Christianity and Aristotelian ideas

[deef]

Hey guys,

I'm in a discussion with some guys about christianity and science during the middle ages. The usual stuff.
I mentioned how christian theology kind of laid the groundwok for empirical science and 'natural laws' because christianity's ideas about the order and predictable nature of the universe.

Someone replies though that the Greeks (especially the atomists) were much further actually. Mainly because the christians held on to Aristotelian ideas for too long.
He provided these quotes:

Though a few ancient atomists such as Lucretius challenged the teleological viewpoint of Aristotelian ideas about life, teleology (and after the rise of Christianity, natural theology) would remain central to biological thought essentially until the 18th and 19th centuries. Ernst Mayr claimed that there was "nothing of any real consequence in biology after Lucretius and Galen until the Renaissance."

and:

Despite these accolades, many of Aristotle's errors held back science considerably. Bertrand Russell notes that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine"

What do you guys think?

[perplexedseeker]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Lucretius purely concerned with destroying religion rather than advancing any kind of science? He was a poet, not a researcher! I've read some parts of his work and to me it sounded just like a Roman version of "the God Delusion". (most of the arguments are essentially identical)

The way it seems to me, Atomism was essentially an ethical doctrine that wasn't actually concerned with the way the world worked (after all, they thought the world had assembled spontaneously and purely by chance, and could just as easily disappear tomorrow). It was more about what they believed to be the correct attitude towards living. The fact that they happened to be correct that matter is composed of small units is entirely coincidental - after all, they were hopelessly wrong about what those units actually were, what they were composed of and the laws that governed them. (remember, these guys were mind-body dualists and many of them still believed the gods existed, but were simply chance collections of matter, much like humans) The whole point of the Epicureanism that Lucretius was into was to persuade people to enjoy themselves rather than waste time trying to prevent natural disasters by sacrificing to gods who either didn't exist or didn't care. Epicurus himself detested education and learning, (he thought it made people more worried when they could be achieving inner peace) and even though Lucretius was more interested in how these atoms actually behaved, to me it looked like he thought that this was only a means to destroy religion. Once you accepted Atomism, that was the end of it. Life was meaningless, that was The Ultimate Truth (TM), so get used to it. Conflating this philosophy with modern science is just bizarre, whatever superficial resemblances it might have to some of it.

When you consider that this was the competition it was up against, it's hardly surprising that Christianity became so dominant in the late Roman empire.


Does anyone else agree with my analysis?

[perplexedseeker]

And another thing - whoever said teleological thinking was a hindrance to biology (apart from hardcore mechanists, that is)?

Whilst I don't doubt mechanistic thinking is a useful abstraction in physics and chemistry, when it comes to biology it can be extremely difficult to understand anything without at least having some idea of what it's for. I've seen many senior professors give stern lectures on the importance of mechanism, then slip right back into talking about organs being "designed" to do certain things without even realising they're doing it! Of course they don't literally mean design (in the intelligent design sense), but even if you think about biological structures purely in Darwinian terms of benefits they confer to the organism, it's often less informative to talk about mechanics than it is to talk about the "purpose" of these structures (from the organism's point of view).

[humphreyclarke]

Jan 19, 2010 18:50:48 GMT perplexedseeker said:

And another thing - whoever said teleological thinking was a hindrance to biology (apart from hardcore mechanists, that is)?

This is a point worth repeating. I mean Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' is effectively one long argument against Paley's natural theology. He had been a devotee of Paley earlier in his life, admired him greatly him and had to study him in detail to be able to stick the knife in later. Another influence on Darwin was Thomas Malthus. Malthus's struggle for existence is invoked by him in order to perceive the world as a "a mighty process for awakening matter" in which the Supreme Being acting "according to general laws" created "wants of the body" as "necessary to create exertion" which forms "the reasoning faculty". Finally the intellectual path for the 'Origin' was paved by Robert Chamber's 'Vestiges', a work of natural theology which argues for a progressive creation by natural law. So the argument that natural theology, or teleology in general held back biology is bollocks. Carl Linnaeus for example, accepted the general account of Noah's flood and saw himself as classifying Gods handiwork. Yet still he managed to provide descriptions of 7700 species of plant and 4400 species of animal and arrange them in family relationships and wrote that man should be placed in the same genus as the apes.

Although Lucretius's poem does contain a dis-teleological view of nature, as Perplexed pointed out, ancient atomism wasn't really a scientific theory, it was a postulated for ethical purposes. Lucretius takes this view of nature in order to show that the Gods have no plan for mankind and thus we are not subject to their whims. It' a great piece of poetry, not a scientific programme.

Despite these accolades, many of Aristotle's errors held back science considerably. Bertrand Russell notes that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine"

Aristotle had a coherent and well supported system of natural philosophy which was backed up with good commonsensical arguments. In order to be overthrown he first had to be proved wrong and then the difficulties in his system had to be so insurmountable as to call into question his influence. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages it provide a framework and a vocabulary with which natural philosophical questions could be addressed. Without Aristotle we would have had considerably less science, not more.

[himself]

Jan 19, 2010 14:42:39 GMT deef said:

Someone replies though that the Greeks (especially the atomists) were much further actually. Mainly because the christians held on to Aristotelian ideas for too long.

Self-parody, right? Did they think Aristotle was a medieval?

The ancient atomists were not scientists. It was not a "theory" based on "empirical data." What sort of empirical data could the ancient Greeks have had on such things? It was not even well-thought out philisophically. Aristotle pointed out an inherent contradiction in the notion.

The only reason we think Democritus and the rest were "ahead of their time" is that we use the term "atom" to refer to something entirely different. Those particles we call "atoms" are not at all what Democritus had in mind. They consist of parts, they are "breakable", they are different for different substances, etc. The atomoi were [by definition] unsplittable, were simple [no parts], and were the same for all substances. Some were bigger or smaller, is all; and at some point it was decided that there were five shapes corresponding to the five regular solids. Just because it was cool, I guess.

A lucky guess is not science. Jonathan Swift mentioned the two moons of Mars in Gulliver's Travels. That lucky guess did not make him an astronomer, and he was not "ahead of the time" in astronomy.

Now, Aristotle did have a concept much like the atom; but he contended matter was indefinitely divisible. His minima were a different sort of thing. A minima was the least particle of matter that could support a given form. So, a substance with the form of water could be divided again and again into smaller segments of water. But at some point, the material segment would be insufficient to realize the form of water. The water "molecule" [as we would say] would on the next split become two different substances: hydrogen and oxygen. Then the oxygen "atom" [say] could be divided one again - into protons, electrons, and neutrons. The protons could be divided into quarks. Right now a quark is a mathematical term; but suppose there is a physical quark. There are top quarks and bottom quarks, strange quarks, etc. They have "color" and so on. But in order to be differentiable, they must have features or components and hence, in principle, are also divisible into something even more basic. Und so weiter.

It seems to me that Aristotle's minima are closer to what we recognize about molecule-"atom"-boson-quark than they are to Democritus' atomoi.

He provided these quotes:

teleology ... would remain central to biological thought essentially until the 18th and 19th centuries.

And a good thing, too. Without telos there would be no scientific laws, no regularity in nature. If there was no "tendency toward" there would be no reason why the same ricochets of random atoms would consistently produce the same results. But falling bodies tend always or for the most part toward the point of minimum gravitational potential; they do not fly off in odd directions. Sodium and chlorine combine to make salt, not soda pop; tiger cubs grow up to be mature tigers, not tiger lilies. If there was nothing in X that predisposed Y, then in virtue of what do we find that X produces Y "always or for the most part"?

Evolution would not tend toward an origin of species, nor to greater fitness for a given niche. On the more individual note, species would go extinct if living things did not have a drive to go on living and therefore exploit new niches and resources. Not even Dawkins has been able to write a book without invoking telos.

So science has not disproven the telos, they have only denied it while simultaneously relying on it.
______________

“You find it surprising that I think of the comprehensibility of the world... as a miracle or an eternal mystery. But surely, a priori, one should expect the world to be chaotic, not to be grasped by thought in any way. One might (indeed one should) expect that the world evidenced itself as lawful only so far as we grasp it in an orderly fashion. This would be a sort of order like the alphabetical order of words. On the other hand, the kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s gravitational theory is of a very different character. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order, which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori. Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops.”
-- Albert Einstein, Letter to M. Solovine

It is one of the universal miracles of nature that huge assemblages of particles, subject only to the blind forces of nature, are nevertheless capable of organising themselves into patterns of cooperative activity.”
-- P. DAVIES, “The New Physics"

[perplexedseeker]

Well said. I'm interested, though, what was the "inherent contradiction" that Aristotle found?

More generally, which one of Aristotle's books was this in? I've been trying to read up on him, but the guy wrote a lot. Did he write a shorter book in which he summarised his ideas?

[deef]

Thanks so much for the answers.

The guy I'm debating also said that the Greek thinking was so succesful because of their lack of teleology. Because they didn't know where they were going they were willing to find out for themselves. There were no religious dogma's holding them back, so to speak. Maybe there were gods, but they don't care about us, so let's find out ourselves what's going on.
Is there anything to this view?

I already said to him that many Greek or other pagan thinkers were reluctant to study nature because they thought it to be inpredictable or 'chaotic'. If there's no order to be expected in nature, than there's no use in experiments or empirical thinking.

[humphreyclarke]

Jan 19, 2010 23:32:14 GMT deef said:

The guy I'm debating also said that the Greek thinking was so succesful because of their lack of teleology.

This guy has obviously never read Galen then.

Jan 19, 2010 23:32:14 GMT deef said:

Maybe there were gods, but they don't care about us, so let's find out ourselves what's going on.

This sounds like Epicureanism which is more like 'maybe there are gods, but they don't care about us, so lets withdraw from public life and reside with close, like-minded friends'.

Jan 19, 2010 23:32:14 GMT deef said:

I already said to him that many Greek or other pagan thinkers were reluctant to study nature because they thought it to be inpredictable or 'chaotic'. If there's no order to be expected in nature, than there's no use in experiments or empirical thinking.

I don't know if I agree with this though. What we see in Aristotle is undeniably an idea of the lawfulness of nature but it’s based on the immanent properties of natural objects, not absolutely invariant rules. Furthermore the natural powers inherent in objects could occasionally miscarry giving rise to exceptions. The other problem is that Aristotle there is a division of labour whereby natural philosophy deals with causal explanations and mathematics deals with human constructions. Thus a mathematical account can give good predictions (as for example with heavenly bodies) but without being taken as a true causal explanation. In the medieval period we begin to see this thinking be overturned with the development of anti-Aristotelian traditions, the application of mathematics and mathematical modes of thought to natural phenomena and the emergence of the idea of a clockwork universe. You begin to get the idea of the universe as a giant machine in which passive matter follows laws which are mathematically real and accessible to human reason. By contrast in the Greek view, nature is living organism imbued with attributes of divinity and full of final causes.

[deef]

I was kind of surprised when I heard him say that he thought the christian West was too kind towards Aristotle and his ideas. I thought that was more the case for the Byzantines who weren't very critical of the Greek thinking and mainly restricted themselves to writing kind and gentle commentaries.

My idea was always that after the 'translation movement' Greek wisdom was, because of the church 'Latin' infrastructure, introduced to areas and people that have never heard it before. This resulted in a fresh and more critical look towards the Greek (Aristotelian) wisdom. Eventually becoming the environment where Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler en Newton emerged.

What are your thoughts?

[deef]

I would love for somebody to respond to my last post... still curious.