Meaningful Atheistic Lives

[Augustus]

@It Aint Necessarily So Ignore the last post as we are unlikely to move far with any of it.

Few quick Qs though:

a) Do you consider there to have been any positive influences from Christianity on science? For example: The preservation and translation of Greek and Arabic philosophy? the university and broader education systems? the Church as major (biggest?) funder of scientific research? A religious motivation to study non-productive sciences (that was not common in most other societies)?

b) Beyond Galileo (which is far more nuanced than is commonly believed), which scientists have been persecuted? Which scientists were persecuted during the 'age of faith'? What specific cases justify your assertion of a 'litany of sins'?

c) Do you believe that culture is an important influence on the way we view the world which made the development of modern Science & humanism more likely to occur in certain societies than others? What would you say were the most important cultural variables?

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.

If you have any, I would be very interested in reading any scholarly research on the topic that goes against what I've been saying. What do you recommend?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Do you consider there to have been any positive influences from Christianity on science? For example: The preservation and translation of Greek and Arabic philosophy? the university and broader education systems? the Church as major (biggest?) funder of scientific research? A religious motivation to study non-productive sciences (that was not common in most other societies)?

I wouldn't consider any of those things a product of Christianity, which is a doctrine based on ideas like a personal god creating the world and man, of sin and the fall of man, of the virgin birth and resurrection, of a god who turned into man - a prophesied messiah - and the only path to salvation, of a god that answers prayer and rewards faith, of an immortal soul, of heaven and perdition, and a system of values said to be of divine origin, some borrowed from older traditions (Golden Rule) and some seemingly original (meekness is blessed).

Ideas that spring from that set of beliefs are to the credit of Christianity, and would not likely have come into existence without Christianity existing first.

No, I don't believe that any of that had a positive influence on science.

Other ideas, including preserving scholarship and opening hospitals, are just people being people - not the result of Christianity. No Christian beliefs are necessary to do such things. One just needs to want a formal education system, for example, to build universities, or a place to take the sick to build hospitals. Kings and then later democratic governments would have the same ideas and the same motives without Bibles and priests.

Perhaps you meant the church rather than Christianity, which is more than a set of beliefs. The church is the institution that promulgates those beliefs.

I don't say that no good came from the church. I say that it doesn't come from Christian ideology, meaning that it could have come from anywhere. I
believe that we would have had hospitals and universities without the church.

Beyond Galileo (which is far more nuanced than is commonly believed), which scientists have been persecuted? Which scientists were persecuted during the 'age of faith'? What specific cases justify your assertion of a 'litany of sins'?

You suggested that I bought into a myth of ecclesiastical obstructionism My present position is not the reciting of a tale that I was told, but the result of a lifetime of experiences which includes reading history, following the news, and dealing directly with people. It's an independent conclusion shared by millions.

I understand what religion is, at least Abrahamic style. I understand orthodoxy. I understand how religious institutions receive new ideas. I've watched it all my life, from Roe versus Wade through Obergfell. I know about being in church and being asked not to ask so many questions. I recall being told that man's wisdom is foolishness and to keep my nose in the Bible. I watch the creationists. I see the church trying to invade the government to turn back the clock and restore an older order to whatever extent they can. I see the relentless attacks on Darwin's character (racist, author of social Darwinism).

You talk of the church promoting education, but I see them opening private schools to teach creationism and downplay or ignore biological evolution. I see the American Secretary of Education shunting public tax dollars to these schools. I read of preachers warning families not to let their children go to college.

Who fought against stem cell research?

Christianity is the result of a movement to return Judaism to orthodoxy. Jesus thought that the pharisees had strayed,

Protestantism has the same relationship with Catholicism. Luther thought the pope had strayed with the indulgences.

Dominionism is another expression of reactionary orthodoxy.

This is what the church is. It's the brakes, not the gas, It's the reverse gear, not drive. One aspect of America allows LGBT into the military, and another rescinds it. Guess which one is the Christian side. Reverse gear.

Isn't the evangelical movement and its perverse attachment to candidates such as Trump and Roy Moore a cry to return to a whiter, more Christian America? Reverse gear again.

My present position is the result of seeing all of this, and precious little of the opposite.

Given this, it's simply inconceivable that the church did not assume a reactionary stance following each attempt to move forward just as it still does today - that once, the church was different.

Incidentally, I have no agenda here. If he truth were as you claim, I would be happy to know it. I like reading positive things about the church, and would prefer that the church be a good neighbor and societal asset. This is an article I read this week : https://relevantmagazine.com/life5/texas-church-abolishes-10-million-medical-debt-local-families/

But I simply cannot agree with you or the sources you site. How can I possibly reconcile your claims with my experience?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Do you believe that culture is an important influence on the way we view the world which made the development of modern Science & humanism more likely to occur in certain societies than others?

Yes, but that's not where we part ways. We part ways on the nature of the relationship of the Christian culture and the emerging humanist culture. You seem to hold steadfastly to the idea that this relationship must perforce be akin to a mother and child - that one is a spin-off of the other as Christianity is to Judaism.

As I have said many times, to me, humanism is a repudiation of Christianity, proposing an entirely new world view. The Christian metaphysics of the supernatural and deities becomes an apparently godless, naturalistic cosmos in humanism. Is that an outgrowth or rejection?

A fideistic epistemology is replaced by one reliant on skepticism and the application of reason to evidence. Same question: descendant or contradiction?

Moral theory changes from Divine Command Ethics - it's good because God did or commanded it - to the rational ethical method of humanism in which man is the judge of what is right and wrong after applying reason and empathy to beneficence.

That's been my point all along - humanism is not a product of Christianity, but a radical departure from it, and the argument is supported by looking at these two systems of thought and comparing them as we have just done.

As noted earlier, there is no family resemblance there such as we find when looking at Judaism and Christianity, or Catholicism and Protestantism, or Judaism and Islam. There is a family resemblance, which is why they can all be called Abrahamic religions. They share Abraham, for example.

Abraham doesn't appear in humanism, nor any of the other concepts common to two or more of these Abrahamic faiths. Humanism rejects all of that, which is my point. That is the relationship of humanism to Christian culture - a departure, not a new incarnation. No family resemblance.

You don't seem to acknowledge that an idea can be a rejection of an earlier ideas rather than its descendant. You just keep coming back to the ideas that if humanism arose in the West, then it must have a debt to the dominant culture in which it arose - shoulders of giants and all.

Does the Standard Model in cosmology also owe a debt to the Genesis creation myth? Is that the giant upon whose shoulders the 20th century scientists who gave us that understanding stood?

After all one arose in the culture where the other had dominated, so the scientists must have been propelled by the thinking of the giants that wrote the Genesis account, right?

Your argument seems to be of that nature. Clearly, the scientists needed nothing from Genesis or any other aspect of Christianity to do what they did, which was to reject dogma and faith, and use a radically different method of discovering how the universe got to be the way we find it.

What would you say were the most important cultural variables?

That's a pretty broad question.

I described the Christian worldview and basic doctrine above, which was the milieu in which humanism matured. The relevant variables, if I understand you correctly, are the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethical theory of a worldview, and their byproducts, such as a history (possibly mythical), law (possibly by divine command), and an understanding of nature (possibly through scriptural revelation).

Will that answer suffice?

If you have any, I would be very interested in reading any scholarly research on the topic that goes against what I've been saying.

This is not an area that has been an interest of mine. It shouldn't be difficult to find books taking my position, given that it is the dominant one.

If your purpose was to imply that you have read on these topics, but I have not, in order to diminish my argument, isn't that a logical fallacy? My argument stands on its own merit, not the scholarship of others. After offering multiple examples of the church acting as an impediment to progress, the argument concludes that it is not credible to believe that the church was more open-minded or welcomed new ideas more in the past than now.

You might as well tell me that it is a myth that the church marginalized and demonized atheists and homosexuals.

You also might explain how the idea that the church has been an impediment to progress became so firmly established and widely accepted if it is wrong, especially in the light of the fact that the church usually dominated in any discussion in which it chose to participate. Was this great mind fooled as well?

• "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward the better treatment of the races, every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organised in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world." - Bertrand Russell

Where did this man get this ideas? Did he drink the Kool-Aid as well?

• "Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural." - Robert G. Ingersoll

Are we all misinformed?

 

[Vouthon]

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... 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.

Thanks for your post!

OK, let me try and break this down (correct me if wrong): the position articulated by you is that the ability to innovate (i.e. come up with a new concept that, while it might be inspired by earlier sources, re-defines them in an hitherto unprecedented way) is incompatible with religious thought derived (as you see it) from belief in "old sacred texts" and revelation?

As such, if the 12th century church came up with a radical interpretation of ius which re-defined it as an inviolable natural "right" inhering within all individuals (to use one example), rather than signifying an objective order where people "get what they deserve" according to their station (as the ancient Greeks and Romans understood it), then this development cannot be attributed to religious thoughts and ideals, but must be viewed as an early instance of speculative thinking edging towards the "humanist" worldview, shaped as it is by a profoundly different epistemology?

Would that be a fair overview of your argument?

Right, to my mind, our cross-purpose would appear to stem from a number of things, three of them being:

(1) I - and my church for that matter - see no conflict between "the very human activity of exploring and creating" and belief in divine revelation. We do not espouse what you label "the fideistic epistemology".
​

This is a necessary assumption, or premise, behind your argument and it isn't one that I accept. The traditional teaching of my church has never viewed faith simply as a matter of believing a collection of bits of information that God has revealed. St Anselm’s phrase, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum), is applicable here. Catholic doctrine proclaims that human faith must be guided and completed by reason. See:


Fideism - Wikipedia

Catholic doctrine rejects fideism...In the encyclical, John Paul II warned against "a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith"...

Fideism has received criticism from theologians who argue that fideism is not a proper way to worship God. According to this position, if one does not attempt to understand what one believes, one is not really believing. "Blind faith" is not true faith. Notable articulations of this position include:

• Peter Abelard – Sic et Non
• Lord Herbert – De Veritate

​

So you can't accuse us of condoning or approving of fideism, since Catholics regard "blind faith" as illegitimate.

(2) I feel that you are anachronistically reading into pre-modern worldviews a contemporary ideology which had not yet emerged, while in turn refusing to accept what these people actually had to say regarding the source of their ideas. Historical people should be understood on their own terms and not ones that we retroactively transplant onto them, with our modern conventions.

​

Based upon your criteria, Jesus would be a "humanist" as opposed to the Jewish eschatological preacher that historians describe him as being, in his own context. Why?

Professor Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and atheist thinker, argued for something akin to this in his 2017 book Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist:


Science in the Soul

Of course Jesus was a theist, but that is the least interesting thing about him. He was a theist because, in his time, everybody was. Atheism was not an option [in Judea], even for so radical a thinker as Jesus. What was interesting and remarkable about Jesus was not the obvious fact that he believed in the God of his Jewish religion, but that he rebelled against many aspects of Yahweh’s vengeful nastiness.

At least in the teachings that are attributed to him, he publicly advocated niceness and was one of the first to do so. To those steeped in the Sharia-like cruelties of Leviticus and Deuteronomy; to those brought up to fear the vindictive, Ayatollah-like God of Abraham and Isaac, a charismatic young preacher who advocated generous forgiveness must have seemed radical to the point of subversion. No wonder they nailed him.

I think we owe Jesus the honour of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural nonsense that he inevitably espoused as a man of his time​

As Dawkins notes, Jesus didn't just "blindly" read the Torah and "rely on [Jewish] scripture, tradition, other received wisdom, and authority" (to quote your earlier points). Rather, he encouraged people to depart from the outmoded way of thinking of their ancestors and a literal interpretation of scriptural precepts, and embrace "a better way of thinking about and treating people":

Matthew 5:38 - 43​

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said [to our ancestors], ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"
​

Jesus instructed his audience to stop thinking in terms of the "received wisdom" of their ancestors, as one scholar notes:


The Sermon on the Mount

Jesus was well aware that much of what he was going to say would be in fundamental contradiction to what the masses had been taught. He recognized that there would be a chasm, an incompatibility, between the prevailing orthodoxy (either popular, clerical, or both) that they had been raised in and that which he was advocating (Mt. 9:16, for example).
​

Indeed, he plainly told his audience that they already possessed the ability to make their own value judgments about his ministry, and that they shouldn't look for divine signs in the heavens to validate it:

Luke 12:57 ​

“And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?"​

That is a literal Greek translation of this verse:

GRK Δια τι δε και αφ' εαυτων δεν κρινετε το δικαιον​

This is not an appeal to authority or sacred writ but to common sense, conscience and rational judgement. One commentator, for instance, transliterates the meaning of this injunction as follows: "Why, even without signs, do you not judge rightly of me and of my doctrine by the natural light of reason and of conscience?" (J. R. Dummelow, op. cit., p. 755). How else can it be read? And this is how the Church has always understood it, as you can see from this sermon by the American revivalist preacher and Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758):

Religious Affections

Thus Christ blames the Pharisees, that they did not, even of their own selves judge what was right, without needing miracles to prove it (Luke 12:57).​

(Continued....)​

 

[Vouthon]

(3) The idea implicit in your aforementioned post, that we advance towards "a better way of thinking about and treating people", presupposes a concept of progressive enlightenment which ancient polytheistic societies like the Greeks and Romans lacked (they had a cyclical, static view of history, as I keep telling you), but medieval Christian Europeans did posses as a result of their culture's eschatological understanding of history. There is nothing one can deduce from observation of the mechanistic, purposeless laws of nature that would lead one to adopt a belief in teleological societal progression towards ever greater moral enlightenment.​

As Professor Richard Dawkins has explained:


Richard Dawkins: 'We need an anti-Darwinian society'

“...Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.

Study your Darwinism for two reasons, because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak..."
​

Our sense of moral advancement cannot, and does not, arise from a study of nature because nature is profoundly amoral and purposeless. There is no "direction" in evolution. It is not going "anywhere", or tending towards an end-goal. You don't get a sense of ethical progression from studying random natural selection and survival of the fittest, because there is no teleology in mechanistic physical processes.

So, when you appeal to "the application of reason and compassion to a basic moral principle of benevolence" as the source for "moral progression" and appear to derive this from the attempt "to explain the workings of nature without invoking the supernatural", I fundamentally don't see what you are appealing to.

There is nothing in particle physics or biology which gives one a universal standard of ethical conduct. This idea is derived from religion, philosophy and metaphysics, it does not emerge as the logical and inevitable conclusion of any premises derived from natural, scientifically explicable processes.

As the theoretical physicist Professor George Ellis stated in a 2014 interview for Scientific American:


Physicist George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will

(a) I distinguish very clearly between what is tested or testable science and what is not, (b) I make strenuous efforts to consider what aspects of reality can be comprehended by a strict scientific approach, and what lie outside the limits of mathematically based efforts to encapsulate aspects of the nature of what exists.

Many key aspects of life (such as ethics: what is good and what is bad, and aesthetics: what is beautiful and what is ugly) lie outside the domain of scientific inquiry (science can tell you what kind of circumstances will lead to the extinction of polar bears, or indeed of humanity; it has nothing whatever to say about whether this would be good or bad, that is not a scientific question).

Attempts to explain values in terms of neuroscience or evolutionary theory in fact have nothing whatever to say about what is good or bad. That is a philosophical or religious question. And they cannot for example tell you, from a scientific basis, what should be done about Israel or Syria today. That effort would be a category mistake​

How would one deduce a theory of inherent "natural" rights possessed equally by all human beings, from that?

You don't, and the ancient Greeks never developed this understanding either, from their passive observation of the natural world, because you just can't derive it from that. This idea developed as a result of a religious concept not connected to the examination of physical laws, and was first clearly articulated by clerics writing in the 12th century (as I'm glad to see, you now concede).

That's what Thales did.

Read:


Panpsychism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Panpsychism is an ancient concept in Western philosophy, predating even the earliest writings of the pre-Socratics. It was in fact an essential part of the cosmology into which philosophy was born. Thus we should not be too surprised to find its influence recurring throughout our history.

We see evidence of this at the very beginning of philosophy, in the few remaining fragments of Thales, the man widely regarded as the first philosopher of ancient Greece. Thales believed that the lodestone (magnet) possessed a psyche or soul: “According to Thales…the lodestone has a soul because it moves iron” (Aristotle, De Anima, 405a19). Furthermore, the power of the lodestone was seen as a particularly powerful manifestation of a divine animate quality shared by all things: “Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, and it is perhaps for that reason that Thales came to the opinion that all things are full of gods” (Ibid, 411a7).​

Thales was certainly an innovative thinker in the ancient Greek, pre-socratic tradition. But he is also famous for having stated, according to Aristotle, that:

1. The magnet has a soul. (De Anima 405a19)
2. All things are full of gods. (De Anima 411a7)

In 45BC, Cicero, in his On the Nature of the Gods, described Thales view on god as follows:

“Thales said that water was the first principle, and that god was the mind that fashioned all things from water.”
​

While Thales did try to reduce nature to a single animating cause within it ("water"), and this was certainly a positive step towards a more reasoned worldview, he regarded water as something divine either in principle or as Cicero suggests in origin.

To understand him as a rational humanist, is as groundless as reading humanism into Jesus. Thales was what he was, a bold pre-socratic philosopher who challenged conventional understanding in his day, just like Jesus challenged the conventional understanding of Second Temple Jews.

Demonstrative, experimental science does not start with Thales for some key reasons owing to ancient Greek religious and cultural mores that I referred to earlier, by quoting the Israeli physicist and philosopher of science Max Jammer explained in a 1997 study:

Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics In The Light Of New Technology: Selected Papers From The Proceedings Of The First Through Fourth International Symposia On Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics

Greek science was not experimental science. During the twelve centuries, from Thales to Philoponus, virtually no serious experiment had been performed. In fact, the very idea of an experiment was unacceptable to the Greek mind and this for three major reasons:

(1) The Greek denial of the comprehensibility of change. For the Greek mind, movement and change could never become a subject of scientific study. For only the stationary, the geometrical, which alone can be grasped in terms of the tenseless logic of fixed and unambiguous concepts was intelligible for the Greek mind...This attitude explains why they never developed a theory of dynamics...

Since the idea of an experiment implies the possibility of varying initial conditions and of observing their effect on the final result, the Greek mind, confined as it was to static forms, was not susceptible to the idea of planned and controlled experimentation

(2) The world of nature, according to Greek metaphysics was a world alive and divine...Any interference with the course of nature was for the Greek an act of violence...The performance of an experiment performed under artificial or unnatural conditions could consequently never increase knowledge of nature.

(3) The Greeks did not have a distinct notion of initial or boundary conditions
​

(continued...)

 

[Vouthon]

@It Aint Necessarily So If you believe that "nature is full of gods" and that magnets are propelled by active "souls" as Thales did, then you simply cannot engage in testable, experimental science because varying initial conditions (a necessity for conducting controlled experiments) would be viewed as violating the "static", cyclical divine order of nature.

Christian scientists never had this problem since they rejected the idea that there were any "gods" in nature, or that nature was in anyway divine, by strictly separating the supernatural realm of abstract metaphysics from the natural realm with its mathematically comprehensible physical laws - as reflected in the division of the natural and divine sciences in medieval universities, and secular and canon law etc.

So they had no qualms about investigating and understanding nature on its own terms.

As Ronald Leslie Numbers, an American historian of science (and himself an agnostic), has noted:

Despite the occasional efforts of unbelievers to use scientific naturalism to construct a world without God, it has retained strong Christian support down to the present. And well it might, for (…) scientific naturalism was largely made in Christendom by pious Christians. Although it possessed the potential to corrode religious beliefs—and sometimes did so—it flourished among Christian scientists who believe that God customarily achieved his ends through natural causes...

By the late Middle Ages the search for natural causes had come to typify the work of Christian natural philosophers. Although characteristically leaving the door open for the possibility of direct divine intervention, they frequently expressed contempt for soft-minded contemporaries who invoked miracles rather than searching for natural explanations. The University of Paris cleric Jean Buridan (a. 1295-ca. 1358), described as “perhaps the most brilliant arts master of the Middle Ages,” contrasted the philosopher’s search for “appropriate natural causes” with the common folk’s erroneous habit of attributing unusual astronomical phenomena to the supernatural. In the fourteenth century the natural philosopher Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320-82), who went on to become a Roman Catholic bishop, admonished that, in discussing various marvels of nature, “there is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God as if He would produce these effects directly, more so than those effects whose causes we belive are well known to us.”

Enthusiasm for the naturalistic study of nature picked up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as more and more Christians turned their attention to discovering the so-called secondary causes that God employed in operating the world. The Italian Catholic Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), one of the foremost promoters of the new philosophy, insisted that nature “never violates the terms of the laws imposed upon her.”

(Numbers 2003, p. 267)

​

The next time you hear Intelligent Designers ranting and raving about the evils of methodological naturalism, keep the above in mind.

 

[Vouthon]

Does the Standard Model in cosmology also owe a debt to the Genesis creation myth? Is that the giant upon whose shoulders the 20th century scientists who gave us that understanding stood?

Obviously not, because Genesis isn't a scientific account of natural origins but rather a fable with a moral-theological message, composed in the genre of Near Eastern Creation myth, but ironically for the purposes of our debate "big bang cosmology" originates from research conducted by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre:


Georges Lemaître - Wikipedia

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, RAS Associate[1] (French: [ʒɔʁʒᵊ ləmɛ:tʁᵊ] ( listen); 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic Priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.[2] He proposed on theoretical grounds that the universe is expanding, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble.[3][4] He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.[5][6][7][8] Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".[9]​

Profile: Georges Lemaître, Father of the Big Bang

According to the Big Bang theory, the expansion of the observable universe began with the explosion of a single particle at a definite point in time. This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest. The theory, accepted by nearly all astronomers today, was a radical departure from scientific orthodoxy in the 1930s. Many astronomers at the time were still uncomfortable with the idea that the universe is expanding. That the entire observable universe of galaxies began with a bang seemed preposterous.​

Do you think Fr. Lemaitre would have agreed with your thesis that religion holds people back from scientific progress?

Did it hold him back? Obviously not.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

OK, let me try and break this down (correct me if wrong): the position articulated by you is that the ability to innovate (i.e. come up with a new concept that, while it might be inspired by earlier sources, re-defines them in an hitherto unprecedented way) is incompatible with religious thought derived (as you see it) from belief in "old sacred texts" and revelation?

As such, if the 12th century church came up with a radical interpretation of ius which re-defined it as an inviolable natural "right" inhering within all individuals (to use one example), rather than signifying an objective order where people "get what they deserve" according to their station (as the ancient Greeks and Romans understood it), then this development cannot be attributed to religious thoughts and ideals, but must be viewed as an early instance of speculative thinking edging towards the "humanist" worldview, shaped as it is by a profoundly different epistemology?

Would that be a fair overview of your argument?

No, my position is not that innovation is incompatible with religious thought. I don't think that I said anything like that.

What I said is that they are different things, and innovation is a departure from faith based thought. It's quite compatible with faith based thought - just not the same thing.

The problem here seems to be what you and I call Christianity, which to me is a faith based ideology and worldview described earlier today to Augustus (there is a God, there is sin, Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected from the dead, there is an afterlife, etc.). You see it as including the methods of humanism such as rational inquiry. That's a good thing, but it's not Christianity.

I - and my church for that matter - see no conflict between "the very human activity of exploring and creating" and belief in divine revelation. We do not espouse what you label "the fideistic epistemology".

Is not the god in your worldview the most fundamental belief you have upon which all others derive? Do you know of this god by faith or some other means? If the former, your epistemology is fundamentally fideistic.

If one chooses to apply reason to faith based convictions, they don't cease to be faith based convictions. I just read on another thread that if Jesus exists, then we have a duty to obey his commandments. That's pure reason because it is in the form of a conditional, but it doesn't tell us what is true or how we need to behave. Inject the faith, and it becomes because Jesus exists, we must obey him to receive salvation. Now, it's fideism again.

Catholic doctrine rejects fideism...In the encyclical, John Paul II warned against "a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith"...

Fideism has received criticism from theologians who argue that fideism is not a proper way to worship God. According to this position, if one does not attempt to understand what one believes, one is not really believing. "Blind faith" is not true faith. Notable articulations of this position include:

If Catholic doctrine rejects fideism, then it rejects all faith based ideas. That describes people like me, but probably not the Catholic Church.

I feel that you are anachronistically reading into pre-modern worldviews a contemporary ideology which had not yet emerged, while in turn refusing to accept what these people actually had to say regarding the source of their ideas. Historical people should be understood on their own terms and not ones that we retroactively transplant onto them, with our modern conventions.

As I explained to Augustus, I need to see what belief they think informed what conclusions to see if I agree with them. He provided the example of Newton. I don't see any religious input into his optics, dynamics, gravitational theory, or mathematics.Ifhe claims that it was inspired by his god belief, I'd like to see which belief led him to those ideas, ideas that I am pretty sure that atheists could have conceived with no god belief.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Based upon your criteria, Jesus would be a "humanist"

Jesus was a fideist and orthodox Jew trying to reform Judaism, but he might also have been innovative. If he was, he was departing from Jewish orthodoxy, and employing a method of humanism - freethinking.

We can see that this process had been applied between the times of the Old Testament and the New, as we witness the god evolving from an angry, jealous, tribalistic god of one people to the kinder, gentler god of the New Testament.

Faith, and reliance on tradition and authority are the methods of fideism.

Exploration and innovation are a different means of knowing, and characterize humanism.

Jesus instructed his audience to stop thinking in terms of the "received wisdom" of their ancestors,

And substitute it with a revised received wisdom.

Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak..."

That is not related to Darwin's theory, which is about biologial evolution, not cultural evolution, the third and fifth stages in the evolution of our modern world. First material evolution (star and galaxy formation), then chemical evolution (abiogenesis), then biological evolution (here's where Darwin fits in), then the emergence of mind and intelligence in man and the beasts (still related to Darwin's theory), then cultural evolution.

There is nothing in particle physics or biology which gives one a universal standard of ethical conduct. This idea is derived from religion, philosophy and metaphysics, it does not emerge as the logical and inevitable conclusion of any premises derived from natural, scientifically explicable processes.

Yes, the is-ought chasm. Moral values cannot be derived from a study of nature or by the use of pure reason. I just posted to that a few hours ago in the bottom section of this post.

Many key aspects of life (such as ethics: what is good and what is bad, and aesthetics: what is beautiful and what is ugly) lie outside the domain of scientific inquiry

Agreed.

Thales was certainly an innovative thinker in the ancient Greek, pre-socratic tradition. But he is also famous for having stated, according to Aristotle, that:

1. The magnet has a soul. (De Anima 405a19)
2. All things are full of gods. (De Anima 411a7)

We don't expect the first freethinkers to throw off all of their faith based beliefs.

But he did apparently rid himself of the belief that the forces of nature represented the retribution of angry gods, and that nature was incomprehensible to man. That's the beginnings of what became secular humanism, which is the full-fledged ideology that excludes all faith based thought.

Though still not divorced from faith based thought altogether, Newton was further along.

Dawkins further yet.

 

[Vouthon]

No, my position is not that innovation is incompatible with religious thought. I don't think that I said anything like that.

OK, many thanks for clarifying that point.

What I said is that they are different things, and innovation is a departure from faith based thought. It's quite compatible with faith based thought - just not the same thing.

But this gets back to a theological issue I raised in a prior thread.

Catholics don't hold a static understanding of dogma. We believe in 'development of doctrine', described by St. Bonaventure in the Middle Ages: "Christ's works do not go backwards, they do not fail but progress" (Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt) [De Tribus Quaestionibus].

This is an explicit religious sanction for progressive development in thinking. Bonaventure was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church.

Your argument works better in a sola scriptura Protestant framework, I think.

Since the Catholic Church has numerous teachings which have no basis in scripture, and has evidently branched forwards in various areas with the passage of time, adapting to new contexts while retaining its core beliefs (but not in an inflexible way), I see innovation - progress in understanding, that is - as part of my religious tradition.

The problem here seems to be what you and I call Christianity, which to me is a faith based ideology and worldview described earlier today to Augustus (there is a God, there is sin, Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected from the dead, there is an afterlife, etc.). You see it as including the methods of humanism such as rational inquiry. That's a good thing, but it's not Christianity.

Well, its the official teaching of the Catholic Church....which is the world's largest Christian communion (although not in the U.S, where it's always been real Protestant turf).

So...................................

Is not the god in your worldview the most fundamental belief you have upon which all others derive? Do you know of this god by faith or some other means? If the former, your epistemology is fundamentally fideistic.

Fideism holds that faith has nothing to do with reason and faith is superior to reason. As Alvin Plantinga explained it, fideism is: "the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth". The Catholic Church doesn't believe that belief in God should be divorced from rational logic. On 8 September, 1840, the church condemned fideism and stated in two encyclicals: "faith, a heavenly gift, is posterior to revelation, and therefore cannot be properly used against the atheist to prove the existence of God"; and "The use of reason precedes faith and, with the help of revelation and grace, leads to it."

Due to this doctrine, we simply don't agree with fideism. We recognize that faith-based arguments can never be used to counter atheist arguments founded upon reason.

If one chooses to apply reason to faith based convictions, they don't cease to be faith based convictions.

If reason precedes faith, and is a means of attaining faith, then this is not correct.

For the Fideist, faith precedes reason.

For the non-Fideist religious believer, reason precedes faith. For St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, natural reason precedes faith: “for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected.” (See, P. Kreeft, A Shorter Summa, p. 52 (Ignatius Press 1993)(quoting Summa Theologica I, Q2, A2).

When a Catholic grapples with a moral issue, our first port of call is not to revealed writ but to conscience - that is, natural law. The Church teaches (Catechism) that natural law is the same as conscience, the “light of natural understanding placed in us by God,” "a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right" because it is “immutable and permanent throughout the variations of history,” and “expresses the dignity of the human person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties.”


Conscience and Natural Law: What the Church Really Teaches

Natural law is the “highest” and most binding expression of the moral law, even more so than revealed law or the laws of the Church. Natural law is more foundational than even the revealed law expressed definitively in the person of Jesus Christ. This shouldn’t be surprising, though, and in fact it makes perfectly intelligible the way in which natural law arguments are commonly invoked in the public square
​

So, when I face a moral problem, the first thing I do is become introspective and determine a course of action based upon my natural intuition (empathy) guided subsequently by a judgement of reason.

I don't search for a scriptural verse. Faith comes next, as a guide to my moral reflection.

If Catholic doctrine rejects fideism, then it rejects all faith based ideas. That describes people like me, but probably not the Catholic Church.

No, the church rejects faith-based beliefs which scorn reason and fail to utilize it.

(continued...)​

 

[Vouthon]

As I explained to Augustus, I need to see what belief they think informed what conclusions to see if I agree with them. He provided the example of Newton.

OK, let's go much earlier than Newton and classical mechanics.

You raised dynamics. The concepts of inertia, momentum and acceleration in classical mechanics are indebted to the Christian worldview:

Theory of impetus - Wikipedia

The theory of impetus[1] put forth initially to explain projectile motion against gravity. It was introduced by John Philoponus in the 6th century[2][3] and elaborated by Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji at the end of the 12th century,[4] but was only established in western scientific thought by Jean Buridan in the 14th century. It is the intellectual precursor to the concepts of inertia, momentum and acceleration in classical mechanics.​

Who was this 'John Philoponus'?

In his Mechanics, Hero of Alexandria (10 AD – c. 70 AD), an important Roman era mathematician and engineer, states unambiguously and uncritically on the authority of Aristotle that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Now, this is a fundamental error that could have easily been proven wrong were Hero to have engaged in the simplest of experiments. Yet Hero did not do this.

It took a Christian philosopher named John Philoponus (490–570) to actually perform one of the earliest recorded experiments to support his theories (which were critical of Aristotle courtesy of a set of Christian presuppositions), by dropping a heavy and light ball in the sixth century AD.

Philoponus discovered that both balls fell at almost the same speed: the objects (regardless of their mass) experienced the same acceleration when in a state of free fall. He had uncovered the equivalence principle, one of the fundamental principles of modern physics: drop two different weights, and (ignoring wind resistance) they will hit the ground at the same time.

Here is what Philoponus wrote concerning his experiment with the heavy and light balls:

"...But this [view of Aristotle] is completely erroneous, and our view may be completely corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights, one many times heavier than the other you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend [solely] on the weights, but that the difference in time is very small. ..."

— John Philoponus' refutation of the Aristotelian claim that the elapsed time for a falling body is inversely proportional to its weight​

Philoponus also believed that objects could move in a vacuum and argued against antiperistasis (the untested Aristotelian theory that an object is kept in motion by air which travels from the front to the back, giving it a push).

Why did Philoponus reject this positively erroneous Aristotelian idea that his pagan forebears had simply endorsed on the authority of the great man? You guessed it, his Christian faith. Note the part which states: "Philoponus' theological work is recognized in the history of science as the first attempt at a unified theory of dynamics" (David C. Lindberg (15 March 1980), Science in the Middle Ages, University of Chicago Press, p. 11ff, ISBN 978-0-226-48233-0)

Yes, his THEOLOGICAL work (bold lettering!!!!!)

John Philoponus - Wikipedia

John Philoponus (/fɪˈlɒpənəs/; Ἰωάννης ὁ Φιλόπονος; c. 490 – c. 570), also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was an Alexandrian philologist, Aristotelian commentator and Christian theologian.

In the latter work Philoponus became one of the earliest thinkers to reject Aristotle's dynamics and propose the "theory of impetus":[4] i.e., an object moves and continues to move because of an energy imparted in it by the mover and ceases the movement when that energy is exhausted. This insightful theory was the first step towards the concept of inertia in modern physics.

A rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time, John Philoponus broke from the Aristotelian–Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences.

Later in life Philoponus turned to Christian apologetics, arguing against the eternity of the world, a theory which formed the basis of pagan attack of the Christian doctrine of Creation.

Around 550 he wrote a theological work On the Creation of the World as a commentary on the Bible’s story of creation using the insights of Greek philosophers and Basil the Great. In this work he transfers his theory of impetus to the motion of the planets, whereas Aristotle had proposed different explanations for the motion of heavenly bodies and for earthly projectiles. Thus Philoponus' theological work is recognized in the history of science as the first attempt at a unified theory of dynamics.

He introduced a new period of scientific thought based heavily on three premises: (1) The universe is a product of one single God, (2) the heavens and the earth have the same physical properties, (3) and the stars are not divine.[7]

With these principles Philoponus went after his pagan rival, Simplicius of Cilicia, by questioning Aristotle's' view of dynamics and cosmology.[7] He argued that motion can occur in a void and that the velocity of a falling object is not based on its weight.[7]

He also held that God created all matter with its physical properties and with natural laws that would allow matter to progress from a state of chaos to an organized state forming the present universe.[7] What remains of his writings indicate that he used the same didactic methods of reasoning that modern science uses and that he performed genuine experiments.[7]​

(continued....)

 

[Vouthon]

In the 14th century, the Catholic priest Jean Buridan postulated, based upon his reading of Philopponus, the notion of motive force, which he named "impetus". Buridan pointed out that Aristotle’s unmoved movers were not biblical in origin and moreover did not correspond with experimental observation.

He wrote:

When a mover sets a body in motion he implants into it a certain impetus, that is, a certain force enabling a body to move in the direction in which the mover starts it, be it upwards, downwards, sidewards, or in a circle.

The implanted impetus increases in the same ratio as the velocity. It is because of this impetus that a stone moves on after the thrower has ceased moving it. But because of the resistance of the air (and also because of the gravity of the stone) which strives to move it in the opposite direction to the motion caused by the impetus, the latter will weaken all the time.

In my opinion one can accept this explanation because the other explanations prove to be false whereas all phenomena agree with this one (Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics XII.9: 73ra)
​

And he gave a religious basis for this idea, just like Philoponus before him:

"God, when He created the world, impressed in the celestial orbs impetuses which moved them without his having to move them any more…And those impetuses which he impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased or corrupted afterwards, because there was no inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which would be corruptive or repressive of that impetus."
​

When Buridan moved towards the idea that motion does not require a continuous impulse — that objects left to themselves simply keep moving without any outside help — he enabled later generations to break with Aristotelian teleology, which had resulted in bad physics courtesy of his flawed metaphysics, and provided the groundwork for modern dynamics.

Read:

Jean Buridan - Wikipedia

Jean Buridan (French: [byʁidɑ̃]; Latin: Johannes Buridanus; c. 1300 – c. 1358/61) was an influential 14th century French philosopher.

Buridan was a teacher in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris for his entire career, focusing in particular on logic and the works of Aristotle. Buridan sowed the seeds of the Copernican revolution in Europe.[9] He developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia and an important development in the history of medieval science.

Buridan gives his theory a mathematical value: impetus = weight x velocity

Buridan's pupil Dominicus de Clavasio in his 1357 De Caelo, as follows:

"When something moves a stone by violence, in addition to imposing on it an actual force, it impresses in it a certain impetus. In the same way gravity not only gives motion itself to a moving body, but also gives it a motive power and an impetus, ...".

Buridan also maintained that impetus was proportional to speed; thus, his initial idea of impetus was similar in many ways to the modern concept of momentum.

Buridan pointed out that neither Aristotle's unmoved movers nor Plato's souls are in the Bible, so he applied impetus theory to the eternal rotation of the celestial spheres ​

 

[Vouthon]

@It Aint Necessarily So here are some more sources on Philoponus and his importance to science. Note in particular: "Philoponus was the first to interpret [the unity of heaven and earth] in the framework of a scientific conception and to explain it in terms of a world view differing from myth or pagan beliefs." and even more the two paragraphs beginning: "The monotheistic dogma of the creation of the universe ex nihilo by the single act of a God who transcends nature implied, for Philoponus, the creation of matter imbued with all the physical faculties for its independent development".


John Philoponus facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about John Philoponus

Philoponus’ main significance for the history of science lies in his being, at the close of antiquity, the first thinker to undertake a comprehensive and massive attack on the principal tenets of Aristotle’s physics and cosmology, an attack unequaled in thoroughness until Galileo. The essential part of his criticism is in the commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica, in his book De aeternitate mundi contra Proclum, and in excerpts from his book against Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of the world.

Philoponus’ philosophy of nature was the first to combine scientific cosmology and monotheism. The monotheistic belief in the universe as a creation of God and the subsequent assumption that there is no essential difference between things in heaven and on earth, as well as the rejection of the belief in the divine nature of the stars, had already been expressed in the Old Testament and was taken over by Christianity and later by Islam.

The unity of heaven and earth had been accepted as a fact, but Philoponus was the first to interpret it in the framework of a scientific conception and to explain it in terms of a world view differing from myth or pagan beliefs. His point of departure was a criticism, supported by physical arguments, of Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of the universe and the invariable structure of the celestial region. The physical basis of Aristotle’s dichotomy of heaven and earth was his assumption that the celestial bodies are made of the indestructible fifth element, the ether...

Philoponus’s arguments against the ether went much further than those of Xenarchus, particularly those concerned with his physical proofs in favor of the fiery nature of the sun and stars. Aristotle had claimed that “the stars are neither made of fire nor move ikn fire” (De caelo,289a34) and that the celestial stuff “is eternal, suffers neither growth nor diminution, but is ageless, unalterable and impassive” (ibid., 270bI).

Philoponus denied Aristotle’s statement regarding the color of the sun and emphasized that the color of a fire depends on the nature of the fuel: “The sun is not white, of the kind of color which many stars possess; it obviously appears yellow, like the color of a flame produced by dry and finely chopped wood. However, even if the sun were white, this would not prove that it is not of fire, for the color of fire changes with the nature of the fuel” (In Meteorologica, 47, 18).
Philoponus expressed this idea elsewhere, explicitly comparing celestial and terrestrial sources of light: “There is much difference among the stars in magnitude, color, and brightness; and I think the reason for this is to be found nothing else than the composition of the matter of which the stars are constructed. . .. Terrestrial fires lit for human purpose also differ according to the fuel, be it oil or pitch, reed, papyrus, or different kinds of wood, either humid or in a dry state” (De opificio mundi, IV, 12). If the different colors of the stars indicate their different constitutions, it follows that stars are composite bodies; and since composite things imply decomposition and things implying decomposition imply decay, one must conclude that celestial bodies are subject to decay.

But, Philoponus argued, even those who believe the stars to be made of ether must assume them to be composed of both the matter of the fifth element and their individual form, different for each star. “However, if one abstracts the forms of all things, there obviously remains the three- dimensional extension only, in which respect there is no differnce between any of the celestial and the terrestrial bodies “(Philoponus, apud: Simplicius, In Physica 1331, 10).

Thus, anticipating Descartes, Philoponus arrived at the conclusion that all bodies in heaven, as well as on earth, are substances whose common attribute is extension. Against the objection raised by Simplicius that no change can be observed in the celestial bodies, Philoponus adduced arguments from physics, stressing that the greater the mass of a body, the slower its rate of decay. Furthermore, the slowness of change is a function not only of the mass but also of certain physical properties, such as hardness; moreover, it is well known, for instance, that different animals have different life spans and that some parts of them are more resistant than others to change.

The monotheistic dogma of the creation of the universe ex nihilo by the single act of a God who transcends nature implied, for Philoponus, the creation of matter imbued with all the physical faculties for its independent development according to the laws of nature, a development that he conceived of as extending from the primary chaotic state to the present organized structure of the universe.

This deistic conception of a world that, once created, continues to exist automatically by natural law, was completely foreign to the classical Greek view, which never considered the gods to be “above nature” but associated them with nature, reigning not above it but within it. The shock created by this conception of Philoponus’ is reflected in the words of Simplicius, who is bewildered by the idea of a god who acts only at the single moment of creation and then hands over his creation to nature.

Philoponus’ anti- Aristotelian views were not restricted to problems of cosmology and to the removal of the barriers between heaven and earth. He also took strong exception to some of the main tenets of Aristotle’s dynamics...

Of special importance is Philoponus’ criticism of Aristotle’s theory of forced motion. He rejected the main contention of the Peripatetic that in every forced motion there must always be an immediate contact between the mover and the body forced to move in a direction other than that of its natural motion.

In particular Philoponus denied Aristotle’s hypothesis that besides the push given to a missile by the thrower, the air behind the missile is set in motion and continues to push it. He argued convincingly that if string and arrow, or hand and stone, are in direct contact, there is no air behind the missile to be moved, and that the air which is moved along the sides of the missile can contribute nothing, or very little, to its motion.

Philoponus concluded that “some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown “and that” if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same things will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower” (ibid, 641, 29). This is the famous theory of the impetus, the precursor of the modern vectorial term “momentum” or scalar term “kinetic energy.”

The impetus was rediscovered by Philoponus 700 years after it had been conceived of by Hipparchus (see Simplicius, In De caelo, 264, 25) In the physics of medieval Islamic philosophers and Western Schoolman the concept of impetus was developed further, mainly as a consequence of a tradition folling Philoponus...

One interesting aspect of Philoponus’ treatment of this problem is the way in which, anticipating Descartes, he looked at the human body as a mechanism capable of functioning only if its parts have the necessary mechanical fitness.

​

Everything you claimed for Thales can be said for Philoponus, with the signal exception that the latter was actually proved correct by later generations of scientists in a number of his ideas and actually performed experiments, whereas the former didn't.

By all accounts, I would contend that Philoponus was by far the more significant of the two thinkers for the development of Western science, as you can probably tell from the above article.

See again:

In-Between - Chicago Scholarship

John Philoponus (born around 490, dead sometime in the 570s) devoted his life to the Christianization of Hellenistic thought in general and to the mummification of Ptolemy's Almagest in particular.

Already at a young age he had orchestrated a massive assault on Aristotle's physics and cosmology. The most remarkable aspect of this man and his revolutionary philosophy is that it grew out of the conviction that the universe is the single creation of a single God. Philoponus rejected the prevalent belief in the world's eternity and accepted instead the proposition that heaven and earth are constituted by the same physical properties and governed by the same physical laws. Closely connected with this belief in creatio ex nihilo was also Philoponus' revision of Aristotle's theory of dynamics.

In line with his creationist critique of Aristotle, Philoponus got involved in debates about the definition of Jesus Christ. Throughout the debates frequent references were made to the discussion of identity and difference as it first appeared in Plato's Parmenides and then reappeared again in Plotinus' concept of hypostasis.​

 

[Augustus]

This is not an area that has been an interest of mine. It shouldn't be difficult to find books taking my position, given that it is the dominant one.

The thing is, it is not the dominant view. It might be common in pop-culture, especially among atheists, but it finds almost no support in the academic study of the history of science.

While opinions on the question are subjective, it is objectively false to claim yours is the dominant view among modern scholars. Things might have been different 40 odd years, but a lot has changed since then in scholarly understanding.

While this doesn't necessarily make them right, a Humanist should at least consider why people from diverse religious/non-religious background who are widely accepted as experts on the topic and have studied the evidence in great detail have abandoned the old conflict thesis en masse.

But I simply cannot agree with you or the sources you site. How can I possibly reconcile your claims with my experience?

While many of the points you raise are true, you seem to be addressing a completely different topic to me.

I'm sure you don't believe the best method of understanding the history of science is via personal experience of modern America.

Of course countless modern American fundamentalists are hostile to science, it's not really relevant to the discussion of pre-modern Europe and why modern science and humanism developed there though. Anything that occurred after the development of modern science is a different subject. Few people believe that Christianity offers much benefit for contemporary science after all.

I'll reply to the more substantial points in another post.

 

[Vouthon]

Now, onto somebody much later, namely Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer who was one of the most important figures in the 17th century Scientific Revolution.

Kepler, in a letter to J. G. Herwart von Hohenburg, March 26, 1598, put it like this:

as we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, we are bound to think of the praise of God and not of the glory of our own capacities … Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.
​

Kepler believed that the language of mathematics was crucial to “thinking God’s thoughts” about the nature of creation, and he took seriously the role of astronomers as priests articulating God’s book of nature. The universe became, in effect, his house of worship.

Likewise, in his 1615 Letter to Mary Christine of Lorraine, the mother of the Duke of Tuscany, Galileo discussed biblical exegesis, based on St. Augustine’s doctrine, especially in his work De Genesi ad litteram and on Copernicus' faith:

Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany | Inters.org

a most useful doctrine of St. Augustine's, relative to our making positive statements about things which are obscure and hard to understand by means of reason alone. Speaking of a certain physical conclusion about the heavenly bodies, he wrote:

“Now keeping always our respect for moderation in grave piety, we ought not to believe anything inadvisedly on a dubious point, lest in favor to our error we conceive a prejudice against something that truth hereafter may reveal to be not contrary in any way to the sacred books of either the Old or the New Testament.”...
​

its author, or rather its restorer and confirmer, was Nicholas Copernicus; and that he was not only a Catholic, but a priest and a canon. He was in fact so esteemed by the church that when the Lateran Council under Leo X took up the correction of the church calendar, Copernicus was called to Rome from the most remote parts of Germany to undertake its reform...

With Herculean toil he set his admirable mind to this task, and he made such great progress in this science and brought our knowledge of the heavenly motions to such precision that he became celebrated as an astronomer. Since that time not only has the calendar been regulated by his teachings, but tables of all the motions of the planets have been calculated as well.

Having reduced his system into six books, he published these at the instance of the Cardinal of Capua (2) and the Bishop of Culm (3). And since he had assumed his laborious enterprise by order of the Supreme Pontiff, he dedicated this book On the celestial revolutions to Pope Paul III. When printed, the book was accepted by the holy Church, and it has been read and studied by everyone without the faintest hint of any objection ever being conceived against its doctrines...

I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify...

I should judge that the authority of the Bible was designed to persuade men of those articles and propositions which, surpassing all human reasoning, could not be made credible by science, or by any other means than through the very mouth of the Holy Spirit. Yet even in those propositions which are not matters of faith, this authority ought to be preferred over that of all human writings which are supported only by bare assertions or probable arguments, and not set forth in a demonstrative way. This I hold to be necessary and proper to the same extent that divine wisdom surpasses all human judgment and conjecture.

But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations...

Such is the opinion of the holiest and most learned Fathers, and in St. Augustine we find the following words:

“It is likewise commonly asked what we may believe about the form and shape of the heavens according to the Scriptures, for many contend much about these matters. But with superior prudence our authors have forborne to speak of this, as in no way furthering the student with respect to a blessed life—and, more important still, as taking up much of that time which should be spent in holy exercises. What is it to me whether heaven, like a sphere, surrounds the earth on all sides as a mass balanced in the center of the universe, or whether like a dish it merely covers and overcasts the earth? Belief in Scripture is urged rather for the reason we have often mentioned; that is, in order that no one, through ignorance of divine passages, finding anything in our Bibles or hearing anything cited from them of such a nature as may seem to oppose manifest conclusions, should be induced to suspect their truth when they teach, relate, and deliver more profitable matters. Hence let it be said briefly, touching the form of heaven, that our authors knew the truth but the Holy Spirit did not desire that men should learn things that are useful to no one for salvation.” (6)
​

The same disregard of these sacred authors toward beliefs about the phenomena of the celestial bodies is repeated to us by St. Augustine in his next chapter. On the question whether we are to believe that the heaven moves or stands still, he writes thus:

“Some of the brethren raise a question concerning the motion of heaven, whether it is fixed or moved. If it is moved, they say, how is it a firmament? If it stands still, how do these stars which are held fixed in it go round from east to west, the more northerly performing shorter circuits near the pole, so that heaven (if there is another pole unknown to us) may seem to revolve upon some axis, or (if there is no other pole) may be thought to move as a discus? To these men I reply that it would require many subtle and profound reasonings to find out which of these things is actually so; but to undertake this and discuss it is consistent neither with my leisure nor with the duty of those whom I desire to instruct in essential matters more directly conducing to their salvation and to the benefit of the holy Church.” (7)
​

From these things it follows as a necessary consequence that, since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus or extended in a plane, nor whether the earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same kind...

But let us again consider the degree to which necessary demonstrations and sense experiences ought to be respected in physical conclusions, and the authority they have enjoyed at the hands of holy and learned theologians. From among a hundred attestations I have selected the following:

"We must also take heed, in handling the doctrine of Moses, that we altogether avoid saying positively and confidently anything which contradicts manifest experiences and the reasoning of philosophy or the other sciences. For since every truth is in agreement with all other truth, the truth of Holy Writ cannot be contrary to the solid reasons and experiences of human knowledge.”
​

(9) And in St. Augustine we read:

“If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation; not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.” (10)​

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You put a lot of work into this. Thanks for the effort and interest.

Catholics don't hold a static understanding of dogma. We believe in 'development of doctrine', described by St. Bonaventure in the Middle Ages: "Christ's works do not go backwards, they do not fail but progress" (Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt) [De Tribus Quaestionibus].

This is an explicit religious sanction for progressive development in thinking. Bonaventure was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church.

Your argument works better in a sola scriptura Protestant framework, I think.

Progressive thinking is to the credit of Catholicism. I think the difference in our perspective is whether we view that growth and progression independent of the Bible a result of Christian principles laid out in the Bible, or Christians doing what human beings do without a religion. If it's the latter, then what part does the religion play in this except to serve as the substrate to be subjected to reason and innovation?

Remember, I make the distinction between Christianity being the foundation of an idea or method, and Christians coming up with it. The latter does not imply the former.

Since the Catholic Church has numerous teachings which have no basis in scripture, and has evidently branched forwards in various areas with the passage of time, adapting to new contexts while retaining its core beliefs (but not in an inflexible way), I see innovation - progress in understanding, that is - as part of my religious tradition.

I can see why you would.

I don't believe that it is a part of the Protestant tradition, which is Christianity as well. Why do you suppose one branch of Christianity went one way an the other another? My point is that the choice to progress as you describe Catholicism doing seems to be unrelated to Christianity, at least as the Protestants see it.

Catholic Church doesn't believe that belief in God should be divorced from rational logic. On 8 September, 1840, the church condemned fideism and stated in two encyclicals: "faith, a heavenly gift, is posterior to revelation, and therefore cannot be properly used against the atheist to prove the existence of God"; and "The use of reason precedes faith and, with the help of revelation and grace, leads to it."

Due to this doctrine, we simply don't agree with fideism. We recognize that faith-based arguments can never be used to counter atheist arguments founded upon reason.

Perhaps we're not using the word fideism the same way. In epistemology, as you surely know, we identify potential ways of knowing what is true. If we consider reason a path to knowledge, then we are rationalists. Most rationalists are also empiricists, that is, believe that consulting physical reality is a path to knowledge.

Some might add intuition, such as the intuition that what appears to be external reality corresponds to something outside of our minds, or that a nothing can be both x and not-x at the same time - ideas that cannot be derived from reason or observation, but are strongly felt to be true for reasons that cannot be given. This is intuitionism.

And the final method that is claimed to be a path to truth is faith. If one belongs to this school, he is a fideist (faithist).

As indicated, can be more than one of these. By my reckoning, all theists are fideists.

When I call somebody a fideist, what I mean is that that person considers faith a valid path to truth and is willing to believe things to be true based on faith, by which I mean without sufficient supporting evidence.

You must be using the word differently.

For the Fideist, faith precedes reason. For the non-Fideist religious believer, reason precedes faith. For St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, natural reason precedes faith: “for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected.”

I don't understand what that means exactly. Are you saying that your faith in God is the result of prior reason?

I should add here that in my opinion, faith invalidates all subsequent thought based on the faith based belief. Faith is roughly the same thing as jumping to a conclusion, which is recognized as a logical fallacy, which is why I don't partake of it. I also have trouble accepting a method that claims to be a path to truth that allows one to equally well believe any idea or its polar opposite. Although I've learned enough biology that I don't need to believe Darwin's theory by faith, had I not, I could have chosen to do so, or I could have chosen creationism using this same alleged path to knowledge about what is true..

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Natural law is the “highest” and most binding expression of the moral law, even more so than revealed law or the laws of the Church. Natural law is more foundational than even the revealed law expressed definitively in the person of Jesus Christ. So, when I face a moral problem, the first thing I do is become introspective and determine a course of action based upon my natural intuition (empathy) guided subsequently by a judgement of reason

That sounds like rational ethics, not divine command theory.

I think you equated natural law with the conscience, or internal moral compass. If so, I agree. My moral direction comes from only that source.

I'm surprised that you would allow conscience to trump a biblical commandment. Are Christians permitted to turn "Thou shalt" into "Thou shalt unless you feel morally conflicted"?

The theory of impetus[1] put forth initially to explain projectile motion against gravity. It was introduced by John Philoponus in the 6th century[2][3] and elaborated by Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji at the end of the 12th century,[4] but was only established in western scientific thought by Jean Buridan in the 14th century. It is the intellectual precursor to the concepts of inertia, momentum and acceleration in classical mechanics.

OK. I presume you are going to show me how these ideas derived from or were dependent on Christian doctrine.

He also held that God created all matter with its physical properties and with natural laws that would allow matter to progress from a state of chaos to an organized state forming the present universe.[7] What remains of his writings indicate that he used the same didactic methods of reasoning that modern science uses and that he performed genuine experiments.[7]

Where did these didactic methods originate? Remember, for me, there is a difference between ideas deriving from Christian doctrine, and Christians inventing ideas.

I am trying to identify the role that Christianity and its core doctrine, which distinguish it from other religions and non-theistic ideologies, played in the advent of humanism as was claimed. Those core beliefs are the ones I listed above - sin, salvation, a personal god, substitutional atonement, grace, etc.. I can't connect these two.

Philoponus’ philosophy of nature was the first to combine scientific cosmology and monotheism. The monotheistic belief in the universe as a creation of God and the subsequent assumption that there is no essential difference between things in heaven and on earth, as well as the rejection of the belief in the divine nature of the stars, had already been expressed in the Old Testament and was taken over by Christianity and later by Islam.

That idea of uniting the heavens and earth doesn't sound like it comes from Christianity, which cosmology makes a distinction between the earthly and heavenly realms. The heavens are perfect and ethereal. Isn't that what all of the fuss was about when Galileo turned his telescope on the moon and found it to be pock-marked (cratered)? It was thought to be a perfect heavenly orb

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

a Humanist should at least consider why people from diverse religious/non-religious background who are widely accepted as experts on the topic and have studied the evidence in great detail have abandoned the old conflict thesis en masse.

Agreed. You're point is taken. I will revise my position. It appears likely that the hostility to science that I have observed in my lifetime doesn't characterize the history of the relationship between the church and science. Perhaps that began later, perhaps with the publication of Darwin's theory and the fundamentalist movements that arose subsequently.

I'm sure you don't believe the best method of understanding the history of science is via personal experience of modern America.

See above.

“Now keeping always our respect for moderation in grave piety, we ought not to believe anything inadvisedly on a dubious point, lest in favor to our error we conceive a prejudice against something that truth hereafter may reveal to be not contrary in any way to the sacred books of either the Old or the New Testament.”...

This sounds like an exhortation to skepticism. Is the claim that this derives from Christianity? Isn't skepticism antithetical to faith? Isn't it included in the foolishness of man that scripture describes. Isn't it the fool who questions the existence of God? As I understand it, the Christian message is to trust in God and the word of God, not the notions of man.

I'll say it again. Christians can be innovative. Christians can do science. You can present countless examples of this, but unless we can tie these innovations to Christian doctrine, why are we giving Christianity credit for them?

I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.

And this sounds like Galileo repudiating Christian doctrine again. He would trust his senses and his reasoning faculty over scripture? Isn't that how Satan gets to you, and plants doubt?

What I am seeing in your multiple examples (and thank you for doing so much leg work bringing them here) is man culturally evolving away from the Christian tradition of faith, revelation, tradition and other received and unquestioned wisdom as a means of knowing truth into a more modern, skeptical, empirical tradition that characterizes modernity. The question seems to be where these new ideas came from - Christian doctrine, or elsewhere. That's the difference between saying that humanism is the daughter of Christianity, and that humanism is a rejection of it.

In an earlier post, I outlined that radical differences in these two ideologies' metaphysics, epistemology, and moral theory. For me, that answers the question.

 

[Vouthon]

@It Aint Necessarily So many thanks again for your replies to my posts (which, I know, are long due to the very real complexity of this topic, spanning intellectual history over the course of 2,000 years, so double thank you for bearing with me).

That sounds like rational ethics, not divine command theory.

I think you equated natural law with the conscience, or internal moral compass. If so, I agree. My moral direction comes from only that source.

In the history of Catholic philosophy, the dominant theory of ethics is not the so-called "Divine Command Theory", which seems to be popular among contemporary American Evangelicals.

That honour goes to Natural Law. We are a natural law faith tradition.

God’s commandments, through the revealed Divine Law, were considered by Thomist Catholics to be a means of illuminating what is morally true and not what determines what is morally true. They are meant as guide to conscience, should we find ourselves struggling to work out some vexing moral problem on our own - in accordance with intuition and right reason - but never as a substitute for conscience.

The traditional Catholic 'Thomist' approach from the High Middle Ages thus was, in point of fact, closer to rational ethics than it is to divine command, with the proviso being that 'conscience' - the internal moral compass as you call it - is given 'primacy'. And what precisely does this moral compass involve?

Scholastic theologians worked out a differentiation between two Latin terms involved in the process of conscientious moral decision-making: synderesis and conscientia.

As explained by one scholar, Lyons (2009): “conscience is the whole internal conscious process by which first principles of moral right and wrong, learnt intuitively by synderesis [a functional intuitive capacity], are applied to some action now contemplated in order to produce a moral verdict on that action, known as conscientia." (p.479).

That said, I don't really want to get too bogged down in Catholic philosophy since it would take a dissertation-sized epic work of scholarly research to properly explain it all - which I definitely do not want to do! That's well beyond my pay-grade

I'm surprised that you would allow conscience to trump a biblical commandment. Are Christians permitted to turn "Thou shalt" into "Thou shalt unless you feel morally conflicted"?

It's more complicated than that:


CHRISTIAN MORAL PRINCIPLES : Chapter 3: Conscience: Knowledge of Moral Truth

According to common Catholic teaching, one must follow one’s conscience even when it is [objectively from a Christian standpoint] mistaken. St. Thomas explains this as follows. Conscience is one’s last and best judgment as to the choice one ought to make. If this judgment is mistaken, one does not know it at the time. One will follow one’s conscience if one is choosing reasonably...So if one acts against one’s conscience, one is certainly in the wrong (see S.t., 1–2, q. 19, aa. 5–6).11

Thomas drives home his point. If a superior gives one an order which cannot be obeyed without violating one’s conscience, one must not obey. To obey the superior in this case would be to disobey what one believes...(see S.t., 1–2, q. 19, a. 5, ad 2; 2–2, q. 104, a. 5). Indeed, to believe in Jesus is in itself good and essential for salvation; but one can only believe in him rightly if one judges that one ought to. Therefore, one whose conscience is that it is wrong to believe in Jesus would be morally guilty if he or she chose against this judgment​

That's the traditional Thomist Catholic understanding. It doesn't apply to those who, "care but little for truth and goodness, and conscience by degrees grows practically sightless” (GS 16; translation supplied). This is because: "Conscience entails moral responsibility. One’s first responsibility is to form conscience rightly". Rather, the above assumes a sincere person who is seeking to live a moral life according to the dictates of their conscience.

To give you an example, read this from the book Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church (2015) by Alexander Murray, a Professor at University College, Oxford:

Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church

"...It is in a letter of Innocent III, written in 1201...A woman called Guleilma had left her husband, alleging consanguinity, recently discovered. To outsider with partial knowledge of the facts, the true motive of the wife must seem doubtful. Was hr desertion really due to her discovery of an impediment? Or vice versa?...This was the question that came to Pope Innocent III...

None the less, Innocent's wisdom insisted, she must obey her conscience...

Innocent III's letter would be duly preserved in Gregory IX's Decretals where it would calmly declare to every student of the subject, without ant special warning of the time-bomb it actually contained, the ultimate supremacy of conscience. Hostiensis himself, the most zealous apostle of the pope's fullness of power, expressly acknowledged that the authority of conscience was in the last resort even greater..."
​

Here are Pope Innocent III's (1198-1216) actual words in the letter to that woman:

"...No one ought to act against his own conscience and he should follow his conscience rather than the judgement of the church when he is certain...one ought to suffer any evil rather than sin against conscience..."​

Some commentary on this:


Defending American Religious Neutrality

"...The basic idea of the supreme authority of conscience had already been endorsed, in stronger terms [than ever before], by Pope Innocent III (1198-1216)...Here one sees the beginnings of the idea that conscience can trump even the objective law.

Noah Feldman observes that the idea of freedom of conscience is already being suggested here: 'If it was sinful to act against conscience, there might be reason to avoid requiring anyone to act against conscience'..."​

Here you have a medieval Pope telling a woman that her individual conscience on this matter is ultimately supreme at the last recourse even over the authority of the Pope or Church.

The traditional teaching has a high regard for the internal process of individual discernment of truth.

It should said also, that in John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) he reiterated but radicalized and developed this same doctrine of the individual having an obligation to obey his conscience, painting it in religious terms: "No way whatsoever that I shall walk in, against the Dictates of my Conscience, will ever bring me to the Mansions of the Blessed", he wrote. See:

Amendment I (Religion): John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration

Compare John Locke saying here in 1689:

No private person has any right in any manner to prejudice another person in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church or religion. All the rights and franchises that belong to him as a man, or as a denizen, are inviolably to be preserved to him. These are not the business of religion. No violence nor injury is to be offered him, whether he be Christian or Pagan.

This the Gospel enjoins, this reason directs, and this that natural fellowship we are born into requires of us. If any man err from the right way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be miserable in that which is to come.

​

With Pope Nicholas I almost a thousand years before in his A.D. 886 letter to the Bulgars, Ad Consulta Vestra:

Internet History Sourcebooks

The Responses of Pope Nicholas I to the Questions of the Bulgars A.D. 866 (Letter 99)​

Chapter XLI.

Concerning those who refuse to receive the good of Christianity and sacrifice and bend their knees to idols, we can write nothing else to you than that you move them towards the right faith by warnings, exhortations, and reason rather than by force...

Violence should by no means be inflicted upon them to make them believe. For everything which is not voluntary, cannot be good; for it is written: Willingly shall I sacrifice to you,[Ps. 53:8] and again: Make all the commands of my mouth your will,[Ps. 118:108] and again, And by my own will I shall confess to Him.[Ps. 27:7] Indeed, God commands that willing service be performed only by the willing. Listen to the apostle Paul who, when he wrote to the Corinthians, says: Why indeed is it my business to judge concerning those who are outside? Do you not judge concerning those who are inside? God will judge those who are outside. Remove the evil from yourselves.[I Cor. 5:12-13] It is as if he said: Concerning those who are outside our religion, I shall judge nothing.

Chapter CII.

We have taught above that violence should not be inflicted upon the pagan in order to make him become a Christian.
​

There is a clear development of ideas here over time, rather than rupture.

 

[Augustus]

Will that answer suffice?

I actually meant what were the most important cultural variables that contributed to the rise of modern science and Humanism in your opinion.

How common do you think such cultural variables were in pre-modern societies?

(I'll give a proper reply to the points you raised before tomorrow, my brain is a bit of a painkiller addled mush at the moment though so I'm even less articulate than normal )