“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” -Galatians 3:28.
It’s pretty clear to me that, throughout history, religion in general and Christianity in particular has been used both on the side of oppression and on the side of liberation. It really has contributed significantly to increasing the status and bettering the circumstances of women, slaves, the poor, etc. But it’s also been used by the powerful and privileged to maintain the status quo.
Apparently I also do not understand what you mean when you say “science.” I provided you multiple definitions that prove my point. Please provide your definition, with citation (preferably from a non-religious-based source).
Then we can discuss how a primitive person, stumbling around in the dark and cold can “intuitively” realize, when he has never before seen shelter or fire, that he needs some boards and a flint so he can be warm and dry. :rolleyes:
The Templeton Prize is awarded to a living person who, in the estimation of the judges, “has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works”. Basically, furthering religion through science. Martinus J. G. Veltman, the 1999 Nobel laureate in physics, suggested the prize “bridg[ed] the gap between sense and nonsense”.
In ancient Greece and Rome, newborn girls were often killed simply because they were girls. It’s estimated that 20-30% of all girls were killed in this manner. When Christians took over the Roman Empire, they outlawed the practice of infanticide. Similarly infanticide was practiced in many parts of the world until the arrival of Christian missionaries and/or a government based on Christian principles forced it to be outlawed.
Also in ancient Rome, there was gladiator combat, where innocent people (and the occasional guilty person) were forced to fight each other to the death for people’s amusement. When Christians took over, they outlawed gladiator combat.
Also in ancient Rome, the law gave the male head of the household complete power over all members of his family, including the power to kill them or sell them into slavery. Christianity abolished this law and established that all persons had rights. This was the first time in history that women had been given the power to move about freely and leave their households if they chose.
Christianity was responsible for abolishing slavery in Europe, and when slavery was introduced in the Americas the Church was the only organization that was opposed to it. (Unfortunately secular governments were not opposed to it until about three centuries later.)
When communism first became a major movement in Europe–and later in other parts of the world–Christianity provided the strongest force in opposition to communism and in favor of people maintaining basic economic freedoms.
Christians built the world’s first permanent hospitals in the third and fourth centuries.
When the eugenics movement got going in England in the late 19th century, and later in most of the other countries in western Europe, Christianity was the strongest force opposed to the practice of eugenics and opposed to the philosophical idea that certain races or groups are genetically inferior to others.
All of the oldest universities in the western world were built by Christians, many with the explicit purpose of training clergy. Many of these are still among the world’s best. Perhaps you’ve heard of places called Harvard and Yale?
Even today, Christian schools provide an elementary and secondary education far better than secular public schools in the United States. In certain other countries Christian schools offer the only education.
No, I’m saying that humans do evil for a variety of reasons and there is no compelling reason to think there would be less if there was no religion. You can’t just take one factor out and assume that everything else is going to stay the same. Some people do evil in the name of religion, some refrain from doing evil in the name of religion, some people do evil to get resources, etc.
Fair enough. I guess one can legitimately dispute Curtis LeMay’s claim that “Christianity implemented the moral concept that all humans are brothers and fundamentally equal”: to Paul, the brotherhood consisted of all Christians rather than all humans.
“Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” -Galatians 6:10
What a steaming heap that article is! I recommend everyone read it.
First, he claims the creation story for Christianity.
Why did hundreds of years of Jewish belief in exactly the same thing not lead to the same result?
We didn’t form a large community, true, because we are not an evangelizing religion. How belief in Christ has anything to do with this is beyond me. He then makes the claim, already quoted, about Moslem and Jewish intellectuals being pantheists. With two examples, both Jewish. I suspect Islamic pantheists wouldn’t get very far for much of their history. Islam, of course, did form a very large community. Jaki appears to be a Christian fanatic, discounting the value of anything outside of Christianity.
Then we have:
They did get to this point at the time of Galileo, but the cosmology Dante uses hardly has all bodies as natural. It is not at all clear to me that the Greeks saw the moon and planets as any less natural than the early Christians.
We can wonder why, since Christianity was so supportive of science, that there wasn’t any science for 1200 years after Christianity took control. He does give an answer:
You learn something new every day. I never realized that the Genesis account was ever in doubt. I’m not so sure about the second, but I do know that Aristotlean natural philosophy was predicated on logic. Now, I suppose you could say that things about the universe that you could prove in this way are necessary, but no more so than philosophers of the day were doing - and the great variety of Greek and later Roman philosophical thought belies the idea of orthodoxy. Christianity for a long time made Aristotle’s findings almost orthodox, but no one back in his day went to the rack for disagreeing with Aristotle.
The big difference between science and natural philosophy was the willingness to experiment, something not so well supported by the Church. I think we can argue that the growth of the secular state and the relative weakening of the church had a lot to do with the rise of science - which happened centuries after the doctrines mentioned here. Bacon had a clue, but was a pioneer who was not followed for quite a while.
One final thing. Jaki is quoted
I assume this is meant as an attack on the Greeks who turned a blind eye to reality when it disagreed with their findings. But it is ironic today. In the early 19th century many religionists jumped into the fad of science with the aim of specifically showing that the world looked like the Bible said it should look like. Some Christians, the more fundamentalist ones, took the Greek view that the world was like the Bible claimed, and that any evidence otherwise was in error, and that the effort to synchronize faith and science was dangerous. As the scientists discovered that the world was not like what the Bible claimed, with the topper being Darwin’s discovery that we were not specially created, the fundamentalists triumphed - in the realm of religion, at least.
Jaki seems to believe that belief in the Incarnation is necessary to do real science, which makes me wonder how he explains the dominance of Jews in science well out of proportion to our numbers. In fact rationality and the willingness to question and argue are far more important, and I’d say that a Talmudic tradition in which everything is open to question is far more useful in doing science than any bit of dogma.
If by “know already” you mean verifiable facts about the world, I definitely agree. By religion here I assume you mean revelation - believers working in other contexts certainly have discovered things. Religion at its heart defines certain things that are true because God told us they are true. As far as facts about the world go, God has an awful track record. You only get close to saying something in the Bible got it right by reading so much into the passages that, if you applied the same techniques to Nostradamus, would make him 100% correct.
Now, people inspired by religion have given us great art and architecture. The latter us true especially because religion had an excellent way of collecting money and thus funding long term projects such as cathedral building.
Morals, not so much. We seem to have a set of morals hard wired into most of us, and most religions share these. But the further back you go the more these morals apply only to the in-group and not to the out-group, whether they involve Moses butchering tribes that get in the way, the Aztecs cutting the hearts out of enemy slaves, the Crusades, or various Islamic conquests. Moral revelation seems to lag secular moral development, and any words within a holy book too advanced seem to get ignored by the people actually running the religion.
Got a cite for that? In historic times, at least, it seems not to be the case that regions with similar religions or beliefs unite, but that one belief conquers another and forces the population of the conquered area into the belief system of the first. Sometimes this is done culturally (as in the Greek religion spreading to Rome) and not by the sword, but much more often the latter. South America is not Catholic because the indigenous people suddenly decided that it was a good idea, after all.
In pre-Christian times, religion was more fragmented because conversion by sword was not done - see Alexander the Great, for example.
Who knows? Jaki didn’t say that Jewish belief could NOT have lead to the same result. He merely points out that it did not.
Again, he didn’t claim that belief in Christ was the only way in which science could have come about. Quite the contrary; he acknowledged the scientific talent that was evident in other cultures, even though science ultimately proved to be stillborn in those societies. Rather, he said that science came about due to, and was fostered by, Christian culture.
Therein lies the problem with your objections (and to a more severe extent, the objections raised by others). They require attacking an inaccurate representation of what Jaki said. It gets frustrating to have to point this out time and again, and there are more responsible ways in which I need to be using my time. I will point out, however, that it’s poor form to dismiss this article as a “steaming pile” when one’s objections do not accurately address the claims that he made.
I’ve read it. Not much surprising there. It’s mainly in accordance with all serious approaches to the origins of scientific thought. The close links between Christian theological positions and the beginning of science may be news to many people on this message board, but among people who study the history of ideas for a living it’s broadly accepted and there are plentiful books and articles out there that present the same opinion as Jaki. See, for instance, Science and the Modern World, by Alfred North Whitehead, written in 1925.
You are, I hope, aware that the Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poetical work whose cosmology is a metaphor for the ascent of the human soul towards divine truth, rather than a literal description.
There was plentiful science in Europe during the 1200 years after Christianity rose to power. There was a great deal of development of new strains of crops and livestock, as well as an effort to spread the best strains across Europe. There were also great developments in metallurgy, with the processes of metal mining and smelting being vastly more efficient in the Middle Ages than in ancient times. There were advances in clock-making and tool-making, with great improvements in precision. It’s simply untrue to say that there were no advances in science during that period. Once the truth is known, the real question becomes why there were so many advances in science in Christian Europe as compared to the rest of the world.
By what standard was it “not so well supported by the Church”? Who do you think provided the funding for Galileo to do his experiments throughout his life? It wasn’t the local group of atheists.
I think we can argue that the growth of the secular state and the relative weakening of the church had a lot to do with the rise of science - which happened centuries after the doctrines mentioned here. Bacon had a clue, but was a pioneer who was not followed for quite a while.
Actually they hadn’t gotten to that point by the time of Galileo. One of his major sins was in discovering sunspots when it was religious dogma that the Sun was perfect; not like the corrupt matter of fallen Earth.
It wasn’t the Church that came up with the idea that everything worked under the same rules; it was science working against the explicit position (and the threats of torture and death) of the Church.
I always heard that terrain and the pheloria of smallish naturally-divided yet contentious states was what prompted european development. I mean, isn’t that what Cecil said?
I would suggest you read up a little more about the introduction of Christianity to the Americas and to other parts of world as well. Peaceful missionary work has been the rule. There are very few instances that match up with what you are describing here.
Actually, in pre-Christian times, everybody living in the Roman Empire was forced to worship the Emperor. This was the primary cause for the violent persecution of Christians for three centuries–Christians refused to worship the Emperor. When Constantine converted and became the first Christian Emperor, he proclaimed religious freedom.