesting is that despite being advanced in some areas like this, the Incas never properly developed writing or the wheel.

liquid

Some relevant cites for you...

There are also several more listed here. Unfortunately, it's mostly Spanish, so I'm not expecting a full on scientific argument, just want to know specifically what you think it lacking if you choose to dismiss it.


Blanco, Oscar. 1987. "Fundamentos científicos de la tecnología andina" en Tecnología y desarrollo en el Perú", Ediciones Comisión de Coordinación de Tecnología Andina (CCTA).

Brack-Egg, Antonio. 1994. "Posibilidades de las plantas cultivadas para el control de las plagas en el Perú", en "Plantas para proteger cultivos", Ediciones Red de Acción en Alternativas al uso de Agroquímicos (RAAA).

Earls, John, 1986. "Evolución de la administración ecológica inca", en "Andenes y camellones en el Perú", Ediciones CONCYTEC.

Earls, John, 1989. "Planificación agrícola andina", Universidad el Pacífico.

Holdrige, L.E. 1947. "Determination os world plant formation from simple climate data", Science, 105 (2727):367-368.

Ishizawa, Jorge, 1990. Comentarios al libro "Planificación agrícola andina", en "Cuadernos Informativos", revista de la CCTA N° 3, Diciembre 1990.

Fr.Andrew

[Fr Andrew]--Fwiw, this is vintage Bede.
I got into debate with him 4-5 years ago on another forum and wasted quite a bit of time demonstrating pre-Christian science--only to have him say, "Oh...I meant modern science!"

lpetrich

Nomad:
... as for all the types of worlds we have ever had, only one seems to have produced science, and the worldview that dominated it was Christian. In his posts Bede suggests that a Jewish worldview might have produced a similar result, and this strikes me as plausible, but untestable.

When confronted with counterevidence to this position, Bede retreats and says modern science.

As to modern science growing out of medieval theology, it more properly grew out of medieval Scholastic philosophy, as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and others. The later Scholastics were heavily influenced by Aristotle, who often was called ille philosophus, "The Philosopher".

So modern science more likely had its roots in the rediscovery of Aristotle's work. However, early-modern scientists ended up outgrowing Aristotle, with the philosophical "Old Guard" doing a lot of Aristotle-thumping. They also outgrew the common medieval practice of calling potentially-controversial theories pure speculation, though not without Galileo being compelled to recant.

{edited by Toto to fix tag}

joedad

Obviously you mean modern secular science, not science. Even Bede has admitted as much. That other worldviews (?) "produced" science is an indisputable historical fact. Perhaps you can present an explanation as to why neither christianity nor judaism invented writing, agriculture, civilization, the wheel, math, movable type, etc.

As I said to Bede, and it is a point he chose to not address, you and he would be arguing that christianity is responsible for removing christianity from science. I've never seen such an argument made. From my perspective, however, it seems a foregone inevitability, what with science requiring rigorous methodology, something quite alien to religion.Well, we got him to admit his mistake again, so good for him again I guess.

And as already noted, because Bede is asserting that the science we practice today has a christian genesis, I'd like to see him explain how it is that christian religious beliefs caused the removal of christian religious belief from this same science. It's like arguing that Jesus is the reason that Jesus is not mentioned in mayan creationism.

(And Ipetrich, you're just too quick on the draw!)

Nomad

My admitedly limited understanding of science is that it is predicated on the principles of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, theory, more experimentation, development of the theory (or its rejection) as new data becomes available, etc. I do not recall the Greeks, nor any of the other ancients engaging in such things. Aristotle, for example, seemed content to observe, offer a theory to explain what he had observed, then call it a day. No one tested his theories until the dawn of the Age of Science.

Now, if my information is incorrect, and people from all over were going through the methods of hypothesis, experiment, refinement of the hypothesis into a theory, and additional experimentation, then I apologize. But I do not believe that I am mistaken on this point.

This is because you have been working with an incorrect definition of science. Perhaps this means that everyone has simply been arguing past one another, but the fact remains that something extraordinary and unique happened around the 17th Century in Europe. It is traditionally called the beginning of the Age of Science. Perhaps those who coined the term were in error, but it does seem to have stuck. In the meantime, Stark has written a book that seeks to understand why this happened, in and in typical scientific fashion he looks at the unique features of the environment in which science arose.

But it evolved in only one place. Everywhere else it remained stuck with basic mathematics and astronomy, together with literacy, agriculture, rudamentary medicine and the like. But none of this looks like what has brought us to what we now call the modern age of industrialism, computers, surgury and medical advances, as well as space exploration.

Your seeming lack of curiousity about how science evolved in this particular instance is curious, but it leaves you to assert that given enough time, the Chinese, Africans, Muslims, Aztecs and perhaps everybody else would have eventually gotten to where we are today, but you do so in the face of no supporting evidence, and that is quite unscientific of you.

Was there any method of experimentation? If so, why was it so routinely rejected by most thinkers up until the 17th Century? After all, something that is proven to be true scientifically is demonstratable to all objective observers. That is what is called duplication of effort, or somesuch. My understanding is that Ptolemy's model was rejected by everyone, Christian or not, until science demonstrated that Ptolemy was right all along.

As for Kepler, I thought Bede was talking about Stark. Does Stark use him as a part of his proof?

In any case, the hypothesis has been put. Science arose in 17th Century Europe directly because of the worldview that dominated that part of the world. That worldview was Christian. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but I do not see actual tests of the hypothesis being tried here, but only restatements of the kinds of questions such an hypothesis would be expected to explain.

Nomad

joedad

What then was Eratosthenes doing exactly when he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth?

And how would you classify Strabo's thinking when he wrote:And of course it was Columbus, centuries later, using this same information, and Ptolemy's, and skewing it for his own purposes, that enabled his voyages.