Bede

NOGO, you have explained with admirable clarity WHAT Copernicus did. You have not explained WHY.

B

DMB

From the title of this thread, the claim being investigated is not that xianity was uniquely responsible for the rise of science but simply a necessary prerequisite; i.e. it would be a necessary condition but would not have to be a sufficient condition.

I often wonder how much the rise of modern science was due to the rise of protestantism. By breaking the authority and tyranny of the single church and establishing the importance of the individual and his/her direct relationship with god, it allowed him/her much more freedom to speculate about god and nature. Obviously, not all the early scientists were protestant, but ideas circulated very easily among the learned of Europe, regardless of religious regime.

Bede

David,

A lot of mistakes in your post, I'm afraid. Let's go through it.

First, I said it was one necessary cause. There were others, including the work of the Greeks and Arabs.

And the Athenians executed Socrates and built the Parthenon. So, in your books, classical Athens was anti-science too?

Like who? There are three examples, none of whom are thought to be killed for their scientific ideas. Do you know who they were?

You'd better tell that to Boethius, John Philoponus and Bede who were all scientifically curious Christians in late antiquity and the dark ages.

The Latin Europe allowed autopsies from the 12th century, with what Edward Grant calls remarkably little resistance from the church. The church having a problem with this is a myth according to all modern scholars. Of course, the Greeks (except a brief period in Alex), the Romans and Islam all forbade autopsies and dissection.

Wrong. The rise of science started in the 12th century and liberalism in the 18th.

Wrong. Apart from the Galileo debackle, there has been almost no institutional resistance to science from the Churches. Today's creationists are a rare exception. That stuff about autopsies, the flat earth, lightening conductors etc is untrue.

What secular thought? It didn't exist until the eighteenth century when it gave us the French terror and then Marxism. It gave us many good things, but certainly not science that came well before any serious secularism (as apposed to simple non-belief, which was always quite widespread).

Christianity did a number of important things, which I quote from my website:

The preservation of literacy in the Dark Ages

Because it is a literary religion based on sacred texts and informed by the writings of the early church fathers, Christianity was exclusively responsible for the preservation of literacy and learning after the fall of the Western Empire. This meant not only that the Latin classics were preserved but also that their were sufficient men of learning to take Greek thought forward when it was rediscovered.

The doctrine of the lawfulness of of nature

As they believed in a law abiding creator God, even before the rediscovery of Greek thought, twelfth century Christians felt they could investigate the natural world for secondary causes rather than put everything down to fate (like the ancients) or the will of Allah (like Moslems). Although we see a respect for the powers of reason by Arab scholars they did not seem to make the step of looking for universal laws of nature.

The need to examine the real world rather than rely on pure reason/

Christians insisted that God could have created the world any way he like and so Aristotle's insistence that the world was the way it was because it had to be was successfully challenged. This meant that his ideas started to be tested and abandoned if they did not measure up.

The belief that science was a sacred duty

This is not so much covered in this essay, but features again and again in scientific writing. The early modern scientists were inspired by their faith to make their discoveries and saw studying the creation of God as a form of worship. This led to a respect for nature and the attempt to find simple, economical solutions to problems. Hence Copernicus felt he could propose a heliocentric model for no better reason that it seemed more elegant.

Not all these factors were unique to Christianity but they all came together in Western Europe to give the world its only case of scientific take off which has since seen its ideas spread to the rest of the world.

Yours

Bede

<a href="http://www.bede.org.uk" target="_blank">Bede's Library - faith and reason</a>

Autonemesis

I agree with Bede. Christianity had to arise before it could be repudiated by science. In that sense, Christianity is responsible for modern science, for it provided a inviting target for skeptics to repudiate, indeed it seems to have begged the human spirit to repudiate it for centuries before science emerged and succeeded. Modern science is responsible for having repudiated Christianinanity (and ghosts, and spirits, and demons, and astrology, and a myriad other incorrect ideas).

Whatever it was in the past, modern science is not now a form of worship in any sense, and has thoroughly discredited religiously-dictated views of the world. If Christianity was the "parent" of modern science, then its child has grown up and told the parent to get a life and mind its own business.

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

Butters

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: Butters ]</p>

Rusting Car Bumper

"Being open and accomadating" was not at issue.

The question is one of neccessity. See the title of the thread.

People have seen the limitations of their dominant religion of many cultures and sought knowledge outside that. Take Islamic and Chinese cultures for example.

Because they then expanded that or went beyond it does not mean that the dominant religion was necessary.

DC

lpetrich

However, essentially all of the Greek ones had been pre-Constantine, and many of them pre-Jesus-Christ. So why didn't the early Xians take up exactly where the pagans had left off? Why did they wait a thousand years for that?

The persecutions of Anaxagoras and Socrates were peanuts compared to what Justinian had done. Plato was never persecuted, despite his proposing that his society's "Bible" be banned from his ideal city as having lots of bad examples in it. And Plato's Academy lasted for centuries before Justinian shut it down.

Except that they were not a whole movement. If anything, there was often the opposite tendency -- suspicion of Greco-Roman learning as supporting false religions.

Except that that alleged allowing of dissection had had no impact on the medical community. If human dissections had been common long before Vesalius, then there would have been no need for him to do what he did: point out that common beliefs about human anatomy were in error.

In fact, for many centuries in Xiandom, a big objection to human dissections was that they would make it difficult to properly resurrect corpses. Which has been a long-time objection to cremation. It is a totally absurd belief, because corpses turned into worms are equally difficult to resurrect, but it has been a common belief.

Except that that is a rewrite of history. Bede has presented no counterevidence to Andrew Dickson White's account. None whatsoever. And it wasn't just Galileo who got into trouble. Consider what Martin Luther and John Calvin had said about heliocentrism. However, Protestants were more divided among themselves, and heresies like heliocentrism had an easier time in Protestant areas.

As if the Divine Right of Kings had been much, much better.

How could non-belief possibly be widespread?

I will concede that in a limited fashion.

Except that miracles had been widely celebrated. Consider what saints were notable for -- working miracles. And NOT recognizing the lawfulness of nature and using it to their advantage. Something like what Ben Franklin was eventually to do.

Consider (from one of Richard Carrier's essays)
Compare St. Genevieve to Ben Franklin -- whose "inventions" have ultimately been more useful? How many people have been able to repeat St. Genevieve's performance? As opposed to construction of lightning rods.

(a lot of other pseudohistory deleted)

David Bowden

There's nothing quite like having your clock cleaned to teach you to read all the way through a thread before posting.

Bede (and others): my apologies; had I not been in a hurry to finish lunch I would have read this thread and discovered I was intruding on a fairly well-developed discussion. I just shouldn't have tried to post to an upper forum without learning where the discussion stood. And Bede, thanks for posting your answer to my question. If this is the thesis which inspired it all:

then I have no issue with it. Although we might in the future have something to discuss with regard to the origins and development of secular thought at least as far back as Lucretius, and other matters now tangental to the thread's overall direction.

I think it's fair to wonder how secular thought might have developed, had Christianity left the various philosophical schools alone. Why the long gap between pagan and Christian proto-science?

But as long as you leave open the possibility of science developing without Christianity (I believe all the necessary and sufficient factors could have eventually derived from pre-Christian intellectual traditions), I'm fine with the above thesis.

(What follows are miscellaneous remarks related to the replies I received, and not to earlier parts of the thread.)

I see your point; I worded this very poorly. I (mis)understood the topic in a different light when I first posted.

Again, I had not read through the thread before firing that off. Had I known that you were posting or that the thread acquired the tone it did, I would have read carefully and known better.

[quote]Originally posted by Bede:
<strong>quoting David:
---------
Instead, the ascent of this religion was heralded with the suppression of Plato's and Aristotle's academies in Athens. (Justinian, who performed this sacred act, built a great church to "Holy Wisdom" instead.)
---------

The Parthenon wasn't built under the same sort of government as damned Socrates (indeed I doubt very much that Pericles would have had Socrates condemned), and there's just not as much irony involved there as there is in tearing down noteworthy schools while building a cathedral dedicated to "wisdom." Justinian's act would be more like President Bush closing down Harvard or the University of Chicago and founding an even more grandiose National Cathedral.

Socrates wasn't much of a natural philosopher, but on a popular level, yes, the Athenian people seemed to have harbored sentiments antagonistic towards scientific inquiry. Aristophanes's Clouds and Plato's Apology would seem to support the conclusion that Socrates' alleged meddling in natural philosophy factored into their dislike of him.

(In this superlatively stupid moment in history, the people of Athens also condemned him of "complete atheism", as Meletus articulated it. Misunderstanding honest inquiry and then pressing charges for heresy aren't uniquely Christian contributions to human culture, either.)

I only said these proto-scientists were killed for teaching heresies. Even if the three examples you have in mind (is Hypatia one of them?) were not killed for teaching scientific ideas, does that make their murders any less a step in the wrong direction for science?

Performing a modern medical abortion procedure (or prescribing RU-486) is still worth a bullet to the head, according to many Christians, though admittedly most only call it a great sin. Will a Pope one day apologize for this malignment of a legitimate use of medical science? Will the Catholics now working on developing birth control drugs one day be "rehabilitated" and their "sin" or error pronounced virtue?

What are the present attitudes of Christianity worth anyway, in light of the possibility of a later apology for them?

Hasn't it been this way for centuries - Christian teaching backs down and re-formulates in the face of scientific knowledge, or looks ridiculous stalling. Whether or not science could only come after Christianity developed, the fact that scientific knowledge trumps dogma on any occasion - and moreover, the fact that Christian thinkers have acquiesced at all - demonstrates that our knowledge about reality is firmer when it comes not by faith or creed but via other means.

Mea culpa. I overstated here, and I regret it now. I enjoyed reading The Consolations of Philosophy in college, btw.

Well, you learn something new every day. I'd still be curious as to what "remarkably little resistance" amounted to, and as to whether the Church's impedence (both before and after ca. 1100 C.E.) was "justified" by Christianity's teachings, or rather by some secular teaching.

My point was that on so many occasions, the Christian religion (or its human aspect, filled, as it claims to be, with the Holy Spirit) has, if only for a moment, but sometimes for generations, impeded both the free inquiry of the curious-minded, and the dissemination of knowledge created by those who inquire (birth control, evolution, heliocentrism).

If Christianity's divinely dispensed teachings are represented by the thought of its theologians and outspoken leaders, it has repeatedly done a good job of getting in the way of scientific study and application, rather than opening wide the doors of inquiry.

Yes, I'm aware that the Catholic church has done better of late. This does mean, though, that it did relatively poorly, previously. One wonders whether the Christian God intended for science to develop at all, given the repeated role of his Spirit-guided worshippers as obstacles to free inquiry.

My bad; I meant "liberal thought" as in "able to think freely without worrying about conforming to orthodoxy enforced by the sword," not "political liberalism."

Although I suppose the case could be made that the Church tolerated freedom of thought less in matters of theology than in matters pertaining to physical science, since the 12th century also saw the Albigenses get massacred, and over 200 years later, Jan Hus and others were treated to a Christian stake for sharing their thoughts.

But in any event, if a natural philosopher in the 12th century had some brilliant notion that he suspected would get him killed for heresy, he would have been an idiot to say anything. How many thoughts died with their thinkers as the result of Christian intimidation? How much has science accomplished now that western society is relatively unfettered by religious oversight, than it did when Galileo struggled with the question of truth versus obedience?

Perhaps a more important question in evaluating the relationship of science and Christianity is whether science is more purely scientific, and more efficient and productive of knowledge, for having come to ignore the Christian worldview entirely.

With that, I'll leave the thread to develop along its original directions and go read some Plotinus.

-David

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: David Bowden ]</p>

Vorkosigan

No. There was an Arabist in our department who discussed this with me informally, and David Hess talks about it in one of his books but does not go into details. Apparently many of the early thinkers of this period were plugged into the flow of information from Arabia in diverse ways, but had in common connections to the U of Padua, where Aristotle was not held in the greatest esteem (Galileo, Harvey, as I recall). I don't know how Copernicus came by his Arab treatise.

Vorkosigan

The Latin Europe allowed autopsies from the 12th century, with what Edward Grant calls remarkably little resistance from the church. The church having a problem with this is a myth according to all modern scholars. Of course, the Greeks (except a brief period in Alex), the Romans and Islam all forbade autopsies and dissection.

Galen (121-200) did do autopsies, Bede. Perhaps the Romans in general did not? Autopsies were done by the medical faculty at Bologna from 1200 on, the Pope issued an edict permitted Padua and Bologna med schools to do autopsies in late 1400. By 1500 the Church generally accepted autopsies.