Science: How many advancements have been made because someone doubted the bible?

[colonial]

@Shakes

Well, their was a Baron.

Not a scientist, I know.

The French Philosophes and encyclopedists did include a number of skeptics,
but as you say they were not cutting-edge scientists.

[ITR_champion]

@Shakes

Wasn’t he put under house arrest for heresy? And was it not a comonly held belief that the heavens revolved around the Earth?

Are you referring to Copernicus? If so, the answer is no. Copernicus carried out a lifetime of work on astronomy, including the development of the heliocentric theory, without ever having any trouble with Church authorities.

During the 16th century, both the the geocentric theory and the heliocentric theory were out there and freely used as dinner-table conversation matter for intellectuals. There were also various other theories that tried to split the difference. Most intellectuals still sided against the heliocentric theory. This was mainly because of the influence of Tycho Brahe, the greatest and most influential astronomer of the age. Brahe placed the earth at the center of the universe with the sun, moon, and stars orbiting it. He put the other planets orbiting the sun.

It is true that Galileo was tried and placed under house arrest, nominally for his cosmological theories. Debate about theories of the cosmos continued throughout Europe, both in Catholic and Protestant areas, during the 16th and 17th centuries, which demonstrates that the Catholic Church never made any widespread attempt to stamp out scientific research.

[Trinopus]

The west was very fortunate, in that Thomas Aquinas (and others) persuasively argued that science was okay. It’s good to go to nature itself and observe it, to see what it may tell you about the character of its creator.

There were others at Aquinas’ time who argued otherwise, and that scripture was the first, last, and only source of wisdom or knowledge. They argued that science could never do more than confirm Biblical truth, and was therefore a waste of time.

We may thank our stars – or just our naked stinking luck! – that Aquinas’ view won out!

[Chronos]

Quoth colonial:

I wonder if anyone can identify a cutting-edge scientist prior to Darwin who was a skeptic.

His contemporary the great James Clerk Maxwell was, for example, an evangelical of the 19th-century type.

I don’t know about “prior”, but his contemporary Laplace “had no need of the hypothesis” of divine intervention, and was somewhere between deism and atheism.

[KarlGauss]

@Little_Nemo

By 1859, these classical sources would have been supplanted by more recent writers such as Kepler, Bullialdus, and Newton.

(emphasis added).

Interesting choice. Thank you. I won’t pretend to have known his name before your post.

[Voyager]

@ITR_champion

Are you referring to Copernicus? If so, the answer is no. Copernicus carried out a lifetime of work on astronomy, including the development of the heliocentric theory, without ever having any trouble with Church authorities.

True. but his book was published just before his death. It was placed on the Index of Prohibited books at the time of Galileo, and stayed there until 1835, though discussion of heliocentrism was permitted 100 years earlier.

[colonial]

@Chronos

I don’t know about “prior”, but his contemporary Laplace “had no need of the hypothesis” of divine intervention, and was somewhere between deism and atheism.

I had forgotten about Laplace, who I agree must have been a skeptic.

However, since they they were born and died ~50 years apart:

1749-1827 (Laplace)
1809-1882 (Darwin)

I think “prior” is more accurate than “contemporary” from the point
of view of their productive lives, even though per Wiki Darwin was
a precocious undergraduate.

[Little_Nemo]

@KarlGauss

Interesting choice. Thank you. I won’t pretend to have known his name before your post.

I highly recommend The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers all by Daniel Boorstin. They’re excellent general histories of science, art, and philosophy respectively. An interesting difference from the way most histories focus primarily on politics and war.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@GIGObuster

Darwin was very religious at the beginning of the Beagle voyage; and he was, like many then, looking to show how the bible was correct.

Darwin told Robert FitzRoy he was trying to prove the Bible correct just so he’d let him on the boat (FitzRoy being something of a fundamentalist even by the standards of the day.) Darwin himself doesn’t seem to have cared much either way.

[GIGObuster]

IIRC it was not Darwin who told FitzRoy, FitzRoy invited Darwin, he almost did not go because Darwin´s father opposed his trip.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/robert-fitzroy-captain-of-hms-beagle—and-a-forgotten-pioneer-of-science/

Fitzroy had invited Darwin along as ship’s naturalist in a gesture of friendship, but also of self-interest: the ordinary sailors of the British Navy could hardly be expected to keep up their end of a conversation, and he needed someone to talk with. Over the course of those five years, the conversation was strained, for Darwin, impatient and preoccupied, was well on his way to declaring his iconoclastic theory of evolution, while Fitzroy was a religious fundamentalist who would sooner maroon Darwin on a guano island than admit that the Bible was not literally true.

Interesting bit: Darwin was one of the two naturalists in the trip, there was already an official naturalist, Darwin was a supernumerary, as in: an additional society member, or extra manpower for Fitzroy, When the official naturalist Robert McCormick left the Beagle when they got to Brazil (Seems McCormick did not like the preferential treatment Darwin got), Darwin took over.