Doug Shaver

1. The two beliefs are not necessarily connected. Anybody can accept one while rejecting the other.
2. Premodern humans were no more monolithic in their thinking than modern humans.
3. As an argument form, "The Bible says X, therefore the medieval church must have taught X" is worthless.

Toto

Bede a/k/a James Hannum is a former poster here who, the last time he showed up, was trying to get a book published on some of the topics covered in this book.

I don't think this book is intended to be a work of historical revisionism.

lpetrich

THose theologians must be jealous. :devil1:

I wouldn't be surprised if it was more widespread than that -- that's what Richard Weikart (From Darwin to Hitler) and Ben Stein (Expelled) have been claiming.

Hundreds of thousands?

And what "suppression" do you have in mind? Seems more like disdain and suspicion of heresy. These were gentlemen who could get worked up over minute deviations from the official line about the Trinity.

Richard Carrier has proposed that scientific inquiry involves three important values:

• Curiosity
• Empiricism
• Progress

Early Xian theologians disdained all three as foolish if not outright presumptious or dangerous. Richard Carrier has summarized early theologian Athenagoras's arguments as "Screw you, all you academic lunkheads, and screw all your logic and science and scholarship. We have the Law and the Prophets. Everything else is obvious. End of argument." (Would the Facts Be Checked? and Did the Earliest Christians Encourage Critical Inquiry?)

RC had done his PhD thesis on early-Roman-Empire proto-scientists, and he concludes that they came quite close to starting a scientific revolution. However, the strife and disorders of the third century got in the way, and the Emperors after it were more interested in imposing order than encouraging intellectual inquiry.

So what? I was asked about what the Bible says about the motions of the Earth and the Sun, and geocentrism was a clear part of its flat-earthism.
So what? But some beliefs were typical of them.
The medieval Church was all geocentrists, because if nothing else, the theologians' favorite philosophers were geocentrists. However, the late-medieval Church did accept the approximate sphericity of the Earth.

Bede is James Hannam. His blog is http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/ and he is working on a book, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science.

But Richard Carrier is no slouch. As he describes in Ancient Science, he is turning his Columbia University PhD thesis into a book, he Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

It'll be interesting when both books come out -- imagine a Battle of the Super Historians: Bede vs. Richard Carrier

PhilosopherJay

Hi IPetrich,

I'm basing the hundreds of thousands on the number of Ph.D.'s issued in the U.S. in the field of Humanities in the Twentieth century. (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf063...es/tt03-01.htm), 171,870 from 1920-1999. I am assuming that an equal or larger number was given outside the United States. So we have about 400,000 people with Ph.D.'s in Humanities. I'm assuming another 400,000 without Ph.D.'s have also investigated the issues of the relationship of Christianity to medieval and ancient science. That would be about 800,000 people. I'm basing the 98% on how frequently I've seen the claim that Christianity was destructive of logic and rational thought in those times with the rarely made claim that it wasn't.

I am assuming that the Roman Empire would have continued to let schools of Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic and Epicurian thought flourish as they did for 600 years before Christianity became the dominant ideology. I am assuming that Christian doctrines that emphasize that human suffering is good and people should only be concerned in their life with their relation to mythological Biblical Characters were not conducive to scientific or rational thought, and that the penalties for practicing any type of science or rational thought -- torture and violent, immediate death -- would have acted as deterrents.

Richard Carrier's hypothesis seems right to me, but we should consider that the rise of Christianity in the Third Century contributed directly to the problems and strife within the empire in the Third Century.


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay





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andrewcriddle

Due to be published this August. See http://jameshannam.com/ and God's Philosophers

Andrew Criddle

lpetrich

Can you point to any actual work on this subject?

I agree that they would likely have continued, though they took a beating in the disorders of the 3rd century and thereabouts.
Where did you get that idea?

That's bullshit -- the Xian Church was too small in the third century (200's) -- it was only in the fourth century (300's) that the Church got official support.

I think that that strife was because the Empire was top-heavy and too dependent on revenue from plunder -- a source that had mostly dried up in the second century. The Germans didn't have much to steal, and the Parthians could successfully fight back.

Toto

James Hannam gets published

Somehow "sad" seems a little lacking.

No Robots

Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.--Catholic Encylopedia

Bruno was an early martyr to the science of literary analysis. Bruno's interpretation of Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the Devil are scientific, ie. the result of textual analysis based on his whole system of thought. The Church has, since Bruno's time, lost control over the application of scientific procedures to the understanding of sacred texts. It will eventually have to come to terms with Bruno as an early pioneer of science-based Bible exegesis.