gregor

Bede

If you're replying to FMan's seven points, might I also add an eighth:

8. Explain why scientific progress appears to have dramatically accelerated (est. from between 1600 and 1800) at the same time that church authority waned.

Is there correlation or causation?

Bede

Hi Gregor,

Christianity did not wane in the period you mention. The seventeenth century is recognised as the most religiously charged century in Europe's history with the eighteenth still highly Christianised. You are making the age old mistake of confusing Christianity with particular manifestations of it as a political authority. Because the churches became less politically powerful does not mean Europe became less Christian.

So you point is based a false premise and hence void.

B

Steven Carr

BEDE
'The idea of a secular science that could stand on its own two feet and then offer support to theology only came about after Newton when his natural philosophy proved itself to be so successful that it gained an authority that previously only revelation had enjoyed.'

CARR
Did the Greeks have a secular science before Newton, with results that had an authority that only revelation enjoyed?

Bede

Greeks didn't have a secular anything as far as I'm aware. They were massively religious and had a habit of putting people like Socrates on trial for questioning this. Aristotle was much more popular with Christians than he ever was with Greeks!

B

Family Man

You're misinterpreting Gregor. He's not saying that Christianity waned (at least I hope not); he's saying that church authority waned. It is the same as my point six. The Reformation diminished the church's control as an formal institution (i.e. there were no formal mechanisms, such as the inquisition, for supression of dissenting views in the Protestant north, which in part explains much of the history of the region -- why the north pretty much dominated the next few centuries economically, politically, and in academic thought.)

In developing your case, keep this in mind. My main criticism of your position is that it is overly dependent on a single piece of questionable data (Copernicus's self-report of his motivations). When I was taught how to do history it was stressed to me that multiple threads of evidence is extremely desirable. I'm less interested in a refutation of my seven points than I am of seeing a positive case for your position on the necessity of Christianity for the development of science.

lpetrich

Bede:
Christianity did not wane in the period you mention. ... Because the churches became less politically powerful does not mean Europe became less Christian.

I think that Bede is judging exclusively from a common modern viewpoint, that religion is a matter of personal conviction and not a society-wide thing. He ought to check out Saudi Arabia and Iran to get a picture of how a society-wide religion works.

The churches becoming less politically powerful does mean a kind of waning. And science got farther in northern Europe, where the churches were politically weaker than in southern Europe, meaning that northern heresiophobes were less able to get their way than southern ones.

lpetrich

Bede:
Greeks didn't have a secular anything as far as I'm aware. They were massively religious and had a habit of putting people like Socrates on trial for questioning this. Aristotle was much more popular with Christians than he ever was with Greeks!

This is such unhistorical horse manure that I don't know what to say. Is this some projection of Christian persecution of supposedly heretical scientific inquiry?

Socrates got in trouble because he was pro-Spartan, and Sparta's Thirty Tyrants had recently been overthrown. His accusers could not mention the real reason, since pro-Spartans had been protected by an amnesty, so they invented those well-known charges of un-Athenian activities.

Interestingly, Plato got away scot-free with his Republic, in which his society's religion would be outlawed and replaced with some custom-made "royal lie". I suggest that Bede imagine what would happen if someone advocated banning the Bible from some ideal society on the ground that it contained lots of bad examples, including a false picture of God. In most of the centuries since Constantine, someone like that would have gotten into deep trouble.

Also, Aristotle had plenty of competition in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, competition like Stoicism and Epicureanism. And one theory popular about religion among educated people in those times was euhemerism, that the deities of popular belief were human heroes exaggerated by their chroniclers. Could anyone have gotten away with that about the Biblical God in most centuries since Constantine?

Celsus

To all,

There is no need for the emotively charged language. I will not hesitate to shut this thread down if I see more of it.

Joel

Bede

Familyman,

I felt Gregor was confusing the issue and fear your point 6 does the same. As Protestants were just as religious, I fail to see how your point is remotely relevant even if science did develop quicker in England than ultra-Catholic France which it probably didn't. Likewise, Italy continues to produce scientific figures from Torricelli to Volta and Mesmer.

You are right I need to supply other examples and will do so. Laziness is the main reason I don't give full quotations in every post, but in my article you will see remarks by Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Bacon, Newton and others all of whom affirm the primacy of their religion in matters of nature.

Lpetrich,

Don't confuse one controversial view of Socrates (which my Greek professor says is untrue) with the concensus. But you are right to point out that his trial was politically motiviated, just like many heresy trials in Europe. What I said about Greek's being extremely religious is true but remains an unpopular view with positivists. Try reading the first third of Robin Lane Fox's "Pagans and Christians" for the Roman Period. As for your views on the Republic, where does he advocate banning religious texts? The Republic he advocates is practically a theocracy. As far as I am aware, he wants to ban poetry because he thinks this has a bad influence.

You are also unhistorical in your view about euhemerism. It was perfectly accepted that heroes joined the Gods - Heracles, Castor and Pollox, Orentes etc etc. This was part of Greek religion and not a daring innovation. Chrisitianity's conception of God was wholly different and so the same ideas are not appropriate. The Greeks and Romans recognised no secular sphere and even sceptics (like Cicero) thought this was a jolly good thing.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

lpetrich

Classical Greco-Roman religion was more a matter of practice than belief -- one could be a complete atheist yet worship the official gods. Also, it was pluralistic and non-exclusivistic; worship of Zeus did not exclude the worship of other deities. And religious persecution was much rarer than it would be under Christendom. Certainly nobody was ever burned at the stake for some disagreement as to whom Zeus had seduced, even one with glaring political overtones.

Most philosophers ignored the Olympian deities in their explanations; they believed in other sorts of deities and/or natural laws. Hippocrates's Oath stated that one is to swear by some Olympians, but Hippocrates's real views on them were Laplacian -- he stated that epilepsy is considered the disease of the Gods because nobody really knows what causes it. Something that Hippocrates and his followers never got in trouble for. And something that present-day medical practitioners have much more in common with than Jesus Christ's exorcisms and magical spit therapy.

The Clouds satirized Socrates as someone who probed into unholy mysteries and someone who denied the existence of Zeus; someone who wanted his help was presented as someone who believes that rain is Zeus pissing through a sieve (dia koskinou ourein). But consider what would have happened in most centuries since Constantine if someone had written a satire that featured a country bumpkin who believed that rain is God pissing through a sieve.

As to Cicero, he discussed a variety of views in On the Nature of the Gods, including the view that the religion business is essentially inventing fictional cosmic bogeypeople in order to make people virtuous. This is the essence of Plato's "royal lie" view of religion; he had advocated a custom-made one for his Republic.

And here is chapter and verse in Plato's Republic: Book 2, 376d-392c. Keep in mind that the works of Homer and Hesiod were essentially religious texts.

I do agree that Plato's Republic is not much different from a theocracy.

Euhemerism was applied not just to "ordinary" heroes, but also to the Olympians themselves; Zeus himself was imagined to have once been a completely-mortal king -- which was a come-down from being the immortal Ruler of the Universe. And possibly Hephaestus had been a notable smith, Athena a notable weaver, Hermes a notable messenger, Apollo a notable physician, Artemis a notable midwife, Aphrodite a notable sex symbol, etc.