The War Against the War of Faith Versus Science
Posted on 23 July 2010
A reader, briefly named EdV, hurls down his gauntlet at me. He makes the asseveration that Christianity retards the progess of the arts, sciences, and the cause of liberty.
I humbly submit for your candid consideration that Christianity provides the only rational ethical basis for human liberty, and the only rational metaphysical basis for empiricism.
The ethical basis of liberty is the obviously counter-intuitive principle that all men are created equal in dignity and should be equal under law, and that the law is not make by law-makers but is discovered by them, since it exists in a metaphysical or ideal form, produced by a source beyond human making.
Logically, there are only two possibilities: law are manmade, like poems, or laws are discovered, like geometry proofs.
If laws are manmade, any man with the power to change the law is right to do so, and law is merely the will of the stronger. No liberal or equal laws can be erected on such a basis.
If laws are discovered, then they must pre-exist mankind, and the justice of those laws must be a stubborn fact no human will can change, and ergo their justice must derive from a non-human source.
Justice cannot come from the material universe, from the merely by-play of atoms in motion, because Justice is a non-material and non-temporal thing. Justice is a mental thing: an ideal or an idea. Mental things only exist in minds. Justice is also universal and eternal, or else it is not justice. Ergo the only mind that could have invented or decreed the idea of Justice is an eternal and universal Mind. And this all men know to be God.
Without such a Divine Mind, there can be no justice, merely partisan interest or temporary Hobbesean armistices. Without justice, there can be no liberal or equal laws.
Since men are evidently not equal in every measure except their dignity as human beings, only a mystical belief in the dignity of human beings, that is, the belief that men are made in the image of God, can sustain that dignity.
Any other measure leads to immediate inequalities. If we say the dignity of man is based on his capacity for reason, then logically neither babies nor senile crones nor anyone who can be painted as ignorant or stupid has any right to enjoy the benefits of equal and free laws. Indeed, it cannot have escaped the notice of any observer of the modern world that those political parties and regimes who base their laws on any principle other than the divine equality of man all too soon become elitist: the Soviets were run by the Nomenklatura; the Democrat Party in America is surrounded by an atmosphere of sanctimonious elitism so thick that you could scoop it into bowls and eat is as soup.
(The Political Correctors in the US and Britain are composed of people stupider or wickeder than average whose only claim to moral superiority is their laughably transparent claim to be smarter and purer than average. They are so braindead and morally retarded that they cannot even tell if babies are human or not. They cannot deduce whether or not members of the same sex can mate, and need laws to protect their mating rituals and vows. Even the simplest moral calculation, such as asking whether minorities can be ‘racist’ or such as asking whether it is right to concede civilization, unfought and undebated, meekly to the Jihad, is too complicated for their pea sized brains, and requires moral courage beyond the power of their subpea sized testes. All these things are beyond their allegedly titanic intellectual efforts. ‘A is A’ is something they don’t know what it means, these paragons of the intellect. Fie on them all.)
But, my scorn for the anti-intellectual intellectuals to one side, whether you agree or not of the moral and mental caliber of these Morlocks, let us at the minimum agree that they are elitist: they believe a cadre of experts, learned, or concerned citizens should have the right to order the affairs of the layman, the ignorant, or the unconcerned, based on the superiority of their learning and their compassion. They do not believe in the equality of man (or the privacy of property, which is a corollary thereof).
The modern intellectual does not believe that a stupid man or an evil one has a right to earn his own money as he would, and spent it as he would, to speak as he would, worship as he pleases, consume as he pleases, dig up or drill as he pleases, and burn what he pleases on his own land. The only liberty that the modern intellectual is eager, nay, is sanctimoniously devout to grant the subjects of his enlightened despotism is the right to sin as they please, especially sexual sins.
In short, the claim that all men are created equal cannot be based on any empirical or scientific claim, because then it can be empirically disproven. It must be based on a mystical claim, a spiritual reality that all enlightened men perceive by spiritual means, because then to dispute or dismiss it is benighted.
Without equal government, a liberal (I mean liberty-protecting) government is not logically possible. Once you grant that the elite moiety has the right to dictate the education and behavior of the benighted majority, the idea of restrictions on the government, the idea of Constitutional prohibitions on that the state may do, the very idea that the state is only authorized to do those things the governed authorize, will be greeted with Pellosian bewilderment and indignation. “Are you serious?”
But let us give EvD his comment in context, lest this debate become disjointed from its environment:
Sorry, but you’re still wrong. (BTW, pointing out that the author is anti-atheist is not an ad hominem attack, any more than the author’s continuous and unabashed referencing of various “pagan” eyewitnesses (whom he repeatedly suggests may have lied or distorted facts because they may have been anti-Christian) is ad hominem. One’s religious biases are certainly relevant for us to consider. This is not a personal attack.
[...]
She (Hypatia) was not killed in a street. Orestes was attacked in a street. Hypatia, according to the most reliable reporter, was killed in a church. Historical fact as reported by the best reporter of the era. No way around it.
Yet the location is almost beside the point. Cyril’s character is extremely well-known, and it’s true that even other Christians didn’t like him (and that they ultimately lay the blame for Hypatia’s murder at Cyril’s feet.) He is, as I wrote, one of the father figures of modern Christianity. His intolerance, violent temper, and Old Testament “driving out enemies to the faith” attitude is important to our discussion, because it sets the tone for what Christianity brought upon civilization later (i.e. it is okay to exterminate the South American civilizations in the 1500s as long as when the dust settles we have good Christian men and women left standing; it is okay to paint illuminated prayer-books over the pagan works of Archimedes, etc.)
And despite the spin in the articles, Christian philosophy is not about questioning the world, but rather, about submitting to a Bronze Age patriarchal figure. Cyril is the then-embodiment of that patriarch. Like his uncle, he slashed-and-burned a field in Alexandria which had known debate and discussion
Now, to veer off into parallel (but still relevant) matters….
I like your writing style and I consider you an intelligent guy, but I take issue with your spin. It’s swell that you’re Christian, that it gave you order and meaning to your life. But that doesn’t change the fact that Christianity’s philosophy is actually anti-Enlightenment. The great discoveries and social progress of the last couple centuries have happened in defiance of Christianity. Consider how different American civilization would be if we had been founded, as modern day Cyrils would prefer, on a religious Constitution instead of a secular one.
Care to respond?
Dear sir, go back to your Logic 101 textbook and look up ‘ad hominem.’ The information is also available on many website around the internet. If you do not know what it means, merely ask me, I will explain it to you.
My life had plenty of meaning and order before my conversion, and I do not believe in Christ because I seek order and meaning there, but because it is the truth.
I concede the point that Hypatia was murdered in a Church. Will you concede the point that the reason for the murder was what that same eyewitness reported it to be, namely, a political altercation no different from any of the countless others agitating the city of Alexandria for a hundred years?
“Christianity’s philosophy is actually anti-Enlightenment. The great discoveries and social progress of the last couple centuries have happened in defiance of Christianity.”
If so, explain the utter lack of great discoveries and social progress in areas of the world, and times of history, where Christianity was not present? If you say A opposes or hinders the growth of B, then in the absence of some supervening cause, should we not expect the absence of A to correspond to the flourishing of B?
Empirical Science was founded in the Dark Ages, ironic as that sounds. They are called “Dark” not because they were a province of ignorance and magic (that came later, during the Renaissance) nor of brutal Church persecutions, inquisitions, and witch-hunts (that came during the Reformation); they are called “Dark” because the records were burned during wars with Norse and Saracen.
Empirical science is the unique cultural product of Christianity. Neither the Greek philosophy nor the Jewish world-view either by itself created the conditions for the progressive notions hidden in them to flourish. Christianity is the marriage of these two traditions: Jewish faith and Greek metaphysics.
Empirical science presupposes a rational and real world governed by a rational and real creator, able and indeed meant to be understood by a rational animal like man: the metaphysic of the pagans supposes either an illusionary world, or one governed by whimsical and malign spirits; the Mohammedan presupposes the world is as arbitrary and incomprehensible as the will of Allah, into which no man may inquire; the metaphysic of the modern materialist presupposes the universe cannot be understood because man is not rational, nor can he explain where nature came from, or why it is rational. This by no means implies that non-Christians cannot do scientific work! But it does imply that the pagan, the Mohammedan, the atheist can give no account, no reason, and make no sense of why their work is scientific, or how it relates to reality. Science is not a natural or native product of their world view, and is, in fact, ultimately incompatible with it. The best they can say is that is just is because it just is, and rule all further or deeper inquiry into causes out of bounds. No man is allowed to ask from whence the Big Bang arose, or what or who must have existed in non-time and non-space, something made not of matter nor energy which gave rise to the great explosion of timespace and matter-energy that initiated the entire sidereal universe.
Unfortunately, since you are a random stranger on the Internet, I do not know how much history you know, or how much of the history of natural philosophy. Are familiar with these men and their writings:
- St. Thomas Aquinas?
- Robert Grosseteste?
- Nicholas of Oresme?
- William of Occam?
- Roger Bacon?
- Copernicus?
- Brahe?
- Kepler?
- Galileo?
- Nicholas of Cusa?
- Isaac Newton?
Are you familiar with the Middle Ages? Below is a partial list of the inventions in the Middle Ages, when Christendom was the unchallenged and dominant world view.
Of the things on this list, please tell me which ones were opposed, oppressed, or hindered by the Church?
I am not asking whether the Chinese had gunpowder or paper before the West: I am asking whether Christianity discouraged these things which came into widespread use at that time.
I will reject with scorn any airy generalities: give me the name of the Papal Bull and the date anathematizing the invention or the inventor.
- Gunpowder
- Silk
- Spectacles
- Clock
- Hour glass
- Paper
- Numbering System The roman numerals were replaced by the Arabs numbering system in the Middle Ages
- Minute Glass
- Printing Press the printing press was invented in the mid 1400′s
- Sun dial
- Compass
- Traverse Boards Traverse boards were navigation instruments, an older version of the Astrolabe
- Astrolabes
- Cross-staffs Cross-staffs were used to measure the angle of the Sun or a star above the horizon
- Nocturnals – a timekeeping instrument
- Quadrants
- Almanacs
- Oars
- The Rudder
- Artesian wells — eliminated the need for pumping
- Mills — to pump water, grind grain, and crush ore
- Windmills
- Wheelbarrow
- Horseshoes
- Horsecollar
- Moldboard Plough
- Stirrups
- The Bit and Bridle
- The high-backed saddle
- Siege weapons
- The Longbow
- The Crossbow
- Chemical/Alchemical Processes, Apparatus – e.g., furnace and still, assay-scales; distillation of alcohol
(By the way, the word “inventor” INGENETOR, is a Medieval Invention, and occurs naturally in no language outside Christendom: they use our word after contact with the West.)
As for the Enlightenment, here we must be careful to avoid an ambiguity. There are two children who claim to be the culmination and heir of the Enlightenment: one in America, the American Revolution and its aftermath, and one in France, the French Revolution and its aftermath.
Of these two, one of them was firmly grounded in the Christian tradition, opened it meetings with prayers, mentioned the Creator in its founding documents, and tried to eliminate government meddling in the affairs of the Church. Its fruits were liberty, liberality, and longevity.
The other unambiguously rejected the Church and all its forms, set about to tear down steeples and put up cathedrals to the goddess Reason, scorned all talk of God. Its fruits were the Terror, followed by Napoleon, Imperium, Secret Police, war and ruination. It did not last a single generation. The methods and rhetoric of the French Revolution are the direct causes and fathers of the Fascist movement in Italy, the Nazi movement in Germany, and the Red Revolution in Russia.
Science has only one martyr to its name: and that is Lavoisier, father of chemistry, killed by the French Enlightenment. The case trying to paint Galileo and Hypatia as martyrs to science falling to obscurantist Christians founders on historical fact.
Turning to the American Revolution, I submit to you that they, and not the French, are the true heirs and true culmination of the Enlightenment. When I compare your statement about the role of the Christian religion in this noble revolution in human affairs, forgive me if I take their word over yours: because history has proven that they knew whereof they spoke. They are the ones who designed and wrote the Constitution, after all, and the surrounding documents.
Now, I would like you to examine the following quotes, not for the truth of falsehood of what they say (I do not expect you or any man to believe something merely because a famed figure said it) but to examine them to confirm the proposition that (1) these are the true representatives of the Enlightenment and its spirit and (2) they saw Christianity as integral to rather than independent of (or hostile to) the Christian religion. Indeed, one quote below expresses the idea that kingless self-government (which is the very touchstone of the Enlightenment) is impossible for a people who do not voluntarily submit themselves to the ethical precepts of the Bible.
Now, this is a rather remarkable statement, and is in direct and overwhelming contradiction to your own. If Christianity and the (American) Enlightenment were at odds, then there should be at least as many statements condemning the Christian religion to be found in the letters and writings of the figures recognized as the leaders and archtypes of the Enlightenment.
Can you provide such a list?
Can you find the quotes from each of the men listed below condemning, not establishment of religion as a state function, but religion in general and Christianity in particular?
(I will concede un-argued that Thomas Paine was a Deist, if you will concede that Deism is a religion. Christianity holds that man knows God by means of tradition, scripture, and natural reason. The Protestants rejected tradition as a source, saying that scripture and natural reason are sufficient. Deism, to be precise it is that form or heretical version of Christianity that does the Protestants one better by rejection not just tradition but scripture as well, and relies on natural reason alone. Deism is not agnosticism and certainly not atheism. Indeed, it is an oddly optimistic religion, because it rests its entire case on the argument from design: Deism expects all men to come to know God through natural philosophy and scientific reasoning. That is not atheism nor agnosticism.)
Can you provide a list of the anti-Christian writings of the Enlightenment figures and founders? If not, where is your evidence, and I mean historical evidence and not mere airy speculation, that the Enlightenment was in opposition to Christianity and in despite of it?
If your argument is merely that the French Enlightenment, which culminated in terror and madness, was opposed to Christianity, and Christianity to it, that argument I will concede with a smile, albeit that argument hardly redounds to your credit.
I am only interested in talking about the Anglo-American Enlightenment. As should be plain, I consider them to be the mere opposite of the French Enlightenment, just as I consider Mohammedanism to be the mere opposite of Christianity, or a satanic parody of it.
Here are the men who did not see the contradiction between Enlightenment and Christianity that you see. Again, I am not asking you to dispute the truth or falsehood of what they say: i am asking you to explain, as a matter of historical fact, how these men (who, by your theory, where directly opposed to Christianity) came to say these things.
To make my question clear, consider this parallel. Suppose a random stranger on the internet challenged you with the statement that the Enlightenment was pro-Monarchist and wished at all costs to preserve the ancient regime of state-established churches and aristocratic privilege. The only way open to you to show the anti-Monarchist fervor of the Enlightenment would be to quote the Enlightenment figures and challenge your challenger to explain them away. That is what I am doing here with you. Your claim that the Enlightenment (in America) was anti-Religious or in despite of religion is as absurd, as historically blind, as a claim that the Enlightenment was pro-Monarchist rather than anti-Monarchist, or pro-establishmentarian rather than anti-establishmentarian.
You have to explain why all these men, none of whom were cowed or unwilling to speak out against Monarchy in the most clear and powerful terms, are speaking out in favor of Christ in clear and powerful terms, when your claim is that their opposition to Christ was like their opposition to Monarchy.
Or were they secretly opposed to Christianity without knowing it? And somehow, by some miracle of insight, you know what they opposed when they did not?
If you decline to respond to this specific point, or change the subject, or invent some “just-so” story to explain away plain historical fact, I will not pursue the conversation further with you.
Here is a (very abbreviated) list of quotes. I could have tripled or quadrupled its length without any additional effort. Explain how each one was either given under duress or was secretly a quote showing a preference for atheism over Christianity:
- John Adams and John Hancock:
We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus! [April 18, 1775]
- John Adams:
“ The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity… I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” –October 11, 1798
- Samuel Adams: (Yes, that Sam Adams, the one the beer is named after)
“ Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity… and leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.” [October 4, 1790]
- Charles Carroll – signer of the Declaration of Independence | Portrait of Charles Carroll
” Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.” [Source: To James McHenry on November 4, 1800.]
- Benjamin Franklin:
“ God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this. I also believe that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel” –Constitutional Convention of 1787
“In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered… do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?” [Constitutional Convention, Thursday June 28, 1787]
- Alexander Hamilton:
“For my own part, I sincerely esteem it [the Constitution] a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests.” [1787 after the Constitutional Convention]
“I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”
- Patrick Henry:
“It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” [May 1765 Speech to the House of Burgesses]
- John Jay:
“ Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” Source: October 12, 1816. The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, Henry P. Johnston, ed., (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), Vol. IV, p. 393.
- Thomas Jefferson:
“I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” (excerpts are inscribed on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial in the nations capital) [Source: Merrill . D. Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984), Vol. IV, p. 289. From Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, 1781.]
- James Madison
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” [1778 to the General Assembly of the State of Virginia]
- George Washington:
The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion” …and later: “…reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle…”
“ It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and Bible.”
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Finally, as to you last point: give me the name of a ‘modern day Cyril’ and show the quote and the date when he said what you are implying he said. Tell me the name of the Christian leader who has asked his flock to butcher pagan scientists in churches with rooftiles or clamshells.
And I am asking for Christians, not Mohammedans. I am not asking for Christians who oppose aborticide or gay marriage or who scoff at Darwin or scoff at Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Scientific Racism, and so on.
If you cannot provide an example of a ‘modern day Cyril’ I would like you to retract the comment.
An absolute delight to read. You have a way of taking a ten-pound hammer to a ball-peen job, and the result is always rational. Many thanks.
Well, that’s the problem, he is. Bush is a Christian, and Bush opposed federal funding for the mutilation of “embryos”, so Christians are “anti-science”. The Left has made a fetish of “breaking taboos”, and Christians have a habit of defending taboos. They want to become as Gods, they keep building the Tower of Babel as a means to that end, and when the structure collapses, as it always does, they blame the Christians for the failure. “If only you had held the ladder better!”.
Then there is the fact that Christians have already accomplished their most avowed goals. Charity for the Poor? Didn’t have the homeless problem until the Left tried to do what the Christians have done for thousands of years. Communism? Take your pick. The Christians have dozens of religious orders, all of which are Communist, but with different flavors. Pick the one that suits you. And it didn’t require us to murder millions to do it. How they must hate Christians, those jerks, those “Ned Flanders”; willing to help, making it look easy……
>> “…or who scoff at Darwin…”
I know I am just picking on a tiny scrap, but I have been present for at least 5 iterations of this topic so…
What is your actual consideration of evolution? I have a sister that believes all the fossils were planted by Satan to lure us to evolution. I am assuming you have a more sophisticated view. Or are you to blow the top off my head and assert the Earth to be 6000 years old? Seriously, you would blow my nog right off my shoulders.
How does one navigate the two? I know plenty a Christian who scoffs at Darwin and evolution without ever examining either (and have never read something called the… uh… hmmm…. what was the name of that book? The Bible!).
“What is your actual consideration of evolution?”
Me? I am a Roman Catholic. Roman Catholics have never had a problem with Darwinism as a theory of biology. We object to people using it as a flimsy excuse to practice eugenics or social Darwinism or to preach the theory that the races of man must clash in interracial war without pity or quarter to improve the race by culling the weak — that sort of BS which Darwin himself would also condemn.
Some (by no means all) Protestants, by rejecting Church tradition as a source of divine wisdom, take the Bible as the sole and complete guide to Christianity, and insist that the centuries and millenniums (note the plural) of divinely inspired thought and interpretation, findings of General Counsels, et cetera, which define the correct interpretation of the Bible must be tossed out, so that each man for himself, aided by the Holy Spirit, should interpret these complex and ancient documents written in another language, and each man reinvent the wheel for himself, and figure out what the book means for himself.
Unfortunately, the simplest and most direct way to strip the Bible of all interpretation is to interpret it strictly literally, and assume that the poem which opens the book of Genesis is a literal and scientific account. Myself, I would call this literal interpretation a misinterpretation, not in keeping with the intent of Moses.
That being said, I do not regard challenges to the Darwinian Theory of Evolution to be out of bounds for honest scientific inquiry. There are inadequacies in the theory which are striking to me: such as the lack of any direct evidence of speciation among domesticated animals, like the dog, which have been bred by deliberate breeders since before the invention of writing. The theory predicts smooth evolution; the fossil record show punctuated episodes or explosions of new forms followed by long periods of equilibrium. Scientists have been unable to speciate new species out of flies by means of induced mutation: this inability is inexplicable by the theory, and no good explanation has arisen to explain the lack.
The theory predicts transitional forms: the evidence or explanations to explain this lack I find inconclusive. The speculation of ‘pre-evolution’ is that complex mechanisms, such as the eye or the wing, which could serve no useful purpose except in its full blown and final form, must have had some other function which gave it an evolutionary advantage during the transitional stage strikes me as wishful thinking rather than a sober and testable scientific hypothesis.
Darwin’s formulation of the theory is not ‘disprovable’. If you did find a clear record of a father and mother of one species producing a child who was intersterile with its previous generation, on what basis could it be shown that this was by natural selection and survival of the fittest rather than, say, survival for some other reason? It would be like an economist saying that whatever product did not go out of business was the one the customer selected — but in real life, Alcoa lost business due to what (from an economist’s point of view) was a blind accident, an arbitrary antitrust case, not part of the market process.
Even back when I was an atheist, I did not see the conflict between evolution and Genesis. If God produced man in His own image, why does it suddenly become an insult to the dignity of religion if God made man out of an ape rather than out of dust. If anything, apes are more dignified than dust. Likewise, a scientist has no basis to object if he says blind chance or undirected natural process drives evolution, including man, and a theologian says that God is the one who controls and decrees both blind chance and natural processes.
I assure you that as an author of a story I can have blind chance within my story do exactly what I want it to do to bring about the outcome I need: I can arrange the coincidence — a sudden cry, a broken wheel, a desire to take a short cut to the tobacconists — whereby Sherlock Holmes happens to stumble across the exact alleyway where some goon who works for Dr. Moriarity is committing a crime, if I so wish. The Great Author of all being has a similar privilege.
Finally, one misinterpretation of Darwin I would like to see put to rest forever is the Victorian idea (popularized by Nietzsche and Marx) of Evolution, that is, the idea that the process always moves from lesser forms to greater forms, baser to finer, less complex to more complex.
Not only did Darwin himself most carefully avoid the use of this misleading term in his book (he called the process ‘descent through modification’) his theory makes it clear that the later species are only better adapted for the space of time of the changed conditions of their environment, and only for so long as that change lasts, not better adapted in some general or spiritual way.
The race that comes after man might be the Superman, as Nietzsche hoped, or it may be the Morlocks, as HG Wells feared. The Morlocks come after and supplant mankind; but this does not mean that they are ‘better’ or ‘finer’ or ‘more suited’ except in the circular and technical sense that Darwin used the word: namely, that this species is the one who just so happened to outbreed or outlast its competition.
I don’t have any links, but I’ve been recently struck by stories in the news of the numbers of distinct ‘species’ which can interbreed successfully – including the Orca and the Dolphin, stories which challenge the very foundation of the modern idea of ‘species’ for me.
Also, the existence of ‘junk’ DNA and the like seem to point to what I call “super animals” in antiquity – a fewer number of animals that were the basis of – and contained all the traits for – all the more ‘diverse’ animals we see today. Modern animals are then simpler, not more complex, than previously in this model. (As you said.)
Anyway, I doubt this is anything new for most folks, but it was disruptive to my public-school educated self, and relevant to the comment and on my mind the last couple of weeks.
Also consider the fascinating case of dogs. As I understand the issue, all dogs are descended from wolves, but were then shaped by men over time, artificially selecting for traits that were useful to them. Those useful traits weren’t created by random mutation, however, (at least I don’t think anyone is saying that they were) so all of those traits had to /already exist in potential/ in wolves. In other words, ancient wolves had to already have all the genetic flexibility it takes to be able to be the genetic source for tiny Chihuahuas, super-intelligent and biddable border collies, as well as whopping big great danes and squish-nosed pugs. And dogs today can still generally interbreed with wolves. Super animals in a genetic way actually make sense. Creating new genes by accidental mutation is vastly, unutterably more difficult than starting out with something that has huge genetic potential (such as a genetic pool of ancient wolves) and someday ending up with something extreme that doesn’t have much stretch room in it’s genes. (Or I would assume that there isn’t much stretch room in the genes of the more extreme breeds.) I doubt you could repopulate a fresh new planet lacking canines that’s otherwise just like this one with only a pool of chihuahuas and have chihuahuas create as many and varied breeds as have come from wolves. (Of course, the more extreme dog breeds are often not as stable as more ‘generic’ dogs, such as really big dogs dying sooner on average and having hip problems, but that doesn’t mean that they would automatically die out if they could otherwise handle conditions and keep breeding.) You can only select for what’s already there, genetically, regardless of where it came from, mutation or otherwise.
so all of those traits had to /already exist in potential/ in wolves.
That’s what Augustine said.
“It is therefore, causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth. In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created what was to be in times to come. — On the literal meanings of Genesis, Book V Ch. 4:11
And it is precisely the Aristotelian concept of Potency as the principle of change that makes this explicable.
>> “Me? I am a Roman Catholic. Roman Catholics have never had a problem with Darwinism as a theory of biology. We object to people using it as a flimsy excuse to practice eugenics or social Darwinism or to preach the theory that the races of man must clash in interracial war without pity or quarter to improve the race by culling the weak — that sort of BS which Darwin himself would also condemn.”
Indeed. I have no problem with evolution as a theory of biology either. I also reject its misapplication outside of its field. What I fervently reject is its infusion, if you will, with atheism as if evolution had a relation to theology at all. Or that you can deduce atheism from evolution (or a code of ethics, or anything else).
>> “Unfortunately, the simplest and most direct way to strip the Bible of all interpretation is to interpret it strictly literally, and assume that the poem which opens the book of Genesis is a literal and scientific account. Myself, I would call this literal interpretation a misinterpretation, not in keeping with the intent of Moses.”
I took a class on Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament, or Tanakh. It was argued that the purpose of Genesis is not a literal historical account of creation so much as it is the foundation of the Jewish monotheistic argument and the rejection of the meta-divine realm; the statement of first principles of the monotheistic argument in the form of story. By this means Israel defined a new vision of God, so to speak. It stood in direct opposition to the theogony and other features of the polytheistic religions of it time. Taken this way Genesis is more of a defining of God than history.
>> “The theory predicts transitional forms: the evidence or explanations to explain this lack I find inconclusive. The speculation of ‘pre-evolution’ is that complex mechanisms, such as the eye or the wing, which could serve no useful purpose except in its full blown and final form, must have had some other function which gave it an evolutionary advantage during the transitional stage strikes me as wishful thinking rather than a sober and testable scientific hypothesis.”
Of all people (because I detest the man for thinking his particular field answers all questions) Richard Dawkins in his capacity as biologist had a very good explanation of this in The Blind Watchmaker. The explanation of which I cannot reproduce for you here because it was very long and I cannot reduce it except to repeat it verbatim.
>> “Finally, one misinterpretation of Darwin I would like to see put to rest forever is the Victorian idea (popularized by Nietzsche and Marx) of Evolution, that is, the idea that the process always moves from lesser forms to greater forms, baser to finer, less complex to more complex.”
Exactly on the money. Evolution is a contextual process, not a preconceived -Platonic? -ladder that points up. I would agree with some people that Darwin’s “idea” is dangerous. Not the idea itself, but, because of the huge complexity of the concepts, it results in bizarre aberrations when handled by “lesser” minds. And I find most discussions of Darwin, by people of any stripe, to not be about what Darwin actually said at all. I sometimes wonder how many religious people have read their Bible (or atheists for that matter), or how many evolutionists have read their Darwin (or creationists for that matter).
“I am a Roman Catholic. Roman Catholics have never had a problem with Darwinism as a theory of biology. We object to people using it as a flimsy excuse to practice eugenics or social Darwinism or to preach the theory that the races of man must clash in interracial war without pity or quarter to improve the race by culling the weak — that sort of BS which Darwin himself would also condemn.”
This is off-topic, but just a small point. I believe the problem arises when one attempts to reconcile the theology of a purposeful God or creator with that of purposeless Darwinian Evolution (I want to stress here: when I use the word Darwinian, I mean the brand of evolution that professes utterly unguided evolution). It seems to me then that a Christian may certainly believe in some form of guided evolution (i.e. front loading/design etc), but the prevailing theory of evolution as it stands today (Darwinism, Lewontin, etc…) belies the notion of a purposeful God. I’ve seen the question posed: “Why would God choose to reveal Himself in cosmology and not in biology?”
the problem arises when one attempts to reconcile the theology of a purposeful God or creator with that of purposeless Darwinian Evolution
a) “Creator” has nothing to do with evolution. A first cause is not an instrumental cause. God is not a scientific hypothesis competing with other efficient causes for the explanation of this or that natural behavior. We mustn’t think about creation as if it were an engineer at a drafting table designing bunny rabbits.
b) This creator being rational, the universe follows natural laws. To the extent that Darwinism is a true natural law, it provides modest evidence for the existence of the creator.
c) Creation is bringing into being; that is, joining an essence to an act of existence, for which you need a being that is Existence Itself. Evolution is making one thing out of another thing; for example, making dogs and bears out of dogbears. That is transformation: from one form of thing to another form of thing, and no more needs theokinetics than does the transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water.
d) Evolution most certainly does have a purpose: to achieve greater fitness to a particular niche. This fitness is the telos or final cause of evolution. It is not that a species in a niche will be endowed by fortune with some characteristic that makes it better fit, but that the creatures’ purposeful behaviors — seeking sunlight, seeking nuts, seeking mates, etc. — will lead them to exploit their powers. If need be they will flourish in a different niche. In a way, they create their niche.
e) Natural science can deal with the workings out and consequences of beings actualizing their natural powers; but it cannot deal with that they have these natural powers. That is, it can explain how gravity works, even quantify it; but it cannot explain that gravity is, only assert it.
f) Those who assert otherwise are like a physicist who attends a concert by Sharon Kam and believes he has “explained” the music when he discovers the existence of the clarinet and the nature of compression waves in the air and their correlation to the vibrating reed. He then declares his has no need of the “Kam hypothesis.” (Let alone the “Mozart hypothesis.”)
May I recommend The Language of God by Dr. Francis Collins as a good and accessible treatment of evolution from a Christian perspective. He is a noted geneticist and so presents a well-reasoned discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to the relationship between divine creation and evolution held by Christian and atheist alike.
“it is okay to paint illuminated prayer-books over the pagan works of Archimedes”
*flails*
*thrashes*
Okay, deep breaths, deep breaths.
We’re talking about palimpsests here, right?
Firstly, if every single copy of Archimedes had been scraped off and painted over, we wouldn’t be throwing this around in comment-box dispute because nobody would flippin’ well know about Archimedes (except as perhaps a footnote in some other parchment).
Secondly, this was good eco-conscious recycling. In other words, making parchment (or vellum) is a long, tedious, expensive process and you re-use every scrap you can get your hands on. So if there are spare copies of Archimedes or anyone lying around, you re-use them, for the reason that there are already plenty of copies of Archimedes or whomever and so one more copy more or less is no great odds.
Thirdly, I don’t even know if they did this – paint over Archimedes. But if they did, see above.
Fourthly, not just Christians did this. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri? Discovered in a town rubbish dump? Because the citizens (private) and public offices periodically did a clear out and dumped what they considered to be worn-out, rotten, spare or just unfashionable old papers lying around – which archaelogists are now salivating over. If you want to invent a time machine in your spare time and go back and reprove our ancestors for not knowing what people several hundred years down the line would want to read, go ahead. Just as our remote descendants (should our civilisation survive to have any) will be groaning over the, I dunno, the lost episodes of “I’m A Celebrity Taxidermist Reality Show” that uncaring tv stations taped over because they never considered anyone would want to keep them.
Ah, never mind. Is this to do with Mr. Flynn’s long series of posts on The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria?
He’s referring to this, most likely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
One of the treatises scraped off is the only copy now in existence.
Thank you for the reference. And I note that the copy to which the article refers (the one scraped off and re-used) was made in the 10th century – that is, in an era numbered by Christian numbering, probably written by a Christian scribe (since it was in the possession of a monastery) and, ironically (for the purposes of Mr. EvD) preserved by being re-used for a liturgical text, instead of being thrown out as scrap. It may be the only copy surviving *today*, but I’m willing to bet that at the time, there were others floating around. Time, chance and fate did for them, not a deliberate policy of destruction.
A far cry from ‘the Evil Church evilly went around destroying all science texts because they were pagan and, more to the point, disrupted the evil power of the Evil Church by encouraging people to think for themselves!’
The usual case, of course, is EvD’s, and it’s crap, as you note. The strongest case that can be made evidentially is that Christians valued their religion more than ancient math & science, and so did not always preserve math & science treatises when a religious text was at hand* (and this is probably true). The question of their being multiple copies is possible, but not necessary; parchment was too expensive to just have that stuff lying around all over the place, and ‘librarians’ had to choose what to preserve. I don’t think it’s completely out of the question that they either didn’t know or care to preserve this particular document.
*That argument, of course, begs the question in a religion v. science debate (which is a stupid debate in any case) because it assumes religious texts are automatically less worth preserving.
Making a lot of assumptions here, but I imagine that one of the things any librarian would weigh up when deciding “Can we scrape off and reuse this?” is “Are there other copies around? Is this outdated by more up-to-date knowledge?”
If the librarian knew that, say, there was another copy of this in a monastery in St. Gall, then I think he’d have gone ahead and re-used it. Again, deliberately destroying for the sake of destruction for paganism is something very low down on the list of reasons, I would wager.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t know anything about people like Aristotle or the rest of them. If there were a deliberate policy of destruction, it didn’t work too well.
I have read something about the work of Archimedes that was found in the particular palimpsest in question. It appears that it was a rough or scratch copy, made either for private study or to provide a text from which the copyists could make a fair copy. This was a frequent procedure among monastic scribes, I am told. Once the finished books were made, the monks no longer needed the scratch copy and felt free to reuse it for other purposes.
Unfortunately, the finished books were generally illuminated manuscripts of high quality and artistic value; the monks lavished the best materials upon them, including quantities of gold leaf. Many mediaeval books fell into the hands of pagan Vikings, or Saracens, or of Christians who did not read the language in which the book was written and cared nothing for the contents; and they were destroyed for the sake of scavenging the gold. Thus it sometimes happened that the scratch copy, which had been overwritten with some other work, survived when the fine manuscripts were destroyed.
Like I said, the deliberate process of destruction theory is an obviously bad one; one based on preference isn’t, necessarily. In any case, it was never the policy of Christians in the Dark Ages to destroy pagan objects unless they were related to the pagan religion, like Odin’s oaks. The scientific, mathematical, etc. texts of the Greeks and Romans were never deliberately destroyed, for religious reasons or anything else.
But, of course, the entire teleology of history has been aimed at the Wonderful Wonderfulness that is the twenty-first-century secular Western and so they were wrong to have chosen according to their priorities, not the priorities of this paragon, whom they should have known about.
Exactly. The arrogance is palpable.
1. Archimedes is hard and was not popular even in ancient times. The Arabs translated only a few works. The palimpsest in question, as I recollect, was his notes in which he used a “cheat” to find the answer to a problem, and then reverse engineered the “right” way to answer it. Today, we consider the “cheat” to be the more important; but Archimedes did not. There is no evidence other ancient Greeks knew of this tract.
1a. The Latin West was doing mathematics almost from scratch because very little of Greek mathematics had been translated into Latin by the Romans. Once you have enough arithmetic to add up the booty and enough geometry to survey conquered lands, the Romans lost interest. Hence, the medievals did not always see what the Greeks were getting at, and invented their own methods – often with fruitful creativity. See Science in the Middle Ages ed. David Lindberg.
2. The oldest copy of a Bible book we possess is on the “erased” layer of a palimpsest, overwritten by some routine sermons by a minor figure. So it was not just Archimedes who got overwritten. The old palimpsest was scraped clean using a razor; hence, “eraser” and Ockham’s Razor.
3. The palimpsest in question is 10th century and appears to have been made in Constantinople by a fellow who later became the Ecumenical Patriarch. He had no aversion to copying it. There must have been multiple copies because this one wound up in a monastery in the Sinai not in the Imperial Library.
4. It was copied over in the 13th century by the monks in Sinai, which means they kept it around for 300 years. By then, the area had been cut off by Islam, and no one understood the math.
5. At about the same time the Sinai monks were overwriting their copy of a single Archimedes tract, William of Moerbeke was in Greece and Sicily translating the entire Archimedes corpus then available into Latin. This would hardly be the case if there were some sort of hostility or even indifference to Archimedes math.
6. It is to Billy Moe that we owe our knowledge of Archimedes. Some of his own copies have since been lost. (Material causes like mice, rot, and water are more likely in the demise of mss. I wonder why materialists never think of them.) The remainder of Billy’s translations are still in the Vatican Library.
6a. This means there were copies of Archimedes readily available in Greece and Sicily in the 13th century.
6b. It is unlikely that the rediscovered palimpsest was the only copy in existence at the time. We don’t have all of Billy Moe’s work, so the “lost” Archimedes could have been among them as well.
7. Archimedes did not think it was important, so we can’t blame the monks of Sinai for agreeing.
Thanks for the details. I’ll have to pick up a copy of Science in the Middle Ages. I’ve recently become interested in the subject, due in no small part to your posts here and at your own blog.
http://m-francis.livejournal.com/101659.html
Thanks – Gies’ book on the medieval village is the only one I’ve read. Good stuff.
My favorite medieval invention is the buttonhole, because it was invented about a hundred years after the button was prevalent in medieval clothing.
I like the article – especially the very important distinction between the two Enlightenments. Unfortunately, most people who praise the Enlightenment like the horrific French one.
A minor issue – I would say that the Dark Ages (a term I dislike, but Early Middle Ages is slow to catch on) and the High Middle Ages had their share of persecutions and inquisitions, if not as extreme as later periods. In the Dark Ages, the biggest example I can think of is Charlemagne’s campaigns to subdue and convert the Saxons – thousands of pagans were forcibly converted or killed. The Albigensian Crusade predates the Reformation as well (though I for one think the Crusade was justified). And although the Spanish Inquisition’s casualties have been greatly exaggerated, it was not a Reformation job. Throughout both periods, of course, Jews were persecuted, though with great variance in frequency and intensity. Basically, I think you made your case stronger than the historical record supports, but I don’t in the main disagree.
But there were also instances where there weren’t mass persecutions and forced conversions; Gerald Cambriensius (in his justifications of the Norman conquest of Ireland) recounts a conversation with an Irish bishop where he taunted the Irishman that Ireland had no martyrs for the Faith, and the bishop responded that indeed, there were none among the pagan Irish so lost as to kill men of God, but now a people had come that would indeed make martyrs (a swipe at the Normans versus the Irish).
That’s one of the things underlying the unfortunate attitude that likes to pit a notional “Celtic Christianity” against a perceived centralised “Roman Christianity”; the history in these islands really does seem to be more or less that people said “Hey, I want to be a Christian!” of their own accord, with little or no evidence of the kings forcing conversion on unwilling subjects.
Oh, I agree. The Visigoths in Spain went from being Arian to Catholic without a single persecution – the king said it, the nobles accepted it, done. (There were some small persecutions pre-conversion, as the Spanish people were Catholic and their rulers were not.) There are numerous examples of medieval rulers being persuaded to convert via conversation, and their people accepting without much fuss – Russia, the Bulgars, Bede’s Sparrow.
These sorts of peaceful mass conversion stories are unimaginable today; they come from a social and political structure completely lost to us.
Saxons:
Once you realize what the Saxons were like you realize Big Chuck’s desperation to find =something= that would wean them off their blood-feud-without-end. For example, that signing a treaty meant that you should keep your word and not go on the warpath right after. It was less a matter of spreading the faith than of domesticating the Saxons.
Indeed it was: and much more humane than the Roman method of dealing with troublesome Germanic tribes, which was to send punitive expeditions to exterminate them. Tacitus gives detailed accounts of border warfare with the Germans in the reign of Tiberius; the Romans made treaties with those who would keep them, but when the treaties were broken, they would wipe out an entire offending tribe to serve as an example to the others. Much better, after a battle, to dunk the survivors in water and teach them the catechism; but that was a method not yet invented in Tiberius’s day.
I’m not massively against Charlemagne’s campaigns or anything, but if you look at the Heliand you see that there were peaceful attempts at conversion going on as well (and as direct responses to Charlemagne’s violence). And there were executions for Saxons who recanted (though the numbers are probably inflated), so unfortunately it wasn’t always just a peaceful dunking.
Hi John,
I will start with your comments on America first, and work my way back.
“Can you provide a list of the anti-Christian writings of the Enlightenment figures and founders? If not, where is your evidence, and I mean historical evidence and not mere airy speculation, that the Enlightenment was in opposition to Christianity and in despite of it?”
Yes, I can.
I submit to you that the Founding Fathers wrote a single document to provide the basis of American civilization. Before I get to that document, we can both agree that we can easily mine the letters and speeches and diaries of the Founders for religious and anti-Christian documentation. For example, I could snag John Adams for his statement in the Treaty of Tripoli, that
“The United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” 1792
Or Jefferson (and I’ve got a lot of these) when he wrote:
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.” February 10, 1814
And I need not bring up Thomas Paine, whose positions you yourself are well aware of.
I can certainly go on and on and on, and so can you. But that’s how these kinds of debates devolve, because quoting from believers or unbelievers and what they believed or didn’t believe is beside the point. The only thing relevant is the document they bequeathed to us.
Now, that document. The Constitution. If it was inspired by Christianity as you say, it would include some important clauses about Christianity. Certainly it would feature the Bible (NT) and references to attributions to Jesus.
Know how many times the Constitution references the Bible, Jesus, and Christianity?
Zero.
In fact, the Constitution goes out of its way to establish itself as a thoroughly secular document that permits religious liberty. The single solitary reference to God is in the dating of the document, as all legal documents were done back then (a document signed in the year 45 of the New Age would not be admissible, so they worked with the established and accepted Gregorian calendar.) We are not a Christian-based nation. Those who claim it is so as a way of ham-fisting religious endorsement from our founding fathers.
You write that one fruit of the Enlightenment (America) “mentioned the Creator in its founding documents.”
Wrong again, as per the comments above. The Declaration of Independence (which never endorses a specific religion) is a letter justifying high treason for the sake of liberty. But the Declaration is not the law of the land. The Constitution is. And in its own words, is “the supreme law of the land.” A secular power, sir, not a religious or Christian one. Article 6 of the Constitution decries any religious tests for our elected officials, and the very first ten words of the very first Amendment posit the Establishment clause.
That many Founders were Christians is utterly irrelevant, as is that many of them wore wigs, had slaves, or ran farms. If their religion was a factor in giving us the document we are to preserve, protect, and defend, it would state it. Instead, the founding fathers wanted us to choose for ourselves what to be, while no administration could ever make laws based on a divinity. Want to be atheist? No problem! Want to be a Baptist? Go ahead! Want to be an Apollo-worshiping pagan moon-dancer? Feel free! The government stays neutral and secular. There is no way to argue against this fact.
The importance of this cannot be overstated.
But what about your claims that America’s liberty stems, and can only have come from, Christianity?
Democracy was plucked from Periclean Greece; back under Pericles it was a good idea at the wrong time. The Founders were keenly aware of the ancients (Washington himself was a member of the Order of the Cincinatus, named for the Roman general.) They didn’t get democracy from the Bible. The Bible promotes only theocracy.
In fact, even the 10 Commandments have nothing to do with American government. Can you show me where in the Constitution is says to “Keep Holy the Sabbath?” Or not to have other gods before the supposed one god? Or not to take the Lord’s name in vain?
You write:
“You have to explain why all these men, none of whom were cowed or unwilling to speak out against Monarchy in the most clear and powerful terms, are speaking out in favor of Christ in clear and powerful terms, when your claim is that their opposition to Christ was like their opposition to Monarchy.”
Well, you are putting words in my mouth (a bad tactic). I didn’t say they were comparing Christ to monarchy. However, my point is only that the Founders were keenly aware of the importance of religion and state remaining separate.
However, I will single out one comment, from Washington, which I will take issue with (and with you, by extension)
“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and Bible.”
Have you actually read the Bible? I like it for the strength of metaphors and its look into earlier societies, but as a document to govern the world it is grotesque. Let’s see how the laws of America, which you state are Christian in origin, relate to the spiffy rules of the Bible.
I especially like this one:
“You should not let a sorceress live.” (Exodus 22:17)
I wonder if that had some influence on the Hypatia situation?
But there’s a lot more:
How about the Consitution’s tolerance for other religions? The Bible disagrees!
“Whoever sacrifices to any god, except the Lord alone, shall be doomed. (Exodus)
“Suppose you hear in one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods. In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully. If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it. Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to the LORD your God. That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt. Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction. Then the LORD will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you. He will have compassion on you and make you a great.” (Deuteronomy 13:13-19)
I wonder if that had something to do with the attitude of Christians towards pagans during that stretch of history we rightly call the Dark Ages?
Or maybe this one, which is also antithetical to the Constitution:
“If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him.” (Deuteronomy)
How about the Constitution’s secular authority versus religious authority?
“Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death. (Deuteronomy)
How about this one that always gives me a chuckle:
“A man or a woman who acts as a medium or fortuneteller shall be put to death by stoning; they have no one but themselves to blame for their death. (Leviticus)
There goes Sylvia Brown… not a bad thing, actually.
“All who curse their father or mother must be put to death. They are guilty of a capital offense. (Leviticus)
“A priest’s daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death. (Leviticus)
Or how about that Iranian woman who is supposed to be stoned to death for adultery? Well, Biblical law does the same thing! If a woman is found to not b a virgin on her wedding night, “if this charge is true and evidence of the girls virginity is not found, they shall bring the girl to the entrance of her fathers house and there her townsman shall stone her to death. (Deuteronomy)
I can go on and on and on. These are not rare gems in the Bible, but the bread-and-butter of its teachings, and they paint a Bronze Age dictator who demands blind obedience and nothing approaching free inquiry or scientific research. They have precisely nothing to do with American civilization, and they certainly do not represent any major social progress or concept of liberty.
Now, I am very disappointed with the straw man argument you set up against me, asking me to name the Papal Bull in which various inventions (and you include such things as the oar, as examples!) are decried by Christians. I am not familiar with, nor did I claim that there exist, any Papal Bulls about anything on your list.
But I did mention a Papal Bull about the destruction and genocide in the South American civilizations, so I will cite that one, since it’s what we were actually talking about. This is the Romanus Pontifex of 1455:
“… if we bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes, who, like athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith, as we know by the evidence of facts, not only restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name, but also for the defense and increase of the faith vanquish them and their kingdoms and habitations.”
There are several other bulls of that century to this effect; I do not need to quote them to you, as I’m sure you are aware of them or have reference to them.
I also confess I am astonished by this comment of yours:
“… explain the utter lack of great discoveries and social progress in areas of the world, and times of history, where Christianity was not present?”
Democracy was invented far before Christianity in the time of Pericles. As to great discoveries, let us consider: That the world was round (thank Eratosthenes who mathematically concluded it was round, and was close to estimating its correct size, while the Christian worldview was that it was a flat disk); astronomy, engineering and philosophy (all pioneered in the pagan Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Babylonian civilizations); medicine (under the pagan Galen and Hippocrates); irrigation (Babylon); writing (Sumer); etc etc etc.
You write:
“Empirical science presupposes a rational and real world governed by a rational and real creator”
Absolutely not, my friend! Referring to any dictionary – science is the “systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.” The difference between religion and science is exactly the difference between astrology and astronomy.
If what you state is correct, what would empirical science do if it concluded, through rational investigation, that there was no God-hand present in the world? The Creationist view has been slain again and again – evolution is the only explanation for life’s development that has overwhelming evidence to support it. The Christian view is of magic and talking snakes. Snakes do not talk, and there is no empirical data to suggest that the world was made in six days! I challenge you to offer some.
Also thrown out was the Catholic Church’s stubborn adherence to a geocentric model of the universe (which I admit came largely from the pagan Ptolemy.) But we need not linger on this point, other than to say that free inquiry and observational data was made in defiance of a “God put us at the center of Creation” philosophy.
I am not saying that religion always stifles science; I am saying that religious worldviews are inherently illogical. There is no quantifiable data to show that souls or angels exist. We know that our thoughts derive from the brain… not a magical thing in the center of our chests… and that if the brain is injured, the person can be irreparably damaged. Positing that there is a soul is in need of evidence.
You state that you are Christian because it is the truth. Swell for you. But the truth is that if you nail a man to a piece of wood and he died, he cannot return from the dead three days later. Show me some data to demonstrate otherwise. Cryonic suspension was not available two thousand years ago.
You see, this is where your claim (and that of others of your belief system) fall apart. You believe in miracles and magic, cloven-footed reinterpretations of Pan, virgin births and lakes of fire. These are impossibilities. The burden of proof is on you to show some evidence for them, and empirical science has not succeeded in doing this. It does not posit a Creator, far from it. It promotes a rational inquiry, and thus far, no rational inquiry has shown support or evidence for any of these positions, anymore than for other religious ideologies.
Many religions claim to have monopoly on the truth. Yours is no different; it has the same amount of data supporting it that other religions have:
Zero.
Finally, as for modern-day Cyrils… do I really have to bring up Jerry Falwell and other Christian leaders? Seriously?
My good sir…your knowledge of history seems to have come directly from Dr. Carl Sagan, a brilliant scientist who was also incredibly ignorant when it came to history. To be frank, you argue with all the gumption and nuance of a Southern Baptist–and I should know, having lived all my life in the Deep South, a land where, as the old joke goes, there are more Baptists than people.
Your comments on the Hypatia matter make me wonder whether or not you’ve actually read the M. Flynn article on the subject (which was the main topic of John’s blog post–the other one whose author you attacked was at best a small side note). And if that doesn’t suit you, Mike Flynn being a Christian, then please read this article by the excellent Tim O’Neill, who is (as you profess to be) an atheist and a committed historian of science: http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html
If that doesn’t satisfy you, then read the comboxes, where Mr. O’Neill responds to various counterclaims. Your reading of the Hypatia incident is simply unsuported by the evidence.
And, yes, she was murdered by Christians, because she supported a rival Christian leader, who was also supported largely by Christians. Your point?
But this is only one part of your incredibly wrongheaded and simplistic view of history. Your thesis that Christianity was a backwards, superstitious religion that hindered technological development, opposed pagan learning, and caused the Dark Ages is a groundless myth, which no serious historian of the classical era or the Middle Ages would support. You seem to have taken to heart the popular narrative of “rational, feminist pagans vs superstitious, patriarchal Christians,” a characterization of history that is not only false, but virtually the exact opposite of true. Ancient pagans were overwhelmingly superstitious and patriarchal; Christianity, on the other hand, was by the standards of the time extremely egalitarian, affirming human equality and dignity even among slaves and women, and embracing a comprehensive view of the world. Popular paganism should never be confused with pagan philosophy; and even the latter was almost exclusively patriarchal, and far from egalitarian (Plato of course proposed the psuedo-totalitarian Republic, and both he and Aristotle regarded women as morally and intellectually inferior). No one denies that pagan philosophy produced magnificent works of scientific and philosophical discovery; but these were by and large the creations of lone geniuses. The apparati of scientific discovery, invention, and curriculum, are all Medieval Christian inventions.
Even from the time of Paul, Christians were making use of pagan philosophy; over time, and against various opposition from prominent Christians such as Tertullian, Christianity as a whole quickly came to embrace pagan science and philosophy as an important “handmaiden” to faith. Christianity and Neoplatonism clashed infrequently, and even in the late Roman empire, many Neoplatonists were Christians; there was little contradiction between the two systems. By the late Roman empire, Christianity and pagan science were largely at peace.
In the “Dark Ages,” Christian monks went to great lengths to preserve pagan learning; almost everything in the West from the classical world that survived the period did so in monasteries, where monks laborously preserved and copied ancient pagan medical texts and scientific treatises. Your pathetic attempt to blackwash these monks by pointing to one (ONE!) example of a Monk performing the common practice of re-using a piece of expensive parchment that contained a work already extant at the time is rather like accusing Mother Theresa of being a vicious enemy of humanity for re-using hospital beds. In the Middle Ages, the university and set curricula were created, many of the various fields of science begun, enormous leaps forward made in virtually all sciences, and the foundations of modern science laid down. Pagan science was popularly embraced, even to the point of virtually canonizing the philosophers involved. Your characterization of history is shallow and simply wrong.
I am not really qualified to give my opinion on the topic of the Founding Fathers religion, only to say that while indeed America was founded as a secular nation and not a Christian one, nevertheless it was intended to follow Christian ethics, and was based on Christian ideals, for a broadly Christian populace; this much John’s quotes would indicate.
As for your characterization of the Enlightenment science as “anti-Christian,” or in some way a repudiation of Christianity, I think you greatly confuse Enlightenment science with Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy was largely Anti-Christian; but many of the biggest scientific advances of the area were produced by Christians, among whom we find the not at all shabby names of Sir Isaac Newton, Mendell, and Monsignor Georges Lemaître, the creator of Big Bang theory. I think these men would have a thing or two to say concerning the idea that modern science was founded upon some “repudiation of Christianity.” The idea is patently ridiculous, and is based upon an ignorant confutation of Enlightenment intellectualism, history, and philosophy with actual science.
I note with some amusement that you quote solely from the Book of Dueteronomy in your Biblical hack-job, and not at all from the New Testament. Perhaps if you had, you would leave off this utterly ridiculous notion that the proscriptions of punishments for sins were the “bread-and-butter of [the Bible's] teachings.” Even for the ancient Jews, there was a distinction in their reading of the Law between the actual moral teachings and sins involved, and the proscriptions for punishments But when discussing the New Testament, where Jesus prevents a woman from being stoned for adultery, where Paul abrogates the Deuteronomic law and declares that in Christ “there is neither slave nor free, Greek nor Jew, male nor female,” to declare that the bread and butter of THIS is the Deuteronomic punishments for sexual sin…gah! What is one to do with such ignorance? Perhaps if you did take the time to read the New Testament, you would discover that much if not all of our modern ethics and ideals found its origin in its pages…as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers would gladly tell you.
As for your rather tiresome ranting on the subject of religion and science, I regard it precisely as I would regard a Baptist arguing that evolution was impossible because God didn’t say anything about it in the Bible.
I might come off as a tad impolite here, but I want to assure you that I bear you only good will. Good day to you, sir.
“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and Bible.”
EdV
Have you actually read the Bible? … Let’s see how the laws of America, which you state are Christian in origin, relate to the spiffy rules of the Bible.
TOF
Washington referred not to the use of the Bible as a law book. Why you fundamentalists are so focused on literal interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures only I do not know. You must ask:
a) Outside of the day and age for which they were propagated, do practicing Jews do these things?
b) Have Christians ever done these things?
If the answer is “No, but the Bible says they should,” then you are not attacking real-world Judaism or real-world Christianity, but fantasy game constructs inside your head.
+ + +
EdV
I especially like this one: “You should not let a sorceress live.” (Exodus 22:17)
TOF
The word in Latin is veneficia which referred to those who concocted and sold poisons — “the powders of inheritance.” I do not know the Greek term. Roman civil law also prescribed death for poisoners. Also, while the Romans could understand empirically how a man might die from a sword in the gut or a fall from the Tarpeian Rock, they could not understand how poisons worked. So it was sorcery. Of course, sorcery is simply the use of occult properties of matter, and occult only means “hidden”, so the poisoners really were using the hidden properties of matter to kill people.
EdV
I wonder if that had some influence on the Hypatia situation?
TOF
None whatsoever. Read the history. No one was confusing Neoplatonic philosophy, astrology, and music with poisoning.
+ + +
EdV
That the world was round (thank Eratosthenes who mathematically concluded it was round, and was close to estimating its correct size, while the Christian worldview was that it was a flat disk)
TOF
a) You cannot conclude “mathematically” that it is round.
b) It was Aristotle who summarized the physical reasoning of the earth’s roundness.
c) These proofs were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The first Christians included many ancient Greeks and Romans.
d) The roundness of the earth is mentioned periodically during the Christian era – e.g., by Thomas Aquinas in a remark in the Summa theologica; by a popular sermonizer; in a popular book about a fictional trip around the world; by Bede, Porphyry, etc.
e) In any case, do not confuse a view held by Christians with a Christian view.
In the Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: ‘I send you the Holy Spirit so that He might teach you all about the course of the sun and the moon.’ The Lord wanted to make Christians, not astronomers. You learn at school all the useful things you need to know about nature.” –Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Contra Faustum manichaeum
+ + +
John Wright:
“Empirical science presupposes a rational and real world governed by a rational and real creator”
EdV
Absolutely not, my friend! Referring to any dictionary – science is the “systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.” The difference between religion and science is exactly the difference between astrology and astronomy.
TOF
If there were no rational creator, there would be no expectation of consistent and coherent laws of nature.
“You find it surprising that I think of the comprehensibility of the world… as a miracle or an eternal mystery. But surely, a priori, one should expect the world to be chaotic, not to be grasped by thought in any way. One might (indeed one should) expect that the world evidenced itself as lawful only so far as we grasp it in an orderly fashion. This would be a sort of order like the alphabetical order of words. On the other hand, the kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s gravitational theory is of a very different character. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order, which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori. Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops.”
– Albert Einstein, Letter to M. Solovine
+ + +
EdV
what would empirical science do if it concluded, through rational investigation, that there was no God-hand present in the world?
TOF
Empirical science is as unable to conclude such a thing as it is to conclude there is justice or beauty or love or 3. The realms of metaphysics and mathematics are not empirical sciences.
EdV
Also thrown out was the Catholic Church’s stubborn adherence to a geocentric model of the universe (which I admit came largely from the pagan Ptolemy.) But we need not linger on this point, other than to say that free inquiry and observational data was made in defiance of a “God put us at the center of Creation” philosophy.
TOF
a) The belief was that we were at the bottom of the world, the most ignoble place, farthest from heaven.
b) As T.H.Huxley said of the Galileo case, “The Church had the better argument.” To wit, that there was no empirical evidence for heliocentrism and no refutation of the two falsifications, one of which had been noted by Aristotle and Archimedes. When the empirical proofs finally became available ca. 1800 or so, Settele got the injunction canceled.
EdV
There is no quantifiable data to show that souls or angels exist. We know that our thoughts derive from the brain… not a magical thing in the center of our chests… and that if the brain is injured, the person can be irreparably damaged. Positing that there is a soul is in need of evidence.
TOF
Souls are easily verified empirically, even if they are non-metrical. Recall that the discussion took place in Latin. The term “anima” translated “soul” means “life, living.” So asking “Does X have a soul?” translates as “Is X alive?” This is empirically verifiable. There are detailed differences between the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul.
We do not know our thoughts “derive” [somehow] from our brain. We know that thinking uses our brains, but that is not the same thing. One may as well say that a journey derives from leg movement. It is true, but not nearly the whole truth, or even a very important part of the truth.
Because the soul is “the substantive form of the body,” things that damage the body affect the soul. But note that the soul is not a separate substance from the body. Soul and body are a single substance, just as in a basketball rubber and sphere are a single substance. If basketballs were alive, “rubber” would be its body and “sphere” would be its soul. Hope that helps.
EdV
you believe in invisible omnipowerful deities, angels, resurrections, and a bestiary of absurdities no different from the Greeks who believed in the Minotaur, or the Egyptians who awaited the Feather of Truth.
TOF
You make the error of supposing that the set {X|”I do not believe in X”} constitutes a scientific genus. It does not. They are not “no different.” Just as Zeus is different from Tien and both are different from God. You may disbelieve in all three, but that does not make them the same thing.
>> “TOF
If there were no rational creator, there would be no expectation of consistent and coherent laws of nature.”
This is simply an unsupported assertion, as is the Einstein quote, which was merely your appeal to authority. Order is simply causality; if something exists, it is what it is by the mere fact of being and acts according to its nature. Causality is merely the law of identity applied to action. You don’t need a rational creator for that, you merely need existence itself.
>> “TOF
Empirical science is as unable to conclude such a thing as it is to conclude there is justice or beauty or love or 3. The realms of metaphysics and mathematics are not empirical sciences.”
3? How do you think a child comes to understand 3? How do you think it first grasps 2 + 2 = 4? Sure, at our adult age where we can goof around with imaginary numbers and advanced calculus it may be easy to forget the very empirical grounding of our mathematics.
I would make a slightly similar case in regards to metaphysics, but that is more meat than I want to chew here. But just enough to say that there is no need for an exclusive dichotomy. Metaphysics may not be a strictly empirical science, but neither is it strictly the province of rationalism either – else we get the monads and other such dribble.
>> “b) As T.H.Huxley said of the Galileo case, “The Church had the better argument.” To wit, that there was no empirical evidence for heliocentrism…”
The question here is, since you brought it up, whether or not the church should have been in the argument at all.
>> “TOF
Souls are easily verified empirically,”
While I believe in the existence of soul, I suspect the poster was referring to the soul that survives the death of the body.
>> “If the answer is “No, but the Bible says they should,” then you are not attacking real-world Judaism or real-world Christianity, but fantasy game constructs inside your head.”
That is a bit of a stretch. They are not fantasy game constructs in someone’s head. While it be the case that Jews and Christians do not follow such dictates, it remains a disturbing characteristic of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is disturbing all around to be most generous in describing it.
TOF: If there were no rational creator, there would be no expectation of consistent and coherent laws of nature.”
BobWiz
This is simply an unsupported assertion, as is the Einstein quote, which was merely your appeal to authority.
TOF
The Einstein quote was no more an appeal to authority than a footnote or a reference in a scientific paper. It is a way of condensing an argument and becomes invalid only if the authority isn’t an authority, like quoting Dawkins on metaphysics or Sagan on history.
BobWiz
Order is simply causality…
TOF
I could call that an unsupported assertion, I suppose. In fact, the two are not identical, as the existence of distinct terms indicates. They are not unrelated, obviously. Thomas argued toward God from both causality and from order. Well enough so that Hume could come to no other riposte than to deny causality in favor of correlation and to banish both formal and final causes from nature. Here, you equate formality with finality and teeter on the brink of a key insight of Aristotle and Thomas.
BobWiz
Order is simply causality; if something exists, it is what it is by the mere fact of being and acts according to its nature.
TOF
Excellent. A very Thomistic statement. The Moderns of course denied that things have natures at all. The key phrase is “If something exists…” Whence the “act of being”? And whence the nature/forms?
BobWiz
Causality is merely the law of identity applied to action.
TOF
Whatever that means. It sounds like some sort of pop philosophy. A=A is not A->B because the whole point is that while there is something in A that points toward B, A is not in fact B.
BobWiz
You don’t need a rational creator for that, you merely need existence itself.
TOF
ROFL. Was that intentional? You realize that Thomas’ cosmological proofs demonstrate that essential chains of movers or of causes must terminate in a first mover/cause and that such a first mover/cause must logically be a “being of pure act.” A being that is purely actual is one whose essence just is its existence. That is, a being we would call Existence Itself. If it could talk, it would call itself simply I AM. Such a being cannot not exist because it must be that Existence exists. All else follows logically – uniqueness, immateriality, eternal, unchanging, simple, outside space-time, all power-full, rational, etc.
+ + +
TOF: Empirical science is as unable to conclude such a thing as it is to conclude there is justice or beauty or love or 3. The realms of metaphysics and mathematics are not empirical sciences.
BobWiz
3? How do you think a child comes to understand 3? How do you think it first grasps 2 + 2 = 4?
TOF
Show me a 3. How much does it weigh? What is its length? How does it differ from III? I said that 3 is not empirical. That says nothing about how we learn of 3. “Dog” is not empirical, either. Only Fido, Rover, Spot, etc. are empirical.
We come to understand 3 as Aristotle and St. Thomas said of our knowing anything. It is not the same as eating. All knowledge begins in the senses. Those three red apples. The intellect reflects on the sense perception and abstracts a concept. Like “three” or “red” or “apple” or for that matter “those.” These concepts to not exist as material objects. You can perceive a bird, but you cannot perceive “bird.” You can only conceive “bird.”
Your objection therefore confuses epistemology with ontology; that is, how we learn of “3″ with what “3″ is.
Over and above this, mathematics as a whole is not empirical. It reaches its conclusions with certainty by deduction from axioms. Empirical science reaches tentative and often incorrect conclusions by induction from observables.
+ + +
>> “b) As T.H.Huxley said of the Galileo case, “The Church had the better argument.” To wit, that there was no empirical evidence for heliocentrism…”
BobWiz
The question here is, since you brought it up, whether or not the church should have been in the argument at all.
TOF
She would not have been except that Galileo wrote that letter to the Grand Duchess in which he pontificated about Scriptural exegesis – which a layman was not supposed to do – and he wrote a book in which he mocked an old friend and benefactor. There were churchmen on both sides of the debate. The scientists were mostly against Galileo, Kepler, and a few others. The evidence was against them: heliocentrism had been falsified in good Popperian fashion more than a millennium earlier.
+ + +
BobWiz
While it be the case that Jews and Christians do not follow such dictates, it remains a disturbing characteristic of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is disturbing all around to be most generous in describing it.
TOF
Then it is a good thing that you are not the magisterium. All sorts of ancient books are “disturbing” to moderns.
TOF
>> “Excellent. A very Thomistic statement. The Moderns of course denied that things have natures at all. The key phrase is “If something exists…” Whence the “act of being”? And whence the nature/forms?”
ME
Thank you, I will take that as a compliment. But I am afraid this line of discussion must terminate at an impasse precisely at this point. Since we agree with axioms down to the very fundamentals with the exception that you argue that a creator is needed to seal the deal, and I argue that from the starting point of existence, we can argue from no deeper wells. No need for us to worry on that as a leaf is still a leaf and will act as a leaf because of what it is – you call it God, I call it Identity. If you know a way (or a need) to argue it further, I would be interested, but I don’t know of one.
TOF
>> “Whatever that means. It sounds like some sort of pop philosophy. A=A is not A->B because the whole point is that while there is something in A that points toward B, A is not in fact B.”
ME
Whatever that means. Meaning, I do not see how your response relates to mine. What I was saying was merely a short hand way of saying that what actions are possible to a thing is determined by the nature of the thing.
TOF
>> “ROFL. Was that intentional?”
ME
Bah, don’t make me look up modern texting code, I know nothing beyond LOL, and that I had to look up last year.
And yes it was intentional, and I am aware of Thomas’ argument, I just don’t think it a good argument. I take Existence as my starting point, I don’t try to get under it or explain it. That may seem inadequate to you, but outside of a God it is the only position that does not terminate in complete skepticism – see Descartes to Hume for further details.
TOF
>> “We come to understand 3 as Aristotle and St. Thomas said of our knowing anything. It is not the same as eating. All knowledge begins in the senses.”
ME
Then I misinterpreted you as I am in complete agreement with this. I thought you were arguing from a position of extreme rationalism. Another dichotomy I reject is the empiricist/rationalist one, I think it distorts the true picture of our methods of cognition. And by that dichotomy I mean it as it is classically understood.
TOF
>> “She would not have been except…”
ME
Question still stands.
TOF
>> “Then it is a good thing that you are not the magisterium. All sorts of ancient books are “disturbing” to moderns.”
True enough, but none quite so popular and revered as the Bible though, nor thought of as worthy of instruction to our young. Whatever book comes in second place after the Bible in readership would have to be a very, very, very distant second. I have also wondered why such things were not excised from the book by the Christians. It must be rather conflicting to be told to kill (or watch God work his genocidal wrath) for the first half of the book, and then to love and forgive for the second half. Although, to contradict my second sentence, I would be curious to know how many people have read beyond Genesis’ first set of “begets”, and settle instead entirely on someone else’s explanation on Sunday.
TOF
>> “Then it is a good thing that you are not the magisterium. All sorts of
ancient books are “disturbing” to moderns.”
Bob
True enough, but none quite so popular and revered as the Bible though, nor
thought of as worthy of instruction to our young.
TOF
For the ancient Greeks, it was Homer. IIRC, fully 50% of all recovered ancient texts [as opposed to those copied by the Syrian and Latin Christians] are fragments of Homer.
Bob
I have also wondered why such things were not excised from the book by the Christians.
TOF
Simple. Because they did not edit the texts they collected.
Bob
It must be rather conflicting to be told to kill (or watch God work his genocidal wrath) for the first half of the book, and then to love and forgive for the second half.
TOF
How so? They clearly believed there had been a break. The Christian religion was not founded on a bunch of texts they found lying around in which they discovered what to believe. Rather, they already believed certain things based on their encounter with a living person and the living traditions (Clement, Mark, Polycarp, etc.) originating in that person. [This was the common mode in ancient times. Notice that the Greeks never wrote an historie or a bios until the eyewitnesses began dying off. They regarded documents as less trustworthy than spoken testimony.] Consequently, as massive numbers of Jews converted they read their texts in a different way. They were “dead to the law.” That is, justification did not stem from painstaking attention to a plethora of minute mandates; rather it stemmed from the two-fold love – of God and of neighbor. The text was then read in that context. Even if originally written as a set of wedding songs, it was read now in the context of God’s love for the world.
For details, see here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1202.htm
Bob
someone else’s explanation on Sunday.
TOF
This is a common fundamentalist trope. As if they could read the ancient Greek koine for themselves, interpret long-forgotten idioms and figures of speech, see past the naive-literal meanings to the allegorical and anagogical truths, etc., or even to recognize when different interpretations might be held with no harm. It is, bigod!, a set of minute instructions to be taken at face value. No expertise, no consensus, is required.
The Traditional Churches — the Orthodox, Roman, Syriac, and Coptic — understand that the Church came before the books; the beliefs before the texts. It was the Christians who chose from existing texts, and who wrote new ones. And even after, in the sub-canonical age, continued to write and comment; for example, from John to Papius and Polycarp to Irenaeus; from Peter to Clement; and so on. Periodically, when disagreements arose, they all got together in Council and reached a consensus on the catholic [universal] belief. When you stack that up against the ad hoc readings of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Bible Shack, the latter simply does not stand up.
TOF
For the ancient Greeks, it was Homer. IIRC, fully 50% of all recovered ancient texts [as opposed to those copied by the Syrian and Latin Christians] are fragments of Homer.
ME
What is your point? Ancient Greece is a long dead culture. I don’t know what IIRC means, I don’t do text speak.
TOF
Simple. Because they did not edit the texts they collected.
ME
Since excising something from a document can be considered a form of editing, your response amounts to “because they didn’t”, I know they didn’t, and wondered why.
TOF
How so? They clearly believed there had been a break. The Christian religion was not founded on a bunch of texts they found lying around in which they discovered what to believe.
ME
Yes, I am familiar with Christian history, you can stop with the history lessons. I have read numerous histories specifically on the early Church, taken Biblical courses (along with actually reading the thing), and have the New Advent as a well-used bookmark. I be neither Bill, nor Ted!
Perhaps the break was not so jarring to them as it is to the modern mind – to which I was referring in case I was unclear. After all wars, for example, were still as ruthlessly executed in their day as the wars in the Old Testament, life was still brutal, etc. So maybe they didn’t drop their jaws at the act of wiping out the Earth (The Flood) and preserving a man whose only action we are certain of (outside of obeying orders to build a boat) is that he got drunk on his own wine and got naked.
Literal or instructive interpretation of the Old Testament still reveals a frightening book.
>> “Bob
someone else’s explanation on Sunday.
TOF
This is a common fundamentalist trope.” >>
Now you are just being purposefully obtuse. My full quote is below.
>> “Although, to contradict my second sentence, I would be curious to know how many people have read beyond Genesis’ first set of “begets”, and settle instead entirely on someone else’s explanation on Sunday.” >>
I do not know if “fundamentalist trope” is some form of condescension on your part or not, but I’ll pass it by. I am obviously here referring to people NOW, not people back then. You go on to presume that I am dumb enough to think the printing press existed in ancient times. Or that any of them had access to any of the things you mentioned.
My comment was entirely on the modern. And, in this age of ultimate information (and ironically, ignorance) all the commentary and centuries of thought is literally at anyone’s fingertips. So my argument still stands – was doubled actually by your response, thank you. Also it is wrong to assume, with all the denominations today, that the man at the pulpit has done anymore homework than I. After all, I could join the Universal Life Church today, be ordained, marry people, perform rites at funerals, start a church, and interpret it any old way I would want to. Give me money sayeth the Lorda!
Bob
Since excising something from a document can be considered a form of editing, your response amounts to “because they didn’t”, I know they didn’t, and wondered why.
TOF
Perhaps I was too elliptical. It’s because they were not trying to deceive anyone, cover up anything, etc. What they did, is they read it with a different understanding.
TOF
The Christian religion was not founded on a bunch of texts they found lying around in which they discovered what to believe.
ME
Yes, I am familiar with Christian history, you can stop with the history lessons. I have read numerous histories specifically on the early Church, taken Biblical courses (along with actually reading the thing), and have the New Advent as a well-used bookmark. I be neither Bill, nor Ted!
TOF
Then perhaps you should not need to ask the questions you do. Read Augustine’s On Christian doctrine, where he explains how to read passages that seem abhorrent to moderns.
Bob
Perhaps the break was not so jarring to them as it is to the modern mind…. After all wars, for example, were still as ruthlessly executed in their day as the wars in the Old Testament, life was still brutal, etc. So maybe they didn’t drop their jaws at the act of wiping out the Earth
TOF
Unlike the soft, gentle era typified by death camps, firebombings, nuclear bombs, machine guns, nerve gasses, I suppose. There has been no era so stuffed with war and destruction as the modern era. When Nation-worshiping States were not going out and slaughtering primitives, they were going to war with one another over Jenkins Ear or the tariff on lace or other weighty measures.
Certainly, a tribe in a kill-or-be-killed situation might consider that wiping out the other tribe was called for, even if folks four thousand years later would wonder why they didn’t do fluffy bunnies and rainbows.
>> “Bob
someone else’s explanation on Sunday.
TOF
This is a common fundamentalist trope.” >>
Bob
Now you are just being purposefully obtuse. My full quote is (etc.) I do not know if “fundamentalist trope” is some form of condescension…. I am obviously here referring to people NOW, not people back then.
TOF
Fundamentalists are around now. They hold that those who listen to the traditional interpretation “on Sundays” — by which they mean the Orthodox and Roman Churches — are somehow illegitimate, and push the individual reading with individual understanding.
Bob
You go on to presume that I am dumb enough to think the printing press existed in ancient times.
TOF
I don’t recall mentioning the printing press.
Bob
Also it is wrong to assume, with all the denominations today, that the man at the pulpit has done anymore homework than I. After all, I could join the Universal Life Church today, be ordained, marry people, perform rites at funerals, start a church, and interpret it any old way I would want to. Give me money sayeth the Lorda!
TOF
I was referring to those who have kept and taught a common interpretation of the faith for the past two thousand years. The Orthodox and Catholic churches have been in substantial agreement on most issues, differing primarily in ecclesiastical administration, and they account for the vast majority of self-described Christians. The Coptic and Oriental churches broke away after Chalcedon and Ephesus, resp. That is, they did not agree with the consensus of the Church. However, modern discussions are reaching the conclusion that the disagreement was more about Greek grammar than any substantive doctrine.
You are absolutely right that any ignoramus can set up his own “church.” Allowing it is certainly an effective way of breaking up the Church still further and concentrating power toward the State. That’s why we used to have a quality control department.
I take Existence as my starting point, I don’t try to get under it or explain it.
It’s always weird to me how critics of faith who insist on the worship of the intellect instead of the use thereof simply abandon thinking at this point and then get mad at Thomas for *not* abandoning thinking.
That may seem inadequate to you, but outside of a God it is the only position that does not terminate in complete skepticism
Simply wilfully avoiding Thomas’ inexorable logic does indeed seem pretty inadequate, as does refusing to think when the logic is point in an undesirable direction.
Ah, Mr. Shea, I have heard of you, it is a pleasure. Although most of what I have heard is in the form of snippets offered by others that I am sure do not do you justice. Let’s proceed with your response.
Mr. Shea
“It’s always weird to me how critics of faith who insist on the worship of the intellect instead of the use thereof simply abandon thinking at this point and then get mad at Thomas for *not* abandoning thinking.”
Me
The question at issue was a poster’s assertion that there was no expectation of consistent and coherent laws of nature without a rational creator. I presented my case, which, of course, was in opposition to his view.
However, it turned out that we agreed (as I knew we would because I knew his philosophy, but did not tell him mine) on the fundamentals, ending at the point of the cosmological proofs, of which I do not agree.
I have thought about the issue, and have the greatest respect for Aquinas, as I have for Aristotle. I no more get “mad” at Aquinas for what I see as an error than I do at Aristotle.
But at what point do you presume to know that the cause is an abandonment of thinking? At what do point do you assume that it is simply not an error on my part? How do you know that? At what point do you presume that my not trying to get under or explain existence is the result of sloth, and not the result of thinking itself even if containing an error I do not at this time see?
Mr. Shea
“Simply wilfully avoiding Thomas’ inexorable logic does indeed seem pretty inadequate, as does refusing to think when the logic is point in an undesirable direction.”
Again, by what means do you arrive at divining my mental processes? Willfully avoiding? How do you know this? Is it possible that I do not properly understand the argument? I am not saying that I do, but how would you know?
At the last you accuse me of evasion. How do you know that I did?
Yours is not an argument, but psychologizing, and borderline ad hominem.
My philosophy, if it completes a picture of the discussion you entered, is Objectivism (read as Ayn Rand if the term is unfamiliar to you).
My good sir…your knowledge of history seems to have come directly from Dr. Carl Sagan, a brilliant scientist who was also incredibly ignorant when it came to history. To be frank, you argue with all the gumption and nuance of a Southern Baptist–and I should know, having lived all my life in the Deep South, a land where, as the old joke goes, there are more Baptists than people.
Your comments on the Hypatia matter make me wonder whether or not you’ve actually read the M. Flynn article on the subject (which was the main topic of John’s blog post–the other one whose author you attacked was at best a small side note). And if that doesn’t suit you, Mike Flynn being a Christian, then please read this article by the excellent Tim O’Neill, who is (as you profess to be) an atheist and a committed historian of science: http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html
If that doesn’t satisfy you, then read the comboxes, where Mr. O’Neill responds to various counterclaims. Your reading of the Hypatia incident is simply unsuported by the evidence.
And, yes, she was murdered by Christians, because she supported a rival Christian leader, who was also supported largely by Christians. Your point?
But this is only one part of your incredibly wrongheaded and simplistic view of history. Your thesis that Christianity was a backwards, superstitious religion that hindered technological development, opposed pagan learning, and caused the Dark Ages is a groundless myth, which no serious historian of the classical era or the Middle Ages would support. You seem to have taken to heart the popular narrative of “rational, feminist pagans vs superstitious, patriarchal Christians,” a characterization of history that is not only false, but virtually the exact opposite of true. Ancient pagans were overwhelmingly superstitious and patriarchal; Christianity, on the other hand, was by the standards of the time extremely egalitarian, affirming human equality and dignity even among slaves and women, and embracing a comprehensive view of the world. Popular paganism should never be confused with pagan philosophy; and even the latter was almost exclusively patriarchal, and far from egalitarian (Plato of course proposed the psuedo-totalitarian Republic, and both he and Aristotle regarded women as morally and intellectually inferior). No one denies that pagan philosophy produced magnificent works of scientific and philosophical discovery; but these were by and large the creations of lone geniuses. The apparati of scientific discovery, invention, and curriculum, are all Medieval Christian inventions.
Even from the time of Paul, Christians were making use of pagan philosophy; over time, and against various opposition from prominent Christians such as Tertullian, Christianity as a whole quickly came to embrace pagan science and philosophy as an important “handmaiden” to faith. Christianity and Neoplatonism clashed infrequently, and even in the late Roman empire, many Neoplatonists were Christians; there was little contradiction between the two systems. By the late Roman empire, Christianity and pagan science were largely at peace.
In the “Dark Ages,” Christian monks went to great lengths to preserve pagan learning; almost everything in the West from the classical world that survived the period did so in monasteries, where monks laborously preserved and copied ancient pagan medical texts and scientific treatises. Your pathetic attempt to blackwash these monks by pointing to one (ONE!) example of a Monk performing the common practice of re-using a piece of expensive parchment that contained a work already extant at the time is rather like accusing Mother Theresa of being a vicious enemy of humanity for re-using hospital beds. In the Middle Ages, the university and set curricula were created, many of the various fields of science begun, enormous leaps forward made in virtually all sciences, and the foundations of modern science laid down. Pagan science was popularly embraced, even to the point of virtually canonizing the philosophers involved. Your characterization of history is shallow and simply wrong.
I am not really qualified to give my opinion on the topic of the Founding Fathers religion, only to say that while indeed America was founded as a secular nation and not a Christian one, nevertheless it was intended to follow Christian ethics, and was based on Christian ideals, for a broadly Christian populace; this much John’s quotes would indicate.
As for your characterization of the Enlightenment science as “anti-Christian,” or in some way a repudiation of Christianity, I think you greatly confuse Enlightenment science with Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy was largely Anti-Christian; but many of the biggest scientific advances of the area were produced by Christians, among whom we find the not at all shabby names of Sir Isaac Newton, Mendell, and Monsignor Georges Lemaître, the creator of Big Bang theory. I think these men would have a thing or two to say concerning the idea that modern science was founded upon some “repudiation of Christianity.” The idea is patently ridiculous, and is based upon an ignorant confutation of Enlightenment intellectualism, history, and philosophy with actual science.
I note with some amusement that you quote solely from the Book of Dueteronomy in your Biblical hack-job, and not at all from the New Testament. Perhaps if you had, you would leave off this utterly ridiculous notion that the proscriptions of punishments for sins were the “bread-and-butter of [the Bible's] teachings.” Even for the ancient Jews, there was a distinction in their reading of the Law between the actual moral teachings and sins involved, and the proscriptions for punishments But when discussing the New Testament, where Jesus prevents a woman from being stoned for adultery, where Paul abrogates the Deuteronomic law and declares that in Christ “there is neither slave nor free, Greek nor Jew, male nor female,” to declare that the bread and butter of THIS is the Deuteronomic punishments for sexual sin…gah! What is one to do with such ignorance? Perhaps if you did take the time to read the New Testament, you would discover that much if not all of our modern ethics and ideals found its origin in its pages…as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers would gladly tell you. Even Nietzche would make quick work of your moralizing.
As for your rather tiresome ranting on the subject of religion and science, I regard it precisely as I would regard a Baptist arguing that evolution was impossible because God didn’t say anything about it in the Bible. That is, it reveals only a massive amount of ignorance of both science and religion.
I know this comes off a little angry, but I assure you I bear you only good will. Good day to you, sir.
As a mid-wife sometime, somewhere, once said: “this ain’t gonna be pretty”
“You believe in miracles and magic, cloven-footed reinterpretations of Pan, virgin births and lakes of fire. These are impossibilities. The burden of proof is on you to show some evidence for them, and empirical science has not succeeded in doing this.”
Mr. Wright can probably answer the rest of your post in more detail, but I did want to ask about this particular aspect.
Before a hypothesis can be accepted as empirically valid the conditions under which it can be falsified must be defined, and must be logically possible (if not necessarily practically achievable on demand). What evidence would you accept as sufficient to falsify the hypothesis that “Miracles are impossible”? What evidence would meet the burden of proof you insist lies with the believers?
It is reasonable to observe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but it is unreasonable and non-empirical to dismiss a priori any evidence for a hypothesis because one has already concluded the hypothesis is impossible (as too many people holding this particular position do). We are happy to try meeting a burden of proof, but only if that burden is philosophically or practically possible.
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.
Your proffer of 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 discovery 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.
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.
As a citizen of a country whose greatest period probably was during what you call the Dark Ages (our Golden Age in Ireland extended between the Sixth to the Ninth centuries), I do not find your use of the term an insult but am proud to be a Dark Age barbarian.
As for “mediaevals believed the world was flat”, may I refer you to this? A 14th century Irish version of a 13th century Latin translation of a late 8th/early 9th century Jewish astronomer of Alexandria:
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/G600030/
One of the headings is “Argumentum ad rotunditatem terrae etcetera.” Now, I have no Latin and less Greek, but it seems to me that translates out to something like “Proofs that the world is round etc.”
Well, if nothing else, this guy proves once again that the old saying is true: “Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist”. Yawn.
And he proves, in spades, my growing belief that the main reason Christianity is increasingly rejected by the modern West is that the modern West has become too damned ignorant – of history, of philosophy, of virtually everything except technology – to even be capable of understanding what Christianity is, what it teaches, or what role it has played in human history.
[...] C. Wright has an interesting dialogue with a reader about the Christian origins of empirical science. To wit, medieval Christianity, [...]
John,
You asked me a question as a way of framing the debate to your liking, a question that was not relevant to the point I was making. You asked me to respond to lists, presumably as a way of saying that one list was longer than another and therefore your perspective was the correct one. And then you profess that we are not talking about the Constitution — the most tangible and enduring product of the Enlightenment.
This is not fleeing around a battlefield, sir. This is a foggy battlefield where we don’t seem to be talking the same language.
I also have limited time for such debates, but despite all the evasions, quotes (which were not relevant) and lists, I ask you for reality. A man cannot return from the dead as it is claimed that Jesus did. There is no tangible evidence for God of any kind, lest God of a specific religion.
Instead, you counter with this: “The demand for empirical proof of the Christian religion is one I can satisfy: I am an eyewitness.”
The Muslims say the same thing. So do the Hindus. So does every devout of every faith.
That’s inherently irrational, since I have spoken to people who can look at the frightening destructive power of a hurricane and say it is eyewitness proof of an angry God. That doesn’t cut it.
You wrote:
“If laws are manmade, any man with the power to change the law is right to do so, and law is merely the will of the stronger. No liberal or equal laws can be erected on such a basis.”
Absolutely incorrect. Systems of laws and governments can be conceived of by many human minds, some favoring tyranny and some democracy. Your statement that equality cannot come from manmade laws is an assumptive absurdity.
You write:
“If laws are discovered, then they must pre-exist mankind, and the justice of those laws must be a stubborn fact no human will can change, and ergo their justice must derive from a non-human source… Justice cannot come from the material universe, from the merely by-play of atoms in motion, because Justice is a non-material and non-temporal thing. Justice is a mental thing: an ideal or an idea. Mental things only exist in minds.”
We agree on this. Justice does not exist outside of men’s minds.
“Justice is also universal and eternal, or else it is not justice.”
We disagree, and this statement of yours is assumption. There is nothing to show justice is either eternal or universal. It clearly isn’t… since your position is that Christianity brought order to the world (the pagan Romans did in their day) and therefore, where was eternal and universal justice before Christianity? It’s a paradox and an impossibility. A few extra lions in Rome, and Christianity perishes. Does eternal and universal justice perish too, then? History is made up of choice and chance; there is no evidence — not even your alleged and dubious “eyewitnessing” — that there is anything divine in any of this.
You wrote:
“Without such a Divine Mind, there can be no justice, merely partisan interest or temporary Hobbesean armistices. Without justice, there can be no liberal or equal laws.”
That’s just it. It IS Hobbesean. We might not like it, but empires rise and fall, tyrannies and democracies cycle around each other. This is the cold truth that the religious despise… so they invent warmer, cuddly truths about man being in the center of the universe when we clearly are not.
We disagree. Oh well. I think it would be rewarding to talk with you in person and not through this vector of expression (where other people can take feeble pot-shots that try to trivialize the points I made because they threaten their calcified worldviews.) My worldview, by contrast, is to open to the universe… but to ask for hard proofs before I believe in magic. At the end of the day, you believe in invisible omnipowerful deities, angels, resurrections, and a bestiary of absurdities no different from the Greeks who believed in the Minotaur, or the Egyptians who awaited the Feather of Truth.
Good day.
A man cannot return from the dead as it is claimed that Jesus did.
This is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence. How can we believe that you are aware of all the laws of space and time so as to be able to say this?
“A man cannot return from the dead as it is claimed that Jesus did. ”
Interesting. Here is a list of 2000 people who were clinically and legally dead and later returned to life. http://www.nderf.org/. I have heard of cases where the dead person was in a morgue, with a tag on his toe, dead for four hours. I have heard of a case where the person was dead for over a day.
If we suppose that 99 percent of this accounts are lies or hallucinations, we still would be left a sufficient number of unexplained events that the blanket statement that “a man cannot return from the dead” cannot be accepted without qualification or question.
Isn’t this sort of argument superfluous? Was not the resurrection of Jesus a miracle only possible to the son of God, and not some medically arguable action? And like Lazarus, brought back by Jesus after I believe four days, he came back after being in the desert dead. The desert not known for the preservation of dead flesh.
Unless you are claiming that these other cases you cite are also miracles which is what they would absolutely have to be if they happened in the same circumstances.
The argument is superfluous depending on what the case as stated by the opposition is. If the opponent reasons in this fashion: 1. No man returns from the dead 2. Jesus is a man like all others ergo 3. Jesus did not return from the dead, the syllogism can be questioned at two points. First, is it true that no man returns from the dead? I have heard that a quarter million Americans have had some sort of near-death experience, where they have been revived after clinical and legal death. This poses a difficulty for the major premise.
Since the Christians say that Jesus was not a man like all others, and demonstrated this by doing something that all men know no man can do, that is, return from the dead, the mere impossibility of the act of resurrection is proof of the divinity of Jesus, not something we can simply assume did not happen because it is unusual. The unnaturalness of the act is the very thing from which (for Christians) it takes its power as proof. If Jesus did something everyone can do, he is no more than everyone. If he did something wise men can do, he is no more than a wise man. If he did something healers can do, he is no more than a healer. But if he rose from the dead, then he is divine. This poses a difficulty for the minor premise.
The two difficult arguments against the syllogism would have to be argued in the alternate. Obviously if we argue that reviving from death is commonplace, we cannot argue it was unique.
But in either case, the bland statement, “the reports of the a man rising from the dead must be false because men do not rise from the dead” is something of a circular argument.
>> This is the cold truth that the religious despise… so they invent warmer, cuddly truths about man being in the center of the universe when we clearly are not.
Yes, indeed. That old Christian superstition about all men being in danger of eternal torment after death is so clearly a warm, cuddly wish-fulfilment fantasy, isn’t it…. as opposed to the atheist belief that death is just falling peacefully asleep forever, so that one is totally free to do whatever one wishes in life without having to worry about any consequences hereafter – what a manly facing up to the cold truth that is! I am absolutely in awe of your courage.
(Chesterton fans should note and enjoy how our village atheist has followed the well-trodden path of first railing against Christianity for its bloody and merciless violence – stoning adulterous women to death and all that – and then turning right around and railing against Christianity for absurdly coddling people with its comforting but silly nostrums….)
“You asked me a question as a way of framing the debate to your liking, a question that was not relevant to the point I was making. You asked me to respond to lists, presumably as a way of saying that one list was longer than another and therefore your perspective was the correct one. And then you profess that we are not talking about the Constitution — the most tangible and enduring product of the Enlightenment.”
Humbug and hogwash. You made the statement that the Enlightenment was anti-Christian and that Christianity was anti-Enlightenment. I disproved it and asked you for a counter-argument. You changed the subject, and pretended that by “the Enlightenment” you meant “The US Constitution”. I disproved that point as well (to be for disestablishment is not to be against the Christian religion) and asked for a counterargument. You changed the subject again to a general argument against the Christian religion, starting with a statement that there is no proof for the claims made. I myself am an eyewitness who has seen God: I asked you to define your standard of proof. Instead of defining your standard of proof, you changed the subject again, and counted by saying that since other faiths also make claims to prove their point, ergo there is no proof. I am not sure what the argument is intended to imply — as far as I know the Phlogiston Theory, the Geocentric Theory, the State State Theory and the Lemarckian Theory make claims of proof to back their theories, so therefore the mere existence of more than one body of proof to be examined does not, in empirical sciences, preclude the examination of the theory.
You pretend to be an advocate of reason, but you will not reason with me. When I ask you direct questions, you pretend you did not hear them. When I answer you directly, you change the subject. When I say something that is not clear, you do not ask for clarification, but merely repeat your point.
Atheists in my day knew how to debate.
Just one question for EdV: When you argue the apparant awfulness of Christianity and the Christian God you only quote the Old Testament. Why? Why not any quotes about this Bronze Age savage god from the New?
Christians believe (loosely speaking) that everything in the New Testament either is prefigured in the Old or completely trumps it. It’s even called “Christianity” not oh, Yawehism or Jehovah-anity. Why do you suppose that is?
“Neither the Greek philosophy nor the Jewish world-view either by itself created the conditions for the progressive notions hidden in them to flourish. Christianity is the marriage of these two traditions: Jewish faith and Greek metaphysics.”
I mean no insult, but most Protestants would go, “Huh?” at this claim. Sources please, sir? Where in the New Testament is Aristotle mentioned?
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” is a worthy question, I think. While, I will have nothing to do with much of the anti-intellectualism that seems to accompany sola Scriptura…I think it is a fair question indeed.
Where in the New Testament is Aristotle mentioned?
A red herring, sir. Of course he is not mentioned by name; and in any case the metaphysics of the New Testament is not Aristotelian, but predominantly Platonic or Neoplatonic. John 1, in particular, explains the Judaeo-Christian God and His Son, and the relationship between them and the created universe, in Neoplatonic terms for the benefit of Greeks and philosophy-minded Jews. The very term Logos for the Son of God is taken directly from Neoplatonism.
Might be true. However, that is a long way from saying “Christianity was a result of combining Jewish theology and Greek philosophy.”
Where did the Christian prescription of faith first come from? (not Judaism…and no Greek text as far as I can tell…and I’m not going to go into the thorny issue of faith alone…that’s not what I’m talking about…as far as I can tell both Catholics and Protestants hold the position that faith is essential…which Judaism did not take that as a primary at all…Jews hold wildly different views on who God is…and none of them matter as much as adherence to Torah law)
The general attitude towards Pharisee-ism?
What did Greek philosophy have to do with the abandonment of Old Testament laws?
What did Greek philosophy have to do with accepting Jesus as a sacrifice for sins, as opposed to a lamb?
Very well, I’ll go further:
Every statement in the Creeds is the result of applying reason to see that Scripture is interpreted in a way that accounts for all the texts and does not contradict itself. The method of applying reason was taught to the Church Fathers by Platonist and Aristotelian philosophers. It is because of Greek philosophy, and the methods of logic it taught, that the Church is not Marcionite or Gnostic or Sabellian or any of a hundred other heresies — any one of which would have led Christianity into fatal error and ultimately rendered the sacrifice of Christ ineffectual.
Of course all this is a closed book to the modern Protestant, raised on sola scriptura and a tradition of contempt towards the Church Fathers because of their Catholicism. When you once accept the fantastic and insupportable claim that each man should interpret entirely for himself a collection of Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew writings composed and compiled (though at the direction of God) by men of ancient times and alien cultures, when he has no knowledge of their history and cannot even read their languages — why, when you accept that claim, ipso facto you rule out the application of reason to Scripture, for you have banished from your intellectual equipment all the tools of scholarship that make it possible. Scriptural exegesis and theology are real sciences, and require real study to master; and part of that study is learning the methods of formal logic which the Greeks, not the Jews, bequeathed to us.
I have observed that instead of answering my questions, you have chosen to attack my Protestantism instead. I have too much respect for you to do likewise.
I take seriously the idea that man ought not to settle questions that can only be answered by divinity itself, through fallen man’s reasoning (which there are repeated warnings about in scripture). The proposal here, is to take what the Greek’s say…apply it to the Jewish faith…and then accept that as divine command? Sorry, something here does not compute.
I beg your pardon: I am not attacking your Protestantism: I am pointing out that the fundamental tenets of Protestantism make your question essentially unanswerable, because Protestantism consists fundamentally in denying the philosophy and theology of Christianity while attempting to keep the Scriptures.
I take seriously the idea that man ought not to settle questions that can only be answered by divinity itself, through fallen man’s reasoning (which there are repeated warnings about in scripture).
The position of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches is that while man is fallen, reason is a Divine attribute, and if we reason correctly — which requires us, first, not to trust our own unaided reasoning, but to check our answers with each other and with those who have reasoned on the same questions before us, lest we commit errors; and second, to trust prayerfully in the Holy Spirit to guide our reasonings and protect us from error — if, as I say, we reason correctly from true premises, we will reach true conclusions.
Scripture is difficult, and Scripture is often obscure; many of the words used have divers meanings, and it is not always readily apparent in context which of the possible meanings is meant. This means that Scripture must be interpreted. How, then, if not according to reason? According to one’s emotions? According to the whim of the moment? According to some private revelation, which may come not from God, but from one of Satan’s devils masquerading as an angel of light? If you do not interpret Scripture according to reason, you will interpret it in contradictory ways and tangle yourself in mare’s nests, which will lead the faithful astray and make the Faith a laughingstock to unbelievers. But if you do interpret Scripture according to reason, you will find that it stands up under any attack, that your faith is made stronger by understanding (within your capacity, of course), and that Scripture is found to answer many questions that are not obviously addressed in the text, by application of the principles that it teaches.
The proposal here, is to take what the Greek’s say…apply it to the Jewish faith…and then accept that as divine command?
No. The Jews were not a reasoning people; they did not practise either philosophy in general, or formal logic in particular. They had some practical mathematics from the Egyptians and some practical astronomy from the Babylonians, but they themselves contributed nothing to those fields of knowledge in Biblical times, and they were not abstract thinkers. It was the Greeks, and Aristotle above all, who discovered and defined the right and wrong methods of reasoning, identified the fallacies to which naive reason is prone, and taught the ways to reason validly, so that by working from true premises you may reach true conclusions.
In reasoning, you do not ‘take what the Greeks say’, you use the method of reasoning which the Greeks discovered through long study of nature and the mind, both of which are from God; and in so far as the Greek philosophers knew God (particularly the Platonists and Stoics, who knew more about Him than the modern Deists or many non-Christian sects), they knew Him through the Divine attribute of Reason. The Jews themselves employed Greek logic in interpreting their own Scriptures, as in the school of Philo; Jesus’ own disciples employed Greek logic and philosophy, as in the Gospel and epistles of John. Greek philosophy is not matter, but method.
To say that you must not use a method of interpreting Scripture that is not itself contained in Scripture, is to say that you must not use a spade to dig gold out of the earth, because the spade itself is not made of gold. It does not follow. But this was the principal error of Martin Luther, and it is the characteristic error of the Fundamentalists.
If you will not believe me when I say these things, because I am a Catholic, perhaps you will trust a fellow Protestant, from whom, indeed, I learned most of them. His name, of course, is C. S. Lewis, and you will find a fair examination of the relationship between Reason and Scripture in Mere Christianity.
Even still…the people doing the reasoning are not infallible. Yes, I read Mere Christianity. My computer cut out before, I saw it submit…and was hoping it didn’t take. Here is a more full response:
The question of whether or not Christianity sprang from a combination of Greek philosophy and Jewish faith, is answered for me when I look at Jewish attempts at Greek thought. Bahya Pakuda, a 12th century and little known (sadly so) Jewish philosopher, argued that Torah law is not merely something to be practiced outwardly, but is to be applied inwardly to the heart, as well. His system of thought, arguably came close to Christianity but did not equal it. Which tells me that there is something missing in the formula: Greek philosophy + Jewish faith = Christianity. The missing part is Jesus Christ. Greek philosophy + Jewish faith + Jesus Christ = Christianity. ianity is not a religion without Christ in it. Christianity’s true strength is that from the top down (starting with Christ), each thing follows logically from what preceded it. This is the main reason I converted. Incidently, I am not arguing that Biblical exegenesis should not employ rules of reason. I am arguing that Christianity sprung from none other than the words of Jesus Christ himself. It is doubtful that the Church fathers would have had anything to reason about, had Jesus never spoke.
Even here, I find the Catholic tendancy to make human reason a part of divine command…disconcerting. Human beings themselves are fallible, subject to pride, etc… Philosophy, science, etc have all been subject to change and refinement as we think, re-think, discover, and possibly rediscover the things we accept as true about the universe. Rules arrived at through reason, should be available for amendment, and correction when necessary. Not made a divine decree. You, sir, have a greater faith in reason than I. This is also why I would be Baptist before Catholic (though I claim neither).
No, the most compelling argument to me (my Protestant cousins besides) for Catholicism is the argument from tradition as opposed to reason. My background in Judaism (and yes, most especially Bahya Pakuda) informs my Christianity. The traditions and laws of the Jews and their unique way of viewing God, form the rock upon which my Christianity rests. Out of all the Christian sects, Catholicism is the only one with an unbroken line back to the days of antiquity. Baptists may claim antiquity, but when pressed, the historical documents proving their case are sparse, and spurious at best. Even when viewing Catholicism as a whole, I can still see subtle hints of that old Jewish culture.
I await your answer.
Tom, you write: “Of course all this is a closed book to the modern Protestant, raised on sola scriptura and a tradition of contempt towards the Church Fathers because of their Catholicism. When you once accept the fantastic and insupportable claim that each man should interpret entirely for himself a collection of Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew writings composed and compiled (though at the direction of God) by men of ancient times and alien cultures, when he has no knowledge of their history and cannot even read their languages”
This is a straw-man argument. The Protestant teaching is not that scripture is the sole source of information on God (much less that each man is required to consult it on his own unguided study), but rather that the scripture is the sole source of information that is inerrant. Tradition, the church fathers, reason, and mystical experiences are not scorned, they are merely not idolized. All four are viewed as being fallen or the product of fallen men and therefore not to be blindly trusted.
Protestants have in fact accepted some of the doctrinal positions of the 2nd and 3rd century church fathers, such as the primary cannon of scripture and the Trinity. They reject certain teachings such as prayer beads, veneration of Mary and prayer to saints on the grounds that they are imports from Greek and Roman paganism and are opposed by biblical teachings on idolatry. They reject other doctrines such as transubstantiation on the grounds that they are imports from Aristotlean philosophy with no support from first-century writers (and are, frankly, sophistic).
Ha! You’ve argued my point for me nicely, but I’ll also put my two cents, since I already wrote it:
There are some Protestants who take the idea of Sola Scriptura totally literally and try to interpret the Bible for themselves without any help from anyone or formal training (I’ve met one of this type myself.) However, if most Protestants today felt that you should totally rely on Scripture and your own interpretations alone, there shouldn’t be any Protestant Colleges of Theology nor the enormous trade in Protestant-sourced books both technical and ‘pop’ on the subjects of Christian theology and practice. For that matter, I doubt the original Protestants threw out any and all ideas that came from someone else simply on the basis that they did come from someone else. I rather think that it would also be a misinterpretation of Sola Scriptura to act as if holding to Sola Scriptura means never agreeing with (or reading the works of) other people who don’t hold to Sola Scriptura.
Perhaps I don’t understand Sola Scriptura properly, but I always thought it meant only accepting the Bible as final authority for faith, and considering all the rest as disputable matters. That leaves a lot of room for reading the Church fathers and Catholic theology and other people’s opinions and then judging as best as you can whether it measures up against what the Bible says or not. Of course, this is dangerous in it’s own way. Stupid people will reach stupid conclusions (or self serving ones) and even smart, truth seeking people often won’t agree.
However, I don’t see the intrinsic benefit of an appeal to authority (to the collective conclusions of the Catholic Church) as an alternative way of deciding what’s true and should be believed about Christianity and being a Christian . Sola Scriptura means that the only appeal to authority that counts is an appeal to the authority of the Bible. Of course, that’s where interpretations start making things muddy. The system of Sola Scriptura isn’t perfect. But I have yet to be convinced that the Catholic Church’s collective teachings are, in fact, a superior system for finding the truth.
Anyway, to sum up my point, please don’t everyone assume that a belief in Sola Scriptura necessarily (or even commonly) means throwing all pretense of rationality and scholarship to the dogs. It doesn’t.
The original province of Sola Scriptura was the reasonable-sounding argument that any Church practice or doctrine not found in scripture was an later Church accretion, teaching the doctrine of man for the Word of God, and could be questioned or disregarded.
My personal discontent with this argument is that certain things clearly essential to Christianity, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which this argument would reject as an accretion, are accepted by Protestants as Gospel, whereas other teachings clearly and unambiguously in the Gospel, such as the prohibition on divorce except for cause of infidelity, are the central cause of Protestant schism, as in the case of the Anglican Church. This does not necessarily mean the argument is false, but it does lead me to regard them with more suspicion than I would if the argument were well meant.
Certainly care must be taken not to preach human doctrines as divine, and comparison with the written scripture will act as a check on excesses. In cases of unresolvable doubt, a General Council can meet and establish the doctrine of the faithful. If you leave it for each man to determine by his own conscience, you will soon find yourself in a Church were the married homosexual polygamous priestesses are praying in the vernacular and preaching Abortion and Euthanasia as a sacrament — which may be perfectly fine for Unitarians or Anglicans, but then why even bother to pretend that such teachings are Christ’s?
Since the Bible was written and compiled and preserved, and what books were cannon and what were not was decided by the Church — and I mean the universal Church, back before the schism between Catholic and Orthodox — the Bible’s authority rests on the authority of the Church and nowhere else.
Abuses of the Church are a scandal and must be checked; reformation of the Church, such as were heralded by the Franciscans and Jesuits, are certainly a grim necessity; schism with the Church in the name of Protest or in the name of Reform which yanks congregations away from Rome and places them under the authority of a temporal prince, such as the Imperator in Constantinople, the Czar of Russia, the various German princes, or the King of England, is a cure worse than the disease, and leads to a church much more worldly than the Roman Church, not less.
Several things, John:
1. Protestants accept the doctrine of the Trinity because it is supported by scripture, even if not clearly spelled out.
2. I don’t view the Church of England and its offshoots as genuinely protestant because, as you intimate, that schism was motivated by Henry VIII’s penis rather than by the doctrines of the Reformation.
3. Except for birth control, I don’t think that conservative Protestant doctrine on sex, marriage, and divorce is much different from the Catholics.
4. There are plenty of liberal Protestants who have denied some of the basic foundational truths of scripture, but there are plenty of Catholics who have done the same –including Catholic priests. I’m not just talking about the gay pedophiles but the Catholic priests who have openly advocated for leftist ideology as well.
5. The argument about the dangers of letting each man interpret scripture in his own way is a pragmatic argument, not a religious argument. Against it, I would point out the dangers of letting a monolithic organization interpret scripture for everyone else (what happens when you get a leftist Pope?). Historically, both strategies have had numerous failures, but the failures of the free individuals have been less devastating simply because the people who went wrong had less power.
6. You act as if it is a given that Constantinople tried to usurp the Roman pope, but one could just as well argue that it was the Roman popes who usurped the power that had been legally transferred to Constantinople.
1. If the Protestants accept the Trinity due to indirect hints appearing in holy writ, why do that reject doctrines also supported by such indirect hints, such as the primacy of St. Peter, or the sanctity of prayers for the salvation of the dead?
2. The interesting word you use here is ‘genuine.’ I do not see why the schism of England is any less schismatic than that of the Nestorians, the Arians, or the Donatists.
3. Agreed. The teaching about birth control, of course, is what leads to all those others you mention.
4. Agreed. Nonetheless, the Catholics have yet to admit priestesses or to appointed openly homosexual bishops to Sees. Protestants groups are suffering both schisms within their ranks and, in some cases, returns to the Catholic Church because of this Protestant pressure.
5. The argument is both pragmatic and religious. Christ established the Twelve to be serve in the offices of the Levites, and maintain a continuity with the priesthood established by Moses. Nothing in Jewish or Christian tradition, or the Word of God, implies that congregations have the right or authority to elect their own priests and holy offices. Christianity is and always has been a religion of tradition, a gospel or ‘good news’ passed down through apostolic succession: nowhere in logic or law can man be granted the ability, each man as seemeth good in his own eyes, to interpret, change, or silence that message. When Calvin decided that God had not granted free will to man, he was inventing something from his own imagination, not in keeping with Christian teaching; when Luther decided the Christ was talking in parables when He declared the host to be His body and blood, he was again inventing something from his own imaginings. Ironically, both men wanted to reform the Church, not to split her in two and three and numberless bits.
6. No one can seriously make the argument that Constantinople held one of the ancient patriarchates. These were Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria, and had been since the First Century. The Church is older than the city of Constantinople not by years, but by centuries. The argument you are proposing would soon flounder on historical evidence, or rather on the lack of it. As early as the Second Century, bishops and Patriarchs were acknowledging the Primacy of Peter’s See; all the general councils acknowledged it, and so on.
Trinitarianism, which most Protestant sects embrace, is Greek metaphysical reasoning applied to the question of the relation of the Father to the Son.
In the First Century, the Christians were Jews with some Gentile or Greek (i.e. citizens or subjects of the Roman Empire) converts. By the Second Century, the Christians were overwhelmingly citizens and subjects of the Roman Empire, men of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch — and these Romans did not depart from their Roman-ness or Romantic world-view when they become Christian. When John speaks of the ‘Word’ the Logos, he is referring to a Greek Metaphysical concept ultimately derived from Plotinus, who got it from Plato. The pagans deduced as much about God, the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, the Form of the Good of Plato, the Divine Mind or Pronia of the Stoics, as Man can deduce with unaided human reason. It took the coming of Christ to introduce them to the God they were trying to deduce, and the adaptation of Jewish ideas of equality and sanctity to wipe out pagan perversions and abnormalities, starting with the abolition of infanticide and gladiatorial games and ending with abolition of slavery.
If we say the dignity of man is based on his capacity for reason, then logically neither babies nor senile crones nor anyone who can be painted as ignorant or stupid has any right to enjoy the benefits of equal and free laws.
Why not go whole hog and point out that by that definition, “murdered in his sleep” is impossible, since we are not reasonable while sleeping?
TOF
Then perhaps you should not need to ask the questions you do. Read Augustine’s On Christian doctrine, where he explains how to read passages that seem abhorrent to moderns.
ME
My original question, in this jungle that constitutes Mr. Wright’s new journal, was how many people now read the Bible past the first “begets” of Genesis. It was mainly an idle question at the end of a post. No history will tell me this answer to what people’s practice is now.
Outside of that you can bet that if I were a Christian (and not just a curious slob) I wouldn’t consider a simple personal reading of the Bible to be sufficient, I would pillage the entire corpus. The ancient and near modern common man didn’t have this luxury – so much the worse for them. To only drag yourself to a sermon once a week (NOW) I would consider sloth; the sermon that is probably half slept through if I am to judge the actions of many people I observe who call themselves Christians.
TOF
Unlike the soft, gentle era typified by death camps, firebombings, nuclear bombs, machine guns, nerve gasses, I suppose.
ME
Now I am just going to return sarcasm. Why yes just the other day as I was hauling my slaves to the quarry I passed 4 people on a hill bleaching in the sun after being crucified. They were lucky because I heard the village they hailed from was just wiped out by the plague. I was shocked to learn they were Christian though, it is a shame. One remembers how easy they had it back in the Roman Empire when everyone left them alone. And when they assumed the body of Rome how all the Barbarians came with wreaths of flowers and sang them hymns… I mean are you freaking kidding me?
How many people in the lovely USA do you think have ever experienced the things you mentioned with their cell phones, space-aged medicine, plush apartments where movies are streamed in as they munch popcorn with their doggie, Foofy?
Roman times were brutish and hard, more so for the Christians (whose side am I on here?). That was the context. The “horrors” you mention, most of your list is decades past, are not an “in your face” experience of life. The average American (or Swede, or Frenchman) wouldn’t last a day back then, their lives are blissfully ignorant of real suffering comparatively.
Your response (the knee-jerk sarcasm) seems to suggest you think Jesus came back from the dead, and the world was Christian and happy thereafter.
First time I ever got an angry response from a Christian by ripping on the Romans!
It was not an angry response, simply a note that human nature has not changed all that much. I was puzzled by the notion that Jews wiped out another tribe because a holy book told them too. None of the other tribes of that day and age seemed to need such permission. Any tribe that tried the fluffy bunny route in that milieu would not have left enough of themselves around to have left any influential holy books.
And, yes, the ancient world was one of such superstition, fear, and brutality almost unimaginable today. People were surrounded by inanimate objects which they believed had wills and intentions of their own implacably indifferent and capricious regarding human beings. The Athenians could declare that “The strong take what they come and the weak suffer what they must” and still be thought by the Moderns paragons worthy of imitation. The stars were “alive, divine, and influential in human affairs.” We seem to be returning to that milieu. Roughly a third of Generation X was killed before they were even born. Now we talk easily of “too much” medical care, and have tried our hand at starving the comatose to death.
Cell phones and antibiotics are a different topic.
>> “I was puzzled by the notion that Jews wiped out another tribe because a holy book told them too. None of the other tribes of that day and age seemed to need such permission.”
You have a unique gift for completely misreading plain English, I stated no such thing. I was referring to “shock value” to Old Testament stories between the modern mind and ancient mind, as was abundantly clear.
>> “The Athenians could declare that “The strong take what they come and the weak suffer what they must” and still be thought by the Moderns paragons worthy of imitation.”
Vague statements like this make me wonder exactly what Moderns you are referring to. There are many things for which the Athenians are worthy of imitation, and things that are not. Most of the product of Aristotle’s thought (and the action that produced it) are certainly worthy of imitation, but not all.
>> “We seem to be returning to that milieu.”
HA! Optimist! We are going farther back than that! Take a closer look, and you will pray to be sent back to that milieu.
“HA! Optimist! We are going farther back than that! Take a closer look, and you will pray to be sent back to that milieu.”
It may be just my old affection for Ayn Rand speaking up, but I must say, yes and Amen, brother and ‘You said it.’ The intellectual climate of these times among the elite is on the level of schoolyard bullies calling names at each other, about the level of a Second Grader, but the implications of subjectivism and nihilism are pre-literate if not pre-rational, about the level of an ape-man who has not grasped the art of abstracting concepts from concrete perceptions. Their moral development, which praises the perverse and dispraises the wholesome, is of course below even the level of the brute beasts — who at least have an instinct for their self-preservation, and, among mammals, the provision of their young.
“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality.”
Yes, that was my reference! It was a pleasure having it picked up, don’t know why, but it was. She really nailed those elite intellectual freaks to their own inverted cross. They are the enemy.
I thought you knew I was an ex-libertarian. Unlike my previous affiliation with atheists, I have nothing but respect (even if some of it is respectful disagreement) for Objectivism.
Atheists I divide into two camps: those who are atheists because they have encountered no evidence nor formal proofs to convince them of the existence of God, whom I respect, and those are are atheists because they suffer of terminal case of father-hating ego-inflated christophobic buffoonery, such figures as Dawkins and Hitchens. They are so drunk on hatred that they are blind drunk. Since these paranoiac blind drunk atheists have more or less shoved the sober atheists offstage, it is without pride that I count myself as an alumni of the atheist school of thought.
Sober atheists and libertarians and virtuous pagans are people I’d be willing and honored to have in my foxhole against the neobarbarian hordes.
I did, but here you are the One, I am (one of) the Many, so I don’t presume you know everyone’s semi-obscure references. As far as atheism goes, it is not my clarion call, and I cash no chips with its position. It is incidental. Actually if I run into an atheist who is not an Objectivist, the first thing I am is wary – too often it is a position for license, be it subjectivist whim-worship or plain nihilism.
‘Here you are the One’
And I thought Obama was the One, and was a lightworker to boot. I suppose that makes me a Darkworker.
COOL! Does that mean I can have palpable shadow flow from my fingertips when I do a Kung Fu kata like in Airbender, blind foes, strangle laughter, and have the defenders of Gondor quail beneath my shadow and gibber in terror?
The could be a good title for a novel: VENDETTA OF THE DARKWORKER
[...] above is exactly the sort that Chesterton warned against. Like as not, both proper skepticism and a healthy dose of Jesus and Mary are what made the West, and in particular the United States, [...]
As always, I am a day late and a dollar short to these conversations, suffice to say I think it no accident that it was Christian Europe — not China, not the Islamosphere, not the mystical and animorphic empires of the Americas or Africa — which provided fertile soil for the seeds of science. Indeed, some of science’s earliest champions — Kepler, hello — were rather devout Christians who saw science as a tool for revealing the mechanisms of God’s creation. Have there been times when Christendom has knocked heads with science? Sure. But these clashes do not explain the entire story, nor are they emblematic of a gargantuan rift. Rather, I suspect a lot of present-day atheists and anti-Christians seek to re-write the “narrative” of the past to suit their modern hostility. Just look at how the U.S. Founders have been re-imaged in the modern secular mold.
BobWiz
I knew his philosophy, but did not tell him mine
TOF
You’re a Randroid. That was obvious. That was why I pointed out that Aquinas’ cosmological proofs lead to “Existence exists” and the identification of God with Pure Existence (“I AM”).
There are a slew of commentaries here: http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/rand-ayn/
not the least of which is the observation that Rand’s writings were re-inventing Parmenides, and all the absurdities that followed from it. Those pertinent here are
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/01/is-ayn-rand-a-good-philosopher-rand-on-the-primacy-of-existence.html
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/01/rand-and-existence-again.html
and
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/01/existence-god-and-the-randians.html
TOF
“You’re a Randroid.”
That is a derogatory, insulting, term – obviously. I am not going to trade back insults, you can be the little man.
Ha! Nice links. You don’t think you are the first one – even here on Mr. Wright’s site – to send these my way do you?
I am still mystified why people send me these links to that moron. Is it the first thing that pops up in Google after you brush up in Wikipedia? If I have put Objectivism up against the figures in the history of philosophy, and have chosen Objectivism, what makes you think this pip squeak has anything to offer.
The last paragraph is laughable (not to mention the smears and ironic accusations) because you left out the next part. He says Rand and Peikoff are amateurs. Well, Peikoff is a Phd in philosophy who studied under Sidney Hook and taught for a number of years. Seems like the same qualifications, don’t it? What then is the standard for being a professional? I guess only the Maverick calls the shots.
Try to better than to make it in my laugh pile. Don’t bring in Forrest Gump if you have a bone to pick.