Carrier's Dark Ages

[humphreyclarke]

Well, this has been enlightening (see comments thread).

richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2010/01/flynns-pile-of-boners.html

After a lengthy hiatus, it looks like our man Richard Carrier has been hard at work constructing a more sophisticated 'Christian Dark Ages', which seemingly rests on the idea that the world of antiquity had a fully fledged scientific revolution in the making before the third century crisis. Galen apparently conducted human dissection (but didn't spot the rete mirabile wasn't there in humans), Aristotle had a fully fledged concept of the laws of nature, Hipparchus had already conceived of impetus, the application of mathematics to nature was a commonly used methodology and there was already the idea of the universe as a kind of machine. I think this is a similar argument to that made by Lucio Russo in his (eccentric) book 'The forgotten revolution: how science was born in 300 BC and why it had to be reborn'.

Best of all is the idea that the record of watermills in the Domesday book is an unwarranted inference made by christian apologists.

Now we know the nature of the beast, time to work on slaying it.

[humphreyclarke]

Wow, even Charles Freeman has popped up in the comments

[merkavah12]

Sometimes I think that thumping he got during his debate with Craig must have loosened some screws in his head. How else could he come up with tripe like this?

[James Hannam]

Thanks for the head's up, Humphrey. It's a great thread.

Carrier's work isn't tripe, I don't think, even if he is often wrong. I've a post on the blog tomorrow on his comments about Galen, vivisection and dissection.

Best wishes

James