Meaningful Atheistic Lives

[Vouthon]

Not really a topic of interest to me, but aren't you running the risk here of being overly focused on Western tradition?

I get that you've acknowledged Zoroastrianism in terms of preceding Judeo-Christian (ugh...promised never to use that term) humanism. But there appear to be multiple points from which humanism was 'birthed', even if the Christian traditions provide the straightest lineage.

Thanks for your contribution to the thread Lewis! These are good and important questions.

Firstly, I wasn't initially speaking in terms of counterfactuals; only doing so when asked by another poster. My only aim had been to demonstrate the causal influence of the medieval Christian heritage upon contemporary liberal-humanism, not to engage in thought experiments with respect to alternate histories.

But if prodded to speculate, I honestly don't see the liberal-humanist paradigm emerging without the medieval church, since it hasn't been produced anywhere else in the world and its ideals are so profoundly rooted in Christian ethical-metaphysical assumptions. The idea that human beings with our dizzying plurality of cultures, for some intrinsic mystical teleological reason grounded in 'human nature' itself, would inevitably 'discover' these concepts is not plausible as an argument, IMHO, if one has an understanding of how they actually developed in Europe.

I reckon this would be a useful moment for me to explain what I am not arguing for here: my argument isn't concerned with making a value judgement regarding the relative merits, or lack thereof, of the values and epistemology underlying the liberal-humanist paradigm (which I contend is rooted in ideas first pioneered by the medieval church, as per the relevant scholarship). The argument put forward merely intends to explain how, on the basis of the development of intellectual history in the West, this philosophy arose.

I've touched upon in other threads how:

(1) Chinese civilization introduced the concept of a merit-based bureaucracy, with the imperial exams enabling talented individuals to be recruited from a range of backgrounds rather than restricting high-ranking occupations to those of inherited privilege alone

(2) Vedic doctrine in India led to the rise of a "well-organized priestly class of Brahmins" who were able to constrain "the ability of states to concentrate power" by ensuring that kings existed to uphold the varna system and the sacred laws

(3) the Islamic world founded the first hospitals (Bimaristans) with the specific function of diagnosing, treating and caring for the mentally ill rather than just the physically sick (as in practically every other contemporary civilization)

(4) Again in India, the Jain-Buddhist-Upanishadic ethical framework emphasized complete non-violence (no harm) towards all living beings, going considerably beyond a mere humanistic worldview (which is sometimes criticized for its "anthropocentric-chauvinism" by representatives from other cultures). Also Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, was arguably unique among the great philosophers of human history in proclaiming that truth was "many-sided" and every viewpoint claiming absolute truth was therefore limited, and partial at best.​

I could go on in this way but needless to say, you no doubt get the point that I'm not making any argument for the cultural superiority of Western civilization and the liberal-humanist paradigm rooted in Christian thought. That entails a value judgement, which is the prerogative of every person to determine for themselves in accordance with one's own convictions. Obviously, as a practicing Christian and a self-confessed liberal to boot, I am an advocate for the merits of this tradition.

However @Augustus, for his part, has expressed his own preference for the pre-Christian-humanist "tragic" outlook, on the basis that it is the more realist (as opposed to excessively optimistic-utopian) model. So this is not, in any sense, about claiming one worldview as "better" or "superior" (a value judgement) - it is purely and simply to accurately explain how this particular worldview (the liberal-humanist one), for historically contingent reasons arising from medieval Christian principles, rather than an inevitable deterministic reason (which is just not consistent with the evidence IMHO), came to espouse the distinctive ideals that it did. That's all.

The other civilizations mentioned above in my brief overview - which were shaped by Confucian, Hindu and Islamic religious principles, respectively - are incredibly sophisticated and rich in their own right, and came up with unique innovations entirely distinct from the Western tradition, courtesy of a different metaphysical understanding of the world and of purpose in history. Each of them expressed ideas concerning human dignity, justice and order in society.

But what is absolutely crucial to note at this junction, is that the liberal-humanist paradigm, in its distinctive essentials, was not decisively shaped and determined by these civilizations. Nothing approaching liberal, humanist, rights-based individualism emerged from these cultures. As Professor Brian Tierney of Cornell University (one of the scholars I'm reliant upon here), explains in a 1994 study entitled Natural Rights: Before and After Columbus:

A United Nations document of 1949 optimistically declared that the concept of the rights of man "goes back to the very beginning of philosophy, East and West." Few historians would agree. All the great world civilizations have striven to establish justice and order, but most of them have not expressed their ideals in terms of individual natural rights.

Think of classical China. It is hard to imagine a Confucian Hobbes or Locke. The emergence of a doctrine of natural rights is a contingent phenomenon. So the question a historian has to ask is: What historical context, or what set of circumstances, made the emergence of such a doctrine possible, or useful, or necessary?

The problem is largely to understand how an ancient doctrine of natural law-ius naturale became transformed into a theory of subjective rights inhering in individuals...

We can now at last come to the real historical origin- the medieval teaching on natural rights that Vitoria and Las Casas would inherit, and find some answers to the question I posed. What was the historical context that made the new teaching possible? It was, I have been arguing in a series of recent articles, the culture and jurisprudence of the late twelfth century...

Most non-Western cultures, I have said, have not expressed their deepest intuitions about morals and politics in the language of natural rights...​

And his essay, THE IDEA OF NATURAL RIGHTS-ORIGINS AND PERSISTENCE (2004):

It is a mistake to see a concern for rights whenever we encounter policies that we may find morally congenial but that were really based on quite other grounds. Our modern concept has not always existed everywhere; rather it has its own distinctive history that we shall try to explore, and in its early stages it was indeed a Western history...

It is important, therefore, to emphasize at the outset that we shall not be dealing with an inevitable unfolding of ideas always present in the Western psyche or with a sort of predetermined organic growth from Western cultural genes. Western history offered other alternatives. Plato discussed an ideal society without any appeal to natural rights...

There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of a doctrine of natural rights. To explain how the idea first arose, we need to consider a series of contingent situations that occurred in the course of Western history and try to understand how the various responses to them shaped this new way of thinking...

In pursuing this theme, the jurists of the twelfth century, especially the church lawyers, played an important innovatory role.

A more widespread recognition and effective implementation of human rights in the future is neither inevitable nor impossible. History throws contingencies at us; the outcome depends on how we respond to them. It is true that the idea of human rights is of Western origin; but that does not mean that it is necessarily irrelevant for everyone else. Huntington's picture of five self-contained civilizations seems over-simplified in an age of globalization. Some modern cultural phenomena are universal. Modern technology is a Western creation, the product of several centuries of distinctively Western development, but it has been eagerly accepted in all parts of the world...

So it is possible that the ethical norms of various other cultures might be transposed into our Western idiom of human rights and even that this might be of value to the human race.​

Unless one presupposes the Western Christian-liberal-humanist paradigm to be primordial and normative for the human species (a teleological myth, because it is a phenomenon utterly novel in human history), as opposed to a socially-constructed paradigm (which it is), this shouldn't be a problem.

The basic picture is that:

(a) the theory of subjective, inviolable natural rights inhering in every person emerged in the medieval church

(b) the understanding of history as a progressive arch inevitably tending towards the decisive triumph of the forces of good and truth over evil and ignorance, rather than a cycle of endless repetition, is an outcome of Zoroastrian-Jewish-Christian eschatology

(c) experimental science, reliant upon testability, is an outgrowth of the Christian belief in pre-existent, immutable “physical laws” or the “laws of nature” courtesy of an underlying mathematical order designed by God, which displaced an earlier belief in nature as divine and static

(d) moral universalism, as opposed to relativism, is a concept strongly rooted in Pauline Christianity

(e) the idea that governmental power is not absolute but must be constrained by consent of the governed, the rule of law and above all respect for individual rights owes much to medieval Christian ethical precepts

(f) the concept of natural equality, rather than natural inequality, in Western thought is again rooted in Christian universalist ideology about redemption

(g) the separation of religion from politics is a peculiar outgrowth of the 11th century Investiture Contest between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire

(h) as explained by the legal historian Harold Berman, that same "Papal Revolution gave birth to the modern Western state, so it gave birth also to modern Western legal systems, the first of which was the modern system of canon law".
​

As such, these ideas - and others - are not inevitable outcomes of deterministic, universal reason but rather contingent beliefs shaped by a particular set of historical circumstances and the philosophical assumptions of a certain religious tradition.

I could go on but that will suffice for now.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Yes, I am, in terms of the Church - the source of these ideas are to be found in the High Middle Ages, beginning with the canonists of the 12th-13th centuries and their successors the conciliarists of the 15th century, then developed by the Jesuits and scholastics of the 16th century School of Salamanca, and then Calvinist theorists in the late 16th and 17th centuries, from whence these political theories passed to John Locke and the first liberal thinkers, who advanced these concepts yet again, bringing them to their mature articulation, and who finally influenced later humanists.

As Brian Tierney, Professor of Medieval History at Cornell University, explained in his 1994 and 2004 studies (i.e. https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=njihr&ved=2ahUKEwiw-bqalqTaAhULasAKHWTJC_MQFjAEegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw3_Z69O55mPfwFSqMQ_rCyf) as quoted in the following book:

Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective

The twelfth century was an age of renaissance, of new vitality in many spheres of life and thought. This was the age of the first great gothic cathedrals and the first universities. New networks of commerce grew up and with them a revival of city life.

In religious life there was a new emphasis on the individual human person—on individual intention in assessing guilt, individual consent in marriage, individual scrutiny of conscience. And in the everyday life of the time there was an intense concern for rights and liberties...

This widespread concern for rights is famously exemplified in the Anglo-American tradition by our cherished Magna Carta. The first clause of Magna Carta declared that, "the English Church shall be free, and shall have all its rights entire."...

But the canonists who wrote around 1200, reading the old texts in the context of their more humanist, more individualist culture, added another definition. In their writings, ius naturale (natural right) was now sometimes defined in a subjective sense as a faculty , power, force, ability inhering in individual persons. From this initial subjective definition the canonists went on to develop a considerable array of natural rights.

Around 1250 Pope Innocent IV wrote that ownership of property was a right derived from natural law and that even infidels enjoyed this right, along with a right to form their own governments. Other natural rights that were asserted in the thirteenth century included a right to liberty, a right of self-defence, a right of the poor to the surplus wealth of the rich.

By placing these rights squarely within the framework of natural law, the jurists could and did argue that these rights could not be taken away by the human prince. The prince had no jurisdiction over rights based on natural law; consequently these rights were inalienable.
​

And this idea of subjective, inalienable natural rights is evidenced nowhere in ancient Greek or Roman thought. It was an innovation of the medieval canon lawyers of the Catholic Church, developed subsequently by the conciliarists and Salamanca scholastics.

Note that Tierney is: "widely recognized as a leading authority on medieval church law and political thought".

Secular Humanists are the latest off-shoot of a long tradition stretching back to the 12th century, with its roots in a melange of ideas from Antiquity (especially the Bible, Patristic sources and ecclesiastical canons) which the canonists brought together for the first time and reinvented, rather than in classical Greece.

Since this is demonstrable on the basis of the evidence, I see no reason to part from this understanding. Allow me to quote the argument of Professor Larry Siedentop, a renowned historian of liberalism, from his 2014 book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism:

Inventing the Individual

By the 12th and 13th centuries the Papacy sponsored the creation of a legal system for the Church, founded on the assumption of moral equality. Canon lawyers assumed that the basic organising unit of the legal system was the individual (or “soul”).

Working from that assumption, canonists transformed the ancient doctrine of natural law (“everything in its place”) into a theory of natural rights – the forerunner of modern liberal rights theory.

By the 15th century these intellectual developments contributed to a reform movement (“Conciliarism”) calling for something like representative government in the Church.

The failure of that reform movement lay behind the outbreak of the Reformation, which led to religious wars and growing pressure across Europe for the separation of Church and state. By the 18th century such pressure had become a virulent anticlericalism, which reshaped the writing of western history and with it our understanding of ourselves.

It is this selective memory of our past that lies behind our failure to see that it was moral intuitions generated by Christianity that were turned against the coercive claims of the Church – intuitions founded on belief in free will, which led to the conclusion that enforced belief is a contradiction in terms.

So it is no accident that the west generated a rights-based culture of principles rather than of rules

​

Why do you think that a secular scholar, and an expert in the development of liberal thought, would articulate such an argument? He is not alone, variations of it are espoused by all the academics I mentioned.

The reason they advocate the above is that the available evidence demands it.

The principle quod omnes tangit (what touches all should be approved by all) was already a staple of the canon lawyers and decretists of the church in the 12th century. This was a general principle of these medieval jurists which contended that the head of a corporate body (like a state) had to obtain the consent of its members in all matters which affected them. It was incorporated into the Liber Sextus Decretalium compiled under Pope Boniface VIII in 1298.

The idea that every people had a right to elect their own ruler and determine their own choice of government was becoming common in the Church's political philosophy by the fourteenth-century.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has both perceptively and persuasively argued that the rise of the modern constitutional order is a narrative of the “success of resistance to claims of absolutism and a reassertion of the primacy of law” but crucially Fukuyama, echoing many other scholars, contends that such a radical ideology was originally made far more communicable to society at large and effective when “a religious tradition gives law a sanctity, autonomy, and coherence that it otherwise might not have had”. This role was fulfilled, Fukuyama claims, by the Church in medieval Europe, to the extent that it was “the guardian" of canon law and a reinterpreted Roman law after the Gregorian Revolution.

Where were are of these people clamoring for human rights in the Middle Ages, and why did the have to wait for the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of humanist values in political science to get them? What is the church's part in that except to claim that it came up with these ideas and sat on them?

 

[Augustus]

So all the apparently religious wars - Christians/Muslims, Hindus/Muslims, Protestants/Catholics, etc. were merely convenient labels and not driving any particular doctrine - to changes the views of these 'infidels' or conquer them? The history of the UK alone hardly attests to this - the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics over the ages, for example. The partition of India too, when Pakistan was created:

The Bloody Legacy of Indian Partition | The New Yorker

How would you define a religious war?

Just because wars happened between different religious groups didn't mean they were necessarily fighting over religion. Wars to 'change the views of the infidel' have happened, but are pretty rare really.

As for conquering, powerful nations conquered weaker ones, as was the way of the world back then. With power, money and glory at stake, you don't need religion to motivate conquests

People often consider the Muslim conquest of India to be religious, but Timur was a mongol who saw himself as the new Ghenghis Khan charged with recreating his empire. We tend not to see the Mongol conquests as religious wars though.

Religious divides also frequently reflect ethnic/linguistic/cultural divides anyway so they are not always the only cause of the schism.

Many religious conflicts within countries, as in the article you linked to, also the Balkans, Iraq, Ambon, etc. you have a significant change in the political power structures of the country leading to violence between groups who had lived alongside each other for centuries.

In places like Rwanda, Biafra, etc. you had the same issues but divided along ethnic lines.

People need identities, and absent religion, these are still going to be diverse and potential causes of conflict with the 'other'.

Of course some conflicts have been significantly driven by religious belief, but it is a far smaller number than tends to be commonly imagined.

True, but the label often fits, when some seem more inclined to kill for their particular religious beliefs than others having no such thing. And unfortunately religion might unite - as in uniting against others - which perhaps is just as bad or worse than not having anything to unite over.

Nationalism, communism and fascism have combined to kill more people than religious beliefs. It's easy for us to justify violence if we want to.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Where were are of these people clamoring for human rights in the Middle Ages, and why did the have to wait for the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of humanist values in political science to get them? What is the church's part in that except to claim that it came up with these ideas and sat on them?

They were too busy burning people at the stake, coming up with inventive forms of torture, plundering, enslaving and encouraging pogroms, of course.

 

[Augustus]

Where were are of these people clamoring for human rights in the Middle Ages, and why did the have to wait for the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of humanist values in political science to get them? What is the church's part in that except to claim that it came up with these ideas and sat on them?

The history of ideas is 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. The Enlightenment didn't emerge from a vacuum but was the cumulation of numerous strands of thought that had been developing in Western society for centuries.

As well as numerous key Enlightenment figures (Descartes, Newton, Locke, Erasmus, etc.) documenting the role of religion in their thoughts, the Church was a major driver of education, especially the university system, that was one of the major things that led to the Enlightenment in the first place.

 

[Vouthon]

Where were are of these people clamoring for human rights in the Middle Ages, and why did the have to wait for the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of humanist values in political science to get them? What is the church's part in that except to claim that it came up with these ideas and sat on them?

Actually, clauses designed to safeguard and ensure the rights and liberties of individuals are common features of medieval charters. What gave you the impression that they weren't?

People were "clamouring" for their rights, all sorts of rights in fact. As Professor Brian Tierney explains:

The Idea of Natural Rights

In the vigorous, fluid, expanding society of the twelfth century, old rights were persistently asserted and new ones insistently demanded. Cathedral canons asserted their rights against bishops. Bishops and barons defended their rights against kings. Newly-founded communes sometimes bought their rights and sometimes fought for them...

Even peasants, emigrating to found new villages in the still vast expanses of forest and wasteland, could claim enhanced liberties from lords who needed fresh supplies of labor. Medieval people first struggled for survival; then they struggled for rights ​

Consider the 1217 Charter of the Forest, which was actually commemorated by left-wing, progressive parties here in the UK on its 800th anniversary last year:

Charter of the Forest - Wikipedia

At a time when royal forests were the most important potential source of fuel for cooking, heating and industries such as charcoal burning, and of such hotly defended rights as pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing), or turbary (cutting of turf for fuel),[8] this charter was almost unique in providing a degree of economic protection for free men who used the forest to forage for food and to graze their animals.

In contrast to Magna Carta, which dealt with the rights of barons, it restored to the common man some real rights, privileges and protections against the abuses of an encroaching aristocracy.[9
​

Why you've never heard of a Charter that's as important as the Magna Carta

The Charter of the Forest was sealed 800 years ago today. Its defence of the property-less and of ‘the commons’, means the Right would prefer to ignore it - and progressives need to celebrate and renew it.

Eight hundred years ago this month, after the death of a detested king and the defeat of a French invasion in the Battle of Lincoln, one of the foundation stones of the British constitution was laid down. It was the Charter of the Forest, sealed in St Paul’s on November 6, 1217, alongside a shortened Charter of Liberties from 2 years earlier (which became the Magna Carta).

The Charter of the Forest was the first environmental charter forced on any government. It was the first to assert the rights of the property-less, of the commoners, and of the commons. It also made a modest advance for feminism, as it coincided with recognition of the rights of widows to have access to means of subsistence and to refuse to be remarried.

The Charter has the distinction of having been on the statute books for longer than any other piece of legislation. It was repealed 754 years later, in 1971, by a Tory government...

It is scarcely surprising that the political Right want to ignore the Charter. It is about the economic rights of the property-less, limiting private property rights and rolling back the enclosure of land, returning vast expanses to the commons. It was remarkably subversive...

At the heart of the Charter, which is hard to understand unless words that have faded from use are interpreted, is the concept of the commons and the need to protect them and to compensate commoners for their loss.

The Charter has 17 articles, which assert the eternal right of free men and women to work on their own volition in ways that would yield all elements of subsistence on the commons, including such basics as the right to pick fruit, the right to gather wood for buildings and other purposes, the right to dig and use clay for utensils and housing, the right to pasture animals, the right to fish, the right to take peat for fuel, the right to water, and even the right to take honey.

The Charter should be regarded as one of the most radical in our history, since it asserted the right of commoners to obtain raw materials and the means of production, and gave specific meaning to the right to work.

It also set in train the development of local councils and judiciary, notably through the system of Verderers, which paved the way for magistrate courts. In modern parlance, it extended agency freedom, giving commoners voice in managing the commons, as well as system freedom, by opposing enclosure.​

Here's a quotation from the text of the Charter:


Charter of the Forest - Wikisource, the free online library

Now these liberties with regard to the forest we have granted to all...the liberties and free customs in forests and outside them, in warrens and in other things...Moreover, all these aforesaid liberties and customs, which we have granted to be observed, in so far as concerns us, toward our men, all persons of our kingdom, both clergy and laity, shall, in so far as concerns them, observe toward their men
​

These rights were declared to be "universal", applying to all men - even commoners and those without property.

Nor was this kind of language restricted to fellow Christians.

For instance, Pope Innocent IV invoked the language of natural rights to explain the relationship of the papacy to the Jewish community of Europe. In 1247, he decided, after being asked by a Jewish delegation who explained that the Talmud was an essential part of their religious life, to revoke earlier laws which had called for the text to be removed

In a letter to King Louis IX of France about this issue, Innocent stated that in his role as supreme pontiff he was "under an obligation to defend the rights of all persons" ("summus pontifex . . . tenetur reddere cuilibet iura sua") [Innocent IV to Louis IX, of France (12 August, 1247) (document no. 187) in Schlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988) vol. 94, pp. 196-197.], including Jews.

He had proceeded to make good on this claim just a few months before, when he condemned the anti-Semitic blood libel myth that was being used by mobs to justify pogroms, in a letter to the bishops of Germany and France:

The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492–1404; Simonsohn, Shlomo, pp. 188–189, 193–195, 208
​

Pope Innocent IV , 5 July 1247 "Mandate to the prelates of Germany and France to annul all measures adopted against the Jews on account of the ritual murder libel, and to prevent accusation of Arabs on similar charges"​

"Certain of the clergy, and princes, nobles and great lords of your cities and dioceses have falsely devised certain godless plans against the Jews, unjustly depriving them by force of their property, and appropriating it themselves;... they falsely charge them with dividing up among themselves on the Passover the heart of a murdered boy...

In their malice, they ascribe every murder, wherever it chance to occur, to the Jews. And on the ground of these and other fabrications, they are filled with rage against them, rob them of their possessions without any formal accusation, without confession, and without legal trial and conviction, contrary to the privileges granted to them by the Apostolic See...

Since it is our pleasure that they shall not be disturbed,... we ordain that ye behave towards them in a friendly and kind manner. Whenever any unjust attacks upon them come under your notice, redress their injuries, and do not suffer them to be visited in the future by similar tribulations"
​

And he also issued a bull against the myth, see this from "skepticism.org":

Today in History: 3 July 1247: Pope Innocent IV Issues Encyclical Condemning Blood Libels Against Jews

Pope Innocent IV issues the encyclical Lacrimabilem Judaeorum condemning blood libels against Jews.

Innocent writes:

"They are falsely accused that in the same solemnity [Passover] they receive communion with the heart of a murdered child.

This, it is believed, is required by their Law, although it is clearly contrary to it. No matter where a dead body is discovered, their persecutors wickedly cast it against them."​

 

[Mock Turtle]

How would you define a religious war?

Just because wars happened between different religious groups didn't mean they were necessarily fighting over religion. Wars to 'change the views of the infidel' have happened, but are pretty rare really.

As for conquering, powerful nations conquered weaker ones, as was the way of the world back then. With power, money and glory at stake, you don't need religion to motivate conquests

People often consider the Muslim conquest of India to be religious, but Timur was a mongol who saw himself as the new Ghenghis Khan charged with recreating his empire. We tend not to see the Mongol conquests as religious wars though.

Religious divides also frequently reflect ethnic/linguistic/cultural divides anyway so they are not always the only cause of the schism.

Many religious conflicts within countries, as in the article you linked to, also the Balkans, Iraq, Ambon, etc. you have a significant change in the political power structures of the country leading to violence between groups who had lived alongside each other for centuries.

In places like Rwanda, Biafra, etc. you had the same issues but divided along ethnic lines.

People need identities, and absent religion, these are still going to be diverse and potential causes of conflict with the 'other'.

Of course some conflicts have been significantly driven by religious belief, but it is a far smaller number than tends to be commonly imagined.



Nationalism, communism and fascism have combined to kill more people than religious beliefs. It's easy for us to justify violence if we want to.

I'm sorry but body count is hardly a rational argument for such things. Why do we have such things as Sunnis and Shias continually at each other's throats - much the same with other splits in faiths? You can hardly argue that religion has not divided us just as much as it has united many behind the banner of their religion. Perhaps people do need identities but religions are usually such fundamental beliefs so as to cause such separation from others - when without such life might be so much more pleasant. In my view.

 

[Augustus]

I'm sorry but body count is hardly a rational argument for such things. Why do we have such things as Sunnis and Shias continually at each other's throats - much the same with other splits in faiths? You can hardly argue that religion has not divided us just as much as it has united many behind the banner of their religion. Perhaps people do need identities but religions are usually such fundamental beliefs so as to cause such separation from others - when without such life might be so much more pleasant. In my view.

Religion both divides and unites, as do languages, cultures, politics, ideologies, nation states and numerous other things.

Humans conceptualise the world with recourse to in/out groups as reflects our evolutionary heritage and that of our closest simian cousins. Our natural state is to be divided and removing religion from the equation does not change that.

The modern Sunni-Shia conflicts date back to the Iranian Revolution and Saudi Arabia's response in its quest for regional power.

Had Iran been Sunni, you'd still have the Persian/Arab cultural differences that have always existed. The rest of the region speaks Arabic and became Arabised, yet Persia remained Persian. Shia Islam absorbed much of this Persianness over the centuries.

Post-Enlightenment Europe, despite declining religiosity hardly experienced a decline in divisions and had 2 of the worst wars in history, Napoleonic wars, Soviet Communism, Nazism, colonialism, etc.

We are a diverse species and always will be so there will always be division lines between us. Religion is one of these, but whatever replaces religious ideology is also a potential source of division.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Religion both divides and unites, as do languages, cultures, politics, ideologies, nation states and numerous other things.

True, but religious beliefs are so fundamental often - being seen as before almost anything else in many cases (some Islamic beliefs, for example) that they trump all others.

The modern Sunni-Shia conflicts date back to the Iranian Revolution and Saudi Arabia's response in its quest for regional power.

But the split occurred long before all this and the latest troubles are just the latest, as for many other religions.

Post-Enlightenment Europe, despite declining religiosity hardly experienced a decline in divisions and had 2 of the worst wars in history, Napoleonic wars, Soviet Communism, Nazism, colonialism, etc.

And mainly down to a few powerful individuals who had more influence than they deserved.

We are a diverse species and always will be so there will always be division lines between us. Religion is one of these, but whatever replaces religious ideology is also a potential source of division.

I think many of us just don't see it that way. I certainly can't see much dividing me from others - as long as they also don't have a fierce nationalism in them. Drop religions and nationalism and the world would be a better place.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The history of ideas is 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. The Enlightenment didn't emerge from a vacuum but was the cumulation of numerous strands of thought that had been developing in Western society for centuries.

As well as numerous key Enlightenment figures (Descartes, Newton, Locke, Erasmus, etc.) documenting the role of religion in their thoughts, the Church was a major driver of education, especially the university system, that was one of the major things that led to the Enlightenment in the first place.

You've posted the equivalent of this to me many times, but you haven't made the case that there is a debt to Christianity here. The people you name above were among the earliest thinkers pioneering what would become the worldview of modernity, secular humanism. You continually imply that if one idea developed alongside another, that this forces them to have an affinity to one another.

My position all along has been that humanism is a reaction to and repudiation of the old order according to the biblical model of government, in which the relationship of subject to king is the same as man to God - absolute rule.

Yes, I know that that absolute rule eroded over the centuries throughout the Middle Ages, but my position is that that was an expression of people rejecting the Christian model and replacing it with what the likes of Locke thought were better ideas. That's the humanist method, even if Christians are employing it, and even if they are giving credit to their god.

The essential difference between the two ways of thinking is that one is authoritarian and requires blind faith in scripture and tradition, and the other says, hey, maybe I can come up with a better idea. The political philosophy of Locke is a rejection of the biblical order.

When I make this point, you return to some form of, "Ah, but ideas do not arise in a vacuum" as if they must all be derivative of one another rather than a rejection of older ideas. You want to credit the church for others departing from its ways. I don't.

You referred to ideas as standing on the shoulders of giants (earlier ideas). I say that this is more like Goliath and David the giant killer.

Charter of the Forest - Wikipedia

At a time when royal forests were the most important potential source of fuel for cooking, heating and industries such as charcoal burning, and of such hotly defended rights as pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing), or turbary (cutting of turf for fuel),[8] this charter was almost unique in providing a degree of economic protection for free men who used the forest to forage for food and to graze their animals.

In contrast to Magna Carta, which dealt with the rights of barons, it restored to the common man some real rights, privileges and protections against the abuses of an encroaching aristocracy.[9

I don't see Christianity there.

As indicated above, I make a distinction between things done by Christians and things derived from their Christianity. Don't you think that people everywhere living that type of life would want those privileges, and grab them if they could? How did Christianity help in that struggle?

Many people believe that there is nothing done with religion that couldn't have been done as well or better without it. Augustus mentioned universities in the Middle Ages and the church's role fostering them. Others mention hospitals and hospices the same way. Is the implication that people couldn't have done this same thing without baptisms and the gospels?

But I liked reading all of those new (for me) words.

 

[Vouthon]

My position all along has been that humanism is a reaction to and repudiation of the old order according to the biblical model of government, in which the relationship of subject to king is the same as man to God - absolute rule.

IMHO, and with respect, your historiography is seriously off here. Medievalists would go apoplectic reading your post!

(1) You are applying the term "absolutism" anachronistically to the medieval period, when in fact the idea did not exist at that time owing to feudal society, which resulted in generally weak monarchies with dissipated sources of authority operating alongside independent republics, city-states and communes.

Absolutism was a phenomenon of early modernity, namely the 16th - 19th centuries, when nation-states emerged. This needs to be clarified before the discussion can continue, because this misunderstanding is leading us to talk past one another. Read the following from Oxford University's dictionary of the Social Sciences:


Absolutism - Oxford Reference

Absolutism

The theory and practice of unlimited, legitimate state power and authority, typically concentrated in the person of a monarch. The theoretical basis of the doctrine was developed by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes in response to the political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They argued that power should be absolute and undivided in order to maintain social order. In practice, absolutism is associated with the consolidation of the state in early-modern Europe. The “Age of Absolutism” lasted from 1648 to 1789, and was personified by Louis XIV of France and Frederick II of Prussia, although czarist Russia retained many absolutist features until its collapse in 1917.
​

Thomas Hobbes, a 17th century secular theorist, was actually one of the earliest philosophers to explicitly advocate absolutism and articulate an expansive political philosophy to substantiate i.e.


Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes...is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.

Although Hobbes offered some mild pragmatic grounds for preferring monarchy to other forms of government, his main concern was to argue that effective government—whatever its form—must have absolute authority. Its powers must be neither divided nor limited....

Similarly, to impose limitation on the authority of the government is to invite irresoluble disputes over whether it has overstepped those limits. To avoid the horrible prospect of governmental collapse and return to the state of nature, people should treat their sovereign as having absolute authority.
​

Thomas Hobbes | Biography & Facts - Political philosophy

In metaphysics, Hobbes defended materialism, the view that only material things are real.

[For Hobbes] this right of government is absolute...The sovereign determines who owns what, who will hold which public offices, how the economy will be regulated, what acts will be crimes, and what punishments criminals should receive. The sovereign is the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of law,​

I have demonstrated to you, with numerous scholarly references and primary sources, that this was not the "model" endorsed by the medieval church.

The heyday of royal 'absolutism' was not the Middle Ages but actually the Early Modern era, which is contemporaneous with the first stage of the enlightenment.

Medieval governments were entirely different, as the scholar Professor Jan Zielonka of Oxford University explains here:


Europe as Empire

In particular, medieval empires characteristically had limited and decentralized governments, performing only a few basic governmental functions. They were ridden by internal conflicts between a king or emperor and the lower aristocracy, whether feudal or bureaucratic, while the persistent divergence of local cultures, religions and traditions implied a highly divided political loyalty
​

And that's not counting the city-states, the medieval period was described as one prominent historian as characterized by:

Surpassing the Sovereign State

the overlapping authority structures and sovereignties that existed before the seventeenth century in which sovereign states, city-states, city-leagues, loosely controlled empires, and still other entities competed for control.​

I sincerely hope you will not repeat this patently unhistorical argument again about medieval governance being absolutist.

Please, please, please read up on this.

(2) I explained to you likewise, on a prior occasion, that church teaching - regardless of whether it is in the Bible or not - is authoritative for Catholic Christians, since we don't believe in sola scriptura.

The medieval canonical doctrines which I am presenting to you, are not the product of rogue medieval figures "free-thinkers" but rather church-sanctioned theologians and jurists, teaching what they believe to be the doctrinal understanding of the church, the sensus fidelium. The Bible was one of their sources, the Patristics, decretals and canons another.

The idea of natural, inalienable rights is therefore derived from this religious context, beginning in the 12th century. It wasn't a secular innovation but one made by canon lawyers working for the Pope.

Yes, I know that that absolute rule eroded over the centuries throughout the Middle Ages, but my position is that that was an expression of people rejecting the Christian model and replacing it with what the likes of Locke thought were better ideas.

It didn't erode, it increased after the transition away from medieval Christianity to early modernity beginning in the 16th century, as you can see from the secular Hobbesian political philosophy, until this trend was checked by liberal revolutions and political reform movements in the 19th century, inspired by the French Revolution.

In the 16th-17th centuries, the main critiques of absolute monarchy (in the form of both divine right and secular foundations) were from Catholic and Calvinist theologians (i.e. Cardinal Bellarmine, Francisco Suarez), until liberal opponents of absolutism like John Locke emerged circa. 1689, speaking in favour of parliamentarian constitutional monarchy. And Locke was influenced by these earlier Christian exponents of the natural rights tradition, especially as filtered through the cleric Richard Hooker. (I've went over this particular point before on the last thread).

 

[Vouthon]

I don't see Christianity there.

As indicated above, I make a distinction between things done by Christians and things derived from their Christianity. Don't you think that people everywhere living that type of life would want those privileges, and grab them if they could? How did Christianity help in that struggle?

I've already explained, ad nauseum, that Christian canonical thought in the 12th century, based upon an innovative interpretation of the Bible, Patristics and canons, created the concept of natural, inalienable rights inhering in individual persons, which no government had the power to violate.

This was picked up and further developed by 14th-15th century scholastic and conciliarist theologians (i.e. William of Ockham, Jean Gerson, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa etc.) and then the Spanish School of Salamanca in the 16th century, from where it passed to Calvinist theorists and finally the earliest liberal thinkers.

In other words, it was a profoundly religious idea with a profoundly religious justification and origin, before being progressively secularized by liberal thinkers from the late 17th century onwards.

The canon lawyers' innovation was a product of church canonists, decretists and theologians working for the papacy (some of them, like Pope Innocent IV, actually pontiffs themselves), expounding authoritative Catholic moral doctrines in the aftermath of what historians call the Papal Revolution of the 11th century spearheaded by Pope St. Gregory VII, to free the church from interference by the Holy Roman Emperors and lay investiture.

I don't know how many more scholarly and primary sources I'm going to have to quote until you believe me

Here's another, from the Springer Enclyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, published 2011 and written by a scholar I haven't yet brought up, Professor John Kilcullen (yet another expert in politics and medieval studies):


Medieval Theories of Natural Rights - Macquarie University

From the 12th century onwards, medieval canon lawyers and, from the early 14th century, theologians and philosophers began to use ius to mean a right, and developed a theory of natural rights, the predecessor of modern theories of human rights. The main applications of this theory were in respect of property and government.

This is the ancestor of the modern idea of human rights, i.e. rights belonging permanently to any human being as such, independently of the law or customs of any community

A fully-fledged medieval natural rights theory consisted of two elements: a treatment of property rights, and a treatment of political rights. Whether property itself was a natural right was disputed; theologians generally said that property was not natural but a creation of human positive law, lawyers generally said that property, or at least some kind of property, existed by natural law. But it was generally agreed that every person has a natural right to self-preservation and hence a natural right to use things-in a situation of necessity even things belonging to another.

Medieval writers postulated other natural rights with important implications for politics. They held that everyone has a natural right to self-defence. Like the right to use things to sustain life, the right of self-defence was seen as implied by the natural law duty to preserve human life, one's own first of all. Another natural right with political implications was the right to freedom. The right to use things, the right to freedom and the right of self-defence were included in Isidore's statement of natural law: "the common possession of all things and the one liberty of all... and the repelling of force with force" (quoted Gratian, I dist.1 c.7, Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 2)...

In a number of places (OND 88.308-10, Brev. iv.10.54-8, 3.1 Dial. 2.28, 3.2 Dial. 3.6) Ockham invokes the canon Ius civile, in which Isidore explains the meaning of the term "civil law": "Civil law is the law proper to itself that each people or city establishes, for divine and human reason." Ockham interprets this not merely as the explanation of a term but as an assertion of the right of each people to establish for itself a law and a government and to elect its own ruler...

Even in normal situations, the rights or powers of a ruler are limited by the rights of subjects, not only by the right to replace a tyrannical ruler but also by other "rights and liberties". The ruler's power is obviously limited by the natural rights of subjects. Ockham takes this pretty much for granted, since no one claimed that rulers have power superior to natural law.

His main contention, in regard to both popes and secular rulers, is that their power is limited not only by divine and natural law and natural rights, but also by positive rights and by natural and positive liberties...Ockham's accounts of the right to use, the right to property, the rights of rulers and the rights and liberties of subjects make no reference to the difference between Christian believers and unbelievers. Political rights belong to all human beings.

Theories like Ockham's were put forward by many later medieval writers. The leaders of the Conciliar movment studied Ockham (d'Ailly, for example, produced an abbreviatio of Ockham's Dialogus) and were also influenced directly by the canonist tradition that had influenced Ockham (Tierney, 1955).

Gerson's conception of a body whose members had individual rights prior to any enactment by that body, rights that include a right to self-defence and also certain "political" powers (Tierney, pp. 220-5), echoes both Ockham and the canonist tradition. The political theory of Locke's Second Treatise has obvious similarities with Ockham's; the Conciliarists are the most likely medium of transmission of fourteenth century ideas into the seventeenth century (see Oakley).
​

Do you believe that so many experts in the field, wedded to the abundance of primary source material supporting it, are wrong about this? Most other posters engaged in this debate regarding the origins of liberal-humanist rights theory, with the notable exception of @Augustus (who like me is basing his argument on evidence and scholarly research), appear to simply be voicing their own opinions; whereas I am referencing and summarizing the research of actual scholars, not my own personal musings.

As with a lot of things in scholarship, the popular laymen's understanding is misguided, lacking in a complete picture and invariably just wrong.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I've already explained, ad nauseum, that Christian canonical thought in the 12th century, based upon an innovative interpretation of the Bible, Patristics and canons, created the concept of natural, inalienable rights inhering in individual persons, which no government had the power to violate.

You seem to be getting frustrated. Sorry. You've put a lot of effort into this, and in good cheer.

But I also feel that I am not being heard and understood.

Innovative is the key word there. There is no place for innovation in faith based systems that rely on scripture, tradition, other received wisdom, and authority. If you begin speculative thinking, you are moving into the world of the humanist.

If church people created something resembling modern ideas on rights in the 12th century, they did it without the help of their Bibles, which frankly, can be used to support almost any idea (slavery) or its antithesis (abolition).

I mentioned Thales when saying that the roots of humanism antedate Christianity. In the West, as you know, rational skepticism was first introduced by ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, whose skepticism about the claims that natural events were punishments from capricious gods led to free speculation about reality. This is the innovative part.

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. This is what is being called Christianity when Christians do it. You keep presenting ideas from Christians and want to attribute them to Christianity, which was ossified when its scriptures were written down and a Bible produced. All ideas not in that book were innovations of people doing what Thales did, and wondering if the mind of man was capable of understanding his world when others were telling them things like

• "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn." - St. Augustine
• "Since God has spoken to us it is no longer necessary for us to think." - St Augustine of Hippo
• Trust in the lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." - Proverbs 3:5
• "People gave ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth." - Martin Luther

That's what humanism is a reaction to - this demeaning and suppression of human intellect. No number of examples of Christians partaking in the rejection of that old school and turning to a new way of visualizing and confronting reality makes Christianity deserving of credit for any of that progress. The credit goes to freethinking, not a popular idea in the Bible or with most of the church through history (ask Galileo), and discouraged today in Sunday schools, creationism teaching parochial schools, and in home schooling.

Christianity is a brake on moral and intellectual progress, not an engine. Progress comes from innovation, meaning the human impulse to explore and create, which humanism celebrates.

Do you believe that so many experts in the field, wedded to the abundance of primary source material supporting it, are wrong about this?

If they want to credit Christianity, they are. Christianity was an impediment to growth. Copernicus and Darwin both cringed thinking about the church's reaction to their great books. Now that they are exalted, we hear that they were both Christians.

This is the argument that to my knowledge, neither you nor Augustus has addressed. I just keep seeing examples of progress through the Middle Ages from you that you want to say or imply reflect Christian principles, and he wants to say that humanism is a product of Christianity just because - shoulders of giants and all.

 

[Vouthon]

You seem to be getting frustrated. Sorry. You've put a lot of effort into this, and in good cheer.

Thanks for your post!

Apologies on my part, I didn't mean to come across as frustrated! I actually enjoy discussing these kind of topics with you, and your contributions to the forum more generally (as you can probably tell by how many likes I tend to give you).

My sense of frustration is not with you on a personal level but rather with an attitude of a number of people who, when confronted with this ample scholarship, just can't seem to accept that religious anthropology could have spawned ideas which became central to liberal-humanist thought, which does in a sense irk me, given that the evidence for it is very strong.

But I also feel that I am not being heard and understood.

Innovative is the key word there. There is no place for innovation in faith based systems that rely on scripture, tradition, other received wisdom, and authority. If you begin speculative thinking, you are moving into the world of the humanist.

If church people created something resembling modern ideas on rights in the 12th century, they did it without the help of their Bibles, which frankly, can be used to support almost any idea (slavery) or its antithesis (abolition).

Perhaps, this is indeed where our apparent cross-purpose lies. You stated later on:

You keep presenting ideas from Christians and want to attribute them to Christianity, which was ossified when its scriptures were written down and a Bible produced...All ideas not in that book were innovations of people doing what Thales did, and wondering if the mind of man was capable of understanding his world when others were telling them things like​

No, that's not what Catholics believe. Nothing was ossified with the scriptures, especially not since it was the Church long after the scriptures were written which determined which books would be included and what-not.

Catholic Christianity is not a "bible-bashing" branch of the religion. We have sacred tradition, first attested to by the Early Church Fathers, which isn't derived from the Bible. So, don't look for everything Catholics believe in the Bible is point no. 1.

In my religious tradition, and this is point no. 2, there is room for innovation in understanding, based upon later generations of Catholics making explicit what before had only been implicit. We view it as a process of organic growth, in which new insights and a deeper apprehension of truth always lie in the future, waiting to be brought to light.

The traditional way of describing it is with that of acorn and tree: the acorn has the potential to grow into a tree but that potential is only latent until the outward signs of growth became apparent. It's the same with the Church's doctrines.

As one theologian has explained, the “handing on” of this Sacred Tradition from one generation of Catholics to another through the Bishops also: "connotes movement, a movement that implies development, development that suggests an ever deepening and richer unfolding of truths latent in the apostolic deposit of a living faith".

As a Catholic, I recognize the efficacy of a "living, breathing" tradition that can "make progress" with time and adapt to the needs of different eras, over a 'dead letter' that brooks no flexibility.
The Church explained this doctrine of "development of doctrine" in the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum as follows:


Dei verbum

This tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. (5) For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through Episcopal succession the sure gift of truth. For as the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her.

​

We believe in progressive development in understanding of doctrine, as described by Pope Benedict XVI in relation to the version of this teaching put forth by St. Bonaventure (1217 - 1274):

General Audience of 10 March 2010: Saint Bonaventure (2) | BENEDICT XVI

This does not mean that the Church is stationary, fixed in the past, or that there can be no newness within her. "Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt": (Christ's works do not go backwards, they do not fail but progress), the Saint said in his letter De Tribus Quaestionibus. Thus St Bonaventure explicitly formulates the idea of progress...

For St Bonaventure Christ was no longer the end of history, but rather its centre; history does not end with Christ but begins a new period. The following is another consequence: until that moment the idea that the Fathers of the Church were the absolute summit of theology predominated, all successive generations could only be their disciples. St Bonaventure also recognized the Fathers as teachers for ever, but the phenomenon of St Francis assured him that the riches of Christ's word are inexhaustible and that new light could also appear to the new generations. The oneness of Christ also guarantees newness and renewal in all the periods of history.

​

This is the basis upon which the medieval church used older sources to articulate a fresh understanding of natural law as entailing subjective, inviolable rights inhering in the individual: understanding it as part of this process of doctrinal development, drawing out what in the past had been implicit, and using Christian moral principles to do so.

I'll respond to your other points later tonight (I need to attend to household chores)!

 

[Augustus]

• "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn." - St. Augustine

That isn't a real quotation though, it's dishonestly quote mined by missing out huge chunks of text between the sentences that greatly change its meaning.

In reality, Augustine was a very erudite and highly educated scholar.


In the writings of his mature years (the early decades of the fifth century), especially in his exegetical studies of the creation story in the book of Genesis, Augustine’s appreciation of the utility of the physical sciences, as represented in the classical tradition, increased dramatically. Here, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis , he revealed an impressive grasp of Greek cosmology and natural philosophy, expressing dismay at the ignorance of some Christians:

Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful anddangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Indeed, ‘If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to ouruse.’ 17 All truth is God’s truth, even if found in pagan sources; and we should seize it without hesitation and put it to use.

Did Augustine practise what he preached? Yes, indeed! In his Literal Commentary on Genesis , he discussed ideas, drawn from the classical tradition, on lightning, thunder, clouds, wind, rain, dew, snow, frost, storms, tides, plants and animals, the four elements, the doctrine of natural place, seasons, time, the calendar, the planets, planetary motion,phases of the moon, sensation, sound, light and shade, and number theory. 18 For all his worry about overvaluing the sciences of the classical
tradition, Augustine applied them to biblical interpretation with a vengeance. David C Lindberg in the Cambridge companion to science and religion

The essential difference between the two ways of thinking is that one is authoritarian and requires blind faith in scripture and tradition, and the other says, hey, maybe I can come up with a better idea.

One of the problems is that you have created a straw-Christianity based on discredited, agenda driven pseudo-history.

A widespread myth that refuses to die...maintains that consistent opposition of the Christian church to rational thought in general and the natural sciences in particular, throughout the patristic and medieval periods, retarded the development of a viable scientific tradition, thereby delaying the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern science by more than a millennium.

Historical scholarship of the past half-century demonstrates that the truth is otherwise.
David C Lindberg in the Cambridge companion to science and religion

You want to credit the church for others departing from its ways. I don't.

No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the
Christian church. Contemporary pagan culture was no more favorable to disinterested speculation about the cosmos than was Christian culture. It follows that the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of the natural sciences.
Michael H. Shank Ch2 in Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion - Harvard University Press

Although they disagree about nuances, today almost all historians agree that Christianity (Catholicism as well as Protestantism) move many early-modern intellectuals to study nature systematically.4 Historians have also found that notions borrowed from Christian belief found their ways into scientific discourse, with glorious re- sults; the very notion that nature is lawful, some scholars argue, was borrowed from Christian theology.5 Christian convictions also affected how nature was studied. For example, in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, Augustine’s notion of original sin (which held that Adam’s Fall left humans implacably dam- aged) was embraced by advocates of “experimental natural phi- losophy.” As they saw it, fallen humans lacked the grace to understand the workings of the world through cogitation alone, requiring in their disgraced state painstaking experiment and ob- servation to arrive at knowledge of how nature works (though our knowledge even then could never be certain). In this way, Christian doctrine lent urgency to experiment.6

Historians have also found that changing Christian approaches to interpreting the Bible affected the way nature was studied in crucial ways. For example, Reformation leaders disparaged allegorical readings of Scripture, counseling their congregations to read Holy Writ literally. This approach to the Bible led some scholars to change the way they studied nature, no longer seeking the allegorical meaning of plants and animals and instead seeking what they took to be a more straightforward description of the material world.7 Also, many of those today considered “fore- fathers” of modern science found in Christianity legitimation of their pursuits. René Descartes (1596–1650) boasted of his physics that “my new philosophy is in much better agreement with all the truths of faith than that of Aristotle.”8 Isaac Newton (1642–1727) believed that his system restored the original divine wisdom God had provided to Moses and had no doubt that his Christianity bolstered his physics—and that his physics bolstered his Christi- anity.9 Finally, historians have observed that Christian churches were for a crucial millennium leading patrons of natural philosophy and science, in that they supported theorizing, experimentation, observation, exploration, documentation, and publication. (Noah J Efron - Ch9 in Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion - Harvard University Press)

I make a distinction between things done by Christians and things derived from their Christianity.

The thing is you won't accept people, in their own words, acknowledging they were influenced by their Christianity as being evidence they were influenced by Christianity..

Newton:

Yes, I know that that absolute rule eroded over the centuries throughout the Middle Ages, but my position is that that was an expression of people rejecting the Christian model and replacing it with what the likes of Locke thought were better ideas. That's the humanist method, even if Christians are employing it, and even if they are giving credit to their god.

What is this 'Christian model'?

Locke turned to Scripture in search of clarification. He attended especially to the New Testament, particular to the historical books, the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and he read them diligently until he discovered what he took to be the ‘whole tenour’ of their doctrine...

Locke concluded the Essay by declaring that in the light of the human situation in the world and the capacities and limitations of human knowledge, morality is the proper business of mankind and that to be efficacious it must be joined to religion. The Reasonableness was intended to accomplish this. This turning toward religion, however, does not require the abandonment of natural reason, rather its enlargement through revelation, not by endowing it with transcendent capacities, but by showing the reasonableness of extending belief to matters beyond the capacity of reason and experience to discover. This is similar to the project of natural philosophy, which led Locke to skepticism and the conviction that morality, and not natural science, is the proper goal of rational individuals in this world...

Locke recalled that from the beginning he was struck by the ‘Reasonableness and Plainness’ of the doctrine that Jesus and his disciples preached, which made or should have made its doctrine unmistakable to every reader, even the humblest. When he reached the end of his enquiries, he had advanced far beyond the mere doctrine of justification and the petty controversies surrounding it. He was confident that he had discovered ‘Christianity’ pure and simple: ‘a plain, simple, reasonable thing’, ‘suited to all Conditions and Capacities’, and its moral teaching, ‘now with divine Authority established into a legible Law, so far surpassing all that Philosophy and humane Reason had attain’d to, or could possibly make effectual to all degrees of Mankind’.14 He real- ized the satisfaction of a virtuoso who, through his historical researches, having laid bare his object of enquiry, was able to discern its essence. He imagined that he had dis- covered a moral truth suited for all sorts and conditions of men, surpassing in its cogency and efficacy all the discoveries of philosophy, but unlike it not prolix or abstruse, but plain and irresistibly persuasive.

John Locke - The philosopher as Christian virtuoso - Victor Nuovo

 

[Augustus]

If they want to credit Christianity, they are. Christianity was an impediment to growth. Copernicus and Darwin both cringed thinking about the church's reaction to their great books. Now that they are exalted, we hear that they were both Christians.

One problem with this is you treat 'the church' as if it were a monolithic entity rather than an incredibly diverse set or institutions and people. Over centuries, it is not surprising to find examples hostile to innovation, with Copernicus, many of those hostile to his views rejected them for scientific reasons as they still subscribed to Aristotelian physics. In general, humans are quite resistant to changing their views on things.

This diversity of opinion was in full evidence even in the celebrated case of Galileo, where clerics and laymen are to be found distributed across the whole spectrum of responses from support to condemnation. The question, then, is what the preponderant attitude was, and in this case it is clear from the historical record that the Catholic church has been probably the largest single and longest- term patron of science in history, that many contributors to the Scientific Revolution were themselves Catholic, and that several Catholic institutions and perspectives were key influences upon the rise of modern science. Margaret J Osler


What makes you so sure it was an impediment to growth though? Why were these non-Christian societies not racing ahead in their quests for modernity?

A couple of the advantages for Christian societies were a) more widespread education open to more people (contrasted to say the highly elitist Greeks) b) motivation and, importantly funding, to study non-productive science (contrasted to say China).

No account of Catholic involvement with science could be complete without mention of the Jesuits (officially called the Society of Jesus). Formally established in 1540, the society placed such special emphasis on education that by 1625 they had founded nearly 450 colleges in Europe and elsewhere. Many Jesuit priests were deeply involved in scientific issues, and many made important contributions. The reformed calendar, enacted under Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and still in use today, was worked out by the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christoph Clavius (1538–1612). Optics and astronomy were topics of special interest for Jesuits. Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650) studied sunspots, Orazio Grassi (1583–1654) comets, and Giambattista Riccioli (1598–1671) provided a star cata log, a detailed lunar map that provided the names still used today for many of its features, and experimentally confirmed Galileo’s laws of falling bodies by measuring their exact rates of acceleration during descent. Jesuit investigators of optics and light include Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618–1663), who, among other things (such as collaborating with Riccioli on the lunar map), discovered the phenomenon of the diffraction of light and named it. Magnetism as well was studied by several Jesuits, and it was Niccolo Cabeo (1586–1650) who devised the technique of visualizing the magnetic field lines by sprinkling iron filings on a sheet of paper laid on top of a magnet. By 1700, Jesuits held a majority of the chairs of mathematics in European universities.10

Undergirding such scientific activities in the early- modern period was the firm conviction that the study of nature is itself an inherently religious activity. The secrets of nature are the secrets of God. By coming to know the natural world we should, if we observe and understand rightly, come to a better understanding of their Creator. This attitude was by no means unique toCatholics, but many of the priests and other religious involved in teaching and studying natural philosophy underscored this connection. Margaret J Osler


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. Michael H Shank (all above quotes from Gallileo goes to jail)

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

In my religious tradition, and this is point no. 2, there is room for innovation in understanding, based upon later generations of Catholics making explicit what before had only been implicit. We view it as a process of organic growth, in which new insights and a deeper apprehension of truth always lie in the future, waiting to be brought to light.

We're still not communicating.

I didn't say that there was no innovation. I said that innovation doesn't come from consulting ancient holy book or accepting ancient wisdom unquestioningly, but rather from the very human activity of exploring and creating, which is a departure from fideistic epistemology. That's what the humanists do and extol. That's what Thales did. That's what humanists today do when their Christian counterparts look to their Bibles and pronounce homosexuals abominations. Humanists say that there is a better way to decide these matters - the application of reason and compassion to a basic moral principle of benevolence - and come up with a better way of thinking about and treating people. As soon as they put the book down and begin thinking for themselves - innovating - they have left one tradition for the other, and it doesn't matter if they were wearing clerical garb when they did it.

I don't know how to say this any other way. I have said it a couple of times, and your answer has always been that the church innovated or some variation thereof. Your point, which I have conceded, does not address mine.

"There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn." - St. Augustine

That isn't a real quotation though, it's dishonestly quote mined by missing out huge chunks of text between the sentences that greatly change its meaning. In reality, Augustine was a very erudite and highly educated scholar.

I assume by not a real quote you mean that it is a forgery or falsely attributed to Augustine. You also called quote mining, which implies something different.

When you want to claim quote mining, by which I assume you mean removing critical context that shows that the author meant something different from what the excerpt appears to say, then, if you want to be believed, you incur a burden of proof. Just restore the missing context. Please add the surrounding language to that quotation that shows that Augustine wasn't demeaning curiosity (and with it, exploration and t), or what became science. He seems to be telling us quite plainly that such a thing is pointless and can come to naught.

And no amount of erudition or scholarship by Augustine changes the meaning of his words. You seem to be implying that his education proves that he promoted learning in others when his words say otherwise.

One of the problems is that you have created a straw-Christianity based on discredited, agenda driven pseudo-history.

A widespread myth that refuses to die...maintains that consistent opposition of the Christian church to rational thought in general and the natural sciences in particular, throughout the patristic and medieval periods, retarded the development of a viable scientific tradition, thereby delaying the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern science by more than a millennium.

Historical scholarship of the past half-century demonstrates that the truth is otherwise.
David C Lindberg in the Cambridge companion to science and religion

This quote is an unsupported claim (as is yours about discredited pseudo-history). I realize that you cannot reproduce his entire thesis here, but nevertheless, without it, it's just an opinion, not an argument.

You mentioned my agenda. What do you suppose my agenda is here? To deprive Christianity of due credit? Why would I want to do that? Why wouldn't I thank Christianity for its contribution to my worldview if I could see that contribution? It wouldn't be accepting theism.

My problem is that I am being told repeatedly that there is an important piece of Christianity in my worldview, one that I just can't see. Yet when I contrast Christianity and secular humanism, I see different systems of thought with too little in common to agree with those who insist that one came from the other.

A typical example of that is being told that America was founded on Christian principles, and that its subsequent success is due to them. Then we look at them side-by-side to identify commonalities and differences. The founding principles that define America include such things as democracy, egalitarianism, limited, divided, transparent government, church-state separation, and the individual as citizen with guaranteed personal rights and freedoms rather than as a subject.

Then we look to the Bible and the governments of the Age of Faith, when the church had its maximal impact in such matters, and we find the divine right of kings, and the commandment to be submissive to them:

• "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."- Romans 13:1-2

Now somebody comes along and tells me that just because I don't see how one was derived from the other, they were anyway - I just can't see it, probably because of some agenda of mine to deny Christianity its due. This will be followed by an unsupported claim by an academic (about whose agenda we know nothing) that too many people buy into the myth that Americanism was a breakaway experiment founded in the principles of humanism rather than the child of Christianity and its principles.

That's not convincing.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church. Contemporary pagan culture was no more favorable to disinterested speculation about the cosmos than was Christian culture. It follows that the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of the natural sciences. Michael H. Shank Ch2 in Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion - Harvard University Press

Here's another example of such an unsupported claim.

Can you summarize his argument? The claim by itself lacks persuasive power, and I don't intend to read his book.

Also, how do you account for the litany of sins the church has committed against science if you want to argue that it has supported scientific inquiry? Where are the stories of popes looking through telescopes and saying, "Galileo, look at how great our God is. This finding of yours upends church cosmology, and has shown us the error of our ways. This deserves our support. Please, return to your work."

But that didn't happen, did it? And there was virtually zero probability that it would. It's simply not the nature of the church, which is very well known.

That is the public face of Christianity and its relationship with science over the centuries.

The church offers its relationship with evolutionary science as evidence that it is not opposed to science - many large Christian institutions including the Catholic Church have acknowledged that the theory is correct - but only begrudgingly after many decades, and then, it would appear, only because to resist further would be counterproductive.

Once again, one can claim that the opposite is actually the truth - that nobody more enthusiastically promoted science than the church and call contrary opinions myth - but it's not a credible claim.

The thing is you won't accept people, in their own words, acknowledging they were influenced by their Christianity as being evidence they were influenced by Christianity..

Correct. I need to be shown it. Telling me that their religion influenced them isn't enough. Athletes do that when they thank God for their successful performances. I don't believe them, either. Giving God and the credit is commonplace among Christian

I couldn't reproduce the Newton quote you provided, but nothing in those words or his work makes me think that any of it depended on his Christianity, or couldn't have been done by an atheist. It just says that he believes a god exists that created reality, an idea that adds nothing to his work, and doesn't manifest in his work. Newtons god references in Principia are ignored, just like his alchemy.

You might suggest that the idea of there being a regular and comprehensible order to the universe is a Christian idea, but we saw that in Thales.

Locke turned to Scripture in search of clarification. He attended especially to the New Testament, particular to the historical books, the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and he read them diligently until he discovered what he took to be the ‘whole tenour’ of their doctrine...

Locke concluded the Essay by declaring that in the light of the human situation in the world and the capacities and limitations of human knowledge, morality is the proper business of mankind and that to be efficacious it must be joined to religion.

Same problem here. I don't see Christianity in Locke's work.

I see the humanist influence - the one that says let man start fresh and build a new kind of political state, one which liberates and empowers the individual from formal authority as much as possible, and one which removes Christianity from government.

And yet we are asked to believe that Locke got those ideas from the New Testament, which contains the commandment above to submit to kings

That citation looks pretty humanistic to me. It refers to man making morality more efficacious. That is done using the rational ethics of humanism, where man turns away from what are called the absolute morals of a perfect god as revealed by that god to those that people create themselves by applying reason to compassion. That's how it was possible for Christians to disavow slavery. One simply has to stop referring to what scripture says on the matter and make moral judgments himself. In humanism, man is the measure of all things in human society.

One problem with this is you treat 'the church' as if it were a monolithic entity rather than an incredibly diverse set or institutions and people.

When I refer to the church, I am referring to a diverse and complex entity with many parts that can nevertheless be viewed as a collective, just as we do when we refer to America or Americans. If I say that Americans like hamburgers, I am not saying that all Americans like hamburgers, or that they like them made the same way, or that those who like them like them equally.

The collective may have a large number of elements pulling in opposite directions with different frequencies and intensities, but altogether, it can be viewed as a single entity.

Another example: Who knows what the myriad opinions of Americans is on gun control and the relative power of the various sources of opinion except to say that the vector sum of all of those influences is the policy that exists today. America apparently wants essentially unfettered access to weapons including weapons of war however man individual Americans might disagree.

Is that treating America as a monolithic entity? If so, is it inappropriate? I don't think so.

Likewise with the church. There are a multitude of denominations, congregations, and individual congregants, but they can be discussed as collective in terms of their net impact.

What makes you so sure [Christianity] was an impediment to growth though?

I think I answered that above regarding Galileo, and with references to Copernicus, Bruno, and Darwin. It's a recurring theme in the relationship between church and science.

Also, growth flowered when the church lost much of its cultural hegemony with the advent of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Why would that be if the church was promoting that growth?

With all due respect, you like to discuss the narratives and myths that others live by. How about you? I find your position to be just that - a myth. I would call your claims about the Christian roots of humanism and the role of the church in promoting scientific and other intellectual progress just that. You have no more support for that position than you would for the Genesis creation myth, and plenty of evidence that contradicts you - the evidence I cite.

 

[Milton Platt]

Here's an opinion from a theist (Christian, I presume) at http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/29/study-atheists-find-meaning-life-inventing-fairy-tales/ about whether atheists can possibly find meaning in life. Tlede under the title is, "Atheists often snidely dismiss religion as a fairy tale. Yet a study finds the meaning atheists and non-religious people attribute to their lives is entirely self-invented."

the 2018 study ... by David Speed, et al, “What Do You Mean, ‘What Does It All Mean?’ Atheism, Nonreligion, and Life Meaning,” used surveys to try to figure out if atheists find meaning in life or are nihilistic. This survey defined someone as nihilistic if he or she upheld the position: “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose.”

This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic.

However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey admitted the meaning that atheists and non-religious people found in their lives is entirely self-invented. According to the survey, they embraced the position: “Life is only meaningful if you provide the meaning yourself.”

Thus, when religious people say non-religious people have no basis for finding meaning in life, and when non-religious people object, saying they do indeed find meaning in life, they are not talking about the same thing. If one can find meaning in life by creating one’s own meaning, then one is only “finding” the product of one’s own imagination. One has complete freedom to invent whatever meaning one wants.

This makes “meaning” on par with myths and fairy tales. It may make the non-religious person feel good, but it has no objective existence.​

Is this a valid argument? Is a sense of finding meaning and purpose in one's life and the lives of others really the same thing as the mythical stories in the Bible? Meaning in life isn't invented, is it? It is discovered. It's not a story like a myth. It's a sense that life matters - that one's own life matters.

What do you suppose the author meant by meaning in life is he thinks that atheists and theists were talking about different things when they referred to having meaningful lives (4th paragraph)?

Virtually all meaning is self invented.........

 

[Augustus]

You mentioned my agenda. What do you suppose my agenda is here?

I didn't mention your agenda. It was the scholarship of Gibbon, Draper, White, etc. which contributed to the pop-culture understanding of the issue which was agenda driven.

The general consensus among contemporary historians of science is that the basic 'conflict thesis' historiography that developed from the Enlightenment until early 20th C was both biased and unsustainable in light of the available evidence.

Can you summarize his argument? The claim by itself lacks persuasive power, and I don't intend to read his book.

Can 'loan' you a pdf copy by pm if you like. Covers most of your misconceptions and features chapters by historians of science from diverse religious and non-religious backgrounds

Here's another example of such an unsupported claim.

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. Michael H Shank

Although they disagree about nuances, today almost all historians agree that Christianity (Catholicism as well as Protestantism) move many early-modern intellectuals to study nature systematically.4 Historians have also found that notions borrowed from Christian belief found their ways into scientific discourse, with glorious re- sults; the very notion that nature is lawful, some scholars argue, was borrowed from Christian theology.5 Christian convictions also affected how nature was studied. For example, in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, Augustine’s notion of original sin (which held that Adam’s Fall left humans implacably dam- aged) was embraced by advocates of “experimental natural phi- losophy.” As they saw it, fallen humans lacked the grace to understand the workings of the world through cogitation alone, requiring in their disgraced state painstaking experiment and ob- servation to arrive at knowledge of how nature works (though our knowledge even then could never be certain). In this way, Christian doctrine lent urgency to experiment.6

Historians have also found that changing Christian approaches to interpreting the Bible affected the way nature was studied in crucial ways. For example, Reformation leaders disparaged allegorical readings of Scripture, counseling their congregations to read Holy Writ literally. This approach to the Bible led some scholars to change the way they studied nature, no longer seeking the allegorical meaning of plants and animals and instead seeking what they took to be a more straightforward description of the material world.7 Also, many of those today considered “fore- fathers” of modern science found in Christianity legitimation of their pursuits. René Descartes (1596–1650) boasted of his physics that “my new philosophy is in much better agreement with all the truths of faith than that of Aristotle.”8 Isaac Newton (1642–1727) believed that his system restored the original divine wisdom God had provided to Moses and had no doubt that his Christianity bolstered his physics—and that his physics bolstered his Christi- anity.9 Finally, historians have observed that Christian churches were for a crucial millennium leading patrons of natural philosophy and science, in that they supported theorizing, experimentation, observation, exploration, documentation, and publication. (Noah J Efron

And no amount of erudition or scholarship by Augustine changes the meaning of his words. You seem to be implying that his education proves that he promoted learning in others when his words say otherwise.

His words...

Here, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis , he revealed an impressive grasp of Greek cosmology and natural philosophy, expressing dismay at the ignorance of some Christians:

Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful anddangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Indeed, ‘If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to ouruse.’ 17 All truth is God’s truth, even if found in pagan sources; and we should seize it without hesitation and put it to use.

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf Chapter XXXV for the context of the quote you used.

Also, growth flowered when the church lost much of its cultural hegemony with the advent of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Why would that be if the church was promoting that growth?

The handful of celebrated examples of how bad the Church was (Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo) were from the Renaissance, not the 'age of faith' as you put it (and 2 of them are misleading, and the Galileo affair is far more nuanced than the myth goes).

This was in part due to a new literalist impetus among some clerics prompted by the reformation that went against the traditions of the Church.

I think I answered that above regarding Galileo, and with references to Copernicus, Bruno, and Darwin. It's a recurring theme in the relationship between church and science.

Bruno wasn't a scientist and was not persecuted for his scientific beliefs..

Copernicus:

Because Copernicus’s book was highly technical, written for a small audience of mathematically proficient astronomers, it was little known and less read. Contrary to legend, its publication created no public stir. But the book did secure an audience among astronomers, many of whom employed it for calculating planetary positions, while denying its claim to cosmological truth.

Why did those astronomers who first mastered Copernicus’s Revolutions refuse to accept the truth of heliocentrism? Because the evidence that could be marshaled in the middle of the sixteenth century in support of the heliocentric model as physically true was not convincing...

Those astronomers and natural philosophers who rejected heliocentrism did so not because of blind conservatism or religious intolerance, but because of their commitment to widely held scientific principles and theories.

David C Lindberg - Galileo, the Church and the Cosmos in When science and Christianity met

The actual religious reaction to the heliocentric model also differs from the folklore. For one thing, Copernicus did not seem to fear religious opposition to his ideas. After all, he was a reputable cleric himself. He even dedicated his book to Pope Paul III with a letter in which he apologized for the seeming outlandish- ness of his suggestion that the Earth moved. He ex- plained that he was forced to that hypothesis by the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic system for constructing calendars and predicting the positions of stars. A cardinal and a bishop were among those who urged him to publish his book. In fact, for 60 years after Copernicus’s death just two months after its publication, De Revolutionibus was read and at least partially taught at leading Catholic universities.

The Copernican myths. Mano Singham. Physics Today 60, 12, 48 (2007)