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Post by eckadimmock on Feb 27, 2012 1:02:13 GMT
But if America has not yet done so, then in the past she must have been hobbled in her science and progress. So, no discoveries or Nobel prizes for the Americans until they do? And you'd expect a flowering of science when religion declines: but strangely, it appears to have eluded the EU. www.raco.cat/index.php/Papers/article/viewFile/140570/191801
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Post by timoneill on Apr 3, 2012 20:20:38 GMT
My copy of Stenger's book turned up yesterday. I'm unsure if I'm going to bother reading it after going through the first section last night.
First of all, it doesn't seem to be quite what I was expecting: an updated Draper/White reviving the "Conflict Thesis". Very little of it is about history at all and most of it seems to be taking aim at people like Paul Davies of God and the New Physics fame.
The first few very brief chapters do give a summary of the historical relationship between religion and science and it seems at first glance to be at least trying to be fair. He's read Edward Grant (or at least he's read Science and Religion 400 BC to AD 1550), David Lindberg and bits of Ronald Numbers, so seems to know what he can and can't get away with claiming. The account he gives is, on the whole, just on the right side of "reasonably accurate", but with a heavy emphasis on the negative. He constantly emphasises anything that stresses reason being subordinated to belief - eg the idea of "reason as the handmaiden of theology".
Our old pal Richard "Artie Ziff" Carrier gets a thank you in the Acknowledgements and his dead hand is all over this section of the book. Stenger refers to the Draper-White thesis as "somewhat of an oversimplification" (p. 31). He notes that it is rejected by modern scholars but slips in that some of these have "strong ideological motives of their own" (p. 32). He cites Lawrence M. Principe's indictment of Draper's book as "one long, vitriolic, anti Catholic diatribe" but then criticises Principe for saying White claimed the "Earth's sphericity was officially opposed by the Catholic Church". Stenger says he "looked through White's book" and found no claim of an official Church opposition, just references to some Church fathers who opposed the idea and quite a few to Church thinkers who accepted it. On this basis he concludes "some historians have not been particularly careful or accurate in their criticisms of Draper and White" (p. 33)
He goes on to note that it must be remembered that "while Europe languished in the Dark Ages" (he uses that term to refer to the whole Medieval period) science flourished in the Islamic world and there "was little or no conflict between science and Islam" in that period. This seems to imply that the "languishing" in Europe was due to such a conflict.
He then goes into a critique of Ian Barbour's Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. He is displeased by Barbour's claim that Christianity had a positive influence on the rise of science, via an application of Greek reason to the idea of an orderly, rational creation. He dismisses this idea stating "without Christian monotheism the Greek (and Roman) view would not have been suppressed for a thousand years" and calling the development of science in the Middle Ages "meager" (p. 39) It was the glorious "Reformation and the Renaissance" that freed things up (though he acknowledges that Augustine and Aquinas has paved the way) and declares that it is significant "that the scientific revolution occurred outside the Church-dominated universities" (p. 40)
His third chapter gives a very brief summary of Medieval thought, which is sort of okay, and this section ends with a slightly grudging admission that "the medieval era was not the Dark Age that it is often made out to be" (p. 79). He notes, for example, that Medieval cathedrals are rather nice. Then we get this:
No doubt many Christian thinkers during the centuries before Copernicus participated in the intellectual activity leading to the development of natural philosophy. However, suggestions that the scientific revolution was somehow a direct consequence of Christian thinking (footnote) are refuted by the historical facts."
The footnote here is to a certain book by one James Hannam. Though how this idea, also put forward by people like Grant, is "refuted by historical facts" he doesn't say. After a bit more of a potted history of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment he quotes a couple of Christian apologists (eg Robert Hutchinson's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible) baldly claiming Christianity begat science and then counters them with ... guess who:
"Had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress of science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occured a thousand years ago, and our technology today would be a thousand years more advanced" quoth Artie Ziff (quoted in Stenger p. 99).
Stenger finishes his survey of history with that silly squeaking those ringing words of eternal truth from the Great Historian.
I'm not sure I'm going to bother reading the rest of the book.
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Post by sankari on Apr 3, 2012 23:00:52 GMT
He dismisses this idea stating "without Christian monotheism the Greek (and Roman) view would not have been suppressed for a thousand years" and calling the development of science in the Middle Ages "meager" (p. 39) ... After a bit more of a potted history of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment he quotes a couple of Christian apologists (eg Robert Hutchinson's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible) baldly claiming Christianity begat science and then counters them with ... guess who: "Had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress of science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occured a thousand years ago, and our technology today would be a thousand years more advanced" quoth Artie Ziff (quoted in Stenger p. 99). Good grief. Where do people come up with this stuff? By what objective metric do they determine that the Scientific Revolution was delayed by 1,000 years and we'd all be enjoying super-technology right now if it wasn't for that?
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Post by fortigurn on Apr 4, 2012 4:32:23 GMT
What a damp squib.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 4, 2012 14:19:19 GMT
So basically the new conflict thesis - formulated by Carrier - rests on the assumption that the Greeks were on the brink of a scientific revolution (Lucio Russo's argument - though modified to have Hellenistic Science peaking in the 2nd century AD). The crisis of the the third century and it's follow on effects then caused the breakdown of intellectual culture. The Christians were culpable because they were (in the main) not interested in ancient natural philosophy and allowed the bulk of it to perish.
I think there are two related movements going on at the moment. The first comes from one arm of the secular humanists / atheists who are looking to aggrandize ancient thought and come up with something that gives the vast majority of the credit for laying the foundations of the scientific revolution to the Greeks and Romans. The second comes from interests seeking to promote Islamic culture (in some instances backed by Saudi money) who want to give the credit to the Medieval Middle East. In both cases the 'poor benighted Medievals' take a bit of a bashing.
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Post by himself on May 3, 2012 0:12:29 GMT
Random thoughts
There also seems to be confusion between "scientific progress" and "engineering and technological progress." Science as the handmaiden of theology is bad, but science as the handmaiden of business and industry is good? (This was the explicit program of F.Bacon and R.Descartes and the other revolutionaries: to bring [female] Nature in chains before [masculine] man to increase his "dominion over the universe."
It is quite possible to have technological progress without natural science at all. In fact, that was the case in China.
It also seems that Stenger has completely forgotten Byzantium when he talks about Christendom. Does he mean to say that the Dark Ages covered The City and its Empire? Or is it only that he is Eurocentric? + + + The term "progress" meant only a physical motion, as when the king made a progress of his kingdom, or metal was worked in a progressive die. Long about the early 1500s, the term shifted to include "forward" motion in time; so the very concept did not exist beforehand. (Or more precisely, could not be economically stated.) This was contemporary with the emergence of "European" as a noun referring to a kind of person, "primitive" as referring to a non-European, and the convergence of "urban" and "urbane" onto the same meaning of "civilized." And "modern" took on its modern connotations.
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