countjulian

What are you talking about? Plotinous, the founder of neo-Platonism, argued that miracles are impossible. I repeat Plotinous held miracles to be impossible. He called faith healing, exorcisms etc. "Ludicrous" and advised people to utilize medicine and temperance in diet and living to solve health problems. It was the rise of Christianity, with its use of miracles, speaking in tongues, exorcisms, resurrections, etc. (still they same tactics being used today) to gain converts that contributed to the downfall of scientific, naturalistic thinking about the world. The damnation and attack laid upon atomism by the Christians in particular contributed to this.

The pestilences were in large part due to the fact that people in late antiquity were reduced to iron age and pre-iron age levels of consumption and living. The loss of skilled metallurgists crippled the economy, now left hung out to dry with no new coin input. Part of the problem with Justinian was the huge amount of taxes used to fund his vain wars of conquest in the west, and the massive amounts of funds needed to support the church and squash out paganism, Judaism, and heresy wherever it might lie through use of the army and hordes of armed monks.

No doubt this played a great role, however, the barbarians eventually did settle down, and far before the 14th century. What's more, much of the dispute centered around the fact that the barbarians were mainly Arians, while the western and Eastern empires tended more towards niceanism. And the Arab Muslims invasions did not start up until well after the fall of Rome, why hadn't medieval Byzantine scholars and scientists been building particle beam cannons and nuclear warheads to blast the infidels, what with all of the pagan-based Christian science they had had for over 3 centuries?

This was, again, mainly due to the rapacious taxation instituted under Justinian and the church's ever increasing hunger for tithes. Not helping at all was the destruction of public bath houses, the closing of libraries, and the attacks upon temples; no doubt many pagans, Jews, and heretics fancied themselves safer in the country side than in the city, though monks roamed at will there, too.

Are you kidding? Scholarship and science in Alexandria came to an end in the lynching of Hypatia and the anti-pagan riots that followed, not the arrival of the Muslims. Edit: Thanks for telling me about John Philloponusm, really interesting fellow, unfortuantely, like most Christians who are scientists, he ended up a heretic, and his works were pronounced anathema in 610, I believe the date to be. When things started to loosen up thanks to the influx of pagan learning in the 13th and 14th centuries he did have some influence, but up to that time no good Christian wanted Philoponus on his bookshelf.

What about the 6 centuries preceding the Black Death? Perhaps the Christians were a little too fixated on the Crusades, hmmmm?

NOGO

This is the third time that you tell me this. My problem with the statements that you make is that they lack understanding of the subject.

Titles, titles, and titles.
Copernicus was a cleric with a passion for astronomy and it was he and no one else who sorted out our solar system.
How Copernicus thought can best be seen by his work, much more than by his words. This is where you err.


Are you talking about Yahweh?
Tell me how that is so.
The rest of the world of the time was quite happy with the Ptolemaic system and totally rejected Copernicus' work.
...AND YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT I ASSUME THAT COPERNICUS THOUGHT AS I DO !!!!

One must conclude that you want us to believe that Copernicus and only he knew Yahweh PROPERLY and the rest of 16th century Christians did not.

Ancient Israelites were very happy fudging their lunar calendar to realign the seasons. They never thought that this was unworthy of Yahweh.

I guess he waste his time looking at the night sky every night.

Meaningless generalities!
Tell us why Kepler chose to base his work on the Copernican system rather than on the Ptolemaic system?

If Kepler worked from the Ptolemaic system he would have produced nothing worthwhile. Explain why that is so?

There was no discussion since you have not answered any of my criticism of your statements. You are bailing out not concluding a discussion.

Amaleq13

I am certainly open to evidence of this. Was there a specific passage from the link you felt supported the above notion? I'm not sure where amongst those articles "note 33" might be found. Is it short enough to cut & paste here?

Obviously, I agree. That's why I was asking you questions with regard to the evidence that supported your conclusion.

Apparently, your answer is that Bruno was engaged in the sort of debates that do not depend on one's understanding of the scientific basis of a theory in order to advocate for it. If that was the case, you would be correct that there would be no reason to assume any degree of scientific understanding based solely on debate participation.

Buridan

What is this? I provided a link, and not to an article, it was rather to Bruno's "LA CENA DE LE CENERI". How come you didn't click on the link? And didn't do a quick search for "33"?

Note 33 in this annotated work of Bruno, says "This muddled wording is characteristic of most of Bruno's utterances concerning scientific, and specifically quantitative, geometrical details". Other notes point out specific errors and nonsense.

"Note 21: This criticism of Copernicus strikes the keynote of Bruno's scientific posture. Disdainful of mathematics to a very high degree, he claims supreme expertise in 'physical astronomy', about which he rightly notes that it is of overriding importance for a real explanation of the physical universe. But his version of physical astronomy or his explanation of the motion of the earth and of other celestial bodies bogs down in gross animism (to say nothing of his Hermetism), which vitiates much of the forcefulness of his 'assertion of the infinity of the universe."

" Note 25: This, apparently rigorous, quantitative reasoning is merely an exercise in fantasy, the only realm where lanterns from 280 miles can be seen, a circumstance that bad [sic] to be clear to any judicious reader of the passage."

"Note 55: Bruno's eagerness to tie the infinity of the world and the relativity of motion to the absence of perfectly circular orbits derives from his animistic, stellar pantheism, in which there can be no strict laws of motion because these would set a constraint on the freedom of stars and planets permeated by divine attributes. For this reason, Bruno would also have rejected the idea of an elliptic orbit for planets as worked out painstakingly by Kepler. Nor could Bruno have been pleased with the closed space-time continuum of relativistic cosmology with its emphasis on a finite number of stars or galaxies. While science moved with Kepler and Galileo toward exactness and precision, Bruno advocated a trend in the opposite direction."

Precisely.

Buridan

Just some comments, Mr. Julian, to indicate that you may need to look closer before commenting on my statements:

I was not talking about Plotinus, rather about later developments, that tended very much to view the material world as something negative, as just an emancipation and not as something substantial or basic. One insisted that there between the "One" (the mystical divine) and the material world were three descending grades of reality: "Intelligence," (the world-mind), the psyche (world-soul) and physis (nature). As nature was the less real, the most valuable knowledge came from mystical experience and not from one's senses or from experiments. There was also a development towards theurgy (communicating with the Divine by mysticism and magic), also not much helpfull to sustain modern science.

This is in stark contrast to the development within Christianity, where scholars in later centuries came to down play neo-platonism and more and more recognised that if there was an orderly Lawgiver behind nature, nature must have orderly laws.

That edit of yours proves that I am not kidding. Hypatia was in the early fifth century, Philoponus (a much greater natural philosopher) lived more than a hundred years later. And it proves even more that it is nonsense to say like you that "scholarship and science in Alexandria came to an end in the lynching of Hypatia and the anti-pagan riots that followed". That is just part of the Warfare Myth which Scholars have left behind decades ago. There was much important "scholarship and science" in Alexandria long after Hypatia.

And it is even more of a nonsense as I did not say that "scholarship and science" in Alexandria came to an end by the arrival of the Muslims. I was simply mentioning that one reason for the decline of scholarship in Europe, was that scholars of Alexandria were lost to Europe as the city came on Arab hands.

The point about Philoponus is not that he was denounced as a heretic (not for his scientific views, and note that works of his survived - it was kept and copied long after 610). It was that he came to disagree with Aristotle, due to his Christian convictions, a Thousand years before Copernicus. Had the Arabs of Alexandria kept this up, or had Alexandria not been conquered (meaning e.g. that Greek manuscripts would have been available in Western Europe), things may have happened earlier. If the other negative influences I mentioned had not been there. If, if, if.

You are obviously just trying to score points and not doing much research here...

I was talking about (and providing a link to numerical figures on this) the growth in the number of Scholars since the 11th Century (3 centuries before the Black Death, when the West had achieved economic growth again, Viking raids had stopped etc.).

There was an interesting development on its way, and this had even been preceded in the 10th Century by people like Gerbert of Aurillac (Sylvester II). The question is to how large degree this would have been possible (to set in motion and keep going for centuries)without e.g. the Church sponsored Universities and the belief in a rational Lawmaker behind the universe (ref. also the analysis of the Marxist Historian of Science Joseph Needham, in his "The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West").

However, if you really do suspect all serious Historians of Science in this area of working for the Secret Christian Apologist Police (or something like that), I think it is hard to convince you of the merits of a different view than yours by a few messages in this forum. :huh:

andrewcriddle

I think you may be a little oversimplifying Plotinus' position, but you are correct that Plotinus generally took a hard headed sceptical approach to the superstitions of his day.

However his successors Porphyry (to some extent), Iamblichus, Proclus etc did develop an interest in Theurgy occultism etc which seems incompatible with scientific naturalistic thought. Plotinus' rationality found few heirs in later neo-Platonism.

Even Plotinus sometimes shows a tendency to regard the material world as illusory in a way that would have inhibited scientific interests.

Andrew Criddle

lpetrich

I have several further questions and problems.

Where did Plotinus say that there is no such thing as a miracle?

And as to the concept of natural law, calling it specificially Xian is IMO a mistake, since Xianity has long insisted on the importance of miracles. Certain philosophers/theologians may have liked the concept, but it wasn't exactly in wide circulation.

Do saints get canonized on account of a superior understanding of natural law or on account of working miracles? Consider the case of St. Genevieve, who was celebrated for, among other things, calming storms. All she had to do is pray, and Mr. G. would tell himself "Anything you say, Jenny", and do what she prayed for.

Did she show superior expertise at predicting the weather? That's what one would expect if natural laws were the important thing, as opposed to miracles.

I think that if the concept of natural law was a part of medieval theology/philosophy, that it was an assimilation of the theorizing of pagan philosophy, notably Plato and Aristotle. It was the rediscovery of these gentlemen's works that provoked a revival of philosophy in Europe.

This sort of thing makes me wonder if metaphysical naturalism will someday be hailed as "True Xianity", complete with the idea of a Universe-controlling anthropomorphic superbeing being dismissed as a straw caricature invented to discredit Xianity.

I think that this has already partially happened; Ed, in one of his interminable threads, has argued that miracles have been very rare over the history of the Universe.

And the idea of natural law itself may be interpreted as a step in that direction -- God creates natural laws and lets the Universe run on autopilot, instead of actively controlling the Universe. The quasi-deist nature of this notion is why I'm skeptical of the notion that the idea of natural law represents True Xianity.

Finally, I'm also concerned that some present-day people may be projecting modern ideas of natural law onto medieval philosophers/theologians. Something like how some people project the idea of biological evolution on the theorizing of some ancient Greek philosophers.

spin

Eee, thanks for this link. Bruno's Italian is a real pain in its tortuousness.


spin

Amaleq13

I did click the link and I did search for "33". I found "This animistic world view precedes a slightly veiled affirmation of pantheism." but it didn't seem to provide what I wanted. The page that comes up with this link also contains links to other "articles". I still have no idea where on that page you are finding these notes but I appreciate your bringing them here.

Whose opinion is expressed in the notes?

Then I would tend to agree that Bruno shouldn't be given credit for much beyond coincidently backing the right horse. See what can happen with a little clarification?

Buridan

Excactly :notworthy .

The views expressed are those of the translator, Jaki. As he is a firm Catholic he may of course be suspected for distorting things, so the best advice is to check this for yourself by going through Bruno's geometrics.