Now, we can all have different opinions on the interaction between Christianity (or religion as a whole) and science. There are reasonable different positions to take on that. We can have debate and share anecdotes on how many Christians are ok with science, or how many scientists are Christian, and so forth. There are interesting points to be made in this subject.
This claim, on the other hand, is nonsense. Balderdash. It’s simply wrong. And it is obviously wrong. There were people utilising the scientific method before Jesus was around. There were people coming up with considerably highly advanced ideas in regions which went untouched by Christianity for many years. But no; according to ITR, these things aren’t true. Before Jesus, there was no science. And not just that, for you see, that would imply that it was simply a matter of time before we got around to science. No, his claim is greater still than that; Christianity not only is the origin of science, but a necessity. Without Christianity, there would be no science.
I find that I can’t work up much anger at this. It’s just too astonishing a claim. It’s insane. I’d post ITR’s rebuttal to the (quite a few) people who’ve called him on this one, but no such rebuttal exists as of yet.
Like I said; there are reasonable points, reasonable difference of opinion. I can disagree with a religious debater and yet still see their argument as logical, as reasonable, when that warrants, even as we disagree. I can respect a poster who holds a opinion entirely oppposite to me. But I can’t respect this. It’s either the result of enormous guile, or enormous ignorance.
I think it would be fair to say that both religion and science ultimately spring from the human desire to keep asking why, but I would not ever dream of taking it any further than that.
ITR Champion is just spouting anti-atheist bullshit nowadays. He’s a lot like the opposite of Der Trihs, actually, except that Der Trihs doesn’t start nearly as many threads about the evil of religion as ITR does about atheists.
Talking about science the way we now talk about it arose during increasingly secular parts of predominantly Christian parts of western history, but that divergence from the mentality of church domination over intellectual thought came along with science by no coincidence. In any case, there was science before the modern way of discussing it arose. The ancient Greeks may lay claim to laying the fundaments of our science, and they were polytheists. When their civilization fell to barbarism, their science was carried on and advanced considerably by muslims. The blossoming of science in the renaissance coincided with the waning influence of the church. The enlightenment era thinkers who formalized science into a set of coherent disciplines found themselves embattled by religious authorities at every turn. Even the christian scholars who helped advanced scientific knowledge, and these were not trivial in number or influence, were throttled by fear of being accused of heresy, apostasy and atheism.
So, although christiandom can take credit for some advances in science, it must also take the blame for its generational war against science.
I’m an atheist who is prepared to admit that maybe medeival Christian institutions, including monks copying out texts and whatnot, were useful in advancing science or at least not letting it die out in those fragile early years, rather like an incubator keeping a preemie alive.
But Christianity can get lost now, science is old enough to take care of itself.
Oh dear, oh dear. Let’s see if there’s a pony in that pile.
Christian monastaries and cathedrals often collected books into libraries and formed schools of various sorts. This was done to enrich the Church and to ‘tend the flock’. Students eventually took those things in directions that the Church did not intend.* One of those directions developed into science. The Church tried, but failed, to root it out.
And America is much larger and richer than most other countries. We have been without a king longer. And we invest in research and make it available for business applications. We’re not doing it because we’re pious. We’re doing it because it’s good business. And we like it. And it keeps those pesky PhDs off the street.
Not much of a pony, in my opinion. The ideas presented are more of a pile.
*I say students because the early medieval colleges were groups of students who travelled to large towns, shared rooms with other students who came from their home country, and hired tutors who owned precious books and would come read them to them, for a fee. Those who would profess ideas for hire in college towns had to hit the student market.
Not only that, but science is almost big enough to beat Christianity up and steal its lunch money. So, Christianity oughta just STFU and try to stay out of science’s path.
I’ve heard this claim before, and while it is still wrong, it isn’t quite so simplistic. It is not that you have to be Christian to do science, but that Christianity in some way initiated a rational and logical mindset that made it possible for science to emerge. This obviously ignores Aristotle and the other Greek pre-scientists, and that the pioneers of science seemed always to be getting in trouble with the church for questioning accepted doctrine. Since science is all about questioning, I’d say that any religion with a revealed truth and a central authority to enforce it will be at a disadvantage. It doesn’t hold so much today, since in the West anyhow religions can’t enforce orthodoxy very well.
I think it’s fair to say that the scholastic movement in the middle ages had the effect of introducing classical ideas of empirical investigation into Western Christian theology. And that the Church’s theological acknowledgement of empiricism made it easier for the seeds of scientific thought to take root in Europe. But there’s nothing inherent in Christianity that made scholasticism inevitable. The Eastern Orthodox Church followed a different path, despite being in closer proximity to Greece itself.
I’d say that more to the point that christianity emerged under certain Roman influences which could be traced to the Greek philosophers, especially the Stoics.
Sure, i’m not saying Christianity (or indeed Christians) have provided nothing to science. Quite the contrary. There’s a good subject for debate, really. That, on the other hand, not just have Christianity and Christians contributed to science, but have created it and were the only things/people that could have created it, is rubbish.
While I don’t agree with the idea that Christianity is a necessity for science, I would like to point out that, even during the so-called “Dark Ages” in Europe, a lot of things were going on in the sciences and culture. Furthermore, you should not forget about the Byzantine Empire, even though everyone always forgets about the Byzantines.
In Muslim lands during the Middle Ages, such as during the Abbasid Caliphate, there was a flowering of translation and scientific achievement. However, Muslims were not the majority in Muslim lands until after the Crusades, and many if not most of the great translators and scholars were Christian (Like Hunayn bin Ishaq) or Zoroastrian etc. Even when Muslims became the majority in many parts of the world, minority scholarship was very prominent. I suppose you could relate this situation to the position of Jewish scientists and philosophers in majority Christian areas. I am unaware of Christian churches in the Middle East at this time taking anti-intellectual positions, although I am sure some examples exist.
From a Zoroastrian perspective, the Sassanids did a huge amount of scholarly translation and research of all manner of texts from all sorts of different places. This was seen as a confirmation of the universal wisdom of their religion.
Jesuits were very influential in the sciences of Ming and early Qing China. The scientific stagnation of Qing China had little to do with Confucian or Buddhist interference, and much more to do with a very secular type of population pacification and power politics.
I would say that historically, the more “official” organized oppositions to science around the world tended to be based on secular concerns of maintaining power and a monopoly on possibly dangerous technology rather than religious anti-intellectualism.
This is bullshit, absolute bullshit. Scientific tradition started long before the Greeks, with the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians (those Pyramids didn’t build themselves, you know) and while Greco-Roman society certainly made many advancements, all of them were long before Constantine converted to Christianity, just a hundred years before the Roman Empire fell. After that, scientific advancements actually STOPPED for nearly 1,000 years, as Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire held sway – it wasn’t until the Renaissance, when free-thinking men like Kepler, Galileo & DaVinci finally took a look at religion and said, “Hey, this is bullshit,” and went ahead with their own scientific theories based on observation and experiments. And some of them were nearly put to death for it.
Christianity has done nothing but hinder scientific development, a trend which continues today. Just imagine how far ahead we’d be with stem cell research, or dealing with global warming, if the recently ousted (and unapologetically Christian) U.S. Administration had done fuck-all about it.