In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment:
Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can you.
Jim Goetz, who I find to be a balanced and sensible sort of Christian, asked in the comments for some backing to this apparently outrageous claim. It's a fair cop, so here is my argument...
As someone who does not believe in moral absolutes, and yet wants to ground moral claims in the real world, I have a problem (well, it's not just mine - I think it applies to anyone who wants to make moral claims ground in the real world, because none of the foundations in deities or categorical imperatives seem to work). So, I need a solution that while not being fully naturalistic (because you can't get an ought statement from an is statement, description never issues forth in prescription, the Good is not a natural property, etc.) nevertheless provides me with a way to distinguish between societies that are appropriate in their moral strictures, and those that aren't.
Consider a relativist faced with the practice of child eating. It might be the most sacred of duties to fry up one's first borns, and yet I think nobody would really want to say that was a healthy society. Basically, if you live in a society where social evolution results in duties that are fundamentally opposed to the necessities of biological evolution, you have prima facie evidence that is not a viable society. A society that eats its children is not healthy. Of course, there's nothing in biology as such that makes this true - mice will eat their children if they are too crowded, and lion males will eat the children of other males, but these have biological reasons; they are evolved responses. For humans, no such responses exist. Infanticide is not, I think, a viable mode of birth control in the longer term (it has effects on the psychology and general dynamics of the society that are not healthy).
At the other end of the spectrum are those religions that simply practice celibacy, like the Shakers or the Cathars. These are not necessarily malign societies but they will end up going extinct if they run out of converts, and in the long run, we might expect them to evolve to a point where only the "clergy" or the "pure" are celibate, while most are not (which is what the Albigensians or Cathars actually did, but the Shakers, now extinct, did not). So this, too, is not a viable rule for a whole society.
On the understanding that moral rules are supposed to be universal, I think that one can determine how good a moral rule is from its consequences this way: if that rule were imposed on everyone, would the resulting society be a healthy, viable, society, biologically speaking? Kant's categorical imperative can be read that way - what you will for yourself should be what you will for others. Likewise Rawls' Veil of Ignorance (the so-called Original Position): the rules you impose on society should take no account of what you and yours will be in that society (you might be a king or a pauper - choose the rules that best serve both).
So, assume that I want a healthy society in the following ways: it must not favour one group over another (because I don't know what my progeny will be, and they may suffer detrimental fitness effects if they turn out to be the marginal Others); it must permit the persistence of that society; and it must not result in any of the detrimental outcomes that bedevil human societies such as overt patriarchy, despotism, torture, theft of honest toil or its rewards, and so on.
Christianity is, both in principle and going by history, a set of moral claims that are basically and fundamentally unhealthy in this regard. As a theocratic tendency, it concentrates power in the hands of a few, and the subsequent exploitation of those who are powerless. This is something we have seen for two thousand years. While it is true that some Christians have fought for democracy, nearly all the time the various religious leaders have either honoured democracy in the breach or actively fought against it. The moral rules of the New Testament include acquiescence in slavery, the denigration of women, and most of all the exclusion of the outsider. Of course, if you already think these are bad things, on other grounds, you can find moral precepts to attack them. But Paul on infidels or the Old Testament on Shibboleths is more influential than Jesus on Samaritans.
Christianity has an innate tendency to schism. This is rather inevitable when your liturgical and theological politics issues in absolutist claims. So it automatically tends to generate things like Thirty Years Wars, Acts "abolishing diversity of opinions", and the usual sort of sectarian violence we have seen, non-stop somewhere in the world, ever since Constantine.
Of course, this is not only true of Christianity. It is true of any absolutist ideology - Marxism, Hindu nationalism, even Buddhism can play that role. The major differences lie in the inevitability of the malignancy. Buddhism can also play a gentle role in a society, especially a society that is not a single ideology. Most religions do not have this gentle aspect. Christianity can be employed in a gentle way - for example I have no reason to think Jim himself is anything but an admirable man, and I have known many admirable Christians - but when it is installed as the foundation for a society, its fruits (by which ye shall know them, remember?) are subordination of marginal groups like gays, women and "other races", constant wars, imperialisms, and anti-intellectualism. And that's just the obvious negatives.
The worst aspect of Christianity, though, is psychological. To sell the need for salvation, they must first sell the belief that you are a sinner, and that you are damned. It's rather like the psychiatrist first drugging you up into a psychotic state in order to make their interventions worthwhile. The notion of inherited sin is, I think, the most malign concept in the history of the west, possibly only exceeded by the Wheel of Life bullshit that justifies the caste system in Hindu countries. If you just look at humans in a neutral manner, you'll find most of them are decent individuals who live, as circumstances permit, happy lives of satisfaction and cooperation. Some are at the tail of the distributions, and are sociopaths or psychopaths, but humans are relatively constant in their behaviour and attitudes. There's not the slightest evidence for "sin" apart from the fact that if you set up a cooperative system, some will defect depending on what constraints there are. That's a strategic point, not a metaphysical one.
I don't tend to think much of Nietzsche - he's hard to read and oversold. But on many points I think he is, in his own warped way, quite correct. So the last word to that mad sad man:
Believers and their need to believe.— How much one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is "firm" and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it,—is a measure of the degree of one’s strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one’s weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today: therefore it still finds believers. For this is how man is: an article of faith could be refuted before him a thousand times,—if he needed it, he would consider it "true" again and again,—in accordance with that famous "proof of strength" of which the Bible speaks. ... In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. [The Gay Science §348]
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An interesting line of thought. I have a question, though. If X is unhealthy that suggests that there is some Y that is healthy, and you suggest that you are distinguishing societies that are appropriate and societies that are not. But what you outline in the post as healthy (no favoring of one group over another, no self-destructiveness, no "overt patriarchy, despotism, torture, theft of honest toil or its rewards") seems a tall order. What societies in the world's history do you think have been healthy?
Whether or not there have been healthy societies, Brandon, and there were probably many pre-Columbian societies in America who were such before being evangelized; the goal of the enlightenment has been to escape the trap that Christianity and Islam have set. The goal is to attain societies based on the fact that people are decent without the need for a spiritual push or salvation to be good.
Christianity has been marked by the sale of a bill of goods that we are inherently incapable of being good, and it is a self-loathing religion. We must hate the flesh, love the spirit and wait for the deliverance of Death.
Playing devil's advocate: I see no reason why a society with great inequalities couldn't be perfectly healthy and viable, biologically speaking. When you say "you might be a king or a pauper - choose the rules that best serve both" that sounds like you're going for a maximin-type optimization. But if you're dealing with biological fitness, wouldn't an expected value be the proper thing to optimize?
Well said.
To sell the need for salvation, they must first sell the belief that you are a sinner, and that you are damned. It's rather like the psychiatrist first drugging you up into a psychotic state in order to make their interventions worthwhile. The notion of inherited sin is, I think, the most malign concept in the history of the west,
I was on the bus in Chapel Hill a few months ago and this fresh-scrubbed Campus Crusade for Christ type was proselytizing to me, and trying to work his magic on me, but I wouldn't let him get past step one, which was him trying to convince me that according to God's standards, my shoplifting of that Creedence CD when I was 14 befits me for eternal torture. Refusing to accept his absurd standard really jammed him up. He kept trying to think of ways to convince me that I deserved everlasting torture for my minor failings, and I kept refusing the claim. I almost never permit myself to have conversations with those people, for the sake of my blood pressure, and because I like to be nice to my fellow man, but once in a blue moon I'll do it, just to see the looks on their faces when they describe why I'm the scum of the earth, and etermally doomed, and I tell them, "Your god sounds like an asshole. Why doesn't he pick on someone his own size?" People are Really not used to pushback like that.
There are a few fundamental flaws with your argument. The problem is that you view Christianity in a vacuum without considering surrounding history.
Polytheistic religions almost never fight directly over religion. However the Romans were constantly at war. The Mongols conquered huge areas of Asia. The Vikings raided and destroyed Empires. Europe was far from peaceful during the middle ages, ie under Christianity, that is a product of the era, not religion.
Many societies practiced infanticide, including the Romans, Greeks, and Japanese. Christianity ended such practices, and also ended the long history of Berserkers in Norse lands.
Any Roman writings on the barbarians, including Germans and Asian Steppe people's will quickly eliminate any thought that discrimination is new. Romans made other people out to be more beast than human. There is a concept of The Other which is prominent in history. While it seems a bit alien to anyone thinking about it in terms of themselves all people tend to fear and make worse that which they don't understand. This is in now way unique to Christianity. In fact you see this problem when looking at out many Atheists view Christians as dangerous, stupid people who want to stop scientific progress. Many Christians, also, view Atheists with this same kind of fish lens.
The Bible clearly states judge not lest thee be judged, he who is without sin cast the first stone. Many people who claim to be followers of the Bible ignore most of what it says and twist small portions of it to make it say what they want it to say. This is not a problem with Christianity this is a problem with people. Humans are imperfect people, with, or without, Christianity.
jonyfries writes writes: The Bible clearly states judge not lest thee be judged, he who is without sin cast the first stone.
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Sin does not exist. Imperfection does not mean one loses the ability to discriminate, to discern, to learn from mistakes, to improve the lot for individuals and for the collective, to speak out and to challenge the status quo. One can be imperfect and do all of this without being an hypocrite. If your perspective is cast in concrete, that is religious, then you will be part of the problem and not the solution.
I regard anyone needing religion to be suspect, to be suspected of a deep-rooted wonkiness, lacking the basic ability to discern padded bullshit from a workable perspective.
The worst aspect of Christianity, though, is psychological. To sell the need for salvation, they must first sell the belief that you are a sinner, and that you are damned.
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Agreed. That is why the only way out of the dysfunctional Christian family is through therapy.
As an ex-Christian myself, I think the three main counterclaims would be: (1) that the correllation between Christianity and centralisation of power etc is a historical accident; (2) that it wasn't possible for a new religion to deal with all social ills at once, hence tolerance of slavery etc; (3) that much depends upon exactly what you mean by words like "sinner", "damned", etc.
It would be easy to argue for months about each of these points and practically impossible to be concise about any of them. On the third, one of the problems that can be seen in the comments already is that everyone thinks they know what Christianity means by "sin", "damnation", etc.
I'm not sure what parts of the New Testament you're thinking of when you refer to "exclusion of the outsider".
"Sin does not exist."
Well I guess it's a personal thing, but for me sin does exist, although it has little to do with religion. If you do something you know deep down is morally wrong, based on your own standards (and you had a clear choice), then that is a "sin". It has nothing to do with written law. Your punishment is that you may remember it for the rest of your life, and hopefully that will dissuade you from doing it again. I still wince when recalling a few bad things I did in my youth. That's my eternal punishment - I have to live with myself. But if I were suddenly to believe in a God for the express purpose of absolving my "sin", that would be a very selfish thing indeed. In fact, it would be a sin.
I'm not sure what parts of the New Testament you're thinking of when you refer to "exclusion of the outsider".
31)When the son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32)And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall seperate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33)And he set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34)Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35)...
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41)Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
Matthew Chapter 25.
Thony C-
Yes, but the point is it's Christ who does that, and Him exclusively. According to the Bible, the rest of us ain't a'sposed to try separating sheep and goats ourselves.
The first part of this essay sounds disturbingly similar to right wing attacks on homosexuals.
Boo, except for the fact that homosexuality is biologically normal for a small subset of humans, and indeed for a very broad range of species. They may even be advantageous through kin selection: someone with no direct progeny may be more concerned with the welfare of the whole group. It's also not a trait that can ever come to fixation for obvious reasons, unlike infectious memes.
Though that can be turned on its head. What if people who aren't brainwashed are a small subpopulation that is only memetically fertile insofar as they provide useful, practical tools to the rest, a kind of kin selection of ideas?
There's a study that shows a correlation between male homosexuality and above-average female fertility in the same families. Looks like male homosexuality, or one cause of it anyway, is a side effect of something that has an utterly simple Darwinian advantage. Kin selection or no kin selection.
What a bland and simplistic view religion. I'm kind of surprised to see a post like this from an evolutionist. Surely the "healthiness" of a religion can't be measured by how much it violates our sensibilities, or how happy or unhappy it makes its practioners, but only in how well it succeeds in propagting itself and its human hosts. By that measure, Christianity is quite successful. It's practioners may be wracked with guilt but they also colonized a good part of the world, developed science and capitalism, and made Western culture the global default. You may or may not like any of these things, but what does that have to with biology?
Religion is a central aspect of human society; Christianity is central to the development of Western civilization (including science), and as a phenomenon it deserves to be studied with some care, regardless of one's personal belief or taste.
mtraven, it is absurd for you to use your examples of reasons to consider Wilkins simplistic. Science had to fight and struggle against the order of Christianity and its early practitioners were often tried as heretics, tortured or given house arrest for challenging the powers of religious thought.
Your view of colonialism, at least as expressed here, is quite simplistic.
The health of a religion (including secular dogmas like Fascism) and the health of the society it inhabits are not the same thing.
Nor is the healthiness of a religion expressed in the number of adherents, since that is largely due to other factors (read Guns, Germs & Steel).
Oh! That must explains:
- why most named stars have Arabic names
- why our numerical system is Indian/Arabic
- why our political systems derive from that of polytheistic Republican Rome,
- why ideas like heliocentrism, atomism and evolution were so powerfully denounced.
- why science began to flourish as theology lost its grip on how people thought.
You have got to be kidding.
mtraven wrote:
"Religion is a central aspect of human society; Christianity is central to the development of Western civilization (including science), and as a phenomenon it deserves to be studied with some care, regardless of one's personal belief or taste."
Ah yes, back to the "Christianity is responsible for all the good things, but can't be held accountable for all the bad."
As Dr. Wilkins has pointed out, and I agree with, the rise of science was pretty much an economic one, not religious. I know of no particular Christian creed that you could name that could somehow be linked to the development of science. As well, I also think we can link the rise of science to the rediscovery of a good deal of lost or hard-to-obtain Classical (read: pre-Christian) thought.
I can't argue that Christianity holds a key role in Western civilization, though I don't think it was any particular element of Christianity in and of itself that gave rise to that influence. All the politically important pagan beliefs like Divine Right of Kings were happily imported by the various chieftains, princes, kings and emperors who made Christianity the official religion in their territories.
The reality is that Christianity was the most politically expedient of all the religions Constantine had a choice from. It had the most traction within the Roman nobility, already had a reasonably centralized hierarchy that could easily be utilized for his and his successors' Caesaropapist requirements, and certainly showed some traction with the common folk. I wouldn't call Christianity's rise quite an "accident" of history, but there is an indisputable "at the right place at the right time" to it all.
Aaron Clausen wrote:
Ah yes, back to the "Christianity is responsible for all the good things, but can't be held accountable for all the bad."
Which bears zero relationship to anything I actually said. I am (at least in this conversation) neither pro- nor anti- religion. I find such positions tiresome, as is the whole atheists vs believers ongoing battle. Isn't PZ Myer's blog the best place for that kind of stuff? I thought this one was supposed to be grounded in philosophy of biology and religion, which implies to me a somewhat more sophisticated take on these issues.
The idea that Christianity contributed to the rise of science is hardly new with me. I don't see why you folks are so resistant to this idea. You can be as hardcore an atheist as possible and still acknowledge that your ideas have a history. If Christianity gave birth to science, that says exactly nothing about the truth of Christianity. I'm descended from fish, that doesn't mean I have gills.
Modern science arose in Europe due to many factors, but the Christian intellectual culture that combined Jewish monotheism and Greek rationality was certainly one of them, possibly the key one.
Here's Arno Penzias (Nobel laureate in physics for co-discovering the cosmic background radiation):
Lurker #753 wrote:
The health of a religion (including secular dogmas like Fascism) and the health of the society it inhabits are not the same thing.
True, but they are related. Think of religion as a parasite or symbiont (an imperfect metaphor but better than nothing). Some religions (like Shakerism, or Jim Jonesism) end up killing their hosts. But Christianity seems to have done quite well for its adherents. Islam is doing even better, in terms of numbers. This has absolutely nothing to do with their truth, or whether they disturb your sense of aesthetics or morality.
When looking at whether Christianity is a view that is "healthy" for a society, I think you need to look at three different things.
1) The Christian religion, or more precisely, how people practice Christianity.
2) The Christian ideal. What Christ actually taught (which a lot of times is very different from what church figures have taught)
3) The alternatives.
For the Christian ideal, may I point you to the commandment that Jesus said was 2nd most important: Love your neighbor as yourself. It strikes me that this is a very good philosophy to base a society on, as long as "neighbor" is understood in very broad terms. You don't torture or go to war with someone you love, nor do you let them go hungry, or try to take advantage of them. Too bad this ideal is so rarely lived out.
For the alternatives, may I point you to communist Russia, which banned religion.
As for historical Christianity, I agree whole-heartedly that a lot of the things done in God's name were absolutely horrendous.
The article linked through my name on this comment is something I wrote over a year ago to address the common Christian claim that "without God, there can be no morals," or similar claims. That is, of course, ridiculous.
If we think back to the earliest forms of what we might call "life" in any way, shape, or form, nature gave those life forms just one moral imperitive: survive or die. That applied to individuals as well as to entire species. Over time, most species did eventually die off, although some had runs of hundreds of millions of years before becoming extinct. However, extinction never entirely eliminated life. In fact, life kept evolving into increasingly complex organisms until such time that human beings evolved a capability to communicate over time and space and with great complexity of its own such that humans began to have "culture." It is only with "culture" that concepts such as "ethics" or "morals" begin to have distinct values. But at their base is always nature's commandment to survive or die.
Thus, the entire purpose of "ethics" or "morals" in human culture is to add a tool to the toolkit which all humanity uses to survive or die. Christianity is merely one way of propagating a set of moral or ethical principles from one generation to the next, and it isn't particularly consistent or unique in the moral or ethical rules it does transmit. Once we gain an understanding of the value of Christianity as a transmitter of moral or ethical techings from one generation to the next, then Christianity can be easily replaced.
mtraven wrote:
I disagree, and not only do I reject causation, I deny correlation. Counter-examples: the health of the ruling dogma in North Korea is anti-correlated with the health of the members of the society. Khmer Rouge/Cambodia, ditto. Nazism/Germany. Saddam Hussein/Iraq. Pinochet/Chile. Slavery.
Seriously, do you comprehend the mindset implied by "l'état, c'est mois!", and "aprés mois, le deluge"? As long as right-thinking people are running things, it doesn't matter how badly it seems to be going. Shucks, that's just how things are.
There is no limit to the poison and stupidity and self-destructiveness of a ruling dogma, or how long this can go on for.... as long as there is no competing philosophy to challenge it, and with careful inoculation, not even that. Please, please, please read 1984.
Health of religion/dogma correlates with health of society and members thereof? I'd like a few examples. One, even.
Hmmm.. I swear those e-acutes were okay in the preview!
Just to add: Democracy may be inefficient, expensive, and bad at public ritual/pomp and circumstance. However, it is resistant (though not immune) to the problem of entrenched dogma.
To do acutes, use the HTML codes like "&ersand;eacute;". Otherise it confuses Windows codes with real codes...
mtraven wrote @15: I'm kind of surprised to see a post like this from an evolutionist. Surely the "healthiness" of a religion can't be measured by how much it violates our sensibilities, or how happy or unhappy it makes its practioners, but only in how well it succeeds in propagting itself and its human hosts. By that measure, Christianity is quite successful.
Old fallacy (conveniently known as the Genetic fallacy): merely because something is successful doesn't mean it is good (or bad). In fact since Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, it has been clear to many that to be a healthy civilisation, one has to go against ordinary biological fitnesses.
pointed to this by Digg.
Always wonder why such points are made against Christianity, in particular. I sometimes think its the new "in" thing to do in many circles. Don't see the same attack against the other faiths, why?
I also believe there is no such thing as a true atheist. Everyone has some god or gods. It could be God of the bible, Buddha , the spaghetti monster , money, science or themselves.
Violence is one of the nature of man. It has nothing to do with one's belief's. For example, the idea of a holy war dates very far back, and is shown in all belief systems
Basically to say evolution =no god is a belief system , not a truth. To say otherwise , is foolish and false.
Needless to say, I will find deep thought elsewhere.
Christianity was the target because I was debating Christians. I mention other ideologies in the post, which you might have seen had you actually read it. And it is a common claim by theists that everyone has to be a theist. It's balderdash. People having important things in their life isn't having a god. I think my kids matter more than anything else I can do - the only way that is having a god is for someone to make everything about gods, which it ain't. Get used to it.
I think you mean the naturalistic fallacy; the genetic fallacy is something quite different (in fact, the converse of the genetic fallacy appears to be the root of the argument people are offering here, which is that since religion is no good it couldn't possibly be involved in the origins of science).
The hard distinction between is and ought that makes the naturalistic fallacy a fallacy is at least partially undermined by evolutionary processes. These can magically introduce function and teleology into physical processes, so why can't it do the same with morality? That doesn't mean that we have to approve of everything that evolution comes up with, of course. But it strikes me that grounding morality in biology is a much more robust and interesting thing to do than to try to ground it in some abstract principle like Rawls does.
In other words, I don't believe there is any objective way to determine whether a society is "healthy" or "diseased", other than possibly in the evolutionary sense of survival and propagation. If the system you grew up in (liberal democracy) seems to you like it is objectively the best of all ways of ordering society, present or past, that should make you deeply suspicious of your own objectivity. For instance, right now liberal democracy has a serious challenger in authoritarian capitalist states like China. Is our system objectively better than theirs? I don't know, I certainly prefer it, but I don't pretend that my preference is going to automatically be shared by people in different places and cultures.
And when it comes to religion, making diagnoses of whether they are healthy or diseased really is dubious. There isn't any sort of metric to go on.
No, in that case I meant genetic fallacy. It's also a naturalistic fallacy (which isn't a fallacy as such, so much as Moore's assertion). I mean that many evolutionary ethics proponents think that because something has evolved it is therefore good or right or truthmaking. At best, it is merely fitter, that's all, and I don't think that equates to "healthy" (for societies).
In comment # 19, mtraven said,
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"The idea that Christianity contributed to the rise of science is hardly new with me. I don't see why you folks are so resistant to this idea. You can be as hardcore an atheist as possible and still acknowledge that your ideas have a history. If Christianity gave birth to science, that says exactly nothing about the truth of Christianity. I'm descended from fish, that doesn't mean I have gills.
Modern science arose in Europe due to many factors, but the Christian intellectual culture that combined Jewish monotheism and Greek rationality was certainly one of them, possibly the key one."
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It appears that you want readers to accept the claim, "Christianity gave birth to science," then you almost immediately want to stretch this to credit Christianity for thoughts deriving from Jewish monotheism and Greek rationality. I suggest that you greatly broaden your perspective to that of all humanity. Humans the world over had been thinking and reasoning quite clearly about the cosmos for thousands of years before any formal approach to science emerged in Europe. Some of those humans may have been Christians, but it was the human capacity for thought and reason that gave rise to science, not their Christianity.
Instrumental in the rise of structured intergenerational thought, and so a far more important factor in the rise of science, was the printing press. It is rather ironic, that the Christian Church at the time did not want Bibles to be mass produced - they did, in fact, kill many of those who translated the Bible into English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and German - and, so the church controlled access to printing presses.
Printing permitted data and argument to be passed down and disseminated. This allowed all of the thrust of an idea to be passed along with no obligation for allegiance to the idea as was expected in oral traditions. Whereas emotional attachments and obligations to accept them accompanied ideas orally transmitted from parent to child, widely distributed printed words bore no such encumbrances: the ideas contained therein could be impersonally analyzed, torn apart, scavenged for items of merit, or completely discarded as needs or situations warranted. And yet, since they were printed, the digestive process was not distructive and the ideas lingered on the page awaiting fresh appetites.
As far as possible the church obstructed this communication process. Human thought and reason, including the printing press, advanced science; Christianity did not.
If you are claiming that Christianity had an materially causal effect on science then I think you are mistaken. At the time that science was demonstrating its worth as an investigatory and explanatory tool, Christianity wanted nothing to do with science or anything else that disagreed with Biblical or church dictates.
I think Martin Luther represented well the church's position regarding the advancement of thought in statements such as these.
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"The damned whore, Reason."
"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."
"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
"Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason."
"To be a Christian, you must 'pluck out the eye of reason.'"
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Human reason as practiced by human beings the world over gave rise to science. If some of them professed Christianity - a minimum necessity to remain unburned and untortured at that time(I suspect that being tortured and burned could also curtail the advancement of science) - it was coincidence. That Christianity was socially coerced and so was present for any and all happenings in Medieval Europe, I suppose one could posit that Chrisitianity caused the plagues, famines and so forth, but apologists for Christianity only want to get the good stuff like science.
Human reason advanced despite the overarching influences of Christianity, not because of them.
Excellent comment, Russ
#10 Jeff, very interesting response to my "Sin does not exist." Your definition of sin is one steeped in enormous personal responsibility, tenacious memory, self-disappointment, and an unrelentingly tough self-unforgiveness. Perhaps, it keeps you on the straight and narrow, but I suspect your approach is probably gobbling up lots of mental/emotional energy that could be put to better use in improving yourself.
The Christian concept of sin is that you are thinking/doing something that God forbids. Prove God exists first before you can say sin exists. As for some of us not knowing the finer theological non-dressings applied to the Naked Emperor, try some other tact please as that one is threadbare.
The claim is that Christian culture gave rise to modern science, and that there is very likely to have been factors in Christianity that enabled this to happen. The fact that the Church opposed various scientific and other advances doesn't really impact this claim. Cultures are complex things; internal contradictions are the norm.
I really can't improve on the Penzias quotation I already posted as a concise illustration of one of the ways in which religion influenced the birth of science. Nobody here has responded to that yet.
Russ said,
If you are really so ignorant as to not know that Christianity borrowed heavily from those two sources, then you have no business in a discussion like this.
I don't really see why people have to be so partisan about this issue. I'm not a Christian, or very religious at all, so I have no particular ax to grind for my personal belief system. Not every issue should be framed as an atheists-vs-believers fight. The world is not black and white. Culture is complicated; history is complicated.
Nobody denies that science arose in a Christian/Islamic/Hellenic context. The big question is whether or not the particular features of Christianity were the causal factors. I suspect this is an inextricable mess - any factor a historian might identify is not a general factor but a historical particular, and so the "Christianness" of that factor is always something we can appeal to.
But for what it is worth, I think that the major contribution to science that has a particularly Christian flavour is that of nominalism, which arose in the context of theological debates over the nature of God. That made it possible to treat particular phenomena as interesting rather than annoying corruptions of the universal truth.
Monotheism had, so far as I can tell, nothing to do with it. Printing, capital trade and investment, the failure of the trade guilds and the consequent sharing of knowledge, the rise of the leisure classes, and so on, all had a lot to do with it. To the extent that Christendom permitted these social developments, it is the basis for science...
John Wilkins wrote:
I don't think it's an accident that the major changes in European society in the transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era are an accident. We see a number of major die-offs due to plagues which delivered an enormous amount of power into the hands the commoner, we see the Protestant Reformation, which, whatever its theological attributes, was happily adopted by many princes and kings because it utterly undermined the notion of a centralized theological authority. With a changed economic and social situation, it was like throwing gas on a fire. A systematic and *useful* approach to gathering and categorizing knowledge was needed.
I really can't think of any specific Christian doctrine, in either Protestantism or Catholicism, that one could say "And this is why science arose...", considering that in the Classical and Medieval Islamic worlds, we see some pretty clear antecedents.
This is rather like the claim "Christianity is responsible for the modern notion of freedom and civil liberties". It's a lovely thought, but not one that really that stands up to well on scrutiny.
mtraven has sparked a debate on this thread with the claim that Christianity is central to the development of Western civilization (including science), on the whole John Wilkins has said all that needs to be said in his last posting but I would like to add some specific detail to what he said and also contradict another claim made by mtraven. As John says the raise of modern science is in no way mono-casual and the causes are multitudinous and highly complex coming from general social developments, economic factors, trade, fashions in philosophy, technological demands and so on and so forth.
At the middle of any description of the raise of modern science one invariably finds an account of the evolution of astronomy this being the science that developed the most in the early modern period. To describe all of the factors that drove this evolution would require a substantial book (one that I am researching, if not yet actually writing!) but I will just name the three major ones here. The primary driving force was cartography and in fact the evolution of the new astronomy in the early modern period starts in Florence with the first Latin translation of Ptolemaeus' Geographia from the Arabic in 1409. Cartography continued to be a major driving force of this evolution up into the 19th century. Closely connected with this is the second motor of development, navigation. The development of astronomical navigation was in its turn driven by the spice trade and the immense profits to be made with the import of Asian spices into Europe. The third major driving force in the evolution of the new astronomy, and with certainty the biggest, was astrology. The drive toward a better astrology that in its turn was reliant on an improved astronomy was a result of the adoption in the Renaissance of astrological medicine or as it is know technically, iatro-mathematics. None of these causes has anything to do with Christianity, in fact the Church official rejected astrology because it conflicted with their doctrine of free will.
Without a doubt the most important single figure in the evolution of the new astronomy was Johannes Kepler and not as is usually claimed Nicolas Copernicus, which brings me to mtraven's second claim. He quotes Arno Penzias, pointing out that he is a physics' Nobel laureate; All this went along until we had a true believer and this was Kepler. Kepler, after all, was the Old Testament Christian. Right? He really believed in God the Lawgiver. And so he demanded that the same God who spoke in single words and created the universe is not going to have a universe with 35 epicycles in it.
Now first of all on the subject of the history of science the last person you want to quote is a working scientist, their opinion is no better and often worse than that of a carpenter or your hairdresser. Unfortunately most of the worst false statements about the history of science come from scientists who dabble in the history of their subject. Penzias is no exception his description of Kepler and his heuristic is wrong in every single detail. Calling a Lutheran theologian (and Kepler was one before Michael Maestlin thought he would be better off teaching maths in Graz) an Old Testament Christian is dubious to say the least. Also Kepler never set out to remove the epicycles that happened almost by accident. Kepler's heuristic is an almost impenetrable mixture of Christianity, Euclidian geometry, astrology, Pythagorean mysticism, Platonic philosophy and Renaissance music theory. Reducing it to the single element of Christianity is to commit an act of violence against serious historical research.
If you want to understand Kepler then read his Harmonice Mundi there is an excellent English translation so you don't have to deal with his excruciating Latin. You will unfortunately have to do a vast amount of secondary reading in order to understand what the hell he is talking about so you will probably, like most people, go on making false statements about the history of science garnered from the back of cornflake packets or passing Nobel laureates.
#30 Logicel: Just to be clear - the Christian concept of sin is not something I can relate to. I am, for most practical purposes, an atheist. However, I don't feel that my personal concept of sin (a "conscience", if you will) requires a tremendous amount of effort. I don't spend an inordinate amount of time agonizing over past mistakes, nor do I weigh all of them equally. But when the opportunity to make the same mistake presents itself, memory will raise a red flag and I'll withdraw - in the same way that one pulls their hand away from a hot stove. It is simply a learned response, and could easily have an evolutionary explanation. If that "pain" could somehow be removed from my memory, then I would make the same mistakes again.
The real issue of course, is how one knows what is morally wrong in the first place, and I have no real answers for that. It is a personal thing, learned from experience as well as being felt in the gut.
Jeff, Thanks for the further elaboration. It seems that your grasp of the situation is pragmatic and pretty much is the same way I function (or is the way I regard such functioning--who knows all the little bits that go into such functioning).
Of course, I don't use the word 'sin' to describe what I am doing. I call it stupidity or insensitivity or lack of knowledge or lacking the ability to learn quickly enough from previous mistakes or not being well enough to think clearly and decisively, etc. I call it my humanity, I suppose.
Jeff, And to be clearer, my comment #30 second paragraph did not apply specifically to you, but rather to the points raised by several other commenters.
Thony, fascinating perspective and info, thanks.
It appears to me that people can and do read whatever they like into religious texts. Christianity goes from being the bad guy to the good guy and back again on many moral issues throughout history. Doesn't it then act primarily (or at least in part) as a retarding force for change, because the institution can use it to maintain the status quo (which is in its best interests)?
Is fast change in society good or bad? A fast bad change can result in societal collapse, which is very costly. Given that an idea which results in change for the better should have a higher "fitness" than a destructive idea, it would be possible to argue that a religious society provides the stability necessary for good ideas to flourish, whilst preventing bad ideas from taking hold. Or perhaps this effect is more destructive to the good ideas than the benefit of stability is worth. I don't know, but it seems to be something that could be addressed with science rather than philosophy!
Morality is something that evolved to let us work together, and many mammals including us appear to get a good feeling out of being moral. Naturally, we now want to extend this to defining society in a way that works well for the individual, and the society. I wrote about morality in the context of vegetarianism, assuming that we weren't going to get either individuals or society to change if they became less competitive, because competition is happening all the time, and weak societies are crushed in the long run. The only "health" of society that can work is its fitness, but that is defined in terms of its external competitiveness and its internal stability from individuals trying to shape society into something good for them. Perhaps this concept could be applied to John's "healthy society"?
In this sense, whether religion is bad or not for society depends on whether society would be more competitive and more stable without it. John's points above indicate ways in which it makes society less stable, but so far no a-religious society has solved the stability problem (or if they have, time hasn't proven them!)