Does having religious beliefs make a person more moral than someone who is an atheist

[Audie]

God doesnt have to exist for you take a God character as a role model.

And this topic is not about the existence of God.

Whatevs. Maybe you should think about what you write.

 

[firedragon]

Whatevs. Maybe you should think about what you write.

Great. Thanks.

 

[Mock Turtle]

It can be debated this way and that way brother. See, i am not saying anything about Atheists not having morality like some others did and the reason for my entrance here was to say that its absolutely wrong to say that Atheists dont have morals or anything of the sort.

Thats a completely nonsensical discussion altogether.

But where do our moralities come from? That we are not sure of. Though you make a valid claim that religion didnt dissuage adherents from enslaving other people, religion also didnt dissuade people from mass murder, genocide, conquests, pillage, and direct political intervention in other peoples business.

But also if you analyse the anti slavery movements in the UK they were motivated by religious sentiments. This happened in many many areas.

Were they motivated by religion or were they motivated by their innate moral values and they used religion as a protocol? We cannot really say.

Say Im an atheist. Where do my morality come from? Is it because of human nature where we were always moral animals or did we evolve with religious sentiments with a God as a role model? Whats the research we have done to make a claim? I hope you understand the position i am setting.

This is why brother it is not fair to quote a book and tell them that their morality stems from that particular passage. Maybe that passage was written by an immoral man who wished to do his bidding but wanted to use "Religion" as a protocol to communicate his personal agenda in a better or more "moral" manner.

Anyway, i shall stop now. Peace.

I don't know if you have read any of Jared Diamond's books - Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example - but one thing I got from this was that morality between different tribal groups (Papua New Guinea, I believe was one area he studied) varied quite a bit and seemingly was arrived at by what worked for them in their particular environment. Such that morality was mainly about what helped the group survive. As groups became larger, no doubt the moralities tended to converge - and probably develop into religious beliefs to make these more powerful. Plus there is evidence that morality exists, even if more primitive, in other animal species, so it is likely that morality in humans is just more advanced.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The point is that I simply disagree that secular humanism is some kind of "logical extension" of christianity. It isn't.

Agreed, of course, but don't expect the differences you and I have outlined to be acknowledged or addressed.

Of course humanism is a repudiation of Christianity. One only need look at the basic principles and values of each to see that. One only has to look to history to see the transformation in Western society beginning with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to see how different these two worldviews are.

Generally I see morality connected to success, successful actions. Success is very situational, tied to circumstances, individual goals. Depending on what one's goals are they may find different actions being successful towards those goals.

You seem to be defining intelligence and wisdom, intelligence being the mental capacity to get what one wants to exploit opportunities and avoid pitfalls in the pursuit of a specific goal such as preserving one's health or making oneself more emplyable - and wisdom being knowing what to pursue in the pursuit of happiness, that is, what to want.

Graeco-Roman, Christian, Humanist
Time: cyclical, progressive, progressive
Teleology: no, yes, yes
Equality: no, yes, yes
Moral unit: family/society, individual, individual
The weak: to be exploited, to be nurtured, to be nurtured
Outlook: Tragic, optimistic (salvation), optimistic (progress)
Scope: 'tribal', universal, universal

You left out a few:

Christian model (dominated in the Middle Ages), Humanist reaction (dominates in modernity)
Personal rights - none, enumerated and guaranteed.
Intellectual freedom - reserved for priests contemplating angels on pinheads, free thought and free speech
On the individual - a subject of the king, a free autonomous citizen facilitated to pursue happiness as he understands it
On reason - the enemy of salvation, an essential element to acquiring practical and useful knowledge
On gods - yes there is one and you had better obey it or else, what god?
On government - theocratic/autocratic, secular/ democratic
On religion - there is only one god and you are commanded to obey it, take it or leave it.
On leaders - submit to the king who is divinely appointed, secular leaders are to be chosen by the people.
On elections and democracy - what's that?
On women - shut up in church and submit to your husband, equals
On purpose - to obey God and get to heaven, pursuit of happiness however one envisions that and live an upright life.
On skepticism - doubt is a sin and skeptical is synonymous with rebellious, one of the best ideas ever and a serious threat to faith-based systems

Far from one being the rejection of the other, if you created a metric to compare all historical belief systems, liberal Christianity and Humanism would be among the most similar.

Disagree strenuously, but you know that.

That Christianity has become more similar to humanism is to the credit of humanism, not Christianity. Islam and Christianity are strikingly similar on paper.

Each reveres a Semitic desert god who is an angry, petty, vengeful, jealous, judgmental, capricious, prudish, strongman requiring worship and submission under threat of cosmic reprisal.

Believers of each attend temples (Mosques or churches) and obey paternalistic, misogynisitic clergy.

Both religions embrace magical thinking, mythology, dogma, the supernatural, and ritual.

Each feature demons angels, prayer, an afterlife, a judgment, and a system of reward and punishment after death.

Each has its now centuries old holy book of internal contradictions, failed prophecies, and errors of history and science. I'm not as sure about the Qur'an, but it likely also contain vengeance, hatred, tribalism, violence, and failed morals that endorse slavery, rape, infanticide, and incest.

They each think they have the right to determine who should be allowed to diddle whom how, who should be able to marry whom, and what women must do regarding their bodies.

Both are patriarchal, authoritarian, misogynistic, sexually repressive, anhedonisitic, atheophobic, homophobic, antiscientiific, use psychological terrorism on their children, have violent histories featuring torture, genocide and terrorism, and demand obedience and submission.

Each consider faith a virtue and reason a problem.

Each has a history of opposing human rights and science.

Each advocates theocracy over democracy.

And of course, humanism resembles neither of these.

With all of these similarities, why should these two appear so differently where they are applied if not for the reason I just gave? The difference between America and the Middle East is not due to the differences in the holy books of Christianity and Islam.

Before the advent of humanism, these two religions were largely the same barbaric, superstitious, authoritarian cultures. Islam still cuts off hands, throws acid into faces, drops people from towers, burns them alive in cages, etc.. Why don't Western Christians still do the same things they did in the Middle Ages such as putting people in large metal kettles and boiling them alive, or practices for extracting admissions of impiety including the rack, the pear, and whatever other brutal torture they could conceive.

The answer is that they did until humanism was injected into the West and conditioned Christianity with - well, humane practices.

If you traded the ideologies out, and put Christianity in Saudi Arabia and Islam in America, the results would be the same: Christian Arabs cutting off hands and heads, and Americans going door to door asking if you know Mohammed. America would still be a secular state with a Muslim majority forced to tolerate "infidels" thanks to humanist values, and Saudi would still be a brutal, intolerant theocracy, but a Christian one instead. There is no reason to believe otherwise.

And when the Muslims finally ban these practices, it is because they have traded their Abrahamic practices for humanist ones. The only other source I can imagine for such ideas is atheistic Buddhism, which has much in common with humanism.

Christianity and Islam are obviously related because of the incredible list of similarities, and of course, both derive from Hebrew scripture.

But secular humanism is the child of neither. We see its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, and the rational skepticism first introduced by the ancient Greek philosophers, whose skepticism about the claims that natural events were punishments from capricious gods led to free speculation about reality.

(continued next post)

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

(continued)



Thales (624 BC - 546 BC) suggested that everything was a form of water, which was the only substance he knew of capable of existing as solid, liquid and gas. What is significant was his willingness to try to explain the workings of nature without invoking the supernatural or appealing to the ancients and their dicta. The more profound implication was that man might be capable of understanding nature, which might operate according to comprehensible rules that he might discover. You won't find that in the Christian Bible.

The questioning of dogma and the application of reason was a huge leap forward. But rational skepticism without empiricism, which is the appeal to the examination of reality, is as sterile as religion. The pronouncements of Aristotle, such as the one that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, were also taken on faith, and were not tested with actual heavy and light objects until the time of the empiricist Galileo, who did experiments to disprove Aristotle. Galileo was therefore not just a rationalist and philosopher, but a scientist.

Between the ancient rational skeptic philosophers and the scientific skeptics of modernity came the faith based speculations of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages - the Age of Faith - which, like ancient Greek philosophy, was also sterile for lack of its lack empiricism. It also lacked skepticism, but embraced reason applied to articles of faith, which led to such irrelevancies as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and how many different kinds of angels there were. But that bit of rationalism doesn't come from Christianity. It comes from the Greeks via the Arabs and Charlemagne, the first Western renaissance (rebirth).

Family resemblances tell us which is the parent philosophy and which the offspring. Secular humanism doesn't resemble Christianity or Islam, which resemble one another, but instead is the child of ancient Greek rational skepticism

These points were also made the last time we went through this, but never addressed, just waved away. That's why the discussion ended. The argument remains unchanged, and I think speaks forcefully against your position, which seems to be that if secular humanism arose in a culture that was mostly Christian, that humanism must owe a debt Christianity. If so, only in the sense that the American revolutionaries owed a debt to King George III..

Christianity demonstrably made a major contribution to the development of modern science

Disagree again. Christians made contributions to the rise of science, but not using by their Bibles. They turned to humanist principles not found in their Bibles, ideas such as that the world

To me, it is obvious that Christianity was an impediment to the rise of science, and apart from Islam, remains its only detractor. None of the foundational principles of science can be found in biblical scripture, such as skepticism, rationalism, or empiricism - all antithetical to the Christian notion that all useful knowledge comes from the Bible and that man is totally dependent on God for all things. Humanism is the rejection of these ideas, a celebration of humanity and its potential to understand the world and make it a better place, with the rejection of received wisdom in scriptures and faith-based thought.

You seem to think that anything that comes from Christians is Christianity. Not when those Christians are borrowing humanist methods. The earliest scientists (I'm ignoring people like Aristotle, who did do a little science) were the first empiricists, and naturally, they were all or mostly Christians. But they were the ones to lay the foundations for the demise of Christianity.

The first wave of scientists - people like Kepler, Newton, Ampere, Volta, Galileo, Ohm, Harvey, Vesalius, Lavoisier, and Bernoulli - showed us a clockwork universe that ran itself, ushering in the age of deism. We no longer needed a god to keep the planets in orbit or electrons marching through wires, so the creator-ruler god became just the creator god, since we had no answers for how the universe was constructed, and no concept of it self-assembling and evolving. Thus, deism became popular by the time of the late eighteenth century American colonials. Atheism just wasn't tenable.yet.

The second wave of scientists beginning with mid-nineteenth century such as Darwin and Hubble showed us that we didn't need a builder god, either - that matter can assemble itself into galaxies and stars without gods, and that the tree of life could evolve from a single ancestral population without the help of a conscious agent.

The only jobs left for a god are the twin origins problems - where did whatever that began expanding to form the physical universe come from, and where did the first life in that come from? We have naturalistic hypotheses for both of these. Gods just aren't necessary any more. This understanding allowed deism to evolve into atheism.

Was this the intention or expectation of the first scientists. Probably not. Would they pleased with where their work took mankind, even if it meant the decline of their faith? I can only guess, but being men of reason and intelligence with a tendency toward skepticism and a new way of looking at reality, empiricism, I tend to think that they would be content with wherever reason and evidence takes man. I think that if they had been born today, most would be atheists or minimally Christian.

Yes, Newton was a theist - some atypical kind of Christian - but what makes his best work relevant even today was his ability to compartmentalize his religious beliefs and leave them out of his work. His mathematics, optics, gravitational theory and mechanics are still useful today because they look like something an atheist might have come up with were there atheists then. There are no faith-based thoughts in Principia until Newton reaches the limits of his understanding, at which time he insertshis god and his work thereafter becomes useless. From Newton's Principia

• “The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

Newton doesn't invoke a god prior to that in his classic work. He doesn't mention gods when discussing his formula F=ma, nor when discussing his universal law of gravitation. God is nowhere to be found until Newton runs out of ideas.

Science is most definitely not a Christian byproduct. As with humanism, it is a repudiation of old ways.

A heads up before ending. Dialectic, the only method of debate or discussion of interest to me, refers to the cooperative effort of people to determine what is true by tracing back to their point of departure and trying to identify why they went in different directions, with the possibility that one will see a mistake in his own reasoning and correct it.It requires actually addressing one another's arguments.

Your original comment to me on this thread followed my listing of the first two entries in the Affirmations of Humanism were a repudiation of Christianity showing how different they are. - reason, not faith, empiricism, not received wisdom, praising human intelligence rather than denigrating it. Rather than telling me why you thought that those two sentences didn't do what I suggested that they did - reject Christian fundamentals - you deflected to conflict thesis, which is irrelevant to whether secular humanism is a repudiation of Christianity or not. That question is answered by comparing the two and deciding if they are compatible and related, or antithetical and representing divergent world views. Dialectic never transpired. So, naturally, since my point was never addressed, it stands unchanged. And that is why I didn't answer that post.

If you want to actually address the points made in my rebuttal of your claims as I addressed yours - either telling you that I agree (which didn't happen this time), or specifically why I think your claim or argument is wrong, I won't be responding to your post. There would be no reason to, and the discussion is over.

 

[firedragon]

I don't know if you have read any of Jared Diamond's books - Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example - but one thing I got from this was that morality between different tribal groups (Papua New Guinea, I believe was one area he studied) varied quite a bit and seemingly was arrived at by what worked for them in their particular environment. Such that morality was mainly about what helped the group survive. As groups became larger, no doubt the moralities tended to converge - and probably develop into religious beliefs to make these more powerful. Plus there is evidence that morality exists, even if more primitive, in other animal species, so it is likely that morality in humans is just more advanced.

Of course. Great work.

 

[Nakosis]

You seem to be defining intelligence and wisdom, intelligence being the mental capacity to get what one wants to exploit opportunities and avoid pitfalls in the pursuit of a specific goal such as preserving one's health or making oneself more emplyable - and wisdom being knowing what to pursue in the pursuit of happiness, that is, what to want.

It's tough sometimes to have a consistent definition with morals. Right and wrong behavior vs feelings about right and wrong behavior. Sometimes morals coincide with beliefs, but my beliefs are successful behaviors are the right behavior. I feel sometimes in order to be successful one might have to do what they feel is bad. Sometimes doing what one feels is right will lead to failure. So my actions would depend on the importance of whatever goal I'm pursuing atm.

 

[Shad]

I heard atheists argue atheists are just as moral as theists. But I am not sure this is true in general. Many scientists work on weapons designed to destroy humanity.

Scientists are not synonymous with atheist.

Scientists are mostly atheists, and many scientists are engineering weapons of mass death.

A number are Christian including members of the Manhattan Project and the POTUS that authorized it's use.

Then can I conclude there something inherently missing from the way atheists believe?

Nope as your premises are false.

It seems to me someone could use their religious beliefs as a way of seeing working on weapons of mass death as being immoral, and therefore, a person with religious beliefs might not create such evil weapons in the first place because of the potential consequences as held by the religious beliefs.

Likewise people used religion to justify it.

If nothing is sacred then why have any reverence for life?

Who said nothing is sacred besides you?

 

[rational experiences]

I heard atheists argue atheists are just as moral as theists. But I am not sure this is true in general. Many scientists work on weapons designed to destroy humanity. Scientists are mostly atheists, and many scientists are engineering weapons of mass death. Then can I conclude there something inherently missing from the way atheists believe?

It seems to me someone could use their religious beliefs as a way of seeing working on weapons of mass death as being immoral, and therefore, a person with religious beliefs might not create such evil weapons in the first place because of the potential consequences as held by the religious beliefs.

If nothing is sacred then why have any reverence for life?

Being moral first of all imposes a statement, you had to have been immoral.

For if you are just being natural, which humans are, then human being spiritual imposes conditions in that natural life. That a human eats foods, drinks water, does not apply destructive choices to what supports its living conditions, has sexual procreation for self human life continuance and knows that as all babies cannot be born to just 2 parents, see other humans as an extended same family member.

Rational, natural and spiritual to live in support and honour natural life, what a spiritual human is.

Therefore if that human life existed first, which it did, our origins natural and spiritual in that condition, we therefore had to own a choice that was proven immoral.

And science and machine reaction was that status, which introduced the teachings of UFO mass/ radiation the CULT/OCCULT mentality of cause and effect of the sciences of radiation, the cult a group based mentality of group coercion and group choices as compared to the natural mass of natural life.

So humans then had to join in a MASS group condition against the CULT group, the smaller group to take action on behalf of life survival. Which brings about the spiritual religious purpose which owns a historic teaching reasoning of its owned purposes.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Christianity and Islam are obviously related because of the incredible list of similarities, and of course, both derive from Hebrew scripture.

Uhu. In fact, if you put both books side by side, you'll notice that they tell largely the same stories, albeit with different names and some cultural differences.


I'm from Belgium and live rather close to Rupelmonde, the municipality of Gerardus Mercator. The other day there was this event in his memory. So the local paper ran a story on him. Apparantly the dude had been jail by the inquisition at some point for a couple of months - had no idea about that, so I looked into it.

The guy studied at the university of Leuven. There, he apparantly congregated with "the wrong kind" of christians, who were being watched by the religious authorities. He went back to Rupelmonde to visit his family. This was coincidental - he didn't know they were being watched. During his leave, his friends in Leuven were captured and arrested. All of them were brutally killed. Some were bruned alive. Some were boiled alive. 2 women were burried alive. A couple others were beheaded.

Luckily for Mercator, he was good friends with the priest in Rupelmonde. Mercator too was arrested and imprisonned in the castle of the town. His priest friend then carefully lobbied for a few months. "carefully", because defending a heretic makes you a heretic as well and priest or not - you'll suffer the consequences.

Eventually, the priest succeeded and Mercator was released from prison after good 6 months.

That's how it was back then, in the 16th century.

Sounds lovely.

 

[Augustus]

If you want to actually address the points made in my rebuttal of your claims as I addressed yours

The one very simple question I actually asked you was ignored and it is the same question that is always ignored (for very obvious reasons) and will no doubt be ignored again:

If it is so obvious that Christianity was clearly anti-science, then why do basically all contemporary historians of science, who have expert knowledge of the primary sources and context, completely reject this no matter their religious or irreligious background?

If fundamentalist religious people with a strong emotional attachment to a belief rejected out of hand a scholarly consensus on an issue that they have only a superficial understanding, you would find this ridiculous and evidence of religion's detrimental impact on rational, sceptical thought.

Yet this is exactly what you are doing on this issue.

So I was wondering if you actually had a rational reason for believing you are correct and the scholarly consensus is quite obviously wrong?

As someone who claims to be a rational sceptic, doesn't the fact that your view is overwhelmingly rejected by experts even make you think twice and at least start to wonder if in fact many of the assumptions you base your arguments on might not actually be correct after all?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

The one very simple question I actually asked you was ignored and it is the same question that is always ignored (for very obvious reasons) and will no doubt be ignored again:

If it is so obvious that Christianity was clearly anti-science, then why do basically all contemporary historians of science, who have expert knowledge of the primary sources and context, completely reject this no matter their religious or irreligious background?

If fundamentalist religious people with a strong emotional attachment to a belief rejected out of hand a scholarly consensus on an issue that they have only a superficial understanding, you would find this ridiculous and evidence of religion's detrimental impact on rational, sceptical thought.

Yet this is exactly what you are doing on this issue.

So I was wondering if you actually had a rational reason for believing you are correct and the scholarly consensus is quite obviously wrong?

As someone who claims to be a rational sceptic, doesn't the fact that your view is overwhelmingly rejected by experts even make you think twice and at least start to wonder if in fact many of the assumptions you base your arguments on might not actually be correct after all?

I think your question is short-sighted and not actually reflecting what we are really saying.

First of all, "christianity" is the name of a religion. It's people that are anti- or pro- anything.
If one says "christianity was anti-science during this or that period", what is really being said is that the religious authorities were anti-science.

Having said that, I don't think anyone here, me included, said this. Not in such generalized terms anyway.

However, at the same time, it is undeniable that religious authorities weren't exactly pleased when the findings of certain people, or the research itself, ran counter to christian dogma. THAT is what is being meant.

One such example is the study of human anatomy. Dissecting humans was strictly forbidden for religious reasons. So the only way to learn about human anatomy, was to study other mammals, but that obviously didn't always yield accurate intel on human anatomy. This gave rise to the practice of body snatching. Researchers risked quite a lot by stealing corpses, just to gather information.

Then there's all the book burning practices, because the info contained therein was "herecy" and "blasphemous"..

Such are clear and undeniable examples of religious authorities trying to control information and protect dogmatic religious doctrines.

Whenever authorities are trying to control the flow of information, what type of research can and can't be done for religious reasons, which research results are "acceptable", and other such forms of censorship... I don't see how you can call that anything else then being "anti-science" / "anti-progress". They were only "pro" science / progress as long as the new intel fitted the religious worldview.

 

[Augustus]

I think your question is short-sighted and not actually reflecting what we are really saying.

First of all, "christianity" is the name of a religion. It's people that are anti- or pro- anything.
If one says "christianity was anti-science during this or that period", what is really being said is that the religious authorities were anti-science.

Having said that, I don't think anyone here, me included, said this. Not in such generalized terms anyway.

You may not have, but from an above post verbatim: "It's obvious that Christianity was an impediment to the rise of science"

One such example is the study of human anatomy. Dissecting humans was strictly forbidden for religious reasons. So the only way to learn about human anatomy, was to study other mammals, but that obviously didn't always yield accurate intel on human anatomy. This gave rise to the practice of body snatching. Researchers risked quite a lot by stealing corpses, just to gather information.

This perfectly illustrates the major reason so Humanists are so wrong about many aspects of religious history: they base their views on things that are not actually true.

Such myths tend to be either 19th C fabrications from secular polemicists (or perhaps fabulists), or, somewhat ironically, rehashes of Post-reformation Protestant anti-Catholic polemic.

The myth that the medieval church prohibited human dissection has several variants. The most basic version, like a number of the other myths in this book, was largely the creation of Andrew Dickson White in the late nineteenth century...

The facts, then, are as follows: Human dissection does not seem to have been practiced with any regularity before the end of the thirteenth century in either pagan, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim cultures. The only exception was a brief period in the fourth to third century B.C.E., when Herophilus and Erasistratus, two Greek medical scholars working in the Egyptian city of Alexandria,
made a series of studies of the human body based on dissection.3

While the Greek and Roman avoidance of human dissection seems to have had roots in the belief that corpses were ritually unclean, early Christian culture broke definitively with the idea of corpse pollution, embracing tombs as holy places and the bodies of the dead as objects of veneration and potential sources of magical and healing power.4

Although the church did not prohibit human dissection in the early Middle Ages, there is no evidence of its practice...

In the late thirteenth century we find the first evidence of the opening of human bodies on the part of medical men, in connection with municipally mandated autopsies to determine cause of death in the interests of criminal justice or public health. The appearance of human dissection—the opening of corpses in the service of medical teaching and research, continuous with modern academic practices—took place around 1300 in the Italian city of Bologna, home of what was arguably the greatest medical faculty of the day. Inspired by renewed interest in the works of the Greek medical writer Galen (ca. 129–ca. 200) and his Arabic followers, none of whom are known to have dissected human beings, medical teachers and students at Bologna began to open human bodies, and Mondino de’ Liuzzi (ca. 1275–1326) produced the first known anatomy textbook based on human dissection, which remained a staple of university medical instruction through the early sixteenth century. Initially, dissection was confined to Italian universities and colleges of physicians or surgeons, a number of which adopted it as an annual requirement, and to the southern French university of Montpellier. In the late fifteenth century, however, the practice spread to medical faculties in northern Europe, and by the sixteenth century it was widely performed in universities and medical colleges in both Catholic and Protestant areas. Myth 5: That the medieval church prohibited human dissection K Park in Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion - RL Numbers (ed)

If you look at basically all of the common 'anti-science' tropes uncritically repeated by 'Rationalists' you continually find they are not true. I used to make all the same arguments and would have been equally opposed to my current views, when I actually started to look at actual scholarship on the issue rather than the kind of assumptions parroted endlessly in New Atheist type thought bubbles it's perfectly clear that they are basically all wrong (or if not outright fabricated, highly polemical and full of half-truths and misrepresentations).

Most anti-theists assume their view is the dominant one in scholarship as it is common in pop culture, but it's uniformly rejected.

When this is pointed out to people they simply avoid answering why they believe they are right and the scholarly consensus is wrong.

There is a reason why, if you look at countless threads on this and similar topics, one side continually supports their arguments with scholarly and historical sources and the other side, purportedly Rationalists, reject this out of hand and argue from their unsupported prior beliefs.

Then there's all the book burning practices, because the info contained therein was "herecy" and "blasphemous"..

Again this is a myth.

No single institution did more to preserve, study and increase access to ancient philosophical texts than the Church.

For example:

Raymond of Toledo, Archbishop of Toledo from 1126 to 1151, started the first translation efforts at the library of the Cathedral of Toledo, where he led a team of translators who included Mozarabic Toledans, Jewish scholars, Madrasah teachers, and monks from the Order of Cluny. They translated many works, usually from Arabic into Castilian, and then from Castilian into Latin, as it was the official church language. In some cases, the translator could work directly from Arabic into Latin or Greek. The work of these scholars made available very important texts from Arabic and Hebrew philosophers, whom the Archbishop deemed important for an understanding of several classical authors, specially Aristotle.[6] As a result, the library of the cathedral, which had been refitted under Raymond's orders, became a translations center of a scale and importance not matched in the history of western culture.

Not only were the people copying these texts generally clerics, clerics were disproportionately represented in the ranks of 'scientists'.

So during the "Age of Faith" when @It Aint Necessarily So insists that Christians were arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, people like Thomas Bradwardine, an Archbishop of Canterbury no less, were making important contributions to the development of modern physics (see Oxford Calculators - Wikipedia). If you look further you will see countless further examples across the field.


Also, the church was heavily involved in the creation of the modern university system, and the inclusion of such texts in the curriculum. You couldn't even study theology (a postgrad degree) until you had studied natural philosophy.

John Heilbron, no apologist for the Vatican, got it right when he opened his book The Sun in the Church with the following words: “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably all, other institutions.”4

Heilbron’s point can be generalized far beyond astronomy. Put succinctly, the medieval period gave birth to the university, which developed with the active support of the papacy. This unusual institution sprang up rather spontaneously around famous masters in towns like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford before 1200. By 1500, about sixty universities were scattered throughout Europe.

What is the significance of this development for our myth? About 30 percent of the medieval university curriculum covered subjects and texts concerned with the natural world.5 This was not a trivial development. The proliferation of universities between 1200 and 1500 meant that hundreds of thousands of students—a quarter million in the German universities alone from 1350 on—were exposed to science in the Greco-Arabic tradition. Myth 2: That the medieval Christian Church suppressed the growth of science

Such are clear and undeniable examples of religious authorities trying to control information and protect dogmatic religious doctrines.

Yet, as shown, they aren't actually true.

 

[Augustus]

Whenever authorities are trying to control the flow of information, what type of research can and can't be done for religious reasons, which research results are "acceptable", and other such forms of censorship... I don't see how you can call that anything else then being "anti-science" / "anti-progress". They were only "pro" science / progress as long as the new intel fitted the religious worldview.

How many people can you name that were persecuted by the Medieval Church for scientific ideas? My guess is zero

The one people can name, Galileo, was Renaissance, and even this is far more nuanced than the pop-culture understanding. See, for example:

The emergence of modern astronomy – a complex mosaic: Part XXVII

Copernicus had proposed his ideas on heliocentrism in a book dedicated to the Pope and funded by a Bishop after all.

On the other hand you have the massive contributions made. Aside from the more obvious ones mentioned like funding, education, translation, etc., there are far more subtle, yet highly important ones.

Interestingly, one of the reasons science (in the modern sense) gained traction in society, was its link to theology which made it something worth studying. Experimental science was widely considered pointless, and a waste of money at first (no benefit of hindsight here). It was even mocked in Gulliver's Travels; the people of Laputa with their interest in completely impractical knowledge were based on Swift's contempt for experimental scientists. He even viewed it as actively immoral given resources could be better used to help the poor. We tend to think what has value now has always had value, yet this is not the case.

Also an important part of modern scepticism developed in a specifically Christian context related, somewhat surprisingly, to the Fall of Man. Due to the Fall, humans were flawed and thus couldn't trust their senses. The ancient Greek 'rational sceptics' displayed no such doubt.

The experimental approach is justified primarily by appeals to the weakness of our sensory and cognitive capacities. For many seventeenth-century English thinkers these weaknesses were understood as consequences of the Fall. Boyle and Locke, for their part, also place stress on the incapacities that necessarily attend the kind of beings that we are. But in both cases, the more important issue is the nature of human capacities rather than the nature of the Deity. And if the idea of a fall away from an originally perfect knowledge begins to decline in importance towards the end of the seventeenth century, it nonetheless played a crucial role by drawing attention to the question of the capacities of human nature in the present world...

One of the first texts that [Francis] Bacon would have had to contend with was the ‘Organon’, a collection of Aristotle’s writings on logic. All undergraduates were expected to become familiar with its contents, and until well into the seventeenth century university statutes prescribed monetary penalties for those guilty of transgressions against Aristotle’s logic.

Bacon’s early resistance to the Aristotelianism he encountered at university and his later ambition to establish new foundations for learning are both evident in the title of what is probably his best known philosophical work: Novum organum – (The New Organon, 1620). At this point it should be unnecessary to labour the fact that Bacon has a conception of natural philosophy as an enterprise devoted to a recovery of Adamic knowledge of nature and dominion over it.

Each of the two sections of the Novum Organum concludes with an injunction to recover the dominion over nature that was lost as a consequence of the Fall. As for the impediments to this recovery, Bacon saw in the long-standing tradition of Aristotelian logic an implicit recognition of the fact that ‘the human intellect left to its own course is not to be trusted’. But Bacon was convinced that the purveyors of logic had systematically misidentified the nature of mental errors and the means by which they were to be corrected. The champions of the old Organon ‘have given the first place to Logic, supposing that the surest helps to the sciences were to be found in that’. In Bacon’s judgement, ‘the remedy is altogether too weak for the disease’. The impotence of logic in the face of the human propensity for error could be attributed to two factors. First, the logicians had simply underestimated the extent of the problem they were seeking to rectify.154 ‘The root cause of nearly all evils in the sciences’, Bacon wrote, is that ‘we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind.’ As a consequence, ‘we neglect to seek for its true helps’.155 Second, not realising that error stems from multiple failures of the human mind, they had prescribed a single generic remedy.156

In order to arrive at a true interpretation of nature, Bacon insists, we need to begin with an understanding of human faculties and their limitations. In the Novum Organum, then, Bacon identifies the senses, memory, and reason as the faculties involved in knowledge, and seeks specific ‘ministrations’ or ‘helps’ to heal their inherent infirmities.157 These infirmities, which for Bacon ‘have their foundation in human nature itself’, are referred to as ‘the idols of the tribe’, the first category of four ‘idols of the mind’ to which Bacon attributes the errors of human knowledge.158 For Bacon, the deficiencies of the senses provide the first occasion for error: ‘By far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding pro- ceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses.’159The senses, which are ‘infirm and erring’, fail us in two ways. Sometimes they provide no information; sometimes they provide false information...

Bacon believed that a better ‘help’ for the senses was experimentation: ‘For the subtlety of experiments is far greater than that of the sense itself, even when assisted by exquisite instruments.’" Peter Harrison - The Fall of Man and the foundations of modern science

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The one very simple question I actually asked you was ignored and it is the same question that is always ignored (for very obvious reasons) and will no doubt be ignored again:

If it is so obvious that Christianity was clearly anti-science, then why do basically all contemporary historians of science, who have expert knowledge of the primary sources and context, completely reject this no matter their religious or irreligious background?

This is why I choose not to engage in discussions with you any longer. This is unrelated to my posting. My position was that secular humanism was not an outgrowth of Christianity. I gave you my argument, and you changed topics without addressing that argument.

This is an unrelated topic of no interest to me.

 

[Augustus]

This is why I choose not to engage in discussions with you any longer. This is unrelated to my posting. My position was that secular humanism was not an outgrowth of Christianity. I gave you my argument, and you changed topics without addressing that argument.

This is an unrelated topic of no interest to me.

It's actually perfectly related to your posting. The problem with your arguments is they significantly rely on misrepresentations and pseudo-history, hence you believe "it is obvious that Christianity was an impediment to modern science".

The purpose of the question, which obviously you won't answer as you have no rational argument as to why you are right and the overwhelming consensus of scholarly experts is wrong, was to see if you actually care about evidence on this issue. Otherwise there is no point in going to the effort of posting actual scholarship on issues far more nuanced than that one as it will also be dismissed out of hand.

When you explicitly state you have no desire to actually learn anything about an issue, but also insist that you are right and all the experts obviously wrong, it's just a dogmatic assertion of ideological certainty (which apparently Humanists are supposed to be against).

None of the foundational principles of science can be found in biblical scripture, such as skepticism, rationalism, or empiricism - all antithetical to the Christian notion that all useful knowledge comes from the Bible and that man is totally dependent on God for all things.

This is the kind of thing you just make up: Christianity is not simply 'the Bible' and never has been, and the idea the dominant Christian belief is, or ever has been, 'all useful knowledge comes from the Bible' is complete nonsense. Many natural philosophers even believed it was a religious duty to understand "God's creation".

Also, as the previous post about Francis Bacon notes, the rise of experimental science was driven by scepticism regarding human rationality that was significantly impacted by Christian beliefs regarding the Fall of Man.

Further explained:

the Augustinian view.. took a much more pessimistic view of our abilities after we all became inheritors of original sin. The Augustinian view was vigorously revived by the leading reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, and embraced by the counter-reforming Catholics, the Jansenists, thereby introducing another important theological element into the mixture of science and religion in the early modern period. The response to this revived Augustinianism, of course, was to reject the Thomist approach which essentially favoured the use of reason, and to develop an empiricist approach, which was in itself rendered even less prone to dogmatic conclusions by scepticism about our ability correctly to interpret observations and other empirical results. 39

The emphasis, accordingly, was on painstaking work to slowly gather knowledge, either by observations or by the careful performance of many experiments , but this was accompanied not by assurances that certainty could be reached in this way, but by diffidence as to whether certain knowledge could ever be achieved.

Harrison’s thesis is undeniably powerful, not only because it is backed by an impressive array of evidence from writers of the period, who all show a clear concern with the state of man after the Fall and its implications for what we can know, but also because it dovetails very neatly with many other aspects of current historiography. It stands alongside the work of Richard H. Popkin and others, for example, on the growth of scepticism from the Renaissance through the early modern period.

Religion and the Scientific Revolution - John Henry