An Armistice in the War against the War between Science and Faith
Posted on 24 July 2010
From an ongoing conversation:
Dear Mr. EvD,
As promised, since you did not answer, or even address, the point I asked of you, I cannot bring myself to continue the discussion any longer.
You make statements about history (such as that the medieval Christians thought the world flat — Dante included?) that betray an ignorance of the subject matter.
I asked you for specifics, to name the Papal Bull showing the hostility of the Church to the progress in the Dark Ages, and listed the inventions: you declined to answer.
I asked you if you were familiar with the writings of the founders of science, whom I listed by name, all medieval Christians. You declined to answer.
(Instead, you quoted a bull asking for the spread of the Christian faith, and chose to represent the nightmarish empire of the Aztecs as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of superstitious genocidal brutality. Whatever one’s opinion of the spread of the Christian faith, it has no bearing on the topic at hand.)
You proposed that Christianity is anti-Enlightenment and that the Enlightenment is Anti-Christian. I replied by distinguishing between the French and the Anglo-American Enlightenment, and offered that the latter was not Anti-Christian, as proof whereof, I offers quotes by the Founding Fathers.
My argument was that their opinion represented the Enlightenment opinion, and the evidence is that the Enlightenment opinion is not Anti-Christian.
I did not offer these quotes as proof of the subject matter thereof, merely to establish what the Enlightenment opinion was. The Enlightenment was decidedly pro-Christian, so much so that at least one Founding Father, a central figure of the Enlightenment, says that the Christian religion is paramount for good government.
Now, at that point, your choices to save your argument were to distinguish the cases or define your terms. You have said that the Anglo-American Enlightenment was not the Enlightenment you meant. You could have said that these men were Enlightenment thinkers on the topics of government and economics, but where benighted on the topic of religion. You could have said that they wished to be anti-Christian but were afraid to do so. All I asked you to do was to answer the question.
What you chose instead to do was to argue with the figure who is arguably the best and ablest ruler the human race has ever produced, George Washington, and you chose to argue with him in the particular topic of his particular expertise, how to govern. As well argue with Einstein about Relativity.
Your method was to quote the Laws of Deuteronomy. You do not seem to know what the men of the Enlightenment thought of the theological status of the laws of Deuteronomy. You do not seem to know the position of the Church Fathers on that question, or St. Paul.
Your proffer of allegedly Anti-Christian quotes from the Founding Fathers reveal only quotes showing that the Founders were disestablishmentarians: that is, they wished for the sake of the flourishing freedom of religion, for religion to be not interfered with by the Federal government. The Enlightenment opinion was that the establishment of religion was one of the causes of faction that led to the insecurity of the Union (see the Federalist Papers #10).
You may perhaps be of the opinion that it is in the best interests of the Christian religion to be that state religion, and enforced by law. I was of that opinion when I was an atheist. However interesting this may be, it is not on our current topic. The current topic is the Enlightenment, and the opinion of the Enlightenment is that it is in the best interests of the Christian religion to be disestablished and free from government support or interference. (As an aside, the current history of the world seems to support the Enlightenment opinion. In America, Christianity is thriving; in England, where Anglicanism is established at law, Christianity perishes.)
You do not seem to know the facts of history. You express surprise, for example, that I mention the date when the oar came in use rather than the pole. You seem to think Medieval Christians thought the world was flat, as if they were not the people who carefully preserved the writings of the ancient astronomers and mathematicians.
You dismissed my question as a straw man argument, and changed the subject. This is not allowed by the rules of the game called logic. You are like a player who moved a pawn backward in chess: whatever game you are playing, it is not one I care to play.
Ironically, you then played the straw man game with me, pretending that we were arguing about whether the US Constitution mentions Christ by name. What we were arguing about was whether Christianity is anti-Enlightenment and the Enlightenment is Anti-Christian. (I am, by the way, a lawyer who has indeed studied Constitutional Law. I am familiar with the document and the surrounding documents.)
The only response from you I regard as legitimate was your counter example of the advances of the pagans. This is a good point: Aristotle and Ptolemy and so on made real contributions to natural philosophy. I must distinguish the cases and partly retract my statement: your original comment was not about natural philosophy, the plaything of the learned men of antiquity, from which no improvement resulted and no science came, but about the progress of the Enlightenment, which includes scientific progress. The scientific progress of the men I listed as the fathers of science was indeed inspired by the pagans and, where something was useful on which to built, they built on it. As I said in my post, Christianity is as much Greek as it is Jewish. My point is that the discoveries you mention languished, as useless as the Chinese discovery of gunpowder, until the Christian world view discovered their uses.
If you will not answer my questions, I will not answer yours. If you change the subject, I will allow the matter to drop.
Please do not interpret this as a slight against you or you skills as a debater. I have limited time for such amusements, despite my enjoyment of them, but time does not permit me to engage a man who will not engage me. Life is too short for me to spend my time chasing you around the field of battle as you flee my questions.
The demand for empirical proof of the Christian religion is one I can satisfy: I am an eyewitness. Would you use the same standard of proof a court of law uses for determining the guilt or innocence of a man accused of murder as you would in the case for or against the Christian religion? Would you allow written testimony of other eyewitnesses long dead?
Would you allow a philosophical argument as a type of proof: namely that the Christian account of the world makes better sense and has more explanatory power than the pagan or atheist account, which has strange lacunae and even stranger ad hoc explanations?
I am not offering to present such a proof (indeed, I am bowing out of the conversation, until and unless you answer the one question I said was the question without an answer to which I would not continue) I am merely asking what your standard of evidence is. Are you asking for empirical evidence concerning a metaphysical proposition?
I asked you to name the modern Cyrils to whom you refer, that is, a Christian pastor or priest who has his followers to riot and to flay his political rivals alive with sharpened clamshells or rooftiles. Your comment that Jerry Falwell is like Cyril betrays your unwillingness to answer a serious question. You did not answer, but instead pretended that the question was illegitimate. For shame.
If you are here for a serious debate, then debate. Answer the questions asked and provide the proof demanded. If you are here merely to utter unserious and empty-headed rhetoric, be my guest, but expect unserious reply, or no reply.
Let me offer you a bit of advice. If the Christian religion is false, that fact should suffice to condemn it. There is no need to invent flimsy slanders against a position that can be proven false with non-flimsy proofs. There is no need to shoot blanks if you have ammo.
On your quest for ammo — by which I mean I encourage you to familiarize yourself with your defense’s case before you try to argue the prosecution case at trial — I suggest you make a strong attempt to discover what actually happened in history and what the Church actually preaches and teaches.
If you approach a learned Christian, a doctor of the law and a scholar of the classics, and someone familiar with theology and philosophy but your only argument is to accuse him of believing things neither he nor any other nonheretical Christian believes (quick — give me one example of a Christian stoning, from any period in history, including during the Spanish Inquisition — what? Not one?) you will find your persuasive power very limited.
What I discovered, when I was an atheist, in my search for ammo to use against my hated enemies, the Christians, is that most of what I thought they believe and preach was not what they believe and preach. Most of the history, such as the Protestant invention of Capitalism or the Christian burning of Pagan books in the Dark Ages, never happened.
Those ideas are propaganda invented during the wars between Protestant and Catholic Kings, and each side invented the most scurrilous lies to tell about the other, including gross exaggerations of their enormities, and French Enlightenment writers like the Marquis de Sade, and writers inspired by the French Enlightenment, such as Marx, took the propaganda of both sides, thought it was serious and factual, and used it to condemn Christians in general.
A little research would help your case. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, without moving from your chair, you can look up the Papal Bulls and Church documents condemning astronomy (you will find not a single one) and look up the documents and edicts condemning astrology (you will find many). You will even find out where the oldest astronomical observatory still in use is. (Hint: It is the Vatican observatory).
Then you will not make easily disprovable statements of no persuasive power, such as your quip that the Christian religion is (or is like) the support of astrology over astronomy.
Once you discover what the case the opposition maintains actually is, and what the facts actually are, then these sophomoric straw man arguments will stop, and a sober argument will begin.
I’ve followed your apologetics and logic throughout this thread with great interest. Thank you for laying out the facts so very clearly. As the person who brought Francis Shaeffer to Tom Simon’s attention, I salute you.
“Your method was to quote the Laws of Deuteronomy.”
As Mark Shea says, scratch an atheist, get a fundamentalist.
I’m not sure I would call this an armistice; your opponent appears to have retired, or as they say in technical military lingo, ‘vamoosed the ranch’.
No, not at all. he has not expressed a desire to discontinue the conversation: I have. I am the vamooser here, not he.
I’m glad you’re on our side.
Protestant invention of Capitalism
Well, it’s unclear weather Adam Smith was a deist or christain. Ricardo was protestant, I believe.
Whether Smith and Ricardo were Protestants or not scarcely affects the question. Capitalism is not an invention; it is simply the state that markets and economies naturally tend to take when people depend for their living on large-scale industries financed by joint-stock companies. The joint-stock companies go back at least to the 14th century; in fact, one early French company, chartered to build dams and water-powered mills in the southwest of France, survives to this day as a component of a large French hydroelectric concern — the oldest business corporation on earth. You will scarcely argue, I hope, that the 14th-century French were Protestants?
while joint stock companies and banking are esential components of Captialism, they are not it, like radio is to television.
I would also argue that the ideas of supply and demand, the “invisble hand”, enlightened self interest etc, consitute if not an invention, then an important theoretical breakthough that made true capitalism possible. And Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus were not Catholic.
On the contrary: the economic system now known as capitalism already existed when Smith and Ricardo began to describe it and investigate its workings. They were not Utopians proposing a new organization of society, you know; they were empirical philosophers trying to understand things already in existence.
The word ‘capitalism’, however, seems to have been invented by Marx and Engels, in a rather transparent attempt to treat market economies as merely a passing fad in the eternal march of the Hegelian dialectic. They pretended that the early capitalists had invented the laws of economics, which could therefore be repealed at will: in other words, they had the same view of Smith and Ricardo that I have declared against here. Many persons, even fervent non-Marxists, have been taken in by this rhetorical subterfuge. It would appear that you have been somewhat influenced by it yourself.
They were not Utopians proposing a new organization of society, you know; they were empirical philosophers trying to understand things already in existence.
Is that not important? Is that not what Newton, Einstien, and Maxwell did?
It would appear that you have been somewhat influenced by it yourself.
I must disagree. I said Smith’s work was “an important theorectical breakthrough”. I was borrowing Mr. Wright’s phrasing “the invention of capitalism”. I agree that Smith, et al, gave theoretical understanding of real phenomenon.
I was speaking of the invention of the system of market institutions, private ownership, joint stock companies and fractional banking and so on, when I mention the ‘invention of Capitalism’ — I was not speaking of the invention of economics, which is the science describing the laws of the market place.
Adam Smith invented economics, a science. The French and Italians in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries invented the legal institutions of capital formation that are characteristic of the free market system (somewhat misleadingly) labeled ‘Capitalism’.
Max Weber’s theory is the one I was arguing against. His theory was that the Protestant theology led to an uncertainty and panic regarding salvation, and that in order to prove themselves saved, the English and Dutch Protestants rushed out and invented the Puritan work ethic, from which the institutions and mind-set of modern capitalism sprang. Weber passed into the general opinion as a truism that Protestant peoples (Germans, English) are productive and hard-working, whereas Catholic peoples (French, Spanish, Austrians) are lazy and languid, due to the festive or sinister nature of their religion. It was one of those truisms that does not really withstand close investigation.
The status or stature of Adam Smith is not what my comment was about, and your comment about Adam Smith, which I readily grant (Smith was not a Catholic) does not have any direct application to the argument about Weber.
Did Weber say the Mediterranean countries were lazy? I thought he was arguing that there is a paradox at the heart of Protestantism, particularly the Lutheran and Calvinist sects; namely that it is under the spell of determinism and predestination (i.e., God has already decided who will go to heaven) that people are compelled to undertake actions that ought to have no logical relationship to their salvation (re-investment of capital and a ceaseless drive to work). The sociological/philosophical point (I’m sure it doesn’t stand up to rigorous historical analysis) is that when people accept that the decision on their future has been taken, they are provoked into a seemingly paradoxical desire to look for portents (‘God must have chosen me because I am by nature a hard worker’ etc) rather than to apathetically accept this fate. Presumably he would say of the trade, finance, and banking of fifteenth century Venice (for example) that this is different insofar as the profits were used to build huge palaces, churches, patronise the arts and so on rather than to re-invest in further profit generating activities. Hence, his starting point is that, yes, there was a system of commerce and finance operating at this time, but it is only when predestination enters the field that people begin to behave like capitalists (using profit to generate further revenue). Since Catholicism saw work as a punishment for the fall, it was undertaken as a grim inevitability – the wealthy were distinguished by the fact that the did not work. Under Calvinism, where work is a sign of favourable predestination, this is reversed – now it is the idle unemployed who are tarred with the brush of sin (think of how harshly capitalism condemns those who are on welfare). The wealthy, by way of contrast, are those who work obsessively – hence the figure of the captain of industry who works tirelessly into his 80s even though he could quite comfortably have retired at 30. I’m not saying this is a watertight theory, but Weber was just trying to explain why it was that at a certain moment (and particularly in the protestant society he lived in) there was this tendency toward obsessive work and re-investment that could not be explained on the basis of need
I would not disagree. But my point here is that what Weber actually said and the “meme” that passed into the common wisdom are two different things.
The simple version that remained in the public mind, and which I absorbed when I was young, led to an ahistorical version of the origins (and the age) of the free market system: it was caused by Protestant ‘salvation panic’ (rather than by, for example, laws and customs leading to the expansion of an international factional banking system that really started with the Knights Templar).
Fair enough – it’s actually pretty amazing to read of some of the financial instruments the Venetian wool traders had developed in the Middle Ages. Apparently their main bank (Bank of Lombard) was brought down by an English king (I forget which one) defaulting on his debt! They had loaned him what would probably be millions in today’s currency to fight the French, and he simply refused to give it back. A lesson our governments failed to heed in the recent financial crisis – states have armies and therefore trump banks in the hierarchy of powers
I thought it was generally the Florentines who got the blame for the dissemination of banking as a going concern, and I don’t think they were Protestants at the time
(And now all the economists are groaning at my ignorance).
Hi, I’m not sure if EvD is getting his wires crossed, but possibly he was referring to the well-known Papal bull of Gregory XVI. I will just give the lines Wikipedia offer (not exactly a scholarly resource, I know, but it offers the basics):
“Pope Gregory and Cardinal Lambruschini opposed basic technological innovations such as gas lighting and railways, believing that they would promote commerce and increase the power of the bourgeoisie, leading to demands for liberal reforms which would undermine the monarchical power of the Pope over central Italy. Gregory in fact banned railways in the Papal States, calling them chemins d’enfer (literally “ways of hell,” a play on the French for railroad, chemin de fer, literally “iron road”).”
Neither Gregory XVI nor his successors officially repudiated that one (rather like when obscure old laws survive in European legislature – they never get enforced so noone bothers repealing them). However, one COULD say, at a stretch, that this type of evidence can blur the consistency of the Catholic case for tradition. After all, Gregory DID have a point – modern technologies were antithetical to the continuity of tradition, and probably did do a lot to unpick the ties of community. If you can square riding on a train or using a light-bulb with your conscience, even though it’s (relatively) new and untraditional, perhaps women priests can be ordained…
Yes, but according to the list of encyclicals he issued (again with the Wikipedia article), he never issued an official condemnation banning such technological innovations to the universal Church.
He may not have liked the giddy rush of progress and he may not have permitted railways in the Papal States, but he did not use his teaching authority to make this preference (or prejudice, depending on your point of view) part of the teaching of the Church.
So not really working as a “Pope bans technology in effort to keep world in Middle Ages” effort there.
It would also appear that traditionalist, anti-progress Pope Gregory XVI issued a Papal Bull condemning slavery on December 3, 1839, which was not well-received by Catholics in slave-holding states in America:
“The Bull was not well received among slave holding Catholics in Maryland which was the center of American Catholic population and governance until the late 19th Century. To avoid penalties from Rome while still supporting the status quo, American Catholic clergy often interpreted the bull as denunciation of the slave trade but not as a denunciation of the institution of slavery itself. To avoid apparent contradiction with Rome, the Catholic bishops in America remained publicly silent on the issue.”
So… fuddy-duddy anti-SCIENCE!!!! Ultramontanist Pope says slavery is wrong; Catholics in progressive, enlightened, democratic, liberal America are so attuned to the Zeitgeist of their society they fudge it to mean “Yeah, but what he *really* means is…”.
I see the benefits of not being under the oppressive thumb of a despotic religious supreme leader but being bold enough to think for oneself and make one’s own decisions based on individual conscience at work there.
That is a lie. The Pope who decided not to build railways in his kingdoms was not Gregory XVI but his successor Pius IX, and he did so not because they would encourage prosperity, but because he did not have the capital. An assembly of all the bankers and lay and clerical financial experts in 1853 concluded that the Pope’s realm could not in any way finance any serious railway program, which would have had to cross large swamp and mountain tracts. That does mean that the Pope’s countries were very poor, but then, in 1853, so was all of Italy.
“Hi, I’m not sure if EvD is getting his wires crossed, but possibly he was referring to the …”
Nope, all that is going on here is that you provided some documentary evidence to support his proposition, which he was unable to unwilling to provide. Had he referenced that Bull, a debate could have been had to show what this proves that Christianity is anti-Enlightenment.
Instead he provided documentary evidence that the Pope blessed the efforts of Spain in the New World. Since, being a rational person, I think the South American Indians were much better off under the pretty bad reign of the Spaniards rather than the human-sacrificial really bad reign of the Aztecs, particularly since the Missionaries taught them agriculture and literacy, I am not sure how this act of Enlightenment was meant to prove anything, much less to prove that the Spaniards were anti-Enlightenment, or whatever.
No, you made a better argument than he did. It was not what he was really trying to say: he just went for the cheap shot meant to impress the gullible and historically illiterate. A real historian would have to answer your comment. (And since one has, downthread, I need not gild the lily.)
The Aztecs were a ‘colonial’ force anyway – they got licked by about 2,000 Spaniards because their colonies rebelled against them, as such, it ended up being a most successful liberating project!
Aztecs are not South American, and the Incans were not big on human sacrifice (some was practiced, but not comparable to the Aztecs — not a central religious component). However, they were big on defacto enslaving conquered peoples through taxation/forced labor — and there was little difference to the conquered people whether they paid tax to the Spanish or the Incans, I think. Big difference to the ruling class, who was not subject to draft and tribute, though.
Missionaries did play a big role teaching things like winemaking and allowing natives to escape the cycle of mining/agricultural taxation.
Right, sure – I don’t think he issued that many encyclicals anyway did he? I know he spoke out against slavery (and, bizzarely, told the Irish Catholics who were being oppressed by the British NOT to resist the British monarch, since that was one step away from revolution). Anyway, let’s suppose he did issue an encyclical – I assume no one would actually refuse to use trains because a former Pope didn’t think they were in-keeping with tradition.
P.s. don’t be so bloody defensive – I wasn’t trying to make a “Pope bans technology in effort to keep world in Middle Ages” comment. Clearly – explicitly. But since you raise it – the Pope DID ban trains and gas-lights from Rome in an attempt to keep the Vatican as it was int he Middle Ages. He said so himself, why bother to refute it
Check my answer above. The legend of the Pope banning railways is just that – a legend.
Mike, don’t get slippery on me.
If you’re first saying that the Pope did issue an Encyclical (what you refer to as a Papal Bull, which let me remind you, is binding upon the universal Church as a statement of faith and morals) banning railways, then when told “No, within the group of nine or ten encyclicals he did issue, there is no such one”, and then you fall back on “IF” – ‘if he did, anyways, let’s suppose’.
Let’s suppose IF a proponent of free thought, free exercise of conscience, and liberty for all proposed that a certain group of people should have their children forcibly taken away from them and raised by the State for the offence of thoughtcrime – teaching their children their traditions is the equivalent of child abuse! – oh, wait a moment, one such person already did such a thing.
Professor Dawkins, with his “religious education is the same as beating your children bloody” notion. My, my – how untolerant!
Am I defensive? I don’t know, but I do know I’m sick to the back teeth of old myths and new inventions being gaily tossed around as “Everyone knows that – ” and when evidence to disprove them comes up, then I (and others) are told “Oh, don’t be so thin-skinned!”
Sorry, I posted this as a comment – it should be a reply. Forgive the double post
To Fabio P.Barbieri & deiseach:
Fabio – As far as I am aware you are simply wrong. In fact, Pius IX ordered the construction of railways at great expense because he wanted to reach out to Catholics – he realised that the rails allowed the Pope to become a fact in peoples lives, not just a rumour. See, for instance, the sections on both Gregory XVI and Pius IX ‘The Oxford History of the Christian Church: A History of the Popes, 1830 – 1914′. I assume this work has been compiled with a solid grasp of the facts.
As a second source, I cite Vivian Green’s excellent ‘A New History of Christianity’, (1996 hardback edition, p.235). In reference to the early nineteenth century, he writes:
“The popes had so far rdeplored any attempt at modernization. Papal government of the city of Rome remained unjust and inefficient. The jews were confined to their ghetto. Gregory XVI refused to consider the possibility of building a railway. Yet Rome had regained its authority as the centre of the Church.” He then goes on to say many positive things about Gregory XVI
The point is not to bash Gregory, or to insult the Papacy as retrograde – I was making the more modest statement that one can, in fact, find instances of the Church refusing to endorse the modern world, and on occasion, as witht he railways and gaslights, these can be quite comical. When people exalt the adherence to tradition, they rarely consider what this means (traditions are to a large extent fabrications, you have to pick and choose which elements of the past you want to preserve, you have to rely on a strawman picture of your opponent as a radical Stalinist who would have everyone taken out and shot – as if this is a position any sane person would be able to hold [deiseach, see your comments above])
So, in the name of balance, yes I accept that the ignorant, ahistorical portraits of Catholicism as being ‘anti-science’ or ‘Medieval’ are simply incorrect and based on some fethishised and vulgarised notion of progressive enlightenment. But that is not to say that one cannot find ANY evidence of these attitudes amongst the Papacy. Of course there is, there have been 265 Popes, one of those will have said something you don’t like. This does not mean the Church was, in general, anti-science, anti-rational etc. It simply wasn’t – but that doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge a fiar challenge
Given the sort of destruction that railways wreak upon ancient and Renaissance buildings, the dangers of gaslights, and so on, it wasn’t all that strange a decision to make. People forget that 1800′s technology could be extremely unforgiving. There’s a place for early adopters. But there are also distinct advantages to being a late adopter.
Although it’s likely that the real reason was that the Papal States were still recovering from what Napoleon and everybody else did, and that money for public works and upgrades was extremely tight. Not that I know anything about Greg or Papal States history — but I have my suspicions.
Look, this is pointless – all scholarly commentaries make it explicit, drawing on his own flipping letters, that the grounds for rejection were a fear of modernity and the enfranchisement of the middle classes. This is even less surprising than your conjecture about the dangers of technology – Italy was about 20 years away from civil war and unification at this point, so I would guess the signs of social upheaval were in the air. The Napoleonic wars were a significant factor – political history has never been one of my interests and the details are tortuous (hence I don’t claim to fully understand it), but it has something to do with Austria (suitably vague!). This goes back essentially to the Guelphs and Ghibellines of the twelfth century. Hence, by the shake up of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, there had been centuries of tensions between the Papal states, the League of Lombard (holding the hugely significant trading port of Venice and the territory around Milan which held the land route to the alps), and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire (most of which became the Habsburg Empire). The Northern Lombard League, which later came to hold Italy’s industrial heartland, bastion of unificationism and anti-clericalism, tended to swing against the monarchist Habsburgs who had fought them for centuries, while the Pope thought that a good steady dose of monarchic imperialism would steady the ship. Incidentally, the Tsar of Russia was also fiercely opposed to the railways at this time – it was a general principle of the old aristocratic order that such things were dangerous to the social balance (and indeed were – look what happened!). Sorry to ramble, but what I am telling you is a matter of well established fact. I even supplied references. There is no need to guess. If I can’t remember all the details exactly then I am open to being corrected, but why bother having a wild guess such as ‘maybe the gaslights would set the Vatican on fire’ when there are recorded letters from the Pope saying ‘gas lights are the tool of satan and anti-tradtional’? The truth is far more enlighteneing
Can you give me a link to those letters, if possible? This is out of genuine curiosity, and an interest in the nuttier things powers and potentates have said.
Now, that out of the way, let’s keep ploughing onwards.
(1) A Papal Bull or an Encyclical is binding upon the faithful. You made a comment that Gregory XVI had issued such, when he hadn’t. That’s what I was getting at. Personal opinions that modern technology are diabolical are just that – personal opinions.
(2) There seems to be some evidence that it was as much the upheaval in the political situation and the empty coffers of the Papal States that meant progress (as measured by railroads and gaslighting) was impeded, as the attitude of the Pope (or popes).
(3) There is indeed the situation where Modernism has been condemned, and it can be seen (as the proponents of a certain attitude have painted it) as exactly what you are hinting at – keep the middle class down, repress liberty, back to the past. And certainly there is a touch of autocracy in that attitude. But it is more than just merely European Aristocracy versus American Democracy models of government that is being challenged here; the notion that Reason replaces Faith (as we’ve seen in the interminable Science versus Religion debates of our day) and that Enlightenment attitudes will do away with this mediaeval superstition and give us a rational religion (or perhaps no religion at all, once we’ve grown up sufficiently).
Were there clergy who thought science had gone too far? Very probably. Then again, when SCIENCE!!!! is being trumpeted as what is going to do away with God, I have no doubt a Pope may have thought this not so great.
(By the bye, your bit about “gas lights are the tool of satan and anti-tradtional”? Early gaslights were not as reliable as one might have wished, and people did get poisoned in their homes by leaky/faulty/not properly turned off gastaps until town gas was given a smell to alert people to leaks, so this kind of thing – people being killed by modern inventions – may have been seized on as a ‘tool of satan’ attitude by a Pope who didn’t see rushing after the latest fad as the greatest thing).
Deiseach
Ok, I deleted my first reply by accident so here goes attempt number two:
The discussion of Pope Pius IX concerning modern technology is contained in the two books I referenced. I have not read his letters (which are held in the Vatican archive and, I would imagine, are not on public access as they would get destroyed by grubby fingers). the two works I cite are by solid and well-respected scholars though – they’re church historians of some repute, not just frauds trying to make a quick buck. Many years ago I wrote my thesis on the reaction to industrial technology in early-nineteenth-century Europe (taking a comparative view). The two prominent examples in all the literature I consulted were tsar Alexander II of Russia and the papal council, though all the monarchists of Europe were a bit worried. Alexander II hated the railways, as did his successor Alexander III and, when they were eventually constructed (to a limited extent and primarily for military manoeuvres), he proceeded to issue internal passports to stop people moving between cities on non-official business. the papal fear was more ‘cosmological’: God had ordained it that each should have his place. A Calabrian peasant was there to work the land, to produce children to work the land, to go to Church and listen to the priest who made sense of it all. Suddenly, with the rails, this peasant could leave for Rome, Naples, Paris – anywhere. The rails therefore uprooted communities and severed traditional links. I am told by a good Polish friend of mine that certain reactionary elements of the Catholic church in modern day Poland will sermonise similarly against budget flights! Poles who were formerly tied to a traditional close-knit existence are now flying off to London, Paris, Berlin etc and losing their grip on ‘traditional’ values. of course the question that presents itself is that, if these values were so valuable, why would people abandon them en masse? Go figure. My personal guess, supported by my friend’s biography, would be that a rootless life of iniquity in London is, to some people, more valuable than a grinding community based existence of close supervision, prying neighbours, and a watchful priest. You see values are not the preserve of anyone but the person to whom a particular form of life is deemed valuable – but I digress.
Your more specific points: (1) I stand corrected. Innocent III issued a bull in 1211 stating that a priest must be punished when he has assisted in procuring an abortion for a nun, but that if the ‘conceptus’ (his term for ‘dehumanising’ the baby) was not yet felt to be moving in the womb (i.e. about 24 weeks old) he would be punished only for allowing her to get away with illicit sex (a minor offence) and could carry on preaching. Is this binding on my conscience then? It was a bull….
(2) Possibly, but again, the problem is not that the pope couldn’t afford them. He didn’t like them. Anywhere. Not in Rome, not in Naples, not in Paris, not in Madrid. Just didn’t like them. they allowed people to move freely and severed their ties to a watchful (and vengeful) community structure that kept those urges in check. Maybe he had a point. Maybe, like my Polish friend, the average Italian WANTED to get the hell out of his town and go work in bigger place. let’s leave it as a hypothesis – I stand by my point that, in such a case, it is the villager that should decide where and how he or she lives!
(3) This one is interesting. ‘Reason vs Faith’. Hmmmm. It strikes me that this is a modern opposition. for the Church of the Middle Ages, which built and funded a vast network of universities, it was just reason. The church was right because it was rational. It is only much later when the incredibly complex and ingenious accounts of Scholastic philosophy were largely abandoned by figures like Galileo and Descartes that faith became an integral part of interpreting the world. of course faith was requisite in the Middle Ages; one had to have faith that God had appointed the appropriate successor to Peter. But who ever was calling the shots, the scientific or naturalistic account the church developed (which was not subject to papal control at this time) was felt to be inherently rational. If you disputed Ptolemy or Aristotle, you were not deficient in faith, but in reason. I find it interesting now that faith has become such a big deal – never was the case before. Is science doing away with God? about 90% of the world is formally religious. About 85% of Americans are Christians. Hardly seems much of a threat to me…. Actually more Americans believe in UFOs, ghosts, and biblical creation than in evolution. I fail to see that reason has impeded the flourishing of faith
The fact that most schools teach school children that learned people in the time of *COLUMBUS* thought the earth was flat is so angering to me. Has nobody read Dante? Or do they not know people were making globes before then? Or that people looked up at the stars and constellations and the shadow of the sun and notice the earth was round?
You know, it’s just occurred to me that I have absolutely no memory of ever being formally taught in school, as a matter of required knowledge that I had to repeat back correctly, that “people believed the Earth was flat in the Middle Ages”.
I certainly remember hearing this chestnut all over the place, but I honestly don’t think it was taught in St. Christopher’s or St. Martin’s (elementary and secondary Catholic institutions respectively).
I vaguely remember being taught that many people thought Columbus was crazy for embarking in his journeys, because they thought he would be eaten by dragons or fall off the earth. It is true many thought he was crazy — but that is because he had miscalculated the circumference of the earth and was going to die at sea if it wasn’t for the West Indies being there. In other words, they thought he was crazy because they knew the Earth was round and how round it was, not because they thought it was flat.
In fact, Columbus himself was grossly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, and it was his opponents who had it right. Had he not found the wholly unexpected bulk of America, he and his men might well have starved before reaching the furthest islands of Asia as they intended.
It’s one of those old chestnuts that floats around in the popular consciousness and I don’t know if it’ll ever be eradicated.
I had my brain melted by a particular instance of this; in a comment thread I read where various Anglicans got stuck into one another over the Church of England’s current difficulties regarding the introduction of women bishops, one person out of nowhere launched into a screed about how Galileo was prosecuted by the Church for his theory that the earth was round. This was proven by the Bible, and that’s why the Pope forbid anyone to read the Bible. But it wasn’t all the Pope’s fault, because the kings and lords forced him to do this, because if their serfs and peasants knew that the world wasn’t flat (and hence that they wouldn’t fall off the edge of it if they went too far), then they would simply pack up and leave, and the kings and lords couldn’t oppress them any more.
Galileo. Earth round. As economic theory of feudalism. In the seventeenth century.
Against that kind of notion, the stars themselves fight in vain.
I wouldn’t say that most school children are taught this, but some certainly were – we used The American Pageant in high school, which once had the error, and I don’t remember if it’d been corrected yet when we had it.
The myth seems to originate from Washington Irving, of “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” fame, in his book The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. I find that funny.
I distinctly remember one of the ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ short cartoons (or something very similar) having an episode about Columbus that showed him as thinking the world was round, and almost everyone else thinking it was flat.
After a bit of research, it wasn’t a Schoolhouse Rock bit – I’m not sure what it was. But doing a search for ‘columbus world flat’ makes it abundantly clear that that myth is rather pervasive.
Mr. Wright,
In your last post, you made mention of Lavoisier (I think) as a martyr of science at the hands of the French Enlightenment.
One thing I’m curious of, though. What do you think of Lysenkoism on that front? It’s my opinion that that whole event makes the Galileo debacle pale in comparison, yet I never hear anyone mention it.
“What do you think of Lysenkoism on that front?”
I did not mention Lysenko only because I ran out of space. The elevation of the crackpot Lysenko (who rejected the genetic discoveries of Mendeleev, a monk) by the allegedly scientific Stalinist state to predominance, not to mention the imprisonment and deaths of hundreds of scientists throughout the Soviet Union — including Vavilov, Lysenko’s own teacher — not to mention the plans of Ivanov to produce a human-ape hybrid supersoldier just like something out of an over-the-top pulp novel — all this and more serves as an example of how science can flourish in academic freedom under Christendom, and how it languishes when the Sons of the Utopian Revolution take over.
There is no comparable example of scientific politicization and dishonesty parallel to the ‘Climategate’ scandal under Christian rule. The scientists of Christian nations did not at any time universally try to hide evidence of Darwinian theory, nor of the heliocentric theory (which dates back to Ptolemy in Fifth Century (Christian) Alexandria.)
There has never been a time when hundreds of scientists were harassed, imprisoned, or jailed as occurred under the Lysenko period in the Soviet Empire.
But doesn’t that indicate that Stalin was closer to a Catholic worldview than to a modern secular one? After all, Stalin’s basic point about science was that knowledge divorced from a sense of direction, goal, mission etc was not worth knowing. This is not all that removed from some of the Catholic positions which have been voiced in this debate – in fact it is an eminently credible idea. What is the point of a fact if it is not placed in a comprehensible and meaningful context? Regarding Lysonkoism: this was not quite as it has been protrayed. Yes, Stalin exerted significant pressure on biologists to subscribe to a ‘Lamarckian’ system of inheritance. But this, paradoxically, shows the extent to which he took science seriously. If a society has a common project of self-improvement, for instance, then how could it plausibly also hold a scientific idea which suggests, at the fundamental level of inheritance, people cannot modify their conduct, behaviour, capacities etc. There are three options here: 1) Don’t take science seriously – believe in human improvement AND genetic blindness to our aspirations (scientific descriptions therefore operate on a different level and have little bearing on our understanding of ourselves; this seems to be the option most contemporary observers, including Catholics, usually take to reconcile disparate world views); 2) pessimism – the Victorian model – the laws of natural selection tell us that life is a struggle and the weak can/will/must be eradicated (this can either be passive pessimism, as it was with the Victorian English, or active pessimism, as it was for the Nazis); 3) assume that the idological project is correct but the scientific theory is incorrect – possibly (Stalin’s conjecture) because it had been devised in England and sought to explain the social conditions of Victorian capitalism.
Sorry to ramble, but even further context is required here. Russians in the late nineteenth century (i.e. tsarists) did NOT generally believe in Darwin’s theory. On the Origin of Species describes life on a series of islands, where a mass of animals had to compete for a minimum of resources. This message had obvious social resonance in England, at that time the most crowded island on earth. When Russian field biologists looked at their data, compiled from desolate Steppe and frozen wasteland with few animals, they could not see what Darwin was getting at. For them, the successful animal was he who found a mate, or adapted his will to the harsh climate (presumably this was a uniquely Russian way of thinking of society – all their novels are about breaking the will and acclimatising one’s self to hardship).
This leads to the non-ideological element of Lysenko’s theory, which was in fact supported by experiments. Lysenko had bread strands of wheat that appeared to show a ‘memory’ of frost. By freezing wheat in soil and subsequently breeding these strains, he appeared to show a more hardy crop was produced. His ideas, though not accepted, are apparently somewhere near a comeback with the theory of epigenetics. That is, the non-coding parts of DNA do actually have a say in which genes are activated/de-activated, and this process is a direct response to the environment (hence, a Swedish team recently found that chickens will vary in size depending on the diet given to their grandparents – the explanation is something akin to the ideas Lysenko was getting at; a cytological awareness of macro-environment and an ability for this awareness to be translated into genetic shift. Hitherto, models of genetics based on mutation alone have been unable to account for this
N.B. a minor point! the guy is called Mendel, not Mendeleev (who discovered the periodic table). Mendel’s idea of dominants and recessives was also ignored in ‘the West’ for many years – in fact, he sent a copy of his paper to Darwin, who apparently never cut the pages on it! It was only when Dutch botanish Hugo De Vries re-discovered in that his ideas tooks off
Mendeleev
sorry – I have no idea why it says Mendeleev at the bottom of the page! It’s not an attempt at a cryptic signature or anything
During the Lysenkoist period, hundred of scientists were jailed or killed for coming to scientific conclusion not in keeping with the Stalinist state-mandated conclusions. Not only is this unlike the Catholic position, it is the mere opposite. The idea that this criminal brutality can be excused because it was giving the quailing slaves and victims of Red madness a sense of common purpose is merely hogwash.
Oh yeah I entirely agree. Look, I am fully behind the notion that, if you look at the history of modern Europe, it has largely been catholic writers and thinkers (if not the church itself) that have held out against each passing fad and dubious ideal. My point was simply that, when a poster above noted apropos of evolution that, if this is not placed in a larger interpretive context (by postulating God) the facts remain meaningless and ultimately devoid of significance, this is precisely what Stalin thought (substituting the perfectibility of the Soviet man for the understanding of God’s mysterious cosmos). Since the goal was to create ‘real’ humanity – Soviet man – anyone who did not conform to this ideal (i.e. who did not understand Communist theories, who did not behave as a Communist) was not a ‘real’ human, and could be dispensed with.
To Fabio P.Barbieri & deiseach:
Fabio – As far as I am aware you are simply wrong. In fact, Pius IX ordered the construction of railways at great expense because he wanted to reach out to Catholics – he realised that the rails allowed the Pope to become a fact in peoples lives, not just a rumour. See, for instance, the sections on both Gregory XVI and Pius IX ‘The Oxford History of the Christian Church: A History of the Popes, 1830 – 1914′. I assume this work has been compiled with a solid grasp of the facts.
As a second source, I cite Vivian Green’s excellent ‘A New History of Christianity’, (1996 hardback edition, p.235). In reference to the early nineteenth century, he writes:
“The popes had so far rdeplored any attempt at modernization. Papal government of the city of Rome remained unjust and inefficient. The jews were confined to their ghetto. Gregory XVI refused to consider the possibility of building a railway. Yet Rome had regained its authority as the centre of the Church.” He then goes on to say many positive things about Gregory XVI
The point is not to bash Gregory, or to insult the Papacy as retrograde – I was making the more modest statement that one can, in fact, find instances of the Church refusing to endorse the modern world, and on occasion, as witht he railways and gaslights, these can be quite comical. When people exalt the adherence to tradition, they rarely consider what this means (traditions are to a large extent fabrications, you have to pick and choose which elements of the past you want to preserve, you have to rely on a strawman picture of your opponent as a radical Stalinist who would have everyone taken out and shot – as if this is a position any sane person would be able to hold [deiseach, see your comments above])
So, in the name of balance, yes I accept that the ignorant, ahistorical portraits of Catholicism as being ‘anti-science’ or ‘Medieval’ are simply incorrect and based on some fethishised and vulgarised notion of progressive enlightenment. But that is not to say that one cannot find ANY evidence of these attitudes amongst the Papacy. Of course there is, there have been 265 Popes, one of those will have said something you don’t like. This does not mean the Church was, in general, anti-science, anti-rational etc. It simply wasn’t – but that doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge a fiar challenge
This made me smile and hopefully after your last post it will do the same for you:
On the other hand, you have different fingers.