Faith and Philosophy, actually, yes. But you are asserting that religion, and religion alone, gave birth to the European renaissance. So far you haven’t given much cause for why you think that’s a working hypothesis.
The facts it does match are spelled in Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, lest you’re under the impression I’m just making stuff up. Diamond makes a strong argument that the geography of Europe contributed mightily to its rise rather than any alleged superiority of its people (or their religion, I assume). Besides, your claim conveniently ignores contributions made by Jewish, Arabic and Asian philosophers.
I’m just pointing out that there’s nothing specific to Christianity that makes it “vital” to this progress. That a Christian discovered something doesn’t mean Christianity is crucial to the discovery.
Not necessarily true, but okay. Aztecs, after all, had some fairly impressive engineering skills which speaks to at least some inkling (conception, if you will) of physics. I’ll just reiterate what I asked earlier: what are the major tenets of Christianity, and what about them makes them vital to science?
During the period you’re claiming as when Christianity invented science, heretics were burned and original thinkers needed the patronage of the wealthy who certainly were interested in personal glory. When, if ever, was the generous communal existence you describe the norm in Christian Europe?
This is by no means restricted to Christianity. Heck, Judaism required literacy (at least among its male population) long before it became the norm for Christianity.
[quote]
The Christian view of all human beings lowered social barriers. With the need for absolute, cast-in-stone divisions between social classes lowered, widespread education was no longer a threat to the social order.[/quyote]
Class systems in Christian nations persisted well into the Renaissance, arguably the Enlightenment. It took 18th-century philosophies and the rise of Deism for people to start discarding the bible and its mythologies as explanations of the physical world. This, in combination with diminishing reverence for the divine right of kings, undermined class systems.
Well, when there’s a female Pope, I’ll be impressed.
Well, if this was true, I don’t see room for miracles involving the sun dancing around the sky and such, so the rules of the universe evidently can be broken, if God wants to.
The ancient Babylonians are, of course, ancient, but modern Buddhists can and do advance science and were doing so well before Christianity found its way east.
Anyway, I see nothing to seriously challenge my contention. It was the gradual diminishing of religious power in Europe that allowed the rise of reason, and it doesn’t critically matter what exactly the particular dogma of that religion was.
I’m not asserting that, that’s a straw man. Glad that was easily settled.
And it’s logic and faith. Not philosophy and faith, that implies that philosophy is inherently western.
Silly me for quoting a philosopher (Strauss). Certainly if you’re going to assert that Athens is the seat of logic, you are asserting logic itself is inherently western. Which is it? And are these your words in post #14?:
I do believe they are. Perhaps you’d like to rephrase?
I’ve never seem them so used before, but I’ll take your word for it.
“Preceded” != “birthed.”
From “Which Civilisation,” by Michael Lind (published in *Prospect, 2001):
If I understand it, your assertion is that a combination of reason and religion created the Enlightenment. Even granting that (and it’s a stretch) I don’t see why that religion need necessarily have been Christianity.
Sure, Europe was Christian and Europe became a (not the) hotbed of science. Maybe if Europe hadn’t been Christian it would have become a hotbed of science 300 years earlier. Or 500 years later. But never?
The apocryphal is the enemy of the flippant.
Christianity is an adaptation of Judism for pagans. It is significant in that it spread an Axial Age religion throughout Europe and parts of Asia. Where it met other Axial Age religions (eg Buddhism), it enjoyed less success.
For an illustration of the humanizing aspects of Christianity, one can read some of the original versions of Aesop’s Fables. Not only are they brutal, but they accept and condone cruelty in a way that modern ears find striking.
Readers of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and viewers of Shlock Horror know that fictional brutality didn’t go away of course. But in the Fables, “…there seems to have been no public consensus that compassion towards one’s fellow human beings had anything to recommend it.” Cite.
Now maybe the rise of the middle class in general, and the increasing status of women in particular, had something to do with this trend. If so, Christianity is more effect than cause: it appealed to a constituency that, while hardly predominant, was growing more powerful. (h/t Brainglutton)
I’ll also note that while the ancient world was strong in philosophy and mathematics, it wasn’t especially adept at technological development and adaptation, relative to those of the medieval age. So an emerging upwardly mobile class -empowered by Christianity perhaps- had other implications as well.
As for events occurring 1500 or more years after the birth of Christ, I’m partial to something like Jared Diamond’s POV.
No, I am claiming that from a foundation of Christian morality philosophers reasoned a moral philosophy that became known as secular humanism. Philosophers such as Liebniz (Christian), and Spinoza (Jewish) laying the ground work for that. If Secular Humanism is the plant the Christian society was the fertile soil in which it was planted. Obviously it evolved as contact with other cultures occurred.
The rest is a straw man. I am not making any argument regarding singular cause and regard all singular cause arguments to be too simplistic to be worthwhile.
We’re not discussing the way it MAY have happened but the way it DID happen.
But also discussing the enlightenment is about 1000 years later than I wanted to examine. If Christianity is the source of much evil and suffering in the world such that it is a blight upon humanity then we need to demonstrate that what came before it was better.
Okay, then secular humanism is the key to progress, once the ritualistic trappings of Christianity and other parent religions were downplayed or discarded or in any case were no longer viewed as an adequate explanation of how the universe worked, forcing the advent of empiricism.
Just to clarify, the point I’ve attempted to make is that any fertile soil would do. There’s nothing specific to Christianity that was absolutely necessary for science, and if Christianity were to cease to exist, science would continue. As far as I can tell, your argument consists of:
[ul][li]Something good happened in a Christian society - proves Christianity is crucial.[/li][li]Something bad happened in a Christian society - doesn’t count.[/li][li]Something good happened in a nonChristian society - doesn’t count.[/li][li]Something bad happened in a nonChristian society - proves Christianity is crucial.[/ul] [/li]
Amusingly, I recall a passage from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos that suggested that but for the Catholic church, humanity might have had spaceships 500 years earlier - only the lettering on the sides of the ships would be Greek.
I can’t offhand recall the correct word for this - the assumption that a current situation can only be the result of what proceeded it, i.e. humans are comfortable (for the most part) in the temperate ranges of Earth’s environment, therefore Earth’s environment was designed for human comfort. If human history DID happen some other way, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Somebody else might be having it, and debating the ramifications of THEIR history. Maybe those alternatives versions wouldn’t be using the internet to carry on the conversation because it hadn’t been invented. Maybe they wouldn’t be using the internet because it’s so quaint and obsolete and unsuited to a conversation between a colonist on Mars and one killing time in the middle of the Jupiter run.
Well, I personally figure Christianity’s no more destructive, obtrusive and hindering than any other state religion. Better than some, worse than others. I’d like to have seen a religion that had no use for virgin births and such and had as its central revelation from God (or whatever):
I have to figure that if God exists, he’s giving me that insight and it’s just as valid as anything Yeshua bar-Yussef ever said. Disagree? Feel free to prove me wrong.
Well, why don’t you define what you mean by a full-fledged Renaissance? An individual does not make a Renaissance. Neither does a book. Even a system of mathematics does not. (And the mathematics of India and Japan were not that impressive.)
I assume that a full-fledged Renaissance has to be exactly what it the word means. A Renaissance is a rebirth, literally. So the historical period generally called “The Renaissance” is so called because of the birth of lines of thought in art, literature, science, philosophy, and religion that keep going to this day. It’s only a Renaissance if it produces something meaningful and lasting.
There were cases in Asian civilizations, as already mentioned, where we had the beginning of something that looked like it might match the Renaissance. But it never actually did. There was no event that reshaped any Asian civilization the way that the past 500 years have reshaped Europe. Rather, the reshaping that started in Europe spread outward to the rest of the world.
I’ve read Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I am not impressed by it. Like many critics, my main feeling is that Diamond cherry-picked a small number of historical examples that he could fit into his thesis. I suspect that the book’s popularity arises mainly from his shameless kissing up to the far left by endlessly insisting that his thesis is just so totally egalitarian.
First of all, I’ll await your cite to establish the fact that burning of heretics was common across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. An enlightened person such as yourself surely knows that the idea of the Spanish Inquisition burning heretics is a myth, invented by Spain’s political enemies many years after the supposed event, so you’re going to need something else. You’ll surely accompany that with a cite for the claim that “original thinkers needed the patronage of the wealthy who certain were interested in personal glory”. After all, didn’t Galileo depend on the Catholic Church for financing for much of his career? And Issac Newton certainly didn’t depend on anyone’s patronage.
There were universites operating throughout Europe at the time. Oxford got started in the 12th century, if I recall correctly, and by the Renaissance they were popping up like mushrooms.
I’d be interested in seeing proof of that. In any case, though, I still claim that the Scholastics were the first to assert education as an aim in itself, rather than merely as a job skill strictly confined. That breaking of barriers allowed the spread of educational institutions, and of an attitude more favoable to education. Without those institutions and that attitude, there’s no particular reason to believe that the Renaissance would ever happen.
Class systems exist to this day. My point was that the rigidly defined class systems, such as India’s caste system, did not exist in Christian Europe because Christianity would not allow it. Modern schools of course teach that Europe was populated by serfs laboring under the merciless feudal system until the enlightened teachers of the enlightment came and liberated them, but reality was somewhat different.
Should I take it, from this bit of snarkiness, that you have no meaningful response to the point?
Many people do see such rules, and it doesn’t prevent them from doing science. Galileo, Kepler, Newton…all firm believers in the miraculous.
I’d be interested to see documentation of this. Exactly how much science was advanced prior to contact with Christian civilization? Anything to match 17th century European science?
The arrival of Christianity in Europe was the arrival of reason. I suppose you could get out of that by redefining reason as the absence of Christianity, but that would hardly be a rigorous argument.
Michael Lind is a lying sack of
ahem.
Let’s take a look at the claims of Michael Lind.
I bet John Locke would be surprised to hear that.
Hume was born in 1711, at which time Christian movements such as the Quakers had been working to oppose slavery for a long time. The Methodist movement was started by Wesley brothers in the 1730’s and based on explicity Christian demands for an end to slavery. It was that movement that eventually brought the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, and many other examples social progress. Many people from the Church of England and the Presbyterian church were involved as well.
I’ve somehow missed the exorcisms at my church. I guess they’re all done at the 10 o’clock service.
I’ve already shown that the claims about Galileo are atheist myth-making.
Actually the Vatican has many publications engaging with the governments of democratic nations from long earlier than that.
I’m sure a person more knowledgable than myself could pinpoint many more examples of his dishonesty, but I think this short lists proves the point. In order to buttress his claim that Christianity has prevented the spread of modernism, he needs to ignore the facts and make up fictions in their place. Hence we can safely conclude that anyone who ignores the fictions and focuses on the facts must agree that Christianity was conducive to modernism.
I recall that passage too and was delighted by it when I first read it. Years later I actually studied the issue in depth. Guess what?
Sagan is very impressed by a group of Ionian philosophers who lived (maybe) in various city-states along the Turkish coast, some centuries before the golden age of Athens. In reality we know very little about these philosophers. Anaximander is known by only one fragment of a text, for instance. His claims, such as the idea that they had the theory of evolution all worked out, are dubious at best.
And Democrit had the whole Atom-theory worked out too by looking at flecks of dust. The Ionian philosophers were impressive not so much for what they accomplished, as for trying. But Christianity – and in particular the Catholic church - had nothing to do with ending their experiments. They were all dead and buried centuries before Jesus.
Christianity certainly did have a civilizing influence on Viking Scandinavia. Sure, many of the Vikings merely switched from invading Britain to joining the Crusades, but we did stop with things like human sacrifice and it did take the top off the most belligerent side of the Vikings. Also it probably helped with abolishing the worst forms of slavery. Gibbon – no fan of Christianity – also believed Christianity helped civilize the various German tribes overrunning the Roman Empire.
Affirming the consequent.
Good to know nothing happens in the Catholic church without your PERSONAL attention. The Archbishop of Canada probably had a little brainfart and forgot to call you when he appointed two new exorcists this last April.
Yes, those flighty, flighty Chinese. If only they’d documented some of their history and held on to a tradition or two. ahem:
Your Eurocentricity is a little misplaced.