semck: enabled does not mean supported. Yes, the church spread the ability to read and write, and thus to record data. I agree that most literate people at one point (and thus early western scientists) were working for the church. But to be fair, it totally punished people who used those powers if doing so in any way lessened the authority of the church.

Your other claim, that "only a few looney sects" or whatever are responsible, I also take issue with. An anti-stem cell research position is the mainstream of Christianity today. In America we are still debating whether BIRTH CONTROL is a good thing. Even today we get otherwise intelligent, rational people asking if, "maybe we aren't putting too much "faith" in science..." What the hell?!?

These arguments and arguments like them have been the cornerstone of science vs church relations since Galileo. Even if the church coincidentally facilitated the circumstances that allowed science to thrive, I maintain that it is false to pretend that organized religion has been anything but a backwards pressure on science for the last 500 years.

Your third claim, that it is impossible to make Putin admit error with anything, is absolutely true.

@YJ,

"semck: enabled does not mean supported."

I wasn't talking about the church educating people. I was talking about Christian philosophy directly encouraging the rise of science.

"Your other claim, that "only a few looney sects" or whatever are responsible, I also take issue with. An anti-stem cell research position is the mainstream of Christianity today. "

Quit shape-shifting. We were talking about vaccines. Almost no Christians oppose vaccines. Almost no Christians oppose the vast majority of medical procedures, and that has been true at every point in Christian history. Indeed, hospitals in the west were invented by the Christian church, and were run for centuries in that context. There was at no point a sharp break or disagreement to end this trend. Compare this with your earlier, utterly ignorant claim that the Church was an enemy of medicine, and viewed it as a competitor to Jesus.

Now, as for stem cells -- yes, a few procedures that directly entail acts that the Christians view as immoral, the church will oppose. Abortion is another example. None of these do a thing to make your earlier claims less absurd.

"These arguments and arguments like them have been the cornerstone of science vs church relations since Galileo."

This is a complete myth, although one very often repeated among "sceptics." The exception of Galileo aside, most of Christendom has warmly embraced the vast majority of scientific advances, many of which came from inside it.

"Even today we get otherwise intelligent, rational people asking if, "maybe we aren't putting too much "faith" in science..." What the hell?!?"


Yeah? Well, smart people say all kinds of dumb things. I know some who go around parroting easily refutible stories about church-science relations, for example.

"Even if the church coincidentally facilitated the circumstances that allowed science to thrive, I maintain that it is false to pretend that organized religion has been anything but a backwards pressure on science for the last 500 years."

To clarify once again, I'm not talking about coincidental help. I'm talking about directly providing the philosophical context and motivation that led to myriad early great scientists (Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Linnaeus, to name a few) deciding to study nature. But of course, just because they said that, why would you believe them?

Your position is as ridiculous as my trying to argue that atheism held back science in the 20th century, or that Einstein, Feynman, or Weinberg were motivated by the fear of God. Why isn't it enough that you don't believe Christianity is true -- why do you have to tell yourself lies about its effect on other things? I'm perfectly willing to admit that the church has been responsible for some horrors throughout history. What I don't understand is how anybody can pursue such a sloppy, prejudiced view of history as to think that's all it achieved. But certainly that's what you're doing in the realm of science.

Note: Again, I am above representing the views of various philosophers of science -- whom I can dredge up if you want citations, though it would take me awhile -- who have made those claims about Christianity promoting science (and several of whom are not Christians). I have not deeply studied the issue, and suspect, as I said earlier, that the truth lies somewhere between.

If you think Christians promoted or facilitated science, I have a bridge to sell you. In the meantime, read this:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/White/

A very lengthy and well documented expose into how Christianity has blocked the development of science at every turn. Christianity has kept us 1900 years behind. The Greeks had come up with what we discovered in the 19th century after Christianity's iron rule was finally lifted in Europe, before the alleged "birth" of "Christ".

My favorite is the whole bit about 'thunderstones', the Christian bizarro theory about meteors.

Also, the idea that the great scientists were all 'Christians' is rather disingenuous. Most of them were independents/free thinkers/or otherwise not in line with the religious orthodoxies of their country.

Sorry, rather, a bizarro theory about anthropology.

Salaam aleikum. I'd just like to point out that we'd have no idea what the classical scientists had developed, or indeed, how to do math, without the dar al'Islam.

Really? Are you suggesting the Hebrew tribes couldn't add 1+1?

@semcK:

Haha, I love the apologetic argument :P

"Yeah? Well, smart people say all kinds of dumb things. I know some who go around parroting easily refutible stories about church-science relations, for example."

LOL. I like it.

"Quit shape-shifting."

YOU were talking about vaccines. I'd ask you to stop pretending this is the issue I was at any point addressing, and then using my failure to address it as proof of a more general point.

Now, for the rest of what you say, it appears to make a great deal of sense at face value. I feel that the following article does a better job to refute these points than I ever could.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/comments10.htm

All that being said, I will freely accept that organized religion has *accepted* most scientific advances, but I do not accept that the church has embraced any advance that has reduced its authority - as history time and again has demonstrated otherwise. (Wiki article below should offer a few examples to suit you)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_science

But these arguments above aren't even necessary! Many mainstream Christians today STILL believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago and that evolution is false - and they believe this because of their religious indoctrination. It is wrongheaded to the extreme if you are able to convince yourself that that sort of fundamental self-delusion doesn't have far reaching consequences as to how everyday Christians perceive science with suspicion and mistrust.

lol Putin I like yours better... :)

" I'd just like to point out that we'd have no idea what the classical scientists had developed, or indeed, how to do math, without the dar al'Islam."

What a load of nonsense. Why do atheists have to engage in this kind of pro-Islamic hooey?

I'm saying they had no conception of algebra, and very little idea about geometry. Hell, they didn't even have the arithmetical concept of a placeholder for zero.

No geometry? What about the great pyramids and building them didn't involve geometry? The Egyptians and the Greeks and even the Romans predate the Muslims. No, I dismiss your whackjob revisionist theory for the bullshit it is.

Most of the so-called "Islamic" contributions to mathematics were by Greeks and Persians (non-Muslim) living under Islamic rule. Islamic rulers despised science and didn't bother studying foreign languages. The Hindus were arguably more advanced in algebra anyway. Also, Algoritmi, who is credited the most in the Muslim world for contributions to algebra, in particular, was a Zoroastrian of Persian descent.

I don't think we can say anything with specificity about al Kwarizmi's religion. There's a source that claims he was Zoroastrian, but his given name was Muhammad, an epithet unlikely to be found amongst the Zoroastrian population. But this is irrelevant, anyway. The point is that the Caliphate subsidized the translation of Greek works into Arabic, and the dissemination of mathematical knowledge from India. Scholars from Isfahan to Granada could communicate effectively in Arabic and spread ideas across a quarter of the globe. There's plenty to despise about the Caliphate, but its commitment to what is recognizably the beginnings of science, mathematics, and medicine is not amongst them.

Also, btw, I'm agnostic, not atheist. The scientific method deals with natural phenomena, and the idea of a God is supernatural.

Ignostic here, what is God?

Putin,

Awesome! Thank you for the entertaining 114 year old book by Andrew Dickson White. Let's see how it has withstood the test of time, shall we? I quote from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis":

-------------
Contemporary scholarship does not support the Conflict Thesis. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould said: "White’s and Draper’s accounts of the actual interaction between science and religion in Western history do not differ greatly. Both tell a tale of bright progress continually sparked by science. And both develop and utilize the same myths to support their narrative, the flat-earth legend prominently among them". [11] In a summary of the historiography of the Conflict Thesis, Colin Russell said that "Draper takes such liberty with history, perpetuating legends as fact that he is rightly avoided today in serious historical study. The same is nearly as true of White, though his prominent apparatus of prolific footnotes may create a misleading impression of meticulous scholarship”.[12]

In Science & Religion, Gary Ferngren proposes a complex relationship between religion and science:

While some historians had always regarded the Draper-White thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late twentieth century it underwent a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule.[13]

Some contemporary historians of science, such as Peter Barker, Bernard R. Goldstein, and Crosbie Smith propose that scientific discoveries, such as Kepler's laws of planetary motion in the 17th century, and the reformulation of physics in terms of energy, in the 19th century, were driven by religion.[14] Religious organizations and clerics figure prominently in the broad histories of science, until the professionalization of the scientific enterprise, in the 19th century, led to tensions between scholars taking religious and secular approaches to nature.[15] Even the prominent examples of religion’s anti-intellectualism, the Galileo affair (1614) and the Scopes trial (1925), were not pure instances of conflict between science and religion, but included personal and political facts in the development of each conflict.[16]"
-------------------

It is worth noting that few of scholars cited here are Christians.

"Also, the idea that the great scientists were all 'Christians' is rather disingenuous. Most of them were independents/free thinkers/or otherwise not in line with the religious orthodoxies of their country. "

Well, that might be relevant if I were arguing that they were orthodox Christians, but I completely fail to see its relevancy here. It's well established that Newton spent as much of or probably more of his time studying the Bible than doing physics or math (or alchemy, his other love). That, as well as lots of primary sources, would seem to suggest that he took his Christian faith pretty seriously. It's clear that indeed he did, and it underpinned his entire approach to the universe. That he had heterodox views on the trinity is important -- how?

As for the others I cited -- Maxwell was a standard evangelical Presbyterian and an elder in the Church of Scotland. I'm not aware of any nonstandard views by Kepler and Linnaeus, but they might have had some. Of course, those were just examples. Other Christian scientists, such as Descartes, doubtless did have some strange views, though I'd still wonder about relevance.

@Yellowjacket,

Your first source is a lengthy unsourced screed on a site called nobeliefs.com. I confess no surprise at all that it repeats the usual, unnuanced view promoted by such cites.

Your second source, from wikipedia, doesn't substantially undercut anything I'm saying. I said the relationship was complex. Well, so it is. Note in the Gessner case, for example, the RCC's rejection of his work had nothing whatever to do with its content.

I should probably also here point out that I have no particular enthusiasm for the institutions of the RCC. As a Protestant, I already know that popes can act badly when confronted with theological innovations, so it's little surprise they also act badly when confronted with scientific ones. My interest is more broadly how the church broadly -- the religious community of Christendom -- related to science. The answer is, the relationship was complex, and it helped in a great many direct and indirect ways, while also opposing in various ways.

Citing additional examples, past or present, of tensions is not going to change the fact that your initial and defended claim -- your ludicrously caricatured portrayal of the Christian church as a foe (or at best neutral) toward science -- is indefensibly bad scholarship.

"YOU were talking about vaccines. I'd ask you to stop pretending this is the issue I was at any point addressing, and then using my failure to address it as proof of a more general point."

Yes, I was talking about vaccines, and you responded to me -- with a link about vaccines. (To refresh your fragile memory: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/vaccines/mayHV1-1.pdf ). Forgive me for thinking that was an element of our discussion.

"but I do not accept that the church has embraced any advance that has reduced its authority"

I like the added modifier that wasn't part of your claim -- and, incidentally, which is completely impossible to define or evaluate. Which scientific discoveries have reduced its authority, exactly? How would I tell one beforehand, without first knowing whether they opposed it or not?

Christendom has broadly opposed a few discoveries. They have accepted and even made a great many more.

I would once again encourage you to embrace a more nuanced view of history. History's a nuanced beast, and rarely is a simplistic "us good, them bad" narrative going to be borne out, sad to say.

@Jack, if you deny God's existence, then you can't have a relationship with him, on a prairie or anywhere. That's pretty basic.

Putin, I do think some Christians are more literal-minded than is reasonable. Are the streets of heaven literally paved with gold? I don't think so. Is hell a literal fire? Maybe, but I doubt it. Did God create the world in seven (actually six) 24-hour days? He could have, if he wanted to. Is Jesus a literal door, a physical pathway, a rose, a lamb? Was he being literal when he said to eat his body and drink his blood, or was he equating himself with the Passover meal they were celebrating at the last supper, in which the wine and bread were completely symbolic? The meaning is there but often inaccessible without prayer, plus careful consideration of the language, the culture, the context, and the nature of God as revealed to us.

And just to set the record straight, I don't know of anyone who's against using stem cells from the umbilical cord or any source that does not kill a human in an early stage of development.

"Your first source..."

Citations are found at the bottom?

"...indefensibly bad scholarship."

I'm hardly an expert on this, and am admittedly ill equipped to take a scholarly approach. To be honest I feel a bit overwhelmed at yours (and Putin's) knowledge base on this - I have comparably very little .

"...vaccines."

Oh, did you want me to admit that mainstream Christians are in general not anti-vaccine? You got it - and I certainly don't remember saying otherwise - Fragile memory notwithstanding. None of that in any way detracts from my greater point. I apologize if I didn't spell out specifically enough what kinds of science the church has found fault with, I considered it obvious enough that religion hadn't found cause to take issue with the invention of the graphite pencil or the cotton gin.

"Which scientific discoveries have reduced it's authority?"

Doesn't Putin's post give a fairly comprehensive listing? But rather than asking you to challenge the examples he's provided one by one, I'll invite you to give whatever proof by counterexamples you care to (a scientific discovery that reduced religion's authority but was left unchallenged by religion). I don't think your thinly veiled claim of tautology holds water either - it should be fairly apparent that when the the church is going to take issue, it will do so with those sciences that contradicts their holy books or dogma. I think that's as good of a reference point as any.

"Christendom.... accepted and even made a great many more."

Perhaps they have. I'll leave the finer points of that argument to those better equipped. But I'll still challenge you to find examples of mainstream Christianity supporting science that goes against Christian dogma. Judging from your confidence in refuting my historical arguments, and your decision not to address my last one at all, I suspect you may struggle with that.

Whether Christianity supported science or not is a moot point nowadays. The ideology of Christianity faded in the 19th century already. I might be wrong, but it seems to me that the ideology of Science reached its zenith in mid-20th century, maybe around the time of the Moon landing. Since then, there have been signs of its slow decline, but I suppose it will persist for another hundred years. I wonder what new ideology will take its place...

I think Semck and I can both agree on the following: "Zmaj... wtf?"

Lol, just a wider perspective. Don't freak out.

haha I don't think science is going to be replaced. Paradigms that update themselves to reflect reality tend to stay relevant.

@ Yellowjacket - It just means that establishing non-belief requires a lower standard of proof. It depends what your position is. A lack of evidence for god is enough to support the statement "I do not believe in God." but not enough to support the statement "I believe there is no God." See the difference?

"Also, Algoritmi, who is credited the most in the Muslim world for contributions to algebra, in particular, was a Zoroastrian of Persian descent."

Do you have a source for this fantastic claim, or are you making things up as usual? And can you come up with one other Zoroastrian in the history of the world named "Muhammed"?

"Islamic rulers despised science and didn't bother studying foreign languages."

Really? Then why were al-Khwarizmi, Abu Sinna, al Hazen, Averroes, al-Kindi, etc., etc. all supported by Muslim rulers? And how many Christian rulers *ever* bothered to learn Arabic, even while Christian doctors were all using Abu Sinna's "Canon of Medicine" for nearly a thousand years?

":"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis":"

I'm pretty sure if it didn't get written in wikipedia, Semck wouldn't bother reading it. He's probably a Christian because he read the Christianity wiki.

"Contemporary scholarship does not support the Conflict Thesis."

Well, gee, and wiki is the final authority on that.

"Biologist Stephen Jay Gould said"

The creationist's favorite 'biologist', trotted out whenever they need a defense of Christianity, and someone to tell the atheist scientists that they can't fight back. Too bad Gould wasn't taken seriously by many of his fellow biologists, and was known for sloppy misrepresentations of his Darwinian foes, not to mention nasty personal attacks. To cite such a source to criticize others for making up 'myths' is rather humorous.

I'm glad though you're citing critiques of Draper when I didn't even provide you Draper. I guess it doesn't matter because you're too lazy to criticize the actual text of the book I provided you, you have to sift the web for cliffs notes critiques from Christian apologists like Colin Russell.

"It is worth noting that few of scholars cited here are Christians."

Few? Colin Russell is a Christian. Ferngren is a conservative Christian, seen here debating a liberal Christian.Goldstein is the Department of Religious Studies and Department of Jewish Studies, people who known for being anti-religion, naturally.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2716961866237732739

So this notion that your apologists are mostly non-Christian is horsepuckey. The only one who isn't is the enigmatic Stephen J. Gould, who spent most of his career trashing Darwinians, to the joy of Christian fundamentalists everwhere. Try doing something besides copy and pasting wikipedia next time.