Double Standards in History of Science?

[Polymath257]

This is a bit of an overstatement. Ghazahli's 'Incoherence of the philosophers' is often given a lot of credit for reversing the Islamic attitude to science (in Cosmos, Neil Tyson practically blames Ghazali for single handedly precipitating the ending of the Golden Age), but it actually led to an increase in philosophical output.

But a huge decrease in the volume of mathematical and scientific output. If anything astronomy was picked up by the Mongol invaders (Ulug Beg). Tyson is far from being the only one pointing to Al-Ghazali as a big influence in the decline of Islamic learning. Toby Huff takes a very similar position and with a lot more evidence. That said, the Mongol destruction of the Bayt Al-Hikma was certainly another factor.

We see these repressive attitudes frequently at times of threat and instability when there is a strong drive for ideological conformity.

Whether this is post-reformation, 5th C Christianity with disputes over monophysitism/Arianism/etc. combined with the decline of the Western Roman Empire, and plague and Wars with Persia affecting the Eastern part. Also in the Islamic Empire(s) in the period that included in the Mongol invasions.

This seems to be a pretty common future of human group dynamics.

Unfortunately, I tend to agree here.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Yes, by the 16th and 17th centuries, Christianity had started turning against science. This is especially true for Catholicism at that time (Protestants were more bothered by Darwin than Galileo or Newton, which was much later).

But that is a far cry from saying that Christianity was *always* against science. In fact, the driver of the translation movement from Arabic to Latin starting in the 11th century was the church. One of the monks who became pope was involved in these translations and wrote treatises on the astrolabe (one of the more useful scientific instruments at the time). The attempts to reconcile the 'new' teachings from Aristotle lead to a considerable amount of thinking about things like inertia, movement, the concept of uniform velocity, the concept of uniform acceleration, etc. ALL of this was done under the auspices of the church or the church-run universities.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't mean that Christianity opposes religion every opportunity, or that . I mean that if science is being assaulted in the West, guess who's behind it?

I encounter people telling me how untrustworthy science and scientists are almost every time I visit discussion boards like this one. Guess what they have in common.

One key idea in medieval Christianity that was quite different than in medieval Islam was the idea that there *could be* or *are* natural laws that can be understood by humans. While this seems trivial today, it was a huge difference between the cultures in the 11th century.

That idea doesn't come from Christianity, and I don't recall seeing it in the Christian Bible. Here's an excerpt from a presentation I did two years ago:

Thales to Galileo: rational skeptical philosophy to empirical science


In the West, rational skepticism was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosophers, whose skepticism about the claims that natural events were punishments from capricious gods led to free speculation about reality. Thales (624 BC - 546 BC) suggested that everything was a form of water, which was the only substance he knew of capable of existing as solid, liquid and gas. What is significant was his willingness to try to explain the workings of nature without invoking the supernatural or appealing to the ancients and their dicta. The more profound implication was that man might be capable of understanding nature, which might operate according to comprehensible rules that he might discover.

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

Between the ancient rational skeptic philosophers and the scientific skeptics of modernity came the faith based speculations of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages - the Age of Faith - which was also sterile for lack of its lack of skepticism and empiricism. They applied pure reason to the articles of their faith, which led to such irrelevancies as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and how many different kinds of angels there were.

Thus we see that truth is not a function of reason alone, but of reason applied to experience, which in the sciences is usually called observation, experimentation, data collection, hypothesis testing, and the like.

 

[Augustus]

Between the ancient rational skeptic philosophers and the scientific skeptics of modernity came the faith based speculations of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages - the Age of Faith - which was also sterile for lack of its lack of skepticism and empiricism. They applied pure reason to the articles of their faith, which led to such irrelevancies as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and how many different kinds of angels there were.

The idea that the Middle Ages represented this regressive 'sterile' phase is not really true though. Nor is the idea that it lacked scepticism, notwithstanding that this may have been true in some circumstances.

This was the period when Western natural philosophy moved beyond an Aristotolean view of nature, adopted a more mathematical approach to physics (see for example the Oxford calculators) and basically set the foundations for later, more celebrated, advances (or even preempted them only to be denied credit).

Do you see the whole period as generally regressive, or were you only referring to one particular aspect of it?

 

[siti]

I am quite well aware (as a scientist) of the opposition to various fields of science from many fundamentalist religious groups (things like global warming, evolution etc.) . In this regard, I have read countless popular accounts of science that starts with the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic church. While tensions between science and religion in European history is undoubtedly true, it does seem that the account is biased against religion due to selective memory. Scientists had been, and continue to be persecuted whenever their finding go against the ideology prevalent in the society, no matter if its secular, religious or atheistic. For example, Lavoisier, the father of chemistry was executed by the French revolutionaries who created their state in the name of Enlightenment and Reason and the academy of science in France was banned as an organization.
Antoine Lavoisier - Wikipedia
Now, I as a chemist, know the contributions and the life of Lavoisier, who founded the field of modern chemistry with his seminal text, the elements of chemistry, yet his death and the persecution of scientists in the hands of an anti-religious atheistic regime, a dark product of the European enlightenment, has been largely forgotten in the popular discourse of science vs religion. Can it truly be said that religious worldview based political systems have been more hostile to science than non-religious worldview based political systems? If not, why do popular science books single out the cases where religious views persecuted science and forget the cases when secular and atheistic worldviews did the same (and often worse)?

By the way...did you know before this thread that Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry and the discoverer of the law of mass conservation, was executed by the French Revolutionary state?

Yes - I did know that - but then I am a chemist by profession and an amateur student of the history of chemistry.

Anyway, I think you have mis-characterized this particular period of French history, known as la Terreur - it was not anti-religious per se so much as anti-Roman Catholic and anti-establishment. In fact, less than a month after Lavoisier's execution France celebrated the "Festival of the Supreme Being" that was the inauguration of a new National religion Culte de l'Être suprême (Cult of the Supreme Being) - an ostensibly "Deist" religion with a specific "rational" devotion to a personal Divine Law-giver, belief in the immortal soul, a higher "moral code" and the summary justice that this Divine authority underscored - and all the authority to interpret and apply this morality and justice was vested in Robespierre - a religiously motivated tyrant. However, as others have already pointed out, it was neither for his science or his religious beliefs that Lavoisier was executed. Lavoisier had the twin distinctions of being of noble extraction and being a tax collector (big style) that counted against him in the revolution much more than his science or religion. So in terms of the OP - the reasons Lavoisier's execution is not relevant to the discussion of science vs religion is that it had nothing to do with his science or religion and everything to do with his privileged status in French society.

 

[Polymath257]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't mean that Christianity opposes religion every opportunity, or that . I mean that if science is being assaulted in the West, guess who's behind it?

The conservatives?

 

[Polymath257]

The idea that the Middle Ages represented this regressive 'sterile' phase is not really true though. Nor is the idea that it lacked scepticism, notwithstanding that this may have been true in some circumstances.

This was the period when Western natural philosophy moved beyond an Aristotolean view of nature, adopted a more mathematical approach to physics (see for example the Oxford calculators) and basically set the foundations for later, more celebrated, advances (or even preempted them only to be denied credit).

Do you see the whole period as generally regressive, or were you only referring to one particular aspect of it?

Well, the period up to the translation movement was not particularly dynamic on the science front. Certainly the court of Charlemagne made some advances in learning, but not so much in math or science, especially compared to the Arabic/Islamic mathematics of the time. On the technological front, the forge, the waterwheel, and a new type of harness for horses were major advances, though.

Once the ideas of Aristotle were re-introduced into Europe, there was a wonderful fermentation of ideas, though. The contradictions and in accuracies in Aristotelian thinking were discussed freely. The question, for example, of why an arrow continues to move forward after being released from the bow is one that is difficult from an Aristotelian position. This lead to ideas about inertia and motion that were, at the least, precursors to Galileo. Thomas Bradwardine, while not getting a correct dynamic law, realized that Aristotle's ideas for velocity and force were contradictory and attempted to resolve those contradictions. Others were able to resolve the difficulties in describing uniformly accelerated motion. Questions of how to 'fix' the Ptolemaic system to 'save appearances' (i.e, to match observations) were widely discussed.

So, while it is true that there is nothing specifically in Christianity that says that the universe should be understandable by humans, that notion was widely held and argued for by those in the Christian church as a matter of faith during the middle ages in Europe. In contrast, the viewpoint in Islam was that the mere existence of natural laws impinged on the power of God to do whatever he wanted. Both cultures had access (eventually) to the works of the Ancient Greeks, but one culture rejected the possibility of natural laws while the other embraces that notion. Guess which one had a scientific revolution?

Now, fully empirical approach to natural laws only came later. While there were a few people who saw experimentation and observation as important, this was NOT the main viewpoint even among those interested in natural laws. Illusions were seen as negating the reliability of the senses, for example. But this attitude was universal and not specifically a problem in Christian Europe.

 

[David T]

I am quite well aware (as a scientist) of the opposition to various fields of science from many fundamentalist religious groups (things like global warming, evolution etc.) . In this regard, I have read countless popular accounts of science that starts with the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic church. While tensions between science and religion in European history is undoubtedly true, it does seem that the account is biased against religion due to selective memory. Scientists had been, and continue to be persecuted whenever their finding go against the ideology prevalent in the society, no matter if its secular, religious or atheistic. For example, Lavoisier, the father of chemistry was executed by the French revolutionaries who created their state in the name of Enlightenment and Reason and the academy of science in France was banned as an organization.
Antoine Lavoisier - Wikipedia
Now, I as a chemist, know the contributions and the life of Lavoisier, who founded the field of modern chemistry with his seminal text, the elements of chemistry, yet his death and the persecution of scientists in the hands of an anti-religious atheistic regime, a dark product of the European enlightenment, has been largely forgotten in the popular discourse of science vs religion. Can it truly be said that religious worldview based political systems have been more hostile to science than non-religious worldview based political systems? If not, why do popular science books single out the cases where religious views persecuted science and forget the cases when secular and atheistic worldviews did the same (and often worse)?

One of deep dangers in culture. Is that we swing either hyper reductively "scientifically" or "religiously". Ideally science and religion are understood as manifesting from the cranium into external expressions culturally. Both tend to get extremist in that. Very very little on this site this in religion and science connects the individual to nature authoritatively. I have said to understand God you must understand nature, to understand nature you must understand God. That's good science, that's good religion, when understood. On the one hand science generally and certain firlds more than others renders an impression of nature as car engine. Thats valid only in context to an extremely limited context. Contextualizarion is a weakness of science narratively as much as it is a weakness in cultural religion..

I rather would say Christianity became "enemy of science" when they discarded the mytho-cosmological way of interpreting the Creation Story where several deities resembled "the works of creation". In this way the original and real cosmological/scientifical knowledge of the creation became dogmatic and the cosmological insights were lost and abandoned.

Which at its root is self deluding reductionism in application to the bible. So if emperically we can see that reductionism is so nonsensical why is it paraded around as being some kind of fantastic scientific philosophy? If emperically reductionism is an abject and complete failure in religion in reading it's own book whoch it clearly is incapable of how much more self deluded is reductionism in application to nature? Nature as a car engine is religious bs dressed up in scientific jargon self deluding itself just like the dimwits in religion.

 

[David T]

The question, for example, of why an arrow continues to move forward after being released from the bow is one that is difficult from an Aristotelian position

From a virtuality reality view Where we are watching nature thur a virtual movie animation called mathmatics it's easy!!! You are staring at a photograph believing it's divine!!! Reductive fantasy might as well talk about the reductive literal resurrection of Jesus cuz the bible tells me so. Your reductive southern Baptist beliefs dressed in secular drag is hilareous. Go to college did we? Who started the modern univerities? Bad science bad philosophy bad religion.

 

[Polymath257]

From a virtuality reality view Where we are watching nature thur a virtual movie animation called mathmatics it's easy!!! You are staring at a photograph believing it's divine!!! Reductive fantasy might as well talk about the reductive literal resurrection of Jesus cuz the bible tells me so. Your reductive southern Baptist beliefs dressed in secular drag is hilareous. Go to college did we? Who started the modern univerities? Bad science bad philosophy bad religion.

I would suggest that you don't understand my point of view at all. I am not a southern baptist, nor even a Christian. My tendencies are towards strong atheism to ignosticism (no, not agnosticism, although I have a bit of that also). Modern universities were started as an outgrowth of the cathedral schools.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The conservatives?

Good point. I should have referred to evolutionary science rather than science.

You're probably referring to anthropogenic climate change denial, which though not religious, is a also faith-based position, one obviously more dangerous than evolution denial.

 

[David T]

I would suggest that you don't understand my point of view at all. I am not a southern baptist, nor even a Christian. My tendencies are towards strong atheism to ignosticism (no, not agnosticism, although I have a bit of that also). Modern universities were started as an outgrowth of the cathedral schools.

Your tendencies is towards strong reductionism or southern Baptist in religious drag it you care. I actually wasn't being literal you are a southern Baptist in it's fantasy reductive beliefs you have the same fantAsy just " reductive science" is all nothing more than that.

 

[ThePainefulTruth]

I am quite well aware (as a scientist) of the opposition to various fields of science from many fundamentalist religious groups (things like global warming, evolution etc.) . In this regard, I have read countless popular accounts of science that starts with the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic church. While tensions between science and religion in European history is undoubtedly true, it does seem that the account is biased against religion due to selective memory. Scientists had been, and continue to be persecuted whenever their finding go against the ideology prevalent in the society, no matter if its secular, religious or atheistic. For example, Lavoisier, the father of chemistry was executed by the French revolutionaries who created their state in the name of Enlightenment and Reason and the academy of science in France was banned as an organization.
Antoine Lavoisier - Wikipedia
Now, I as a chemist, know the contributions and the life of Lavoisier, who founded the field of modern chemistry with his seminal text, the elements of chemistry, yet his death and the persecution of scientists in the hands of an anti-religious atheistic regime, a dark product of the European enlightenment, has been largely forgotten in the popular discourse of science vs religion. Can it truly be said that religious worldview based political systems have been more hostile to science than non-religious worldview based political systems? If not, why do popular science books single out the cases where religious views persecuted science and forget the cases when secular and atheistic worldviews did the same (and often worse)?

As a fellow scientist (geology), and a freethinking agnostic-deist, I understand that individuals of any group are not above temptation (grants?) and corruption (blackmail?). And just as the members of the Christian faith persecuted Galileo and Copernicus, members of the socialist faith have, through atheocratic government, bribed and blackmailed global warming "scientists".

An atheocracy, hmm...maybe that's why socialist atheocrats are so forgiving of Muslim theocrats.

 

[sayak83]

Well, the period up to the translation movement was not particularly dynamic on the science front. Certainly the court of Charlemagne made some advances in learning, but not so much in math or science, especially compared to the Arabic/Islamic mathematics of the time. On the technological front, the forge, the waterwheel, and a new type of harness for horses were major advances, though.

Once the ideas of Aristotle were re-introduced into Europe, there was a wonderful fermentation of ideas, though. The contradictions and in accuracies in Aristotelian thinking were discussed freely. The question, for example, of why an arrow continues to move forward after being released from the bow is one that is difficult from an Aristotelian position. This lead to ideas about inertia and motion that were, at the least, precursors to Galileo. Thomas Bradwardine, while not getting a correct dynamic law, realized that Aristotle's ideas for velocity and force were contradictory and attempted to resolve those contradictions. Others were able to resolve the difficulties in describing uniformly accelerated motion. Questions of how to 'fix' the Ptolemaic system to 'save appearances' (i.e, to match observations) were widely discussed.

So, while it is true that there is nothing specifically in Christianity that says that the universe should be understandable by humans, that notion was widely held and argued for by those in the Christian church as a matter of faith during the middle ages in Europe. In contrast, the viewpoint in Islam was that the mere existence of natural laws impinged on the power of God to do whatever he wanted. Both cultures had access (eventually) to the works of the Ancient Greeks, but one culture rejected the possibility of natural laws while the other embraces that notion. Guess which one had a scientific revolution?

Now, fully empirical approach to natural laws only came later. While there were a few people who saw experimentation and observation as important, this was NOT the main viewpoint even among those interested in natural laws. Illusions were seen as negating the reliability of the senses, for example. But this attitude was universal and not specifically a problem in Christian Europe.

I like your post. But I am wary of after-the-fact reasons for a one-of event like the scientific revolution. Unlike metal working or domestication of plants and animals, the scientific revolution happened once coupled with lots of other things. It may be said that any large scale colonization effort by a civilization (Greeks, Carthaginians, Vikings, Polynesians and Western Europeans) leads to a series of rapid and innovative changes in a society with long term consequences. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis out if colonization of Mars ever becomes a thing.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

I am quite well aware (as a scientist) of the opposition to various fields of science from many fundamentalist religious groups (things like global warming, evolution etc.) . In this regard, I have read countless popular accounts of science that starts with the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic church. While tensions between science and religion in European history is undoubtedly true, it does seem that the account is biased against religion due to selective memory. Scientists had been, and continue to be persecuted whenever their finding go against the ideology prevalent in the society, no matter if its secular, religious or atheistic. For example, Lavoisier, the father of chemistry was executed by the French revolutionaries who created their state in the name of Enlightenment and Reason and the academy of science in France was banned as an organization.
Antoine Lavoisier - Wikipedia
Now, I as a chemist, know the contributions and the life of Lavoisier, who founded the field of modern chemistry with his seminal text, the elements of chemistry, yet his death and the persecution of scientists in the hands of an anti-religious atheistic regime, a dark product of the European enlightenment, has been largely forgotten in the popular discourse of science vs religion. Can it truly be said that religious worldview based political systems have been more hostile to science than non-religious worldview based political systems? If not, why do popular science books single out the cases where religious views persecuted science and forget the cases when secular and atheistic worldviews did the same (and often worse)?

Politics as a religion is still a religion.

 

[Polymath257]

I like your post. But I am wary of after-the-fact reasons for a one-of event like the scientific revolution. Unlike metal working or domestication of plants and animals, the scientific revolution happened once coupled with lots of other things. It may be said that any large scale colonization effort by a civilization (Greeks, Carthaginians, Vikings, Polynesians and Western Europeans) leads to a series of rapid and innovative changes in a society with long term consequences. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis out if colonization of Mars ever becomes a thing.

I agree. There was a whole constellation of events that needed to happen for the scientific revolution to occur. The mere fact that so many societies *seem* to have come close, but didn't quite do it suggests that it isn't an easy step to make. That said, the *belief* that it is possible for humans to understand the universe around us seems to be fundamental to attempt to do the hard work involved in empirical science.

And yes, introduction to a new environment often leads to many changes. This, by the way, also happens in evolution, where a small founding population going into a new environment can often lead to an upsurge in speciation and the development of novel organisms. So, while cultural evolution seems to be more Lamarckian while genetic evolution seems more Darwinian, there are a LOT of similarities in the overall structures that develop.

 

[Polymath257]

Good point. I should have referred to evolutionary science rather than science.

You're probably referring to anthropogenic climate change denial, which though not religious, is a also faith-based position, one obviously more dangerous than evolution denial.

And the point is that 'religion' is only one of the many faith-based activities people engage in. Politics is another big one. Both can make it uncomfortable for scientists whose conclusions disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy.

And, it should be pointed out, anti-scientific thinking isn't unique to the political/religious right. The anti-vaccination crowd and the crystal power/pyramid power crowds tend to be on the left politically, but are just as much anti-science as the climate change 'skeptics'. Whether their denial is as damaging is a different question.

 

[David M]

So in terms of the OP - the reasons Lavoisier's execution is not relevant to the discussion of science vs religion is that it had nothing to do with his science or religion and everything to do with his privileged status in French society.

I'd fully agree with that. Lavosier's arrest had nothing to do with his science. He was an aristocrat and (by association) a tax collector. Two things that would have put his life in peril even if he had never done any science.