lpetrich

I'm not impressed with this attempted canonization of Sir Robert Boyle, because it looks as if he was trying to advocate the non-intervening deity and the wind-up-toy Universe by professing to be orthodox.

It's sort of like someone "proving" that Xtianity is intellectually acceptable to many freethinkers by quoting approvingly from the works of Bishop John Shelby Spong.

hezekiah jones

This could be "The Constitution was based on Christian Principles" all over again.

***shudder***

Tyler Durden

Boy, the stench of fundamental atheism in this thread is astounding!

The embarrasing inability to credit Christianity with anything positive is the sole attribute of the hardline dogmatists, who champion a non-scholarly approach and are generally unable to counter-argue with anything beyond strawmen.

The belief in God in no way prevented the rise of scientific thinking. In fact, the belief in God's sovereignty over nature is what encouraged the intellectuals to postulate the laws of nature and step away from the other rival orthodoxies of the time.

lpetrich

WHAT "rival orthodoxies"???

And this is a pure rewrite of history. It took over a millennium for anything resembling science to restart in Europe -- and if Xtianity ought to be credited with the origin of science, then it ought to take the blame for the thousand-year delay.

Note the word "restart". I use that word because science got started in ancient Greece, long before Jesus Christ had been born. These first scientists had been at least nominal Hellenic pagans, so should we start worshipping the Olympians on account of them and their beliefs?

I suspect that the main inspirations were:

* The belief in an impersonal Fate.

* The Orphic quest for enlightenment. Which apparently inspired Pythagoras and Plato.

Tyler Durden

The apposite orthodoxy in eastern thought, for one. And a host of proliferated others in the region of Asia and Europe at the time of the Renaissance.

Perhaps you overlook the possibility that the fall of Rome had anything to do with the lack of intellectual progress in the middle ages. What we understand as science comes from the Enlightenment, 17th century rationalism and 18th century empiricism.

That's a non-starter. I'm not concerned with worshipping anything, but rather adopting a more honest attitude to history. What are you so afraid of, Petritch?

By the way, you're a better revisionist than i am, Petritch. The ancient greeks were poor scientists - they thought that doing experiments were below them, that it was a slave's work. This greatly contributed to the sluggish development of modern science for 2000 years.

Yuck, homogeneous (and very lazy) thinking. The ancient Greeks aren't identical to the degenerate ones at the tail end of their dominance.

It comes without any surprise you fail to mention that Plato had already been canonized by the Church for over a thousand years.

Bede

Confusing to have two threads on the same thing...

A point that is often missed is that the Greek works that survive are those that Christians choose to preserve for us. Hence they give a very skewed view of what Greek thought was actually like. For instance, the medical works of Galen make up a full third of the entire surviving classical Greek corpus. Add Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy and the mathematical works and we find that Christians were by far the most keen on copying scientific and medical writings. The papyri from Egypt and epigraphical evidence show that this was not the cencern of most Greeks.

In other words, we think Greeks were a rational lot because Christians were interested in their rational thought. Hence, the preponderance of Greek science in the surviving corpus tells us that the Christians who preserved it were very interested in science - not that the classical Greeks were. Oddly, Stoicism, the Greek philosophy that comes closed to Christianity is severely under represented as is Epicurianism and Cynicism. And yet these three schools rejected much of reason and science, concentrating instead on ethical issues.

We are left with the strong impression that it was Christians who appreciated Greek science a whole lot more than the Greeks did.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

lpetrich

Tyler Durden:
The apposite orthodoxy in eastern thought, for one. And a host of proliferated others in the region of Asia and Europe at the time of the Renaissance.

Like which ones that western and central European would have been likely to know about?

Perhaps you overlook the possibility that the fall of Rome had anything to do with the lack of intellectual progress in the middle ages.

That is correct about the western Roman Empire. But not about its eastern half, which is often known as the Byzantine Empire. The eastern half survived to 1453, when the Turks finally conquered it.

By the way, you're a better revisionist than i am, Petritch. The ancient greeks were poor scientists - they thought that doing experiments were below them, that it was a slave's work. This greatly contributed to the sluggish development of modern science for 2000 years.

True, they left a lot to be desired. But one has to start somewhere.

It comes without any surprise you fail to mention that Plato had already been canonized by the Church for over a thousand years.

But he was nevertheless a pagan.

lpetrich

Bede:
A point that is often missed is that the Greek works that survive are those that Christians choose to preserve for us.

It seems that anyone Bede likes he calls a "Christian" -- much of Greco-Roman learning had been transmitted through the Islamic world.

The Byzantines and some Irish monks also did some transmitting, but the main things many medieval monks liked to copy were the Bible, various Church Fathers, hymnals and the like, and largely-fictional biographies of saints.

And a lot of Greco-Roman scientific work did get lost, like much of the work of the pre-Socratics. None of the works of Leucippus and Democritus survive, though some Epicurean works have. Lucretius's On the Nature of Things had a fair amount of science in it.

Bede

Just to correct Ipetrich (again): none of what survives in the original Greek came through the Arabs. There is a little that survives only in Arabic translation but the vast majority of the Greek scientific work that survives was transmitted through Christian Byzantium.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

lpetrich

However, some writings "survived" by being erased and their parchment reused. Thus, some treatise on law or mathematics or whatever "survived" as a hymnal or a saint biography or whatever -- with the original writing being faintly apparent.