← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Hamilton
Thread ID: 20860 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-11-02
2005-11-02 05:35 | User Profile
[SIZE=2]Excerpted from a tirade against Christian conservatives, by a self-avowed "freethinker." This is such a perfect example of "freethinker" megalomania that I have to share it with this board.
"[/SIZE][SIZE=1][SIZE=2]Of course, the strategy of the Christ-cons is to question the scientific method itself: [B]the method, I might add, that has allowed us to build cities, hospitals, cure the sick, feed the hungry, and expand human knowledge exponentially.[/B] This, to some, is man playing god. It is a threat to them, and they're lashing out. I've heard the rhetoric. It is extreme and illogical. Dangerous, I believe."[/SIZE] [URL="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:wRiykIfCiCMJ:ftmessages.proboards33.com/index.cgi%3Fboard%3Dgeneral%26action%3Dpost%26thread%3D1088023847%26page%3D4+%22freethinkers+of+cs%22+%22scientific+method+itself%22&hl=en"] link[/URL] [SIZE=2] Again, this is a perfect example of just how irrational these fanatical secularists really are.
First, note the chutzpah in ignoring who invented the scientific method in the first place. Those knuckledragging "dark age" "Christ-cons," no less. This methodology developed in a fundamentally Christian civilization. I guess some "freethinking minds" are not quite free enough to [/SIZE][/SIZE]accommodate[SIZE=1][SIZE=2] these realities.
Second, consider again the statement that the scientific method "[/SIZE][/SIZE][SIZE=1][SIZE=2]has allowed us to build cities, hospitals, cure the sick, feed the hungry..." [/SIZE][/SIZE][SIZE=1][SIZE=2] Note the amazing level of arrogance (and a similar level of historical ignorance) in this statement! All of these things predate the scientific method, and even further the secularist distortion of it. I am so struck by the megalomania of these "freethinkers."
Christian scientists correctly point out that the scientific method was developed by Christians. However, I've never seen a Christian argue that without the scientific method, we would be without cities, hospitals, medical treatments, or food. For example, even the Aztecs, a pagan society utterly devoid of what we know as the scientific method (or indeed, any of the underlying precursors) had these things. For all their supposed sophistication, many secularists simply brush aside these inconvenient facts. First they give the scientific method a kind of quasi-mystical reverence. Then they take full credit for it. Talk about lack of perspective! Why are atheists and secularists so prone to making such grandiose claims? It is a question worth looking into.
Another question worth looking into: If secularists are so rational, why do so many act like the guardians of a religion? [/SIZE][/SIZE]
2005-11-02 16:56 | User Profile
A few points:
(1) Christians did not invent science or the scientific method. Many ancient societies that long predated Christianity came up with impressive scientific achievements. Take the ancient Egyptians, for example:
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt#Timeline_of_Ancient_Achievements[/url]
(2) Even if Christians had invented science, that wouldn't mean their current pet ideas about science are correct.
(3) A far greater percentage of scientists were religious in the Middle Ages than is the case today. That's simply because far more natural phenomena were unexplained back then, and people tend to fill the gaps left by unexplained natural phenomena with religious concepts. For example, people used to think that the symptoms of Tourette's syndrome were caused by demonic possession. How else do you explain someone who feels compelled to shout out curse words and blasphemy and display spastic, jerky limb movements? Well, there is a perfectly natural explanation, as usual. But people didn't know it.
As Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick put it in the context of the evolution "debate":
The second property of almost all living things is their complexity, and in particular, their highly organised complexity. This so impressed our forebears that they considered it inconceivable that such intricate and well-organized mechanisms would have arisen without a designer. Had I been living 150 years ago I feel sure I would have been compelled to agree with this Argument from Design. Source: [url]http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990a01.htm[/url]
(4) Without the scientific method, we certainly would be without such things as modern medical treatments. The Aztecs or other ancient societies might have developed some primitive excuses for medicine (e.g., drilling holes in peoples' heads to allow disease-causing evil spirits to escape), but that doesn't count. Without the scientific method, there would be no PET or MRI scans, no laser surgery, no advanced antibiotics, no pacemakers, no electronic hearing aids, and so on. And that's just medicine. Try to land on the moon without using the scientific method and see how far you get.
There is simply no place in science for faith of any sort. "Faith" is a swear word when you're doing an activity that requires carefully justifying every single assumption you make. And all assumptions made must, of course, be checked for accuracy by verifying that empirical observations fit the theory.
2005-11-02 18:29 | User Profile
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. has written a book summarizing the contributions Catholics made to science. Here's a review of the book:
[url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods40.html[/url]
By far the bookââ¬â¢s longest chapter is "The Church and Science." We have all heard a great deal about the Churchââ¬â¢s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half-century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, arguing that the Churchââ¬â¢s role in the development of Western science was far more salutary than previously thought. I am speaking not about Catholic apologists but about serious and important scholars of the history of science such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Thomas Goldstein.
It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory.
In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.
By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits
had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiterââ¬â¢s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturnââ¬â¢s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics ââ¬â all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].
Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.
The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the nineteenth century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography. In Central and South America the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.
The Galileo case is often cited as evidence of Catholic hostility toward science, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization accordingly takes a closer look at the Galileo matter. For now, just one little-known fact: Catholic cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were constructed to function as solar observatories. No more precise instruments for observing the sunââ¬â¢s apparent motion could be found anywhere in the world. When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Keplerââ¬â¢s position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr. Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.
Iââ¬â¢ve tried to fill the book with little-known facts like these.
To say that the Church played a positive role in the development of science has now become absolutely mainstream, even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public. In fact, Stanley Jaki, over the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, has developed a compelling argument that in fact it was important aspects of the Christian worldview that accounted for why it was in the West that science enjoyed the success it did as a self-sustaining enterprise. Non-Christian cultures did not possess the same philosophical tools, and in fact were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science. Jaki extends this thesis to seven great cultures: Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. In these cultures, Jaki explains, science suffered a "stillbirth." My book gives ample attention to Jakiââ¬â¢s work. ////////////
As a matter of fact, among the most important medieval contributions to modern science was the essentially free inquiry of the university system, where scholars could debate and discuss propositions, and in which the utility of human reason was taken for granted. Contrary to the grossly inaccurate picture of the Middle Ages that passes for common knowledge today, medieval intellectual life made indispensable contributions to Western civilization. In The Beginnings of Western Science (1992), David Lindberg writes:
It must be emphatically stated that within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom. The stereotype of the Middle Ages pictures the professor as spineless and subservient, a slavish follower of Aristotle and the Church fathers (exactly how one could be a slavish follower of both, the stereotype does not explain), fearful of departing one iota from the demands of authority. There were broad theological limits, of course, but within those limits the medieval master had remarkable freedom of thought and expression; there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university.
"[S]cholars of the later Middle Ages," concludes Lindberg, "created a broad intellectual tradition, in the absence of which subsequent progress in natural philosophy would have been inconceivable."
Historian of science Edward Grant concurs with this judgment:
What made it possible for Western civilization to develop science and the social sciences in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer, I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages. With the exception of revealed truths, reason was enthroned in medieval universities as the ultimate arbiter for most intellectual arguments and controversies. It was quite natural for scholars immersed in a university environment to employ reason to probe into subject areas that had not been explored before, as well as to discuss possibilities that had not previously been seriously entertained.
The creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to "a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern worldââ¬Â¦though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization."
Here, then, are just a few of the topics to be found in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Iââ¬â¢ve been asked quite a few times in recent weeks what my next project will be. For now, itââ¬â¢ll be getting some rest.