Tharmas

Just time for a quick note. I don’t want to debate this topic – I’m certainly not qualified – but just mention that I am a little mystified why in all these threads, book reviews, etc. there has been no mention of Max Weber’s now 100-year-old thesis that it’s neither Christianity per se nor monotheism per se but the 'Protestant work ethic' that brings about the notion of 'Progress' and essentially creates the modern, i.e. Western world.

Of course you have to make the I suppose outdated neo-Marxist jump that concludes from Capitalism comes Science or something like that. There has to be somebody willing to pay for research. There has to be a goal.

A little searching turned up this website. It’s not much…

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/lifelong-learni...b/reform15.htm

boneyard bill

Bede writes:

I think Bede has debunked his own claim here better than the debunkers have. Greek philosophy was essentially monotheistic long before the emergence of Christianity. In fact, the Old Testament isn't even monotheisitc. The Jews were told to have no gods "before me." Other gods were presumed to exist and could even be worshipped so long as Jahweh was understood to be number one. Elijah's magic outperformed the Phoenicians magic proving that Elijah's god was more powerful. But the Phoenicians were able to perform magic as well. Monotheism is a late development in Jewish thought and may very well have been the result of Greek influence.

Christian monotheism itself seems to depend heavily on the thought of Philo of Alexandria and his concept of the logos is clearly derived from the Greeks or that other Greek/Semitic synthesis, Stoicism.

It's hard to see how Christianity can be understood as a necessary precursor for modern science since Christianity is itself inseparable from the Platonic milieu of the ancient world. But Bede is surely correct in his claim that there was no inherent conflict between Chrisitanity and science for that very same reason.

GakuseiDon

I'm not sure the above is relevant. The claim is about the development of the "rigorous methodology" type science that developed in the last 500 years.

Modern science is based on the assumption of an orderly world that operates on a set of rules that can be examined and defined according to a "rigorous methodology". The ancient Greeks developed ways of examining the world, but never developed the "rigorous methodology".

I don't think Bede is saying that *Christianity* per se was the reason, just that a philosophical framework was required to allow the development of the "rigorous methodology", and that a monotheistic religion (like Christianity) which emphasises a naturalistic universe (outside special acts of creation) best allowed such a thing to happen.

Personally, I'm not convinced, but it is an interesting idea.

Family Man

Actually, that does sound like a defensible idea to me.

spin

It might be worthwhile considering that mathematics and the physical sciences were advanced under Islam. The Chinese were also a high level scientific country from which scientific discoveries made their way west.

The ancient Greeks were as rigorous as they could be with the data and tools that they had at hand. They knew complex things like the curvature of the earth, a reasonable calculation for the distance of the earth.

People take advantage of what is available to them, develop on that, and supply the needs of the time. If the Wright Brothers hadn't invented the aeroplane when they did somebody else would have around the same time. They took advantage of the knowledge of their time and developed upon it. The renaissance of classical thought gave Copernicus the stimulation necessary to fix up Ptolemy's solar system.


spin

GakuseiDon

None of these are the "rigorous methodology" that we associate with modern science, though Islam had the start of it around 1000s CE.

I put it down to the creation of the printing press and the establishment of universities. Ironically these are Christian-related - the printing press was created to print Bibles, and the first universities were established by the Catholic Church. But I think these are coincidences.

variant 13

It might almost be relevant to say:

who was the first scientist?

boneyard bill

GakuseiDon writes:

But the idea of an orderly world tht operates on a set of rules is precisely what Christianity got from it's Greek predecessors. True they never developed the rigorous methodology but neither did Christianity. The intellectual precursors of science that can be found in Christianity are not Biblical, they are Greek.

boneyard bill

GakuseiDon writes:

Don't forget the clock. It took the inventionand development of the clock to enable us to measure time, and time measurement underlies a great many of our physical laws. This was also a Christian invention, but it wasn't intended for scientific purposes. The first clocks arose in the Middle Ages in Christian monasteries. They didn't have dials. They were used to ring bells at the appropriate times for the monks to gather and pray.

So I don't deny that Christianity had an influence on modern science. But I claim that the intellectual influence was largely derivative, and the fundamental inspiration was Greek philosophy.

gregor

Bede

In response to your query about Gus and Rog, let me cite from a book I'm currently re-reading titled "Calendar - Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year" by David Duncan. [written in 1998, back when calendrics was a hot topic with the 99/00 millenial madness and all - and admittedly a popular book, not a dissertation].

Anyway, regarding early fifth century astronomy and mathematics and its impact on creating a calendar, Duncan cites Augustine's disapproval of these and quotes from a letter written in 404 CE "In the Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: I am sending you the Holy spirit so that he can teach you about the course of the sun and the moon. He wanted to make Christians, not mathematicians."

From the same book, Bacon was placed under restrictions in about 1263 by his monastery, prohibiting him from writing any more due to his unorthodox notions. Then, he wrote Opus Maius, later challenged the papacy on intellectual and theological grounds, and was reportedly sent to prison in 1277. In his trial transcript the Franciscan court records asked the pope to suppress his dangerous teachings.

* * *
Interestingly, the book also notes that a serious impediment to scientific advancement in the west for those endeavors that relied upon calculations was the numbering system itself. The west was writing in Roman numerals without positional notation - i.e. there was no tenths, hundredths, thousandths, etc. Rather, you had to add up all of the values of all of the symbols present in a number. If one wanted to write the number "1999", you must write out something like MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII (roughly), a tough task indeed when serious computations were involved. It took along time for the west to adopt arabic numerals with positional notation.

Next problem was the lack of a zero. West didn't have it until it adopted it from eastern cultures.

Next problem was the lack of decimal notation. The west simply used common fractions 1/2, 1/4, 1/10, and rounded everything to reach the common, easy fractions. If the actual year was 365.24165 days long, it couldn't be figured in the west without decimal notation. It took the accretion of all three elements (combined from Indian, Chinese, and Arab cultures) to bring mathematics to modernity in the west.