Orthodox Christianity and Science

[Fade the Butcher]

Is the Orthodox Church responsible for retarding science in the Christian east?

[Shades of Revolution]

Is the Orthodox Church responsible for retarding science in the Christian east?

Not in the strict sense of the word "retarding."
They aren't actually breaking into labs and thwarting research en masse.
But they're not doing the scientific community any good either :P

Though I think it's a tad hypocritical to shun science, but not belong to a colony of Old Order Mennonites or Old Order Amish.

[Fade the Butcher]

In the historical sense.

[Watzy]

Bolshevism unfortunately failed to terminate Orthodoxy in Russia but succeeded to bring Russia into industrial age. Russia owns its 20th century accomplishments to Bolshevism, not Orthodoxy.

It is difficult even to imagine Tzarist Russia in the role of USSR, launching satellites into orbit or spacecrafts to Venus.

[Boleslaw]

Much of the foundation for Russia's scientific achievements were laid during the last few decades of Tsarism.

[Cyprian]

I don't really think the Church has had too much effect on science either way. There was initially a hostile reaction in the East to the "new science" of the 17th century, largely because empirical science and speculative philosophy weren't nearly as separate as they now are, and Western science tended to come with a lot of metaphysical baggage. As this separation begins to occur in the 18th and 19th centuries, I don't really see much evidence of the Church having much of an effect either way on science. More of a lack of concern than anything else.

[delete]

Much of the foundation for Russia's scientific achievements were laid during the last few decades of Tsarism.

Much of the foundation for Russia's scientific achievements were laid by the people who got the posibility to speculte freely about why something happens and which patterns different phenomena follows.

Scientific progress is because people actually do scientific investigations based on empirism, and people inventing new stuff.

Churches and ideologies tends to have other goals than pure improvement of science as they have different moral priorities.

The churches spread knowledge and litteracy in many area, so many got their first glimpse of science trough theological indoctrination. This does not mean that unorthodox opinions were encouraged.

[Watzy]

I don't really think the Church has had too much effect on science either way. There was initially a hostile reaction in the East to the "new science" of the 17th century, largely because empirical science and speculative philosophy weren't nearly as separate as they now are, and Western science tended to come with a lot of metaphysical baggage. As this separation begins to occur in the 18th and 19th centuries, I don't really see much evidence of the Church having much of an effect either way on science. More of a lack of concern than anything else.

Copernicus was a Catholic cleric and Galileo a devout Roman Catholic despite his ideas were in conflict with contemporary doctrine of the Catholic church. On the other hand I've never heard about a great scientist who was an Orthodox priest.

Catholic Church regrettably always liked to interfere into the work of scientists, but also used to stipulate scientists. As you pointed out this was not the case with Orthodox Churches.

[Der Sozialist]

Galileo a devout Roman Catholic despite
This is actually in question. If Galileo were to publicly declare himself an atheist, he would probably be executed by the inquisition.

After all, the Inquisition was successful in "persuading" him to recant his heliocentric ideas.

[Watzy]

This is actually in question. If Galileo were to publicly declare himself an atheist, he would probably be executed by the inquisition.

A biased speculation.

The Religious Affiliation of Astronomer, Scientist Galileo Galilei

Galileo remained a devout Catholic throughout his life. "Affiliation: Catholic; It is known to everyone that Galileo was denounced to the Inquisition in 1615 and that he was tried and condemned by the Inquisition in 1633, living the rest of his life under house arrest. All of this was for Copernicanism, not for any heretical theological views." [Source: The Galileo Project; http://galileo.rice.edu/Catalog/NewFiles/galilei_gal.html; viewed 12 July 2005]. Additionally, it may be noted that although Galileo himself did not consider his writings about heliocentricity to be heretical, his Catholic leaders at that time did. Today the Catholic Church does not consider heliocentricity or any of Galileo's writings to be heretical.
From: Rich Deem, "Famous Scientists Who Believed in God", last modified 19 May 2005, on "Evidence for God from Science" website (http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html; viewed 5 October 2005):

Galileo is often remembered for his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. His controversial work on the solar system was published in 1633. It had no proofs of a sun-centered system (Galileo's telescope discoveries did not indicate a moving earth) and his one "proof" based upon the tides was invalid. It ignored the correct elliptical orbits of planets published twenty five years earlier by Kepler. Since his work finished by putting the Pope's favorite argument in the mouth of the simpleton in the dialogue, the Pope (an old friend of Galileo's) was very offended. After the "trial" and being forbidden to teach the sun-centered system, Galileo did his most useful theoretical work, which was on dynamics. Galileo expressly said that the Bible cannot err, he saw his system as concerning the issue of how the Bible should be interpreted.
[Sources:] Annibale Fantoli, Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church (1994), M. Sharratt, Galileo (1994), M. A. Finnochiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (1989)

From: Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, Hart Publishing Company, New York City (1978), pages 102-104:
The invention of the telescope and the series of discoveries that resulted from it made Galileo famous. However, by supporting the theory of Copernicus he aroused opposition in important [Catholic] Church circles, and in 1616 he was ordered to refrain from teaching the Copernican hypothesis. Galileo chafed under this restriction for several years. When the Pope died, in 1623, he was succeeded by a man who had been an admirer of Galileo. The following year the new Pope, Urban VIII, hinted (though somewhat ambiguously) that the prohibition would no longer be in force.
Galileo spent the next six years composing his most famous work, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. This book was a masterly exposition of the evidence in favor of the Copernican theory, and the book was published in 1632 with the imprimatur of the Church censors. Nevertheless, Church authorities responded in anger when the book appeared, and Galileo was soon brought to trial before the Inquisition of Rome on charges of having violated the 1616 prohibition.

It seems clear that many churchmen were unhappy with the decision to prosecute the eminent scientist. Even under the Church law of the time, the case against Galileo was questionable, and he was givena comparitively light sentence. He was not, in fact, confined to jail at all, but merely to house arrest in his own comfortable villa in Arcetri. Theoretically, he was to have no visitors, but that provision of the sentence was not enforced. His only other punishment was the requirement that he publicly recant hs view that the earth moved around the sun. This the sixty-nine-year-old scientist did in open court. (There is a famous and probably apocryphal story that after he finished making his retraction, Galileo looked down to the earth and whispered softly, "It still moves.") In Arcetri he continued to write on mechanics. He did there, in 1642...

[page 103] Galileo is probably more responsible than any other man for the empirical attitude of scientific research. It was he who first insisted upon the necessity of performing experiments. He rejected the notion that scientific questions could be decided by reliance upon authority, whether it be the pronouncements of the Church of the assertions of Aristotle. He also rejected reliance on complex deductive schemes that were not based on a firm foundation of experiment. Medieval scholastics had discussed at great length what should happen and why things happen, but Galileo insisted upon performing experiments to determine what actually did happen. His scientific outlook was distinctly non-mystical; in this respect, he was even more modern than some of his successors, such as Newton.

Galileo, it might be noted, was a deeply religious man. Despite his trial and conviction, he did not reject either religion or the church, but only the attempt of Church authoritie to stifle investigation of scientific matters. Later generations have quite righlty admired Galileo as a symbol of revolt against dogmatism, and against authoritarian attempts to stifle freedom of thought. Of greater importance, however, is the role he played in founding modern scientific method.

http://www.adherents.com/people/pg/Galileo_Galilei.html

[Watzy]

This is actually in question. If Galileo were to publicly declare himself an atheist, he would probably be executed by the inquisition.

After all, the Inquisition was successful in "persuading" him to recant his heliocentric ideas.

If Galileo was a closet Atheist, than what was Copernicus?! Fate is conditio sine qua non for being a Catholic priest, and Galileo based his scientific views on heliocentricity of Copernicus - a Catholic priest!

[Der Sozialist]

If Galileo was a closet Atheist, than what was Copernicus?! Fate is conditio sine qua non for being a Catholic priest, and Galileo based his scientific views on heliocentricity of Copernicus - a Catholic priest!
Copernicus was Catholic, this is not in controversy.

While defending himself before the Inquisition, Galileo used some interesting arguments. One was that the Scripture was not to be interpreted literally and that it was written by men, and not some omniscient deity, who observed the sun rotating around the earth. This alone was quite startling—the idea of heliocentrism alone would not have landed Galileo in hot water—after all, it did not affect Copernicus or several other Catholic scientists that were searching to prove it alongside Galileo.

No, it was the implications of heliocentrism on scripture, that Galileo was all too eager to expound upon, that landed Galileo before the Inquisition.

No one is saying that Catholics cannot be scientists—back in the dark ages, the clergy were the only literate segment of society. It makes sense that if any discovery were to be made—it would be made from the relatively well educated clergy.

[Boleslaw]

Galileo actually wrote an essay titled "Theology: Queen of the Sciences". Rather odd for an atheist.

[Der Sozialist]

Galileo actually wrote an essay titled "Theology: Queen of the Sciences". Rather odd for an atheist.
This was the classical thought back in the middle ages—Galileo did not invent this title. It appeared before and it is important to understand the philosophical importance of such a title—merely that absolute truth exists and ultimately this truth is revealed through God to men.

It was understood back then that God signified an Christian God and that scripture was the way God revealed natures truth to man—this is ultimately what Galileo was against, for he didn’t believe the scriptures held anything but a moral truth if you will. So, his essay was more of an argument for keeping the church out of science than arguing about the wonderful Christian religion.

It should be noted that any professed Atheist of Galileo’s stature would face excommunication—I dare say one would have to be an imbecile to proclaim himself an atheist/agnostic/deist back in those days.

[Cyprian]

Copernicus was a Catholic cleric and Galileo a devout Roman Catholic despite his ideas were in conflict with contemporary doctrine of the Catholic church. On the other hand I've never heard about a great scientist who was an Orthodox priest.

Catholic Church regrettably always liked to interfere into the work of scientists, but also used to stipulate scientists. As you pointed out this was not the case with Orthodox Churches.I'm a little confused by this comment. I'm not entirely sure whether you're agreeing or disagreeing with me.

[Watzy]

I'm a little confused by this comment. I'm not entirely sure whether you're agreeing or disagreeing with me.

I agree with your statement that Orthodox church had little effects on the science. The stand of the Catholich Church was much less passive.

[Fade the Butcher]

Galileo actually wrote an essay titled "Theology: Queen of the Sciences". Rather odd for an atheist.

The Catholic Church banned Copernicus' De Revolutionibus, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Kepler's New Astronomy, and all the works of Francis Bacon and Descartes. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. During the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon was thrown in prison for fourteen years on the charge of introducing "certain suspicious novelties." Peter Abélard was condemned as a heretic and his books were burned. The books of John Scotus Eriugena and even Petr's hero John Philoponus were also banned centuries after their death. The writings of Aristotle were banned for several decades during the early thirteenth century. Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and d'Holbach, to name just a few, were also banned. This is really nothing compared to the hatchet job done on the great works of Antiquity after the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century. Very little of what once existed has come down to us. As for atheism, you are forgetting that religious tolerance is largely a post-Enlightenment phenomena.

[Macrobius]

Is the Orthodox Church responsible for retarding science in the Christian east?

It is rather difficult to speculate, as there would have been little science of any sort (because no copied manuscripts) in the 16th and 17th century without monasticism, which was Orthdodox in both the East and West until 1053 or so. If one interprets 'science' as the narrowly western phenomenon, with its origins in late/high Medieval Universities and the Humanist follow-on of the Reformation-era Univerisities, then the question cannot arise at all, since there is no Eastern analogue to any of these, or to the critical Islamic influence that arrived via Spain -- and the empirical synthesis centered on the Theology of light (Optics), renewed Aristotelianism of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, the Oxford calculators, or their intellectual heirs. However, Islam didn't produce these either in the East, despite being a critical transmission link to the West.

The whole question is hypothetical unless you broaden the notion of science to include what the Ancients knew. Then one can answer the question directly, and ask similar questions of Neo-Platonism, or other non-Christian understandings of the same body of knowledge.

[Fade the Butcher]

It is rather difficult to speculate, as there would have been little science of any sort (because no copied manuscripts) in the 16th and 17th century without monasticism, which was Orthdodox in both the East and West until 1053 or so.

There was nothing resembling science going on in either the Latin West or Greek East during the Dark Ages. As for the monks, they were the religious fanatics who destroyed the pagan temples in the fourth and fifth centuries. They were also the ones who insisted upon replacing the secular municipal schools that had survived the fall of the Western Empire with ecclesiastical schools shorn of "profane knowledge" in the sixth and seventh centuries.

[Watzy]

There was nothing resembling science going on in either the Latin West or Greek East during the Dark Ages. As for the monks, they were the religious fanatics who destroyed the pagan temples in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Medieval medicine was more advanced comparing to the medicine of Viking pagans. Vikings weren't even capable to preform simplest dentist operations. Medieval medicine was far more advanced in any case, especially during Crusades (Hospitals raised by the Order of St. John).

[Petr]

As for atheism, you are forgetting that religious tolerance is largely a post-Enlightenment phenomena.
Atheism has not made any positive or inspiring contributions to Western culture. It is an entirely negative, parasitical phenomenon.


Petr

[Petr]

This is really nothing compared to the hatchet job done on the great works of Antiquity after the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century. Very little of what once existed has come down to us.
Secular authorities at the time were unable or uninterested to preserve high culture. In the centuries of hardship, monks preserved of secular classical heritage as far as they thought was reasonable to do - after all, it was not supposed to be their main job, but something they did since no-one else did. Like Lindberg wrote,

“The contribution of the religious culture of the early Middle Ages to the scientific movement was thus one of preservation and transmission. The monasteries served as the transmitters of literacy and a thin version of the Classical tradition(including science or natural philosophy) through a period when literacy and scholarship were severely threatened. Without them, Western Europe would not have more science, but less.”
--pg.157


And this is the thanks they get from modernist scumbags like Fade: a spit in the eye.

Many famous Christian apologetic works of antiquity (like Quadratus) have vanished, and many Christian-bashing works like those of Julian the Apostate have been preserved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratus_(apostle)


Petr

[Macrobius]

There was nothing resembling science going on in either the Latin West or Greek East during the Dark Ages. As for the monks, they were the religious fanatics who destroyed the pagan temples in the fourth and fifth centuries. They were also the ones who insisted upon replacing the secular municipal schools that had survived the fall of the Western Empire with ecclesiastical schools shorn of "profane knowledge" in the sixth and seventh centuries.

I fear for a serious response from me you will need to be more specific. What centuries do you include in your term 'dark ages' and are they the same for East and West? Was ancient science *ever* in your opinion scientific? At what point did it cease to be so? 'Secular' schools in the late empire meant Pagan not Atheist, and I doubt a modern would find a dime's worth of difference between how 'superstitious' they were, if atheism is to be the measure. Do you really want to put Maximus Confessor side-by-side with Iamblichus say? The Romans speared Archimedes and that was pretty much the end of Hellenistic science, except for an ossified tradition that showed no particular signs of life in the areas you are looking for, I suspect, after Constantine *or* before.

Whom do you respect of the ancients? Epicurus and his school alone represent your viewpoint. All the rest should have your scorn, if your posts are any indication.

Added: Spengler (doubtless because he was a mathematician) was sound in his assessment of ancient science -- he finds little creativity in Roman *Civilisation* compared to the preceding 'cultural' stage. We have passed Faustian culture-period, and are embarking on our 'civilised' phase. It will be so with us -- we have had the final flowering of Western 'Science' and the next century, ours now, will be considered one day a time of irreversable decline, never surpassing the creative phase of the 16th - 20th centuries. There will never again be discoveries like the atomic theory of Chemistry, 20th century Physics, DNA, universal gravitation, or even Newton's theory of fluids.

BTW, Fade, why are you so upset by the destruction of Pagan temples? Would you not consider the destruction of Christian ones an improvement? Why the special pleading then?

[Petr]

The whole question is hypothetical unless you broaden the notion of science to include what the pknew. Then one can answer the question directly, and ask similar questions of Neo-Platonism, or other non-Christian understandings of the same body of knowledge.
Fade is subscribing to a crude 19th-century positivist narrative; works of Draper and White read today like embarrassingly simplistic fairytales for secularist children where good science eventually triumphs over evil religion...

Real modern scholars have for long known that is it a false dichotomy to make a Manichean distinction between "faith and reason" or "theology and science".


Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (Volume I) by A.C. Crombie


p. 80

The influence of religious belief on the style and content of scientific thought goes back in the Western tradition long before Christianity to the Greek philosophers, to the perception of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics of divine providential design, harmony and economy of the world, eloquently defended by Cicero, and the opposing perception by Democritus and Epicurus of nothing but unguided chance expounded with matching eloquence by Lucretius. Ideas at this level affected scientific theorizing both as a stimulus to the creative imagination and as a control to the acceptability of different explanations, and they could be very persistent. The radical replacement of Greek rationally knowable divine first principle by the Hebrew and Christian God as the inscrutable creator of a world utterly distinct from himself give rise within this context, from the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria and the Christian theologian Lactantius to Descartes, Boyle and Newton, to the conception of laws of nature as the objects of scientific inquiry and to a new style of freedom in cosmological speculation. Lactantius' theological reduction of the creation to a mechanism reappeared in the mechanistic philosophy of Descartes.

...

Believing scientific theorists looked for and found their satisfactions in the verification of characteristics of nature derived from beliefs about the characteristics of God, as Kepler expected and found divine harmony in the simple mathematical proportions of the planetary orbits, Newton in the inverse square law as a confirmation of ancient parables of music, Maupertuis in the principle of least action in both physics and biology. (42) Others, especially later, who rejected theology in their own day as irrelevant to scientific research, nevertheless still belonged to the same intellectual world that had created Western theology and natural science alike, and they habitually continued to accept its fundamental historic style and also, in ways perhaps unsuspected, important consequences of its fundamental metaphysics.


In other words, ingrateful modern scientists forgot the theistic foundations of their work.

(Btw, Crombie gives a lot more positive evaluation of Augustine's impact on Western thought than Fade, who has just been cherry-picking few citations from his works and spitting childish bile at him.)


Petr

[Macrobius]

Atheism has not made any positive or inspiring contributions to Western culture. It is an entirely negative, parasitical phenomenon.


That may be true, however atheism (i.e., Epicurean atomism and its modern variant, Benthamite Utilitarianism and Mills' Liberalism) have unfortunately given us our current atheist, rationalist, materialist, liberal, hedonic society, together with obvious offshoots related to Marxism. In that regard it is not really parasitic to modernism, but of the essence. It is, more or less, directly responsible for 100 million dead humans in the last century, however many we shall see in this. Against this is set the 10-fold population increase that might reasonably be assigned to Western medicine. If one regards only the increase of the human herd, this is of course an astounding victory. The dead might have had a different view of things -- and I'm not sure a Kantian swap with them would prove the survivors' regard for our current system intellectually consistent.

Atheism (locating the religious view within its larger, traditional context) might reasonably called an aspect of the Therapeutic State, or if you like Western Medicine -- in its crude sense of treating humans as biological animals (only), which implies a need to herd and management them for profit. The purpose of this is the pleasure of the managers, of course, or whichever humans manage to come out on top and indulge their nihilist, pleasure-seeking appetites. Atheism and Struassian Neo-Conservatism are, in this respect, more or less one with Trotsky and his ilk. Negative accomplishments yet, but no longer parasitic, metastasised rather.

[Macrobius]

The influence of religious belief on the style and content of scientific thought goes back in the Western tradition long before Christianity to the Greek philosophers, to the perception of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics of divine providential design, harmony and economy of the world, eloquently defended by Cicero, and the opposing perception by Democritus and Epicurus of nothing but unguided chance expounded with matching eloquence by Lucretius.


Enlightenment atheism (and Fade's) is straight out of Lucretius, which is where the Deists and later the Atheists got it. The term 'religious' in a metaphysical and philosophical context is more or less devoid of meaning. As used by Fade and comrades, it seems to be a synonym for [their visceral dislike of...] liturgical-theurgical-or-superstitious praxis. These are not only different things, but a dislike of symbolic ceremony in any form is in some respects a matter of taste and in others of effectiveness. No one likes cod liver oil either but doctors do prescribe it from time to time, or a functional equivalent that pays better dividends on biotech stocks; opinions vary as to the hedonic pleasures of ingesting chocolate, but no one gets upset that *some* people like it.


...Others, especially later, who rejected theology in their own day as irrelevant to scientific research, nevertheless still belonged to the same intellectual world that had created Western theology and natural science alike, and they habitually continued to accept its fundamental historic style and also, in ways perhaps unsuspected, important consequences of its fundamental metaphysics.


The constant fussing over history is very characteristic of modern thought (as fussing over cosmology was characteristic of the 16th and 17th century, or fussing over alchemy a broader time range). In all cases, the essential attribute of the object -- the cosmos, the microscopic world, or the past, is that in every case it was, during the heyday of the science, unknowable. Hence, it was capable of psychological projection. The extreme concentration we see on Natural History [developing a mythical, evolutionist past], and on the constant reinterpretation of History -- including Fade's question, assessments, trends, movements, and especially the History of Ideas -- all this is just our modern equivalent of Alchemy, and no more value to use for determining Truth, though primary data for understanding the modern mentality. The modern believes that the past is more knowable, more certain, than the world in front of him. It alone is worthy of worship, has mystery, is endlessly fascinating.

History, in the modernist sense, is precisely an idol, fashioned after man's own image, and worshiped. That is why persons like Fade put so much store in it --and particularly their judgments against Christians, or anyone in the present, projected into the plastic and receptive medium of their workmanship. That such idols are really not gods (and atheists are the last to admit this in reality, however many verbal protestations they make) -- yet they are treated as if they were. Idol-worship indeed, after a Hegelian or Marxist mode.

[Petr]

History, in the modernist sense, is precisely an idol, fashioned after man's own image, and worshiped. That is why persons like Fade put so much store in it --and particularly their judgments against Christians, or anyone in the present, projected into the plastic and receptive medium of their workmanship. That such idols are really not gods (and atheists are the last to admit this in reality, however many verbal protestations they make) -- yet they are treated as if they were. Idol-worship indeed, after a Hegelian or Marxist mode.
I have already noticed Fade's superstitious historicism (about inevitable progress, conquering galaxy etc.).

Anyways, whom does this stuff below immediately remind us of? :)

There's nothing new under the sun!


From Robert Boyle: A Study in Science and Christian Belief by R. Hooykaas

pp. 60-62


In Boyle's view, the danger posed to the Christian by the study of nature is grossly exaggerated. People allow themselves to be tricked by the clamor of the atheists into believing that they are the true cultivators of science, but Boyle shows that there is much affectation them - that they flirt with their libertinism and their atheism: they are men who "would pass for virtuosi (yet) have but superficial (though conspicuous) wits (and) and not fitted to penetrate such truths as require a lasting and attentive speculation," while others among them, though not wanting in abilities, "are so taken up by their secular affairs and their sensual pleasures that they neither have the disposition nor the leisure to discover those truths that require both an attentive and penetrating mind." (4) Their irreligion, according to Boyle, is based on bias: it was not the study of nature that led them to irreligion; they carried it into their science and wanted to confirm it there. (1) They are blinded by self-interest, prejudice, passions, appetite. (2) We must not forget that Boyle had to contend not only with so-called philosophical atheists but also with shallow rakes from London (3) who covered their lack of morals with a cloak of philosophy. He entertained little hope that he might convert such people: "if the knowledge of nature falls into the hands of a resolved atheist, or a sensual libertine, he may misemploy it to impugn the grounds, or discredit the practice, of religion." (4)

Boyle knew that such people often admired science only from a distance. Naturally, to their hedonistic atheism painstaking research appeared much less attractive than their own pseudo-philosophical arguments, supported by scientific data whose import they could not appreciate. It is Boyle's expectation, however, that a personal investigation of nature canot but lead a "man of probity and ingenuity, or at least free from prejudices and vices," to sentiments of religion. (5) He is of the opinion that the experimental study of nature disposes the mind to look for deeper-lying causes and thus prepares a person to seek after God. The libertines of today say with Pilate, What is truth? but they do not stay for an answer, for they have no time for the study of truths that require serious application; they are "a sort of superficial and desultory wits" who cannot be bothered to reflect upon the existence of God. But he who is accustomed to intricate and laborious experimentation will not easily be deterred from prosecuting the discovery of truths. (6)

Thus at bottom the issue, as Boyle sees it, is that most libertines, although they talk a lot about experimental science, do not themselves engage in it. Sometimes they did: for it was a fad among London's "high life" to dabble in experiments; king Charles II, a dilettant in this field as well, gave the example. (7) But this sort of engagement in science was superficial and biased. "If any of the cultivators of real (experimental) philosophy pervert it to countenance atheism, it is certainly the fault of the persons, not the doctrine, which is to be judged of by its own natural tendency, not by the ill use that some bad men may make of it." (1) Moreover, most if not all philosophers of this sort are but "pretenders" to the philosophy they misuse: "most of these do as little understand the mysteries of nature as believe those of Christianity." (2)

Coming from a mild-tempered man like Boyle, this judgment sounds harsh. In his eyes, they are very nearly always second-rate minds who press science into the service of their anti-religion. We cannot help but to think here of men like Holbach, La Mettrie, Buechner and Haeckel, who surely cannot be put on a par with Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton and Faraday! Just as in Boyle's days the believers allowed themselves to be scared away by the ranting of the self-styled "spokesmen of science," so in the 19th century simple Christians acquired a holy fear of that study that was so "dangerous" to the faith. The arrogant, apodictic tone of the Buechners, of course, sounded very imposing to the layperson.

And yet in 1660 it had "long been the custom of such men to talk as if they were not just the best, but almost the only naturalists"! (3) But Boyle's position was strong; his circle, the Royal Society, which practiced experimental instead of speculative science, counted among its members all the important mathematicians and natural scientists of his day, and these were men who were confirmed Christians: Wren, Wallis, Ward, Newton, etc. It was precisely the man who in Boyle's eyes was so extremely dangerous and impious, Hobbes, who upbraided the Royal Society for its experimenting and declared it fruitless unless it rested on the foundation of his philosophy.


It was precisely this kind of vulgar pseudo-philosophical parvenu scum that would come forward to steal the fruits of Christian progress from the 18th century onwards.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

I fear for a serious response from me you will need to be more specific. What centuries do you include in your term 'dark ages' and are they the same for East and West?

No problem. As for the Dark Ages, with respect to the West, from 381 A.D. (the final triumph of Nicene orthodoxy at the Council of Constantinople) until approximately 1000 A.D. (Pope Sylvester II), with respect to the East, from 381 until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Was ancient science *ever* in your opinion scientific?

Absolutely.

At what point did it cease to be so?

Insofar as science existed in the ancient world, it was largely confined to a single city and scholars associated with it, Alexandria. Important work continued there into the fourth century of the first millennium until the funding of the museum and library was terminated by Constantine's sons. A gradual decline followed which accelerated with the destruction of the Serapeum (392) and the murder of Hypatia (415). The museum and library, which had been the heart of ancient science for centuries, are never heard from again after the destruction of temples in the 390s. Reports from various sources later in the fifth century indicate a precipitous decline in intellectual life and cases of book burning. The last commentators of any significance are John Philoponus and Simplicius in the early sixth century. Simplicius fled to Persia following Justinian's shutdown of the Academy in 529, but later returned under the protection of the Persian king. After the 530s, Philoponus ceased writing about non-theological topics, athough he lived for several more decades. His works were later banned during the seventh century. The last years of Justinian and the reigns of Tiberius II and Maurice were times of vicious state sponsered persecutions of pagans and heretics which effectively squelched what remained of classical science and philosophy. Maurice and his family were later themselves gruesomely murdered in a typical Byzantine fashion which sparked the Persian invasion.

'Secular' schools in the late empire meant Pagan not Atheist, and I doubt a modern would find a dime's worth of difference between how 'superstitious' they were, if atheism is to be the measure.

I was referring specifically to the municipal schools of the Roman Empire, which could be attended without religious qualification, where grammar and rhetoric were taught based on the profane curriculum of classical authors like Horace, Terrence, Virgil, Ovid, Quintilian, and Cicero. Instruction in grammar and rhetoric were avenues to higher education in Greek philosophy. There were also several law and medical schools scattered around the Empire. These schools once serviced a rather large number of laymen during the Empire. Aside from Northeastern Gaul and Britain, the municipal schools survived the barbarian invasions intact and continued to exist well into the sixth century, in some places (Africa, Visigothic Spain), into the seventh century. Theodoric, for example, styled himself as a restorer of the Roman Empire and liberally patronized the schools. Several of the most important translations of Greek texts into Latin by Boethius and Cassiodorus occurred under rule. Similarly, Martianus Capella's The Marriage of Philology and Mercury was written in Vandal North Africa. Unfortunately, it was not to last. Just as the pagan temples were destroyed and converted into Christian churches during the Late Empire, so the municipal schools were in turn replaced in the sixth and seventh centuries by the episcopal schools of the Middle Ages based on a curriculum of Christian texts which consciously excluded "profane knowledge."

Do you really want to put Maximus Confessor side-by-side with Iamblichus say? The Romans speared Archimedes and that was pretty much the end of Hellenistic science, except for an ossified tradition that showed no particular signs of life in the areas you are looking for, I suspect, after Constantine *or* before.

False. Both G.E.R. Lloyd and Edward Grant point out that important work continued into the fourth century. Diophantus in the third century was the founder of algebra and one of the greatest mathematicians of Antiquity. Similarly, Ptolemy in astronomy and optics and Galen in medicine improved upon their predecessors.

Whom do you respect of the ancients? Epicurus and his school alone represent your viewpoint. All the rest should have your scorn, if your posts are any indication.

My scorn is directed towards Paul and the church fathers.



Added: Spengler (doubtless because he was a mathematician) was sound in his assessment of ancient science -- he finds little creativity in Roman *Civilisation* compared to the preceding 'cultural' stage. [/quote]

The Romans had little interest in science or philosophy. The fate of Archimedes (murdered in the invasion of Syracuse), Cicero (murdered, decapitated, hands cut off and displayed in the Senate), and Seneca (forced to commit suicide by Nero) should be sufficient to illustrate that point. There were important exceptions. Hadrian was enamored with all things Greek even to the point of homosexuality. He liberally patronized the great schools of philosophy in Athens and completed the Temple of Zeus in Athens. Marcus Aurelius was a notable Stoic philosopher. Julian was also a great appreciator of Greek philosophy. Still, to say there was little creativity in the classical world post-Archimedes is ridiculous. I will point to Apollonius, Galen, Ptolemy, Diophantus, Plotinus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Aristarchus of Samos, and Hero; all of whom are significant figures.

We have passed Faustian culture-period, and are embarking on our 'civilised' phase. It will be so with us -- we have had the final flowering of Western 'Science' and the next century, ours now, will be considered one day a time of irreversable decline, never surpassing the creative phase of the 16th - 20th centuries. There will never again be discoveries like the atomic theory of Chemistry, 20th century Physics, DNA, universal gravitation, or even Newton's theory of fluids.

Spengler's historical scheme is hopelessly flawed and simplistic.

[Petr]

The last years of Justinian and the reigns of Tiberius II and Maurice were times of vicious state sponsered persecutions of pagans and heretics which effectively squelched what remained of classical science and philosophy.
Fade's own word and paraphrases are less than worthless, so I'll ask you to properly document these claims.

I was referring specifically to the municipal schools of the Roman Empire, which could be attended without religious qualification, where grammar and rhetoric were taught based on the profane curriculum of classical authors like Horace, Terrence, Virgil, Ovid, Quintilian, and Cicero. Instruction in grammar and rhetoric were avenues to higher education in Greek philosophy. There were also several law and medical schools scattered around the Empire. These schools once serviced a rather large number of laymen during the Empire. Aside from Northeastern Gaul and Britain, the municipal schools survived the barbarian invasions intact and continued to exist well into the sixth century, in some places (Africa, Visigothic Spain), into the seventh century. Theodoric, for example, styled himself as a restorer of the Roman Empire and liberally patronized the schools. Several of the most important translations of Greek texts into Latin by Boethius and Cassiodorus occurred under rule. Similarly, Martianus Capella's The Marriage of Philology and Mercury was written in Vandal North Africa. Unfortunately, it was not to last. Just as the pagan temples were destroyed and converted into Christian churches during the Late Empire, so the municipal schools were in turn replaced in the sixth and seventh centuries by the episcopal schools of the Middle Ages based on a curriculum of Christian texts which consciously excluded "profane knowledge."
To begin with, there's more to Christianity than just monks and monasteries. Fade is creating yet another strawman/false dichotomy.

Also, Byzantium did not rely on monks for its secular knowledge.

From A History of the Eastern Roman Empire: From the Fall of Irene to the Accession of Basil I (1912) by J.B. Bury:

pp. 434-35

2. Education and Learning

Among the traditions which the Empire inherited from antiquity, one of the most conspicuous, but not perhaps duly estimated in its importance as a social fact, was higher education. The children of the well-to-do class, from which the superior administrative officials of the State were mainly drawn, were taught ancient Greek, and gained some acquiantance at least with some of the works of the great classical writers. Illiterateness was a reproach among reputable people; and the possession of literary education by laymen generally and women was a deep-reaching distinction between Byzantine civilization and the barbarous West, where the field of letters was monopolized by ecclesiastics. It constituted one of the most indisputable claims of Byzantium to superiority, and it had an important social result. In the West the cleavage between the ecclesiastical and lay classes was widened and deepened by the fact that the distinction between them coincided with the distinction between learned and ignorant. In the East there were as many learned laymen as learned monks and priests; and even in divinity the layman was not helplessly at the mercy of the priest, for his education included some smattering of theology. The patriarchs Tarasius and Nicephorus must have acquired, before they were suddenly moved into the spiritual order, no contemptible knowledge of theology; and Photius, as layman, was a theological expert. Thus layman and cleric of the better classes met on common ground; there was no pregnant significance in the word clerk; and ecclesiastics never obtained the influence, or played the part in administration and politics which their virtually exclusive possession of letters procured for them in Western Europe.

False. Both G.E.R. Lloyd and Edward Grant point out that important work continued into the fourth century.
Some progress in math is not the same as progress in philosophy.

The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon's Problem after Two Centuries, edited by Lynn White Jr.

p. 114

The vapid ideas of late Hellenistic and Roman philosophers, however, were already the products and instruments of the ossification of the ancient philosophical tradition.

...

Pagan philosophy had already come to a dead end before the triumph of Christianity. The Christian intellectuals, the Church Fathers, and authors such as Origen and Cappadocians who were educated in classics, opened up new channels for this Greek predisposition to indulge in metaphysical speculation. (32)

32 This theme is incisively developed by Jaeger, op cit.


Philosophy experts like Zeller have also opined that the Neoplatonic school would have died sooner or later anyway, since its philosophy had reached its logical end.


Spengler's historical scheme is hopelessly flawed and simplistic.
Some nerve you have. You are the one here who is pushing childishly bigoted and simplistic positivist narrative.

I think even Charles Freeman would be ashamed of being cited by someone like you.


Fade

[Fade the Butcher]

BTW, Fade, why are you so upset by the destruction of Pagan temples?

The destruction of the pagan temples, as you know, was symbolic of the annihilation of classical culture at the hands of Christianity and the triumph of Christian totalitarianism post-Theodosius. I cannot stress this enough: it was Christianity that caused the Dark Ages. Who was it that destroyed the temples, statues, and monuments of the ancient world, destroyed the libraries and burned their books in giant bonfires, converted the baths into churches, closed the gymnasia, ended religious tolerance, abolished the Olympic Games, closed the Oracle at Delphi, ended the Eleusian Mysteries, closed the Academy, murdered and persecuted philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, violently rejected and demonized classical culture, and dismantled the municipal schools? It was the barbarians within, not the barbarians from without. The triumph of the latter was fleeting; the former enduring.

If anything is true, the Germanic barbarians who occupied the West were even quicker to appreciate classical culture than the Romans themselves had been when they conquered the Mediterranean basin. The Romans razed Carthage to the ground and inflicted so much devastation upon Corinth that the site remained unoccupied for a hundred years. Nothing of the sort happened in Vandal North Africa. The "sack" of Rome by the Visigoths and Vandals was nothing compared to the damage that had been done to Rome under Nero or the sack of Rome centuries earlier by the Gauls. The Romans harbored a profound dislike of Greek culture for centuries and only gradually came to appreciate it. In contrast, Theodoric set out to restore the greatness of the Empire from the very beginning. His children received expensive classical educations. In fact, his successor (the husband of one of his daughters) was more of a philosopher than a warrior. The Vandals had been so completely assimilated and enervated by wealth that they put up little resistance to Justinian when he reconquered Africa. The Visigoths, Burgundians, and Ostrogoths maintained Roman law and established themselves in sparsely populated areas.

The occupation of the Latin West should have been no more damaging to civilization than the occupation of Greece and Egypt by the Romans centuries earlier. The critical difference was that the barbarians were assimilated into a culture based upon world rejecting, anti-intellectual Christianity whereas the Romans absorbed and came to appreciate Hellenism.

Would you not consider the destruction of Christian ones an improvement? Why the special pleading then?

The destruction of Christianity had positive effects in both France and the Soviet Union.

[Petr]

I cannot stress this enough: it was Christianity that caused the Dark Ages. Who was it that destroyed the temples, statues, and monuments of the ancient world, destroyed the libraries and burned their books in giant bonfires, converted the baths into churches, closed the gymnasia, ended religious tolerance, abolished the Olympic Games, closed the Oracle at Delphi, ended the Eleusian Mysteries, closed the Academy, murdered and persecuted philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, violently rejected and demonized classical culture, and dismantled the municipal schools?.
HO-HO-HOLOHOAX. Cry me a river.


Petr

[Petr]

The destruction of Christianity had positive effects in both France and the Soviet Union.
I am not yet quite sure whether Fade really means what says Edit- Flaming, but in any case, this comment I'm going to remember.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Fade's own word and paraphrases are less than worthless, so I'll ask you to properly document these claims.

As Basil pointed out in the other thread, Petr has quit replying to my arguments because he is unable to respond to them.

To begin with, there's more to Christianity than just monks and monasteries. Fade is creating yet another strawman/false dichotomy.

My post above specifically refers to the West, not Byzantium.

Some progress in math is not the same as progress in philosophy. Philosophy experts like Zeller have also opined that the Neoplatonic school would have died sooner or later anyway, since its philosophy had reached its logical end.

Amusing. That was not the case at all. The notion that philosophy had come to a "dead end" by the time of Christianity is directly refuted by 1.) Paul's denunciation of the Greek philosophers who ridiculed the early Christians, 2.) the vitrolic attacks upon philosophy by the church fathers (if Greek philosophy was dead, why was this necessary?), and 3.) the final state sponsered repression of Greek philosophy by Justinian and the violent persecutions launched against philosophers and pagans in previous centuries.

Some nerve you have. You are the one here who is pushing childishly bigoted and simplistic positivist narrative.

It is entirely fair to say that classical culture was destroyed and replaced by Christianity. The Roman Empire had already taken on a medieval appearance by the early fifth century. The institutions, customs, and values of the classical world were assaulted and replaced one by one Christian institutions and ideas.

I think even Charles Freeman would be ashamed of being cited by someone like you.

Freeman is writing another book about the matter as we speak.

[Petr]

As Basil pointed out in the other thread, Petr has quit replying to my arguments because he is unable to respond to them.
Case in point - now Fade is dishonestly paraphrasing "Basil Fawlty" who merely wrote:

I noticed you tried to change the subject. Am I right in assuming that's because you can't deny the list that Fade has posted?

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=17483&page=40&highlight=numenius


Anyways, Basil gave me positive feedback on my response to that particular post, and he doesn't have very high opinion about your argumentation techniques and general reliability.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Secular authorities at the time were unable or uninterested to preserve high culture.

Bullshit. The municipal schools were patronized and maintained well into the sixth century. In fact, as I said before, the foundation of the medieval trivium and quadrivium was largely based upon the translations of Boethius and Martianus Capella's The Marriage of Philology and Mercury which stem from the successor kingdoms. The barbarian invasions did little to disrupt the schools outside of Britain and Northeastern Gaul. On the contrary, the municipal schools were simply replaced over time by episcopal schools which rejected the profane curriculum.

In the centuries of hardship, monks preserved of secular classical heritage as far as they thought was reasonable to do - after all, it was not supposed to be their main job, but something they did since no-one else did.

This is laughable. No one was more ideologically opposed to the profane knowledge of the municipal schools than the monks. Their objections were instrumental in the creation of the alternative Christian episcopal schools in the sixth century. They had little interest in preserving classical knowledge and only preserved many classical texts in order to wash out and reuse the papyrus they were written on.

Like Lindberg wrote,[/quote]

Lindberg isn't telling the whole truth here and he has little to say about the matter compared to Riché. The collapse of lay literacy in the West was caused by the demise of the municipal schools and their profane curriculum. That, in turn, was directly caused by the emergence of the rival episcopal schools. Lindberg curiously says nothing about Bede's view that all the liberal arts except grammar are worthless.

And this is the thanks they get from modernist scumbags like Fade: a spit in the eye.

We should spit in the eyes. The monks, or the "holy fools" as they called themselves, were the true barbarians who were responsible for the destruction of the pagan temples and the abolition of classical education.

Many famous Christian apologetic works of antiquity (like Quadratus) have vanished, and many Christian-bashing works like those of Julian the Apostate have been preserved.

Much of what we know about Cicero and Aetius stems from the botched attempts of Dark Age monks to overwrite classical texts.

[Fade the Butcher]

Atheism has not made any positive or inspiring contributions to Western culture. It is an entirely negative, parasitical phenomenon.


Petr

I was under the impression that Watson and Crick, the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, were atheists.

[Fade the Butcher]

I am not yet quite sure whether Fade really means what says (he's such a theatrical little queen who begins to pout and bluster when he loses a debate), but in any case, this comment I'm going to remember.


Petr

Who is really losing this debate? You have thrown such a tantrum that the mods have had to delete over two dozen of your posts in the last two weeks. Perhaps you will get around to telling us one day how worthless concepts like the Eucharist, Incarnation, or Trinity are essential aspects of the scientific method.

[Petr]

I was under the impression that Watson and Crick, the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, were atheists.
Fade's grasp of logic is as shabby as his idea of science. :rofl:

If Christianity had nothing to do with the accomplishments of Newton (et cetera, et cetera), then atheism certainly had nothing to do with the accomplishments of Watson & Crick.

Atheism is not necessary for scientific procedure in any way. It is just a morbid, disgusting worldview.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

That may be true, however atheism (i.e., Epicurean atomism and its modern variant, Benthamite Utilitarianism and Mills' Liberalism) have unfortunately given us our current atheist, rationalist, materialist, liberal, hedonic society, together with obvious offshoots related to Marxism.

I'm pleased that you see a connection between Epicurean materialism and modern atheism. Indeed, the latter is really unimaginable in the absence of the former. The revival of the mechanistic philosophy in the seventeenth century gutted Christianity into deism and natural religion within a hundred years. Natural religion opened the door to the rejection of Christian revelation in the eighteenth century.

[Fade the Butcher]

Fade's grasp of logic is as shabby as his idea of science. :rofl:

Petr should tell us more about Biblical zoology. It's a fascinating subject. Now that we know bats are birds and humans coexisted with dinosaurs, perhaps we will learn where we can find unicorns and dragons.

If Christianity had nothing to do with the accomplishments of Newton (et cetera, et cetera), then atheism certainly had nothing to do with the accomplishments of Watson & Crick.

There was nothing particularly new about the concept of forces acting upon matter. Aristotelians had spoken for centuries about "sympathies" and Hermeticism was associated with similar ideas.

Atheism is not necessary for scientific procedure in any way. It is just a morbid, disgusting worldview.

Atheism is merely the byproduct of rational thinking. The only reason there is a word for it is because of the existence of religion. We don't have a word for people who fail to believe in Santa Claus or Peter Pan, although these are just as fictional as the Christian god.

[Fade the Butcher]

An addition to my greatest hits list:

"Shamefully, they dared to examine the secrets of God in the Scriptures in a presumptuous way, motivated by curiosity and not by love. As a result they become heretics. God has decreed that the proud are not to be admitted to the sight of divinity and truth."
—Rupert of Deutz

[Fade the Butcher]

If one interprets 'science' as the narrowly western phenomenon, with its origins in late/high Medieval Universities and the Humanist follow-on of the Reformation-era Univerisities, then the question cannot arise at all, since there is no Eastern analogue to any of these, or to the critical Islamic influence that arrived via Spain -- and the empirical synthesis centered on the Theology of light (Optics), renewed Aristotelianism of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, the Oxford calculators, or their intellectual heirs.

Correct. There was no "science" in Byzantium. Edward Grant argues in his book Science and Religion that the Orthodox Church spent centuries repressing secular learning there and that the Byzantines never abandoned the handmaiden doctrine like the West did after the fourteenth century. The science of the medieval universities was Aristotelianism which remained dominant into the seventeenth century when it was attacked by Galileo.

However, Islam didn't produce these either in the East, despite being a critical transmission link to the West.

Experimental science was imported into the West from the Islamic world, but was given little attention until the sixteenth century.

The whole question is hypothetical unless you broaden the notion of science to include what the Ancients knew. Then one can answer the question directly, and ask similar questions of Neo-Platonism, or other non-Christian understandings of the same body of knowledge.

I was referring to natural philosophy.

[Petr]

Atheism is merely the byproduct of rational thinking. The only reason there is a word for it is because of the existence of religion. We don't have a word for people who fail to believe in Santa Claus or Peter Pan, although these are just as fictional as the Christian god.
Oooga, ooga. Deep thinking. Did you learn such pearls of wisdom from Sam Harris?

Nobody except sworn members of atheist movement themselves are fooled by such sophistries. Nobody needs atheism for anything positive.

Just as soon as people get some alternative to the bestial doctrine of atheism/materialism, they will drop it. That is why establishment materialists are acting so hysterically and control-freaky these days - like all tyrants, they know that as soon as masses smell weakness in them, they will abandon them or even turn against them. They cannot rely on natural affection and loyalty.


The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it.

http://www.home.no/knodt/ReviewGodDelusionPlantinga.doc


Petr

[Macrobius]

Thank you for the clarifications in this and subsequent posts. I believe we have made significant progress in clarifying your view, and your point in posting this thread.

(1) you are an Epicurean (a minor portion of which doctrine is atheism, a stereotyped disdain for gods or archetypes, which denies both interior states and divine metaphysics in favour of materialism). That is to say, by banishing father figures [the polemic seldom mentions mother figures, curiously] to a hypotrophic life in the outer darkness beyond the universe, the atheist hopes to mask their *extreme importance* to his interior life. Methinks you and they protest too much.

(2) your primary scorn, though certainly directed against all Christians from time to time, is directed against specifically Orthodox Christianity, and relieved only to the exact extent that form of Christianity is replaced by something else, as Sylvester II, better the 17th century, better the French Revolution, better still 1917.

This is understandable. There are two diametrically opposed views of what Man is, what makes him healthy, and what processes lead to this health. Once one has established a view and it has become accepted by society at large, one banishes all rivals, just as the present society, based on the principles you advocate, is banishing all but the Therapeutic Society and its Paracelsan pill-alchemy. If man is an animal and materialism is all there is, then the answer to man's health is drugs. 'Religion is the opium of the people' is a more convenient way of saying 'But Science makes opium directly and more efficiently.' Death, then, occurs in a nursing home, with man lying in his own filth begging for one last hit, assuming he has any mind at all. Nasty, brutish, and *long* is the goal.

No problem. As for the Dark Ages, with respect to the West, from 381 A.D. (the final triumph of Nicene orthodoxy at the Council of Constantinople) until approximately 1000 A.D. (Pope Sylvester II), with respect to the East, from 381 until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.


Your contempt for the entire Anglo-Saxon period of your own anscestors, both Pagan and Christian is noted. It is curious in light of your support for the Vandals.


Insofar as science existed in the ancient world, it was largely confined to a single city and scholars associated with it, Alexandria.


You mean the Hellenistic period I suppose. Athens in some periods at the end of the 'Late Antiquity' period.


Important work continued there into the fourth century of the first millennium until the funding of the museum and library was terminated by Constantine's sons.


Your timeline clarifies your views so I do not repeat the text. I believe you should look at Iamblichus again. Hypatia was a proponent of Theurgy (kin to Alchemy). I would also read the primordialists on the (logical, not historical) connections between Neo-Platonism and Buddhism.

After the 530s, Philoponus ceased writing about non-theological topics, athough he lived for several more decades.


One should add that Islamic science takes over from Philoponus, and thus acquires its Aristotelian tinge, which is communicated through Siger of Brabant and provides the heretical matrix in which Latin variant of scholasticism flourishes. Greek scholasticism is the educational method of ca. A.D. 150. The tedious glossing and argument from authority began well before your 'fourth century'.

I will pass over your summary of educational history in the late empire, which I read with interest.



False. Both G.E.R. Lloyd and Edward Grant point out that important work continued into the fourth century.


Important work continued in all centuries at all times.



My scorn is directed towards Paul and the church fathers.


I.e., precisely the Orthodox, to the exact extent they are Orthodox.

Still, to say there was little creativity in the classical world post-Archimedes is ridiculous. I will point to Apollonius, Galen, Ptolemy, Diophantus, Plotinus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Aristarchus of Samos, and Hero; all of whom are significant figures.


I agree. But you will have trouble naming 10 more of similar rank. The ravages of time account for some of this, and I'm sure you will blame that on Christians, but the extant texts to not imply schools with hundreds of persons, tens of them doing world-calibre work at any moment. They read more like a succession of twos and threes.


Spengler's historical scheme is hopelessly flawed and simplistic.

Agreed. I mentioned it to make a point and because I knew it would be familiar to readers of this forum. It is in the mode of a projection of interior state onto history, and it would be inconsistent, given what I said about the history of ideas, to support such a theory. However, some of his insights, not the schematisation of them, which is symbolic and mythical only, are brilliant.

[Petr]

I'm pleased that you see a connection between Epicurean materialism and modern atheism. Indeed, the latter is really unimaginable in the absence of the former.
Paradoxically, even Epicureanism really shows how thoroughly Christianity transformed the Greek heritage - the ordered 17th-century mechanistic atomism was a quite different creature from ancient atomism with its foggy notions of purposeless chaos.

Christian (and Christianity-influenced) scholars managed to make even crap like original Epicureanism look somewhat credible! That's some accomplishment!


Science and Creation by Stanley Jaki:

p. 120

To save the possibility of a modest measure of human happiness in the face of an inexorable cosmic treadmill, Epicurus saw only one escape hatch. It consisted in jettisoning consistent, scientific thinking. Against the demands of science Epicurus made almost pitiful recourse to a primitive, philistine common sense which prescribed among other things the rejection of even the most reasonable conclusions about the true size of celestial objects: "The size of the sun (and of the moon) and other stars," he stated, "is for us what it appears to be; and in reality it is either (slightly) greater than what we see or slightly less of the same size. And every objection on this point will easily be dissipated, if we pay attention to the clear vision, as I show in my books about nature." (65) In those books, now lost, Epicurus took pains to give alternate explanations to celestial phenomena. In doing so he aimed at achieving one of his major objectives, the discrediting of what he called "the slavish artifices of astronomers." (66)

The inspiration of Galileo?

p. 129

Democritus, the leader of atomists and the chief protagonist of the void, saw no justification in trying to improve existing material conditions. His precept was that "One must keep one's mind on what is attainable, and be content with what one has, paying little heed to things envied and admired, and not dwelling on them in one's mind." (114) This passive attitude toward the external world was also voiced in his dictum that one should not take risks but rather accept the ordinary course of events: "Chance is generous but unreliable. Nature, however, is self-sufficient. Therefore it is victorious, by means of its smaller but reliable (power) over the greater promise of hope." (115) In line with this he did not consider life an opportunity to change man's material conditions: "One should realize that human life is weak and brief and mixed with many cares and difficulties, in order that one may care only for moderate possessions, and that hardship may be measured by the standard of one's needs." (116)

The inspiration of Francis Bacon?


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

(1) you are an Epicurean (a minor portion of which doctrine is atheism, a stereotyped disdain for gods or archetypes, which denies both interior states and divine metaphysics in favour of materialism).

Epicurus was not an atheist. He posited an infinite number of gods and asserted they did not bother themselves with interferring in the natural world. The Stoics believed in an impersonal force that animated and ordered the universe. Aristotle posited the existence of intelligences at work in the heavenly spheres, but they had little resemblence to personal gods.

That is to say, by banishing father figures [the polemic seldom mentions mother figures, curiously] to a hypotrophic life in the outer darkness beyond the universe, the atheist hopes to mask their *extreme importance* to his interior life. Methinks you and they protest too much.

Atheism is the absence of belief in supernatural deities. I'm an atheist in the same sense that I am an a-unicornist or a-Elvisist. There is no credible evidence to support the notion that Elvis is still alive or that unicorns exist . . . or any evidence to support belief in the Biblical God.

(2) your primary scorn, though certainly directed against all Christians from time to time, is directed against specifically Orthodox Christianity, and relieved only to the exact extent that form of Christianity is replaced by something else, as Sylvester II, better the 17th century, better the French Revolution, better still 1917.

I have less to say about Protestantism for two reasons: 1.) it has a much shorter track record, so there is less to criticize, 2.) it fractured the unity of Western Christendom and unwittingly assisted the rise of modern science by destroying the authority of the Papacy over much of Europe. The Protestants disintegrated even further into smaller sects which reduced their ability to suppress un-Orthodox ideas. Case in point, Galileo. His book was banned in Catholic Europe, but it was published in the Calvinist Netherlands and continued to circulate and build momentum behind heliocentrism in Northern Europe. This is not to say Protestantism is more enlightened than Catholicism. I have already mentioned the execution of Michael Servetus and the condemnation of Copernicus by Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon. The major difference is that Protestantism was less organized and encouraged the growth of the state at the expense of the Church.

This is understandable. There are two diametrically opposed views of what Man is, what makes him healthy, and what processes lead to this health.

Very true. For centuries, Christians believed that the soul was more important than the body, and that the latter was something intrinsically wicked. A major consequence of this worldview was the association of natural illnesses with diabolical supernatural forces like punishment for sin and the malevolent interference of demons. The cures of this period included visiting shrines which contained the body parts of saints and confession of one's sins and prayers for forgiveness. Millions of Europeans were wiped out over and over again by famines and plagues into the eighteenth century because of this nonsense.

Once one has established a view and it has become accepted by society at large, one banishes all rivals, just as the present society, based on the principles you advocate, is banishing all but the Therapeutic Society and its Paracelsan pill-alchemy. If man is an animal and materialism is all there is, then the answer to man's health is drugs. 'Religion is the opium of the people' is a more convenient way of saying 'But Science makes opium directly and more efficiently.' Death, then, occurs in a nursing home, with man lying in his own filth begging for one last hit, assuming he has any mind at all. Nasty, brutish, and *long* is the goal.

Materialism has easily supplanted its rivals in medicine because they are worthless; nothing more than a mixture of ignorance, mysticism, and gross superstition. There is no evidence that anyone has ever been cured by the carcass of a Christian saint or angels.

Your contempt for the entire Anglo-Saxon period of your own anscestors, both Pagan and Christian is noted. It is curious in light of your support for the Vandals.

It was the great misfortune of England to be converted to Christianity. The liberal arts were well known in England during the Dark Ages. They were DELIBERATELY REJECTED by Bede and others on the grounds that they were worthless to Christians and the profane sciences were the incubators of heresy. This only changed in the eleventh century following the reforms of the cathedral schools by Gerbert and his successors.

You mean the Hellenistic period I suppose. Athens in some periods at the end of the 'Late Antiquity' period.

The Hellenistic period and at least three centuries into the Roman era in Egypt.

Your timeline clarifies your views so I do not repeat the text. I believe you should look at Iamblichus again. Hypatia was a proponent of Theurgy (kin to Alchemy). I would also read the primordialists on the (logical, not historical) connections between Neo-Platonism and Buddhism.

Iamblichus advocated the mathematization of the natural world and Hypatia wrote commentaries on Diophantus and Euclid. Grant cites Clagett: "Diophantus easily solved quadratic equations (involving the unknown squared) and in one special case a cubic equation. His name is still connected with the solution of what are called indeterminate equations. There can be little doubt that Greek mathematical genius was still burning brightly at the time of Diophantus." Far from being dead, the Greek scientific tradition continued to inspire further advancements in the Arab world centuries after its demise in Christendom.

One should add that Islamic science takes over from Philoponus, and thus acquires its Aristotelian tinge, which is communicated through Siger of Brabant and provides the heretical matrix in which Latin variant of scholasticism flourishes. Greek scholasticism is the educational method of ca. A.D. 150. The tedious glossing and argument from authority began well before your 'fourth century'.

The Roman encyclopedic tradition and commentaries on authoritative texts, yes. Proclus, Hypatia, Theon, Simplicius, Philoponus, Averroes and so forth were all commentators. The fact that the Greek scientific tradition continued to inspire advances in the Islamic world and the West after the thirteenth century proves that it was far from dead.

I will pass over your summary of educational history in the late empire, which I read with interest.

I have been fortunate enough to recover an English translation of Pierre Riché's Éducation et culture dans l'Occident barbare, VIème-VIIIème siècles. It is a comprehensive study of the fate of the Roman municipal schools in the barbarian West.

Important work continued in all centuries at all times.

This isn't true. The major turning point was the Council of Constantinople and the decision of Theodosius to use force to impose orthodoxy on the Empire. By the 530s, the transition to the Dark Ages was complete, and productive intellectual activity all but ceased for five centuries.

I agree. But you will have trouble naming 10 more of similar rank. The ravages of time account for some of this, and I'm sure you will blame that on Christians, but the extant texts to not imply schools with hundreds of persons, tens of them doing world-calibre work at any moment. They read more like a succession of twos and threes.

As G.E.R. Lloyd points out, ancient science was an extremely fragile enterprise. Scholars could not communicate easily over vast distances as they can today. The lack of the printing press was another severe limitation. It was not uncommon for centuries to pass without any significant progress in many fields. The rise of Christianity, especially in Alexandria, was the final nail in its coffin. What state patronage existed was withdrawn. The institutions that did exist were destroyed. Those who still pursued science did so under the veil of suspicion.

[Fade the Butcher]

I.e., precisely the Orthodox, to the exact extent they are Orthodox.

Feel free to comment.

"And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to behold, and pleasant to eat of: the tree of life also in the midst of paradise: and the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
—Genesis 2:9 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/gen002.htm)

"And he said to him: And who hath told thee that thou wast naked, but that thou hast eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?"
—Genesis 3:11 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/gen003.htm)

"And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee, that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work: with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life."
—Genesis 3:17 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/gen003.htm)

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts."
—Isaiah 55: 8-9 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/isa055.htm)

"Thus saith the Lord: Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord."
—Jeremiah 17:5 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/jer017.htm)

"Have confidence in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not upon thy own prudence."
—Proverbs 3:5 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/pro003.htm)

"At that time Jesus answered and said: I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones."
—Matthew 11:25 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/mat011.htm)

"Who turning, said to Peter: Go behind me, Satan, thou art a scandal unto me: because thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men."
—Matthew 16:23 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/mat016.htm)

"And I have given my heart to know prudence, and learning, and errors, and folly: and I have perceived that in these also there was labour, and vexation of spirit, Because in much wisdom there is much indignation: and he that addeth knowledge, addeth also labour."
—Ecclesiastes 1:17-18 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/ecc001.htm)

"Therefore if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth."
—Colossians 3: 1-2 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/col003.htm)

"While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen, are eternal."
—II Corinthians 4:18 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/2co004.htm)

]"For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise: and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For, seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world, by wisdom, knew not God, it pleased God, by the foolishness of our preaching, to save them that believe. For both the Jews require signs: and the Greeks seek after wisdom. . . . For the foolishness of God is wiser than men: and the weakness of God is stronger than men. . . . But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise: and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong."
—Paul, 1 Corinthians 1: 19-27 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/1co001.htm)

"Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit: according to the tradition of men according to the elements of the world and not according to Christ."
—Paul, Colossians 2:8 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/col002.htm)

"O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called."
—Paul, I Timothy 6:20 (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/1ti006.htm)

"To this is added another form of temptation more manifoldly dangerous. For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which consisteth in the delight of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves, who go far from Thee, waste and perish, the soul hath, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the title of knowledge and learning, not of delighting in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh.. . . From this disease of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre. Hence men go on to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is besides our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know."
—Augustine, Confessions, Ch.35 (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.xxxv.html)

"The knowledge of the stars, again, is not a matter of narration, but of description. Very few of these, however, are mentioned in Scripture. And as the course of the moon, which is regularly employed in reference to celebrating the anniversary of our Lord's passion, is known to most people; so the rising and setting and other movements of the rest of the heavenly bodies are thoroughly known to very few. And this knowledge, although in itself it involves no superstition, renders very little, indeed almost no assistance, in the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and by engaging the attention unprofitably is a hindrance rather; and as it is closely related to the very pernicious error of the diviners of the fates, it is more convenient and becoming to neglect it."
—Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II, Ch.29, 46 (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/doctrine.iv.iii.html[/url)

"And what did it profit me, that all the books I could procure of the so-called liberal arts, I, the vile slave of vile affections, read by myself, and understood? And I delighted in them, but knew not whence came all, that therein was true or certain. For I had my back to the light, and my face to the things enlightened; whence my face, with which I discerned the things enlightened, itself was not enlightened. Whatever was written, either on rhetoric, or logic, geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or any instructor, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both quickness of understanding, and acuteness in discerning, is Thy gift: yet did I not thence sacrifice to Thee. So then it served not to my use, but rather to my perdition, since I went about to get so good a portion of my substance into my own keeping; and I kept not my strength for Thee, but wandered from Thee into a far country, to spend it upon harlotries."
—Augustine, Confessions, Ch. XVI (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.v.xvi.html)

"If by calling yourself wise, you become a fool, call yourself a fool, and you will become wise."
—Augustine

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.315]

"The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
—Augustine

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.315]

"I would not believe in the Gospel myself if the authority of the Catholic Church did not influence me to do so."
—Augustine

"It is also frequently [b]asked what our belief must be about the form and shape of heaven according to Sacred Scripture. Many scholars engage in lengthy discussions on these matters, but the sacred writers with their deeper wisdom have omitted them.[u] Such subjects are of no profit for those who seek beatitude, and, what is worse, they take up very precious time that ought to be given to what is spiritually beneficial."[/u][/b]
—Augustine, [i]The Literal Meaning of Genesis (http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/saintaugustine.htm)[/i]

"This being the case, when that verse of Maro's gives us pleasure, [i]"Happy is he who can understand the causes of things,"[/i] [b]it still does not follow that our felicity depends upon our knowing the causes of the great physical processes in the world, which are hidden in the secret maze of nature,[/b] [i]"Whence earthquakes, whose force swells the sea to flood, so that they burst their bounds and then subside again,"[/i] [b]and other such things as this."[/b]
—Augustine, [i]Enchiridon[/i], Ch.5, 16 (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/enchiridion.chapter5.html)

"I think, however, [b]there is nothing useful in the other branches of learning that are found among the heathen,[/b] except information about objects, either past or present, that relate to the bodily senses, in which are included also the experiments and conclusions of the useful mechanical arts, except also the sciences of reasoning and of number."
—Augustine, On [i]Christian Doctrine[/i], Book II, Ch. 39 (http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/augocd/ocdb2c35-40.html)

"Wherefore, when it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, [u][b]the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things, after the manner of those whom the Greeks called "physicists." Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains; about the divisions of space and time, about the signs of impending storms, and the myriad other things which these "physicists" have come to understand, or think they have. For even these men, gifted with such superior insight, with their ardor in study and their abundant leisure, exploring some of these matters by human conjecture and others through historical inquiry, have not yet learned everything there is to know.[/u][/b] For that matter, many of the things they are so proud to have discovered are more often matters of opinion than of verified knowledge. [u][b]For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God."[/u][/b]
—Augustine, [i]Enchiridon[/i], Ch.3, 9 (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/enchiridion.chapter3.html)

"Come, Holy Spirit, and help Your prophets, in whom You are wont to dwell, in whom we believe. [b]Shall we believe the wise of this world, if we believe not the prophets? But where is the wise man, where is the scribe? [u]When our peasant planted figs, he found that whereof the philosopher knew nothing, for God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the strong. Are we to believe the Jews?[/b][/u] for God was once known in Jewry. Nay, but they deny that very thing, which is the foundation of our belief, seeing that they know not the Father, who have denied the Son."
—Ambrose, [i]De Fide[/i], Book I, Ch.3, 30 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/34041.htm)

"For they store up [u][b]all the strength of their poisons in dialetical disputation,[/u] which by the judgment of philosophers is defined as having no power to establish anything, and aiming only at destruction.[u] But it was not by dialectic that it pleased God to save His people; "for the kingdom of God consists in simplicity of faith, not in wordy contention."[/b][/u]
—Ambrose, [i]De Fide[/i], Book I, Ch.5, 42 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/34041.htm)

"It is of the Son, therefore, that we read, your mind understands the reading, let your tongue make confession. [u][b]Away with arguments, where faith is required; now let dialectic hold her peace, even in the midst of her schools. I ask not what it is that philosophers say, but I would know what they do. They sit desolate in their schools. See the victory of faith over argument. They who dispute subtly are forsaken daily by their fellows; they who with simplicity believe are daily increased. Not philosophers but fishermen, not masters of dialectic but tax-gatherers, now find credence. [/u][/b]The one sort, through pleasures and luxuries, have bound the world's burden upon themselves; the other, by fasting and mortification, have cast it off, and so does sorrow now begin to win over more followers than pleasure."
—Ambrose, [i]De Fide[/i], Book I, Ch.13, 84 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/34041.htm)

"Let us then run over, if you choose, [b]the opinions of the philosophers, to which they give boastful utterance, respecting the gods; that we may discover philosophy itself, through its conceit making an idol of matter;[/b] although we are able to show, as we proceed, that even while deifying certain demons, it has a dream of the truth."
—Clement of Alexandria, [i]Exhortation to the Heathen[/i], Ch.5, "The Opinions of the Philosophers Respecting God" (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/020805.htm)

"Let the philosophers, then, own as their teachers the Persians, or the Sauromatæ, or the Magi, [b]from whom they have learned the impious doctrine of regarding as divine certain first principles, [u]being ignorant of the great First Cause, the Maker of all things, and Creator of those very first principles, the unbeginning God, but reverencing "these weak and beggarly elements,"[/u] Galatians 4:9 as the apostle says, which were made for the service of man."[/b]
—Clement of Alexandria, [i]Exhortation to the Heathen[/i], Ch.5, "The Opinions of the Philosophers Respecting God" (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/020805.htm)

[b]"Investigation of natural phenomena is superfluous and beyond the human mind, and the learning and study of these matters are impious and false."[/b]
—Eusebius

Source: Ramsey MacMullen, [i]Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries[/i] (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p.88

"As we have been deferring up to the present time our final discourse hereon, which is the fifteenth Book of the treatise in hand, we will now make up what is lacking to the discussions which we have travelled through, [b]by still further dragging into light the solemn doctrines of the fine philosophy of the Greeks, and [u]laying bare before the eyes of all the useless learning therein.[/u] And before all things we shall show that not from ignorance of the things which they admire, [u]but from contempt of the unprofitable study therein we have cared very little for them, and devoted our own souls to the practice of things far better."[/u][/b]
—Eusebius. [i]Praeparatio Evangelica[/i], Book XV (http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_pe_15_book15.htm)

[b]"You have given credence to your wise men and those learned in every kind of study — those, foorsooth, who know nothing and proclaim no one doctrine, who join battle over their views with their adversaries[/b] . . . and make all doubtful, and demonstrate from their disputes that nothing can be known."
—Arnobius, [i]ADVERSVS NATIONES, 2.10 (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/arnobius/arnobius2.shtml)[/i]

Source: [MacMullen, 1997; p.206]

[b]"Blessed is he who has attained infinite ignorance."[/b]
—Evagrius

Source: [MacMullen, 1997; p.208]

[b]"What great and wonderful things have your philosophers effected?[/b] They leave uncovered one of their shoulders; they let their hair grow long; they cultivate their beards; their nails are like the claws of wild beasts. Though they say that they want nothing, yet, like Proteus, they need a currier for their wallet, and a weaver for their mantle, and a wood-cutter for their staff, and the rich, and a cook also for their gluttony. O man competing with the dog, you know not God, and so have turned to the imitation of an irrational animal. You cry out in public with an assumption of authority, and take upon you to avenge your own self; and if you receive nothing, you indulge in abuse, and philosophy is with you the art of getting money. [b]You follow the doctrines of Plato, and a disciple of Epicurus lifts up his voice to oppose you. Again, you wish to be a disciple of Aristotle, and a follower of Democritus rails at you. Pythagoras says that he was Euphorbus, and he is the heir of the doctrine of Pherecydes; but Aristotle impugns the immortality of the soul. You who receive from your predecessors doctrines which clash with one another, you the inharmonious, are fighting against the harmonious. One of you asserts that God is body, but I assert that He is without body; that the world is indestructible, but I say that it is to be destroyed; that a conflagration will take place at various times, but I say that it will come to pass once for all;[/b] that Minos and Rhadamanthus are judges, but I say that God Himself is Judge; that the soul alone is endowed with immortality, but I say that the flesh also is endowed with it. What injury do we inflict upon you, O Greeks? Why do you hate those who follow the word of God, as if they were the vilest of mankind? It is not we who eat human flesh --they among you who assert such a thing have been suborned as false witnesses; it is among you that Pelops is made a supper for the gods, although beloved by Poseidon, and Kronos devours his children, and Zeus swallows Metis.
—Tatian, [i]Address to the Greeks[/i] (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tatian-address.html), 25

[b]"Cease to make a parade of sayings which you have derived from others, and to deck yourselves like the daw in borrowed plumes. If each state were to take away its contribution to your speech, your fallacies would lose their power. While inquiring what God is, you are ignorant of what is in yourselves; and, while staring all agape at the sky, you stumble into pitfalls. The reading of your books is like walking through a labyrinth, and their readers resemble the cask of the Danaids. Why do you divide time, saying that one part is past, and another present, and another future?[/b] For how can the future be passing when the present exists? As those who are sailing imagine in their ignorance, as the ship is borne along, that the hills are in motion, so you do not know that it is you who are passing along, but that time (o aiwn) remains present as long as the Creator wills it to exist. Why am I called to account for uttering my opinions, and why are you in such haste to put them all down? Were not you born in the same manner as ourselves, and placed under the same government of the world? [b]Why say that wisdom is with you alone, who have not another sun, nor other risings of the stars, nor a more distinguished origin, nor a death preferable to that of other men? The grammarians have been the beginning of this idle talk; and you who parcel out wisdom are cut off from the wisdom that is according to truth, and assign the names of the several parts to particular men; and you know not God, but in your fierce contentions destroy one another. And on this account you are all nothing worth. While you arrogate to yourselves the sole right of discussion, you discourse like the blind man with the deaf.[/b] Why do you handle the builder's tools without knowing how to build? Why do you busy yourselves with words, while you keep aloof from deeds, puffed up with praise, but cast down by misfortunes? Your modes of acting are contrary to reaSon, for you make a pompons appearance in public, but hide your teaching in corners. Finding you to be such men as these, we have abandoned you, and no longer concern ourselves with your tenets, but follow the word of God. Why, O man, do you set the letters of the alphabet at war with one another? Why do you, as in a boxing match, make their sounds clash together with your mincing Attic way of speaking, whereas you ought to speak more according to nature? For if you adopt the Attic dialect though not an Athenian, pray why do you not speak like the Dorians? How is it that one appears to you more rugged, the other more pleasant for intercourse?"
—Tatian, [i]Address to the Greeks[/i] (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tatian-address.html), 26

[b]"How can I believe one who tells me that the sun is a red-hot mass and the moon an earth? Such assertions are mere logomachies, and not a sober exposition of truth.[/b] How can it be otherwise than foolish to credit the books of Herodotus relating to the history of Hercules, which tell of an upper earth from which the lion came down that was killed by Hercules? [b]And what avails the Attic style, the sorites of philosophers, the plausibilities of syllogisms, the measurements of the earth, the positions of the stars, and the course of the sun? To be occupied in such inquiries is the work of one who imposes opinions on himself as if they were laws."[/b]
—Tatian, [i]Address to the Greeks[/i] (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tatian-address.html), 27

[b]"If to the causes of natural things, what happiness will be proposed to me, if I shall know the sources of the Nile, or the vain dreams of the natural philosophers respecting the heaven? Why should I mention that on these subjects there is no knowledge, but mere conjecture, which varies according to the abilities of men?[/b]
—Lactantius, [i]Divine Institutes[/i], Book III, "Of the False Wisdom of the Philosophers" (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/07013.htm)

[b]"But I am not prepared to concede even that philosophers are devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, [u]because by that pursuit there is no attaining to wisdom.[/u] For if the power of finding the truth were connected with this pursuit, and if this pursuit were a kind of road to wisdom, it would at length be found. But since so much time and talent have been wasted in the search for it, and it has not yet been gained, it is plain that there is no wisdom there.[/b] Therefore they who apply themselves to philosophy do not devote themselves to the pursuit of wisdom; but they themselves imagine that they do so, because they know not where that is which they are searching for, or of what character it is. [b]Whether, therefore, they devote themselves to the pursuit of wisdom or not, they are not wise, because that can never be discovered which is either sought in an improper manner, or not sought at all."[/b]
—Lactantius, [i]Divine Institutes[/i], Book III, "Of the False Wisdom of the Philosophers" (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/07013.htm)

"Philosophy appears to consist of two subjects, knowledge and conjecture, and of nothing more. [b]Knowledge cannot come from the understanding, nor be apprehended by thought; because to have knowledge in oneself as a peculiar property does not belong to man, but to God.[/b] But the nature of mortals does not receive knowledge, except that which comes from without. For on this account the divine intelligence has opened the eyes and ears and other senses in the body, that by these entrances knowledge might flow through to the mind. [b][u]For to investigate or wish to know the causes of natural things,—whether the sun is as great as it appears to be, or is many times greater than the whole of this earth; also whether the moon be spherical or concave; and whether the stars are fixed to the heaven, or are borne with free course through the air; of what magnitude the heaven itself is, of what material it is composed; whether it is at rest and immoveable, or is turned round with incredible swiftness; how great is the thickness of the earth, or on what foundations it is poised and suspended,—to wish to comprehend these things, I say, by disputation and conjectures, is as though we should wish to discuss what we may suppose to be the character of a city in some very remote country, which we have never seen, and of which we have heard nothing more than the name. If we should claim to ourselves knowledge in a matter of this kind, which cannot be known, should we not appear to be mad, in venturing to affirm that in which we may be refuted? How much more are they to be judged mad and senseless, who imagine that they know natural things, which cannot be known by man!" [/u][/b]
—Lactantius, [i]Divine Institutes[/i], Book III, "Of the False Wisdom of the Philosophers" (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/07013.htm)

"Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? [b]That the crops and trees grow downward? That the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth? I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one vain thing by another."[/b]
—Lactantius, [i]Divine Institutes (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0701.htm)[/i]

[b]"Wretched Aristotle ! who established for them the dialectic art, so ingenious in the construction and refutation of propositions, so crafty in statements, so forced in hypotheses, so inflexible in arguments, so laborious in disputes, so damaging even to itself, always reconsidering everything, so that it never treats thoroughly of anything at all.

Hence come those fables and endless genealogies, and profitless questions, and words which spread like a cancer;[/b] in restraining us from which the Apostle expressly mentions philosophy as that which we ought to beware of, writing to the Colossians, [b]"Take heed lest any one beguile you through philosophy or vain deceit, according to the tradition of men,"[/b] beyond the providence of the Holy Spirit. The Apostle had been at Athens, and in his argumentative encounters there had become acquainted [b]with that human wisdom which affects and corrupts the Truth,[/b] itself also being many times divided into its own heresies by the variety of its mutually antagonistic sects.

[b]What then hath Athens in common with Jerusalem ? What hath the Academy in common with the Church ? What have heretics in common with Christians? Our principles are from the "Porch" of Solomon, who himself handed down that the Lord must be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with those who bring forward a Stoic or Platonic or dialectic Christianity.[u] We have no need of speculative inquiry after we have known Christ Jesus; nor of search for the Truth after we have received the Gospel. When we become believers, we have no desire to believe anything besides; for the first article of our belief is that there is nothing besides which we ought to believe." [/u][/b]
—Tertullian, [i]On the Prescription of Heretics[/i], Chapter, VII (http://www.tertullian.org/articles/bindley_test/bindley_test_07prae.htm)

"Now, pray tell me, [b]what wisdom is there in this hankering after conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong confidence of its assertions, [u]by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity,[/u][/b] which is tricked out with an artful show of language? It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well, and was unmercifully twitted by an Egyptian, who said to him, "Is it because you found nothing on earth to look at, that you think you ought to confine your gaze to the sky?" [u][b]His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor."[/b][/u]
—Tertullian, [i]Ad Nationes[/i], Book II, Ch.4 (http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf03-16.htm)

"So long, however, as its form exists in its proper order, you may seek and discuss as much as you please, and give full rein to your curiosity, in whatever seems to you to hang in doubt, or to be shrouded in obscurity. You have at hand, no doubt, some learned brother gifted with the grace of knowledge, some one of the experienced class, some one of your close acquaintance who is curious like yourself; [b]although with yourself, a seeker he will, after all, [u]be quite aware that it is better for you to remain in ignorance, lest you should come to know what you ought not, because you have acquired the knowledge of what you ought to know. “Thy faith,” He says, “hath saved thee” not observe your skill in the Scriptures.[/u][/b] Now, faith has been deposited in the rule; it has a law, and (in the observance thereof) salvation. Skill, however, consists in curious art, having for its glory simply the readiness that comes from knack. [b][u]Let such curious art give place to faith; let such glory yield to salvation. At any rate, let them either relinquish their noisiness, or else be quiet. To know nothing in opposition to the rule (of faith), is to know all things.[/u][/b] (Suppose) that heretics were not enemies to the truth, so that we were not forewarned to avoid them, what sort of conduct would it be to agree with men who do themselves confess that they are still seeking? For if they are still seeking, they have not as yet found anything amounting to certainty; and therefore, whatever they seem for a while to hold, they betray their own scepticism, whilst they continue seeking. [b]You therefore, who seek after their fashion, looking to those who are themselves ever seeking, a doubter to doubters, a waverer to waverers, must needs be “led, blindly by the blind, down into the ditch.”[/b] But when, for the sake of deceiving us, they pretend that they are still seeking, in order that they may palm their essays upon us by the suggestion of an anxious sympathy, —when, in short (after gaining an access to us), they proceed at once to insist on the necessity of our inquiring into such points as they were in the habit of advancing, then it is high time for us in moral obligation to repel them, so that they may know that it is not Christ, but themselves, whom we disavow. For since they are still seekers, they have no fixed tenets yet; and being not fixed in tenet, they have not yet believed; and being not yet believers, they are not Christians. [u][b]But even though they have their tenets and their belief, they still say that inquiry is necessary in order to discussion. [/u][/b]Previous, however, to the discussion, they deny what they confess not yet to have believed, so long as they keep it an object of inquiry. When men, therefore, are not Christians even on their own admission, how much more (do they fail to appear such) to us! What sort of truth is that which they patronize, when they commend it to us with a lie? Well, but they actually treat of the Scriptures and recommend (their opinions) out of the Scriptures! To be sure they do. From what other source could they derive arguments concerning the things of the faith, except from the records of the faith?"
—Tertullian, [i]Chapter XIV.—Curiosity Ought Not Range Beyond the Rule of Faith. Restless Curiosity, the Feature of Heresy (http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/003/0030280.htm)[/i]

[b]"And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.[/b] And He was buried, and rose again;[b] the fact is certain, because it is impossible."[/b]
—Tertullian, [i]On the Flesh of Christ (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0315.htm)[/i], Ch.5

"As this matter of faith . . . we accept it as useful for the multitude, and that [b]we admittedly teach those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their arguments."[/b]
—Origen

[b]"Restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning,[/b] in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words."
—John Chyrsostom

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.316]

"Did you see how great the holy dread in heaven and how great the arrogant presumption here below? The angels in heaven give God glory;[b] these on earth carry on meddlesome investigations."[/b]
—John Chyrsostom

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.311]

"Whenever God reveals something, [b]it is necessary to accept what is said in faith, not to pry impetuously."[/b]
—John Chyrsostom

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.311]

[b]"But how did He "destroy wisdom?" Being made known to us by Paul and others like him, [u]He showed it to be unprofitable. For towards receiving the evangelical proclamation, neither is the wise profited at all by wisdom,[/u] nor the unlearned injured at all by ignorance. But if one may speak somewhat even wonderful, ignorance rather than wisdom is a condition suitable for that impression, and more easily dealt with. [u]For the shepherd and the rustic will more quickly receive this, once for all both repressing all doubting thoughts and delivering himself to the Lord. In this way then He destroyed wisdom.[/u] For since she first cast herself down, she is ever after useful for nothing. Thus when she ought to have displayed her proper powers, and by the works to have seen the Lord, she would not. Wherefore though she were now willing to introduce herself, she is not able. For the matter is not of that kind; this way of knowing God being far greater than the other. [u]You see then, faith and simplicity are needed, and this we should seek every where, and prefer it before the wisdom which is from without. For "God," says he, "has made wisdom foolish."[/u][/b]
—John Chyrsostom, Homily 4 on First Corinthians (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/220104.htm)

[b]"Let us Christians prefer the simplicity of our faith to the demonstrations of human reason . . .[/b] For to spend much time on research about the essence of things would not serve the edification of the Church."
—Basil of Caesarea

Source: [MacMullen, 1997; p.89]

"And the further we advance in this reasoning the greater force we are obliged to give to this base, so that it may be able to support all the mass weighing upon it. [u][b]Put then a limit to your thought, so that your curiosity in investigating the incomprehensible may not incur the reproaches of Job,[/b][/u] and you be not asked by him, "Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened?"
—Basil of Caesarea, [i]Hexaemeron[/i], (Homily 1), 9 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32011.htm)

[b]"They only seek to persuade by forced reasoning. With us truth presents itself naked and without artifice.[/b] But why torment ourselves to refute the errors of philosophers, when it is sufficient to produce their mutually contradictory books, and, as quiet spectators, to watch the war?"
—Basil of Caesarea, [i]Hexamemeron[/i], (Homily 3), 8 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32013.htm)

"Now we have no more meetings, no more debates, no more gatherings of wise men in the agora, nothing more of all that made our city famous."
—Basil of Caesarea

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.317]

". . . [b]a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan."[/b]
—Basil of Caesarea

Source: Edward Grant, [i]Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550, From Aristotle to Copernicus[/i] (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004), p.118

[b]"There is a certain heresy concerning earthquakes that they come not from God's command, but, it is thought from the very nature of the elements . . . [/b]Paying no attention to God's power, they [the heretics] presume to attribute the motions of force to the elements of nature . . . like certain foolish philosophers who, ascribing this to nature, know not the power of God."
—Philastrius of Brescia

Source: [MacMullen, 1997; p.88]

"Whoever searches the whole of revelation will find there no doctrine of divine nature at all, nor indeed a doctrine of anything else that has a substantial existence,[b] so that we pass our lives in ignorance of much, being ignorant first of all of ourselves as human beings and then of all other things besides."[/b]
—Gregory of Nyssa

"The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone — to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself."
—Gregory of Nyssa

Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.315]

[b]"But it afterwards came to our ears, what we cannot mention without shame,[u] that your Fraternity is in the habit of expounding grammar to certain persons.[/u] This thing we took so much amiss, and so strongly disapproved it,[/b] that we changed what had been said before into groaning and sadness, since the praises of Christ cannot find room in one mouth with the praises of Jupiter. [b]And consider yourself what a grave and heinous offence it is for bishops to sing what is not becoming even for a religious layman."[/b]
—Gregory the Great, [i]Letter to To Desiderius, Bishop of Gaul (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360211054.htm)[/i]

[b]"The wise should be advised to cease from their knowledge."[/b]
—Gregory the Great


Source: [Freeman, 2002; p.303]

[b]"He has defiled the Church, he has infected with his own blight the minds of simple people. He tries to explore with his reason what the devout mind grasps at once with a vigorous faith. Faith believes, it does not dispute. But this man, apparently holding God suspect, will not believe anything until he has first examined it with his reason."[/b]
—St. Bernard of Clairvaux

"People gave ear to [b]an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. [/b]Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best.[b] This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."[/b]
—Martin Luther

"The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolved in the space of twenty-four hours. [b]But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves. . . Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious. It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it."[/b]
—Phillip Melanchthon

[Fade the Butcher]

Some very revealing commentary by Riché on the dismissal of the liberal arts in Anglo-Saxon England:

"Most of the liberal arts, then, were consciously ignored by educated Anglo-Saxon men. The arts were strangers to them, as Aldhelm expressed it so clearly. We have already said that Jarrow could have become a new Vivarium. Here, we must argue that Bede did not follow Cassiodorus' program.

In his commentary on Edsras, Bede incidentally mentioned Cassiodorus, "formerly a senator, then a doctor of the Church." It is that Cassiodorus, the exegate of the Pslams, that alone interested Bede. . . .

In fact, he condemned Christians who, under the influence of the demon, descended from the heights of God's Word to secular sciences. He did not speak of an inverse movement leading from the liberal arts to God. This should not be surprising in light of Bede's several reminders to his readers that secular literature was noxious. He compared secular letters to the thorns that surrounded a rose and to the poisonous stinger of bees that one could not study with impunity. Bede recalled that the masters of the Church had incurred the reproach that they were more Ciceronian than Christian. A Christian must not follow the example of Johathan, who, despite the interdiction of his father, tasted the honey of the forest: these sweets were useless and deceptive.

The disciplines that seemed most dangerous to Bede, as well as to Aldhelm, were rhetoric and dialectic because they were the diabolical weapons used by heretics and philosophers, those "patriarchs of heretics."

It might seem surprising that eighth-century men were still troubled by the errors of philosophy, when the study of philosoph had been practically abandoned in the West. Neither Bede nor Aldhelm had any philosophical culture, and yet they feared philosophy and its daughter, heresy, as real dangers. Did they share th reasons of the seventh-century popes? The theological innovations of the Greeks did not have great reprecussions in England, and the arrival of an Easterner to the see of Canterbury did not provoke a revival of philosophical thought. If Theodore received the surname of "philosopher" from his contemporaries, it was primarily because of his great learning and his knowledge of Greek. What preoccupied Bede more was a resurgence of Pelagianism in ecclessiastical circles. He inserted in his History a letter that Pope John IV wrote to the Celtic clergy in 640 on the subject. This heresy must still have been in existence a century later because Bede denounced it several times and thought it necessary to respond to Pelagius' De amore in a work called De gratia Dei.

Lettered Anglo-Saxons were just as condemnatory when it came to natural philosophy because they feared pagan mythographical and astrological deviations which might result from the study of the "nature of things." Even Isidore of Seville's scientific works were suspect. Bede redid a De natura rerum under the influence of Isidore's work, but he wanted to write a treatise which was more descriptive than explicative. Toward the end of his life, Bede returned once again to Isidore's treatise to draw extract from it, "so that his disciples would not read lies and would not work without profit." This is a clear expression of Bede's criticism of the Sevillian for what Bede thought was an abuse of the allegorical genre and for digressions that were still to close to the cosmic system of the pagans. We should note, however, that except for the De natura rerum and Origines, Isidore's work was almost entirely unknown to Bede. At one point, apropos of the calender, he even affirmed that he preferred the Roman interpretation to that of the Spaniard.

Bede, unlike certain Eastern and Irish exegetes, did not try to bring his scientific learning to bear on the clarification of the sacred text. For him the sole explanation for the miracles recounted in the Bible was the direct intervention of God. For example, having explained the passage in the Epistle in which Saint Paul recalls his stay in the depths of the sea, he remarked that Theodore of Canterbury compared this text to the chasm of Cyzicus into which criminals were pitched. But he refused to embellish this scientific interpretation and compared Paul at the bottom of the sea to Peter who walked on the waters.

We can now better define the principles that inspired the program of Anglo-Saxon masters. They affirmed even more strongly than their predecessors that the Bible was superior to all other texts, "not only by authority, since it is divine, or because of its usefulness, since it leads to eternal life, but even more by its antiquity and its form." Since it contains all literary genres, it was necessary to study grammar, the only liberal art worthy of interest, in order to appreciate all its richness. "Especially apply yourself unceasingly to the reading of the Bible and sacred texts," Aldhelm wrote to his discipline Aethilwald. "If in addition you want to know something about secular literature, do so with the following goal in mind: since in the Scriptures all or nearly all of the sequence of words rests on grammar, you will comprehend all the more easily the deeper and more sacred sense of this divine language when you have learned the very diverse rules of the art of forming its thread." This famous text can be joined to the statements of Bede and Boniface underscoring the importance of grammatical studies for the study of the sacred text.

Detached from the other branches of the future trivium, grammar was now Christianized. The examples from classical authors that had to be known, isolated from their contexts, were no longer noxious for the monk, who only retained the mechanics of their construction. The verses of the pagan poets, which were still feared as dangerous, were neutralized in grammatical treatises when used to illustrate the mechanism of the language. Bede read the classics but did not experience them as literary works. He borrowed only their clarity and correctness of style. He was a poet, but he placed his talent in the service of God and the saints. Far from plagiarizing the pagans, as had the representatives of Christian classical culture, he created a new Christian religious poetry, as had the Irishmen before him.

The interest the Anglo-Saxons had in scientific research was also dictated by religious preoccupations. They left aside theoretical concerns, retaining only the sciences useful in fixing the time and the calender: astronomy, cosmography, and computus. But as a result, they reconstructed a scientific program around the ratio temporum, which no longer existed in the antique school.

It cannot be said that the Anglo-Saxons had "passed on a mutilated Antiquity," for they did not wish to be the heirs of the Ancients. What Gregory the Great called the exteriora studia, that is, the program of the liberal arts, had no meaning for them. As Boniface said in the preface to his grammatical treatise, no knowledge can exist outside the circle of the faith. The only culture worthy of existence was religious culture.

In organizing their studies by abandoning an entire portion of the antique program, the Anglo-Saxon masters freed themselves from the equivocacy that we have noted in studying the culture of Cassiodorus and Isidore. The conditions under which they lived facilitated this break.

Riché, pp.388-393

[Fade the Butcher]

Paradoxically, even Epicureanism really shows how thoroughly Christianity transformed the Greek heritage - the ordered 17th-century mechanistic atomism was a quite different creature from ancient atomism with its foggy notions of purposeless chaos.

Christianity certainly transformed the Greek heritage, but not in the way Petr imagines. They destroyed the ordered, rational, naturalistic cosmos of the Greeks and replaced it with an arbitrary universe where natural phenomena was explained in terms of the whims of an omnipotent god, the devil, and his nefarious minions, the demons. Their favorite method of justifying their claims was by appeal not to reason or evidence, but to miracles: examples of how their magical sky fairy could flaunt any natural law, as the mood strikes, illustrating the pointless of "fallen man" every trying to understand the natural order. The investigation of the natural world was condemned as "vain curiosity" and "the sin of pride." Ignorance was to be preferred to knowledge. It took almost seven hundred years for Western Europe to pull itself out of the muck of the Christian Dark Ages.

Christian (and Christianity-influenced) scholars managed to make even crap like original Epicureanism look somewhat credible! That's some accomplishment!

Jaki's grotesque caricature of Epicureanism illustrates his unreliability and reflects his ignorance. The only arbitrary element in Epicurus's mechanistic universe is the swerve which was posited to save human free will and ethical responsibility. Descartes used dualism for the same purpose.

The inspiration of Galileo?

Sure. The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities comes from Epicurus.

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/theories/atomism.html

"In his Assayer of 1623, Galileo explained his notion of the difference between those qualities, mostly found by touch, that are inherent in bodies (weight, roughness, smoothness, etc.) and those that are in the mind of the observer (taste, color, etc.)--in other words, the difference between what we call primary and secondary qualities. In this discussion he referred to bodies that "continually dissolve into minute particles"[2] and stated his opinion that "for exciting in us tastes, odors, and sounds there are required in external bodies anything but sizes, shapes, numbers, and slow or fast movements."[3] An anonymous cleric filed a report with the Inquisition in which he claimed the first citation to show that Galileo was an atomist and the second to be in conflict with the Council of Trent's pronunciations on the Eucharist.[4] The report did not lead to any action against Galileo."

The inspiration of Francis Bacon?

A good place to start would be to ask Bacon himself.

"out of twenty-five centures with which the memory and learning of man are conversant, scarcely six can be set apart and selected as fertile in science and favorable to its progress. For there are deserts and wastes in times as in countries, and we can reckon upon three revolutions and epochs of philosophy. 1. The Greek. 2. The Roman. 3. Our own, that is the philosophy of the Western nations of Europe and scarcely two centuries can with justice be assigned to each. The intermediate ages of the world were unfortunate both in the quantity and richness of the sciences produced. Nor need we mention the Arabs, or the scholastic philosophy, which, in those ages, ground down the sciences by their numerous treatises, more than they increased their weight. The first cause, then, of the insignificant progress in the sciences, is rightly referred to the small proportion of time which has been favourable thereto."

The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon including "the Advancement of Learning" and "Novum Organum," ed. Joseph Devey (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), pp.413-414

[Macrobius]

Feel free to comment.

Sure: a catena. How scholastic.

[Petr]

Feel free to comment.
Fade is such a brave little spammer. He also has way too much time in his hands.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Fade, you know very little about the complicated relations between theology, philosophy and science, so quit pretending that you do.

The relationship is neither complicated or difficult to understand. As I wrote in the other thread, the Bible itself kicks off with the damnation of man and his expulsion from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge. Paul carries on this theme in his tirades against Greek philosophy which is picked up by the church fathers in the early centuries of Christianity. The Christian attitude towards science and philosophy grows steadily more negative from the second century to the sixth century. Science was reduced to the status of handmaiden to theology in this period. This attitude changed during the sixth century and culminated in the complete rejection of the "profane sciences" and the destruction of the antique schools. The darkness doesn't begin to recede until the reforms of the cathedral schools by Gerbert and his successors in the eleventh century.

"The importance of the school in an Empire officially Christian since the fourth century is, at first glance, surprising. State control of the school should have disturbed the Church, whose mission was to teach Christian truth. Moreover, the moral principles of the Gospels were far removed from the humanist ideal fashioned by centuries of paganism. A Christian was apt to be scandalized by the immorality of the texts chosen by the grammarian and to consider studies whose essential goal was the art of speech as vain. The "cult of the Muses" threatened to turn the faithful from the cult of the true God. Had not the Christian everything in the sacred texts with which to satisfy his intellectual curiosity? Why should he go to the pagan rhetors, poets, scholars, and historians when he had the epistles of Saint Paul, the books of Genesis and Kings? The Bible was a work rich and varied enough to replace the liberal arts. This program, proposed in the Didascalia apostolorum in the third century, was, in fact, adopted by monks in later centuries."

Ibid, pp.7-8

You are just a pretentious ranting layman who is good at spouting simplistic propaganda slogans and cherry-picking citations.What makes Fade so grotesque person is his pathological inability to make any concessions to his opponents. Like a pampered brat, he wants it all or nothing.

Fortunately, we no longer live in the Christian Dark Ages and have ceased to be in thrall to worthless priests.

"While laymen at the end of the Roman Empire could take part in the election of a bishop, play an active role in the councils, administer the goods of the Church, and even "preach" with the permission of the priest, laymen of the eighth century were considered irresponsible minors who were to venerate priests and obey their orders (a layman who encountered a priest was supposed to dismount from his horse to greet the clergyman). More than this, the lay state was regarded as a concession to human weakness. Bede, speaking of those who had not yet left the world ("in populari adhuc vita continetur"), betrayed his regret that society was not composed entirely of monks and clerics. Monks and clerics increasingly formed an order apart, distinguished by their dress, their way of life, their legal privileges, and - especially after the Carolingian reform - by their culture. We are already in the Middle Ages."

Ibid, p.494

[Micaelis]

Petr,

I believe you are wrong in your hostile ranting against Fade. By doing so, you concede to Fade the moral high ground with which to convince others of his position towards religion.

Fade,

It is understood that relations between science and religion were not always friendly. With respect to those people of the Dark Ages, science was still in its infancy and largely under the influence of paganistic mentality. For the sake of the change of order that occured in the Roman Empire and spread itself throughout Europe, it was necessary for the authorities to root out paganistic thought in place of Christian dogma. This is necessary for any change of power to take place, whether it be secular or theistic. The benefits of this were both positive, in a strong military cohesion and identity of collective Europeans, and negative in its damnation of scientific practice.

Through the efforts of many notable Catholics, such as Copernicus and his follower, Galileo, the Vatican in its current state no longer holds such a demonising attitude towards science and what it is able to accomplish, at least that which is beneficial for humanity in the sake of medicine and knowledge in general rather than excessive or motive-driven waste. Science must have a conscience.

Your short-sightedness and drive for hostility between two fundamental assets of human creation and creativity will be your downfall. Let us not forget that it was the Christian bulkwark that helped to establish an Imperial Europe, one that held no second thought in expelling invading tribes and hostile entities, much unlike the secular humanist regimes of today that tolerate such invasions and create laws against their own kind to protect them.

It is my hope that you will step back from your atomistic tirade against Christianity in its early hostilities with science and focus on the larger picture, one that you are currently unable to grasp.

[Sulla the Dictator]

Fade, what role do the Macedonians play in the decline of Greek philosophy?

None? Could that be because that wouldn't make anyone angry?

[Fade the Butcher]

Fade, what role do the Macedonians play in the decline of Greek philosophy? None? Could that be because that wouldn't make anyone angry?

Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander and Ptolemy. Alexander kept in close contact with his old teacher and sent him books and specimens of exotic animals he had acquired in his campaigns in the east. Ptolemy and his successors easily did more to cultivate science and philosophy than anyone else in the ancient world. Stoicism and Epicureanism flourished in Hellenistic Greece.

"Aristotle had always been there in the background, in the calmer, more considered parts of Alexander's and Ptolemy's minds, and through this his influence spread far beyond his own writings and into his pupils' actions. He'd informed Alexander's whole way of thinking, promoting a love of investigation and discovery which not only drove the conquerer across vast physical territories but encouraged his journeys into all areas of knowledge. Alexander was a great devourer of books, often running out of material on campaigns and frantically sending for more. He read histories, scientific treatises, the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus - everything from his precious "casket copy" of the Iliad (as corrected by Aristotle) to the dithrambic odes of Telestes and Philoxenus. He also liked to put his knowledge to use, as Plutarch describes:

Doubtless also it was to Aristotle that he owed the inclination he had, not to the theory only, but likewise to the practice of the art of medicine. For when any of his friends were sick, he would often prescribe them their course of diet, and medicines proper to their disease, as we may find in his epistles.

Plutarch, Life of Alexander, in Parallel Lives, 8

So great was Aristotle's influence on him that, if we are to believe Plutarch, he was often heard to say that he loved and cherished his tutor no less than if he had been his own father, "giving this reason for it, that as he had received life from one, so the other had taught him to live well" (Plutarch, Life of Alexander, in Parallel Lives, 8

Pollard and Reid, p.47

As for the Romans, one of first victims of their imperialism was the greatest mathematician of Antiquity, Archimedes, who was killed during the invasion of Syracase. I mentioned the gruesome murder of Cicero and the forced suicide of Seneca above. The Romans ransacked Greece of valuable statues and material goods in much the same way that the Vandals later carried similar items to North Africa, although Carthage was not annihilated by the Vandals as it was by the Romans after the Third Punic War. Your namesake stole the library of Apellicon of Teos from Athens and carried it back to Rome. Aemilius Paullus stole the royal library of the Macedonian kings, so they were hardly as adverse to knowledge as their Byzantine successors. It took many centuries, but the Romans were eventually civilized by the Greeks. As Horace put it, "Greece, the captive, took her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium."

Compare the destruction of Carthage by the semi-barbarian Romans to the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410:

By all accounts, there followed one of the most civilized sacks of a city ever witnessed. Alaric's Goths were Christian, and treated many of Rome's holiest places with great respect. The two main basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul were nominated places of sanctuary. Those who fled there were left in peace, and refugees to Africa later reported with astonishment how the Goths had even conducted certain holy ladies there, particularly one Marcella, before methodically ransacking their houses. Not that everyone, not even all the city's nuns, fared so well, but the Christian Goths did keep their religious affiliation firmly in view. One huge silver siborium, 2,025 pounds in weight and the gift of the Emperor Constantine, was lifted from the Lateran Palace, but the liturgical vessels of St. Peter were left in situ. Structural damage too, was largely limited to the area of the Salarian Gate and the old Senate house. All in all, even after three days of Gothic attentions, the vast majority of the city's monuments and buildings remained intact, even if stripped of their movable valuables. . . .

It's much more exiciting to think of the sack of Rome as the culmination of Germanic dreams of revenge - inspired by the slaughter of Varus' legions in AD 9 - against Roman imperialism. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from a close exploration of the sequence of events between 408 and 410, however, is that Alaric did not want the sack to happen. His Goths had been outside the city on and off since late autumn 408, and, had they wanted to, could have taken it at any point in the twenty months since their arrival. Alaric could probably not have cared less about possible banner headlines in the historical press and a few dozen wagons' worth of booty. His concerns were of a different order altogether. Since 395, he had been struggling to force the Roman state to rewrite its relationship with the Goths as it had been defined in the treaty of 382. His bottom line, as we know, was the grant of recognized status by a legitimate Roman regime. Once he had given up on Constantinople in 400/1, this had to mean the regime of Honorius in Ravenna. Beseiging Rome was simply a means of pressuring Honorius and his advisors to come to a deal. But the ploy never worked.

Heather, pp.227-229

. . . and the speed with which the Germanic barbarians came to appreciate Greco-Roman culture, as opposed to the distaste the Romans had for the Greeks which endured for centuries.

The deposition of the last Roman emperor and the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms brought few important changes in the West. In the long-abandoned northern reaches of the former empire - Britain, Germany, and northern Gaul - the Barbarians continued to settle. As the traces of Romanization slowly disappeared, these regions returned to paganism and to clan life. In the lands bordered the Mediterranean, however, Roman civilization survived. The Burgundian, Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and even the Vandal princes did not settle in the Empire as newcomers, for all through the fifth century they had been stamped by the civilizing influence of Rome.

The Visigoths, converted to Christianity in the fourth century proudly recalled that their chieftan, Alaric, had not destroyed Rome in 410, as would have other Barbarians. Ataulf, Alaric's successor, who married Galla Placidia, the daughter of Emperor Theodosius, even gave thought to the restoration of the Empire based on Gothic might. In the middle of the fifth century, one of Athaulf's successors was killed defending the West against the armies of Attila. The Ostrogoths, who remained in the East longer than the other Barbarians, placed themselves in the service of the Emperor. In 490, at Zeno's request, Theodoric the Amalian conquered Italy, where Odoacer had ruled since 476. The Burgundians, relatively recent settlers in the Empire, were not less favorably disposed to Roman civilization. Allied to the Romans from the fourth century, they liked to say that they were also linked to the Romans by ties of kinship. The evidence of the fifth and sixth centuries does, in fact, attest to their moderation and their desire to establish good relations with the Gallo-Romans. They were Arians, like the Goths, but only after having first known Catholicism. Also like the Gothic princes, their chieftans intervened in the political life of the Empire, and one of them, Gundobad, lived for a long while in Italy. The Vandals, lastly, do not entirely deserve the reputation for savagery that has been given to them. Despite their religious fanaticism, they too appreciated Roman civilization. When they crossed over into Africa in 429 after along stay in Spain, they preserved the institutions of the Empire.

The territorial unity of the Mediterranean region was not broken by the establishment of four barbarian kingdoms. Close family ties existed among the Barbarian princes. Political borders were easily crossed. The son of Sidonius Apollinaris, a Visigothic subject, was in contact with Avitus of Vienne, in Burgundian territory. Avitus corresponded with friends in Milan and Ravenna, in Ostrogothic territory, while Ennodius in Pavia corresponded with scholars in Lyon. One could still believe that one was living in the time of imperial unity - especially after 507, when Theodoric partially restored that unity by annexing Provence and protecting the Visigothic kingdom agains the attacks of the Franks.

Within this political framework, Romans could maintain the illusion that nothing had really changed. In the first place, their contacts with Barbarian troops were practically nonexistent, since the relatively small number of Barbarians were quartered in well-defined regions - undoubtedly the least Romanized. The Ostrogoths occupied northern Italy, the Burgundians settled on the plains of the Jura, and the Visigoths on the plains of Old Castile. The Vandals in Africa were the only Barbarians who found themselves in a heavily Romanized area, but evne they were not very numerous.

Roman life went on much as it always had. The ruins of the fifth century had been repaired, sometimes even with the help of Barbarian kings. Theodoric's building program in Rome, Verona, and Ravenna are well known. It should be remembered that Gundobad at Geneva, Ruric and Merida, and the Vandal princes at Carthage were also builders. In the towns, a rich citizen could still divide his time among the forum, the business and legal center, the baths, whose benefit even the Barbarians appreciated, the dinners accompanied by gossip and games, the theater, and the races. Life in the great rural domains in Italy, Spain, and Africa is reminiscient of Sidonius' fifth-century descriptions . . .

Riché, pp.15-20

"Theodoric, the last Barbarian prince to settle in the West, was a genuine Maecenas. Of course, was in control of Italy, the source and center of Latin culture. At the same time that he rescued Roman monuments from destruction, this "new Trajan" protected writers and guaranteed a salary for teachers in Rome's schools. . . .

Cassiodorus recounted that the king, wanting to put aside his public duties, asked Cassidorus to read to him the maxims of the ancient sages, to discuss the courses of the stars, the movements of the seas, and the wonders of fountains with him so that he might be called a "philosopher king." Just as it did for many other educated men of his time, philosophy for Theodoric meant only physical science, or more precisely, curiosity about strange natural phenomena.

Not only did Theodoric pretend to imitate Roman scholars; he also wanted to maintain the tradition of his Gothic ancestors, who, in Dicineus' school, were given to philosophizing, and thus became "the most educated of all the Barbarians and almost like Greeks." At least, this is what the official historian recorded at the king's request. The Goths were worthy enough to occupy Italian soil, and their prince had to care for intellectual activities, as did all civilized princes. The first responsibility of a cultured king was to give his family a solid education. Education had made Theodoric, and he was no doubt more demanding than others had been with him. Amalasuntha, his daughter, who was to succeed him on the throne in 523, knew not only Latin but also Greek. The praise which Cassiodorus lavished on her suggests that her education was above average. She understood the value of classical culture, since at the outset of her regency she entrusted the education of her son to a Roman preceptor.

The children of Amalafrida, the king's sister and wife of the Vandal Thrasamund, likewise received an extensive education. Amalabirga, whom Theodoric married to the king of the Thuriginians, was called "litteris docta, moribus erudita." Her brother, Theodahat, a great Tuscan landowner and later associated with the throne through his marriage to Amalasuntha, had acquired great wisdom and self-mastery through reading. Rome could say that it "had never had a king so learned." Procopius, the Byzantine historian, tells us that this prince was more learned in Plato's philosophy than he was in military science. Theodahat, more a scholar than a strategist, did not in fact known how to defend his kingdom against Justinian.

Ibid, pp.58-59

[Fade the Butcher]

I must have forgotten Jerome above.

" . . . dragged before the Judge's judgment seat. I was asked to state my condition, and replied that I was a Christian. But He Who presided said, "Thou liest; thou are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will they heart be also." Straightaway I became dumb, and the strokes of the whip — for he had ordered me to be scourged . . . At last the bystanders fell at the knees of Him Who presided, and prayed Him to pardon my youth and give me opportunity to repent of my error, on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted upon me if I ever read again the books of the Gentile authors . . .This experience was no sweet or idle dream . . . I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, and that I felt the bruises long after I awoke . . . Henceforth I read the books of God with greater zeal than I had ever given before to the books of men."
—Jerome

[Fade the Butcher]

Fade,

It is understood that relations between science and religion were not always friendly.

That's an understatement. The Church styled itself as a dictator with the authority to arbitrate science for nineteen centuries. Although it has since relinquished this cherished role, it was only dragged to it kicking and screaming (and against its will) after suffering a series of devasting blows to its authority from Copernicus to Darwin. It wasn't until the development of natural religion in the seventeenth century that revelation was finally subjected to rational criticism. The influence of the Church had waned considerably by then because of the rise of powerful states serviced by secular bureaucrats, the shattering of Christendom by the Reformation, and the invention of the printing press.

With respect to those people of the Dark Ages, science was still in its infancy and largely under the influence of paganistic mentality.

There was no science in the West during the Dark Ages. Then again, there was no real science going on in the West during the Roman era either. There were only popularizations of Greek science like Pliny's Natural History and the works of other writers like Celsus, Seneca, and Vitruvius. The Roman encyclopedic tradition was carried on by Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Martinus Capella into the barbarian kingdoms. While this was hardly the most desirable state of affairs, at least the Romans (that is, in the West) had access to a thin version of Greek science. The Roman municipal schools also played a vital role in maintaining a literate lay population that possessed the rudiments of education which could always pursue what science was available.

This state of affairs changed after the triumph of Christianity. At first, science was reduced to the role of "handmaiden to theology," that is, what little science that existed which could be pressed into the use of Christian apologetics was permissible. The municipal schools and the encyclopedias survived the barbarian invasions. After the demise of the Western Empire, the Church found itself in a new position of authority, and it had little interest in maintaining the secular schools. Aside from its own inclinations, which were broadly hostile to science in any case, the Church also had to deal with the growing power of the monks. Monasteries had proliferated in Europe during fifth century and had acquired considerable wealth by the sixth century.

No one was more hostile to the secular schools than the monks. The barbarians patronized the schools. Theodoric even styled himself as a philosopher king and the Vandals had become enamored with poetry during their stay in North Africa. Theodoric's restoration of religious tolerance in Italy, Provence, and Spain was perceived as a threat by the monks who feared a revival of heresy and paganism. The schools were also seen as an impediment to the conversion of the countryside. The solution to this problem that was ultimately arrived at was to establish alternative episcopal and monastic schools which could function without the "profane curriculum" of the rhetors and grammarians. The real turning point came in the 530s when Justinian launched his reconquest of the West and restored direct imperial rule to Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain. The Catholic Franks dispatched the Burgundians and Visigoth possessions in Gaul. In 589, Reccared forced Catholicism onto Visigothic Spain. Catholicism was now triumphant in the West and any pretense of religious tolerance was abandoned. The secular schools replaced by the episcopal and monastic schools that served only the clergy.

For the sake of the change of order that occured in the Roman Empire and spread itself throughout Europe, it was necessary for the authorities to root out paganistic thought in place of Christian dogma.

The imposition of Christian totalitarianism upon the Roman Empire was a choice. It was completely unnecessary. The destructive disputes over theology had so alienated the Nestorians and Monophysites from Byzantium that the Arabs were welcomed as liberators during their conquests in the seventh century. The Jews in Spain as well.

This is necessary for any change of power to take place, whether it be secular or theistic. The benefits of this were both positive, in a strong military cohesion and identity of collective Europeans, and negative in its damnation of scientific practice.

I fail to see anything positive about the triumph of Christianity. The Empire was riven by fratricidal theological disputes: Arians vs. Catholics vs. Donatists in North Africa, Alexandria vs. Constantinople. The former policy of religious tolerance was much more sensible and successful.

Through the efforts of many notable Catholics, such as Copernicus and his follower, Galileo, the Vatican in its current state no longer holds such a demonising attitude towards science and what it is able to accomplish, at least that which is beneficial for humanity in the sake of medicine and knowledge in general rather than excessive or motive-driven waste. Science must have a conscience.

It's not like anyone ever had a choice to be or not be a Christian before the eighteenth century. Atheism was a crime in France. Religious tolerance is a novel phenomena that doesn't go back farther than a few centuries in the West.

Your short-sightedness and drive for hostility between two fundamental assets of human creation and creativity will be your downfall.

Where is this creativity that was inspired by Christianity? Explain. What did Christianity produce under its watch except ignorance and barbarism during the first thirteen centuries of its existence in the West (which was only finally ameliorated by the influx of Greco-Arabic science and philosophy)?

Let us not forget that it was the Christian bulkwark that helped to establish an Imperial Europe, one that held no second thought in expelling invading tribes and hostile entities, much unlike the secular humanist regimes of today that tolerate such invasions and create laws against their own kind to protect them.

Christians argued that the barbarian invasions and plague were justified punishments inflicted by God himself upon Europe who was angry over sin. The ravages of the Mongols was explained in such terms. So were the invasions of the Turks which were taken as evidence by Luther that the end of the world was imminent.

It is my hope that you will step back from your atomistic tirade against Christianity in its early hostilities with science and focus on the larger picture, one that you are currently unable to grasp.

The hostility of the Catholic Church to science went on into the nineteenth century and is still carried on by fundamentalist Protestants in our own times.

[Petr]

The principle of monotheistic unity was absolutely necessary for the beginning of science.


Creation and the History of Science by Christopher Kaiser

p. 4

No one with any appreciation for Greek philosophy could fail to be offended by Tertullian's tirade. Modern critics of Christianity have frequently cited his words as evidence of anti-intellectualism in the early Church. Once one allows for the vituperativeness of Tertullian's style, however, there is really nothing to which an informed pagan philosopher of the second or third century would take exception in the substance of his comments. As modern scholars like Edgar Zilsel and Ludwig Edelstein have pointed out, the fatal flaw of Greek science was its division into a multiplicity of schools and its lack of any means of accountability that would allow the resolution of disputes. In fact, this failure was already appreciated by the leading thinkers of the second century, Diodorus, Galen and Ptolemy, to name but a few.

The long-range welfare of natural science depended on the development of of an ecumenical community of scholars dedicated to the pursuit of truth. This ideal was appreciated by leading thinkers of late antiquity, but needed the substructure was not available. As we shall see in section 1.5, the ecumenical foundation of modern science was to be provided by the monastic movement of the Middle Ages, a movement based on the very discipline that was advocated by Irenaeus and Tertullian. Such are the ironies of history!


A. C. Crombie, p. 314

If we are to believe Augustine, the doctrine that the natural world was the creation of an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly free Creator, inscrutable to man except as revealed in Scripture and in the creation itself, offered a standing invitation to man to discover that Creator both these books alike open before his eyes. Again if we are to believe numerous witnesses from Augustine down to Kepler, the doctrine that God in making the world had ordered all things my measure and number and weight promoted a philosophical theology of the Creator as a divine mathematician. Geometry and arithmetic provided a model deducible from first principles and thus brought within rational control, when those principles had been discovered. It might be argued further that the simplicity of Christian certainty about the origin, purpose and the end of created existence, and the conceptions of the natural world as the product of a rational and benevolent Creator and of man as made in his image, offered a standing encouragement not only to follow in his thoughts by reason and the senses but also to use these gifts for their providential purpose of improving the human condition. (2)


The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 by H. Butterfield

pp. 98-99

In the system of Descartes God was another of those clear ideas that are clearer and more precise in the mind than anything seen by the actual eye. Furthermore, everything hung on this existence of a perfect and righteous God. Without Him a man could not trust in anything, could not believe in a geometrical proposition, for He was the guarantee that everything was not an illusion, the senses not a complete hoax, and life not a mere nightmare.

Starting from this point, Descartes was prepared to deduce the whole universe from God, with each step of the argument as clear and certain as a demonstration in geometry. He was determined to have a science as closely knit, as regularly ordered, as any piece of mathematics - one which, so far as the material universe was concerned, (and excluding the soul and and the spiritual side of things), would lay out a perfect piece of mechanism. His vision of a single universal science so unified, so ordered, so interlocked, was perhaps one of his most remarkable contributions to the scientific revolution.

...

The physics of Descartes, therefore, depends in a particular way upon his metaphysics; it provides merely the lower stages in an hierarchical system that definitely reaches back to God.

p. 100

Perhaps the most essential law in the physical system of Descartes was the law concerning the invariability of motion in the universe. Motion depended ultimately on God, and the law concerning the invariability in the amount of motion was a law which followed from the immutability of God.

[Petr]

The fact that the Greek scientific tradition continued to inspire advances in the Islamic world and the West after the thirteenth century proves that it was far from dead.
Many historians of philosophy attribute this to the vitalizing influence of monotheistic creationism that gave thinkers fertile new sources of inspiration to ponder about and helped Greek thought to pull out of evolutionary dead end it was driving into.

(For example, the growth of experimental method was closely connected to the idea of contingency - versus necessity - of the universe.)

Some things can look very sophisticated, gorgeous even, and yet represent an evolutionary dead end.

Fade the Bimbo apparently doesn't even know what the concept of "dead end" really means:

Amusing. That was not the case at all. The notion that philosophy had come to a "dead end" by the time of Christianity is directly refuted by 1.) Paul's denunciation of the Greek philosophers who ridiculed the early Christians, 2.) the vitrolic attacks upon philosophy by the church fathers (if Greek philosophy was dead, why was this necessary?), and 3.) the final state sponsered repression of Greek philosophy by Justinian and the violent persecutions launched against philosophers and pagans in previous centuries.

Petr

[Petr]

Like Lindberg wrote,

Lindberg isn't telling the whole truth here and he has little to say about the matter compared to Riché.
To begin with, Fade isn't in any position to accuse anyone else of telling half-truths.

And here we have a typical case of his childishly presumptuous arrogance. This puny layman really seems to think that he knows this subject better than Lindberg!

Fade has been blustering that he knows things better than Lindberg because he has read White's outdated crap and now Riché.

Perhaps Lindberg, professional that he is, has indeed read carefully what both White and Riché had to say, and then reached his own conclusions nevertheless?


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

The principle of monotheistic unity was absolutely necessary for the beginning of science.

That's amusing. The ancient Hebrews, unlike the Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, Arabs, or Indians, contributed absolutely nothing of importance to science, mathematics, or philosophy. On the contrary, the Bible is full of gross errors about the natural that retarded the progress of science for centuries. The Byzantines contributed nothing to science, and neither did the Christian West for fourteen centuries. Insofar as science existed at all in the Medieval West, it was Aristotelianism, along with some Galen, Avicenna, Ptolemy, and Archimedes, which remained dominant through the Middle Ages and Renaissance into the seventeenth century.

As for an "ecumenical community of scholars," nothing of the sort existed in the Early Modern Era. Galileo was a Copernican and heaped scorn upon the Scholastics who he ridiculed in his Dialogue (probably the major reason it was condemned). The Scholastics were also viciously attacked by Francis Bacon, Descartes, Paracelsus, and Hobbes. Scholastic natural philosophers did not hestitate to invoke the authority of theology in order to silence their critics (some scientific brotherhood!). The Church bitterly opposed the rise of the first scientific societies in Italy and crushed several of them. The Royal Society in England and the French Académie des sciences were sponsered by the state. In Germany, Kepler was an imperial astronomer.

In his final years, Augustine renounced his previous support for the liberal arts in his Retractions and declared they were useless for Christians. This did not go unnoticed by his successors who destroyed the municipal schools in the sixth century only to replace them with ecclessiastical schools where instruction in the "profane sciences" was abolished. Bishops had long been forbidden to study the "profane sciences" anyway since the Fourth Council of Carthage:

http://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/Carthage.html

That nothing in the Church can be read besides the canonical scripture.

ITEM, that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture.

But the Canonical Scriptures are as follows:

Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua the Son of Nun
The Judges
Ruth
The Kings (4 books)
The Chronicles (2 books)
Job
The Psalter
The Five books of Solomon
The Twelve Books of the Prophets
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezechiel
Daniel
Tobit
Judith
Esther
Ezra (2 books)
Macchabees (2 books)The New Testament:

The Gospels (4 books)
The Acts of the Apostles (1 book)
The Epistles of Paul (14)
The Epistles of Peter, the Apostle (2)
The Epistles of John the Apostle (3)
The Epistles of James the Apostle (1)
The Epistle of Jude the Apostle (1)
The Revelation of John (1 book)Let this be sent to our brother and fellow bishop, [Pope] Boniface, and to the other bishops of those parts, that they may confirm this canon, for these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in church.
http://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/media/themesmedia/spacer.gifhttp://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/media/themesmedia/spacer.gifhttp://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/media/themesmedia/spacer.gifhttp://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/media/themesmedia/spacer.gifhttp://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/media/themesmedia/spacer.gif

[Fade the Butcher]

To begin with, Fade isn't in any position to accuse anyone else of telling half-truths.

I have Lindberg's The Beginning of Western Science right here. He devotes a whole two pages to the subject of the decline of the classical schools. His commentary is not very informative and is positively misleading, although he does reject the myth that the monasteries were centers of secular learning. Nowhere does Lindberg mention crucial details though like Bede rejecting all the liberal arts except grammar (comparing them to the thorns of a rose) or how the classical schools survived the barbarian invasions only to be replaced by the episcopal schools. Riché's book is a comprehensive study of the issue over 500 pages in length.

And here we have a typical case of his childishly presumptuous arrogance. This puny layman really seems to think that he knows this subject better than Lindberg!

When two authorites are in disagreement, I defer to the superior source, which in this case is Riché.

Fade has been blustering that he knows things better than Lindberg because he has read White's outdated crap and now Riché.

I wouldn't draw upon White if his claims didn't check out. BTW, White's claim that Roger Bacon was condemned on account of "certain suspicious novelties" and thrown in prison for fourteen years is echoed by Easton who cites the same source.

Perhaps Lindberg, professional that he is, has indeed read carefully what both White and Riché had to say, and then reached his own conclusions nevertheless?

. . . or, perhaps, Lindberg simply ignores details that are discussed at greater length in other sources.

[Fade the Butcher]

It's amusing how many times Fade likes to use this trite little phrase.You're just an empty suit to me, Fade, not a real debater: trotting out predictable, prerecorded soundbites, evasions and lame quips.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Scholastic theology was 1.) rejected by the Protestants in the sixteenth century and 2.) fell out of fashion in Catholic Europe during the seventeenth century. Luther even wrote a track called Against Scholastic Theology.

[Fade the Butcher]

Many historians of philosophy attribute this to the vitalizing influence of monotheistic creationism that gave thinkers fertile new sources of inspiration to ponder about and helped Greek thought to pull out of evolutionary dead end it was driving into.

LOL. Philosophy was vitalized by "monotheistic creationists" like Tatian, Eusebius, Tertullian, Ambrose, and Lactantius who violently condemned philosophy! As Ambrose argued, no longer philosophers, but fishermen and tax collectors.

(For example, the growth of experimental method was closely connected to the idea of contingency - versus necessity - of the universe.)

Virtually all primitive tribes whatsoever believe the universe is dependent upon the arbitrary whims of their favorite gods. There are literally hundreds of different creation myths. Experimental science goes back to Ptolemy and Galen who made use of it in medicine and optics and the Arabs who carried on their work during the Christian Dark Ages.

Some things can look very sophisticated, gorgeous even, and yet represent an evolutionary dead end.

The church fathers would never have wasted their time attacking Greek philosophy if it was not perceived by them as a threat.

[Kodos]

I have less to say about Protestantism for two reasons: 1.) it has a much shorter track record, so there is less to criticize, 2.) it fractured the unity of Western Christendom and unwittingly assisted the rise of modern science by destroying the authority of the Papacy over much of Europe. The Protestants disintegrated even further into smaller sects which reduced their ability to suppress un-Orthodox ideas. Case in point, Galileo. His book was banned in Catholic Europe, but it was published in the Calvinist Netherlands and continued to circulate and build momentum behind heliocentrism in Northern Europe. This is not to say Protestantism is more enlightened than Catholicism. I have already mentioned the execution of Michael Servetus and the condemnation of Copernicus by Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon. The major difference is that Protestantism was less organized and encouraged the growth of the state at the expense of the Church.


Yes... thats why protestant christianity made a better "official" religion.

[Macrobius]

Some very revealing commentary by Riché on the dismissal of the liberal arts in Anglo-Saxon England:

Very little of what you write requires response, aside from noting that your distaste for something is an almost infallible guide to wisdom and truth. However, your implied calumny of the Venerable Bede does requires some correction.

First, as usual, you cite only secondary sources devoid of references or in this case barely having even quotations. If you would just read the primaries (in translation if you must), you would see how false this characterisation is. Who could look at Bede's chronology and not know at a glance how dependent on Isidore's (both that of the Chronicon and that of Origines) it is. One might prove, as your author does, which of the two he in fact followed, and note how minor any discrepancies are. All the *Christian* authors agree on the order of the emperors -- it must have been official in their circles -- and usually in the years. To assert malice in choice of sources is, for your author, the pot calling the kettle black.

But enough -- it is clear you will have none of wisdom. There is more true wisdom left in Bede's humble computus than any half dozen Math professors in any university today, if only they knew it. Your strutting is ludicrous to those who know this, and only worth correcting as childish and unintentional, not a serious assay at understanding. It is so wide of the mark -- how could one have an instructor and colleague so plain-spoken and learned as the godly Hellenist wintermute, if you won't have Christian wisdom, and yet remain so stone-ignorant? Personally, I suspect some sort of ruse or deception, and that really, deep down, you don't mean it.

[Micaelis]

The early scientific revolution was, in part, sparked by the natural investigations of the Spanish in their newly conquered American colonies, their need for the development of new machinery for the exploitation of resources, and biological and geographic information on their new lands. Spain, in all of history, is one of the most zealous Catholic nations to ever exist, and yet it did not hesitate, in all of its papal fury, to employ natural science and investigation for temporal benefits. Again, the hostility that Fade is invoking between faith and science is phantasmal, spurred on by an infantile agenda of destruction.

The reason for the decline in the authority of the Holy See over Europe was not the progression of natural science, which existed along side scholasticism in its glory, but the rise of nationalism and the liberal ideal in Catholic territories.

[HrodbertPalatinus]

That is a good summation of the situation with 'Fade', Macrobius. The oversimplifying ridiculousness of the stuff he posts is self-evident, and I wonder how a seemingly relatively intelligent person can believe such cheap modernist propaganda and this pseudo-elitist, pretentious mythology of the "heaven-storming scientist". He would seem to have better sense and wisdom. There is definitely some sort of strange psychological element (or perverse self-amusement) in this new overdone self-identity as phobic anti-Christian and quasi-Bolshevistic hyper-progressivist.

The only reason I do not systematically and logically take apart the ridiculous claims he constantly makes is that I simply have no time between (mentally exhausting) university studies and other pursuits.

If he is serious, perhaps we can use his own philosophical biases to show the nullity of his conclusions. Jung is somewhat useful as he stood between the two worlds of ancient Christian mysticism and alchemy and modern so-called scientific psychology, and (at the cost of psychologizing spiritual mysteries) presents the former in a way understandable to the modern empiricist. Or even from an "evolutionary biological" perspective, religion would have long died out on Darwinian grounds if it did not offer psychological payoffs; and, sociobiologically, a valid Christianity is highly valuable as an optimal social coordinator. I already quoted from Kevin MacDonald, no "Bible-thumper", on the Darwinian value of a traditional Christianity in the eugenic advancement of the West, but 'Fade' pretends to play deaf. Or for instance there is Donald T. Campbell, an enthusiastically Darwinian psychologist, who, in an address to the American Psychological Association, spoke of religious teachings as "the possible sources of validity in recipes for living that have been evolved, tested and winnowed through hundreds of generations of human social history. On purely scientific grounds, these recipes for living might be regarded as better tested than the best of psychology's and psychiatry's speculations on how lives should be lived" (On the Conflicts Between Biological and Social Evolution and between Psychology and Moral Tradition, American Psychologist 30:1103-26).

[Micaelis]

The Church destroyed the Academy and constructed the University in its place. Considering the comparable progress of the two, I fail to see the loss.

[Macrobius]

Here, anyway about Bede's chronology, from the standard Romanity site at http://friesian.com (the others are Vladimir Moss' essays and other contributions at http://www.romanitas.ru/eng/index.htm, and most importantly the tribute to the late Fr. John Romanides, http://romanity.org/cont.htm, for those who aren't familiar with the, admittedly rather small, 'Romanity movement' in general.)

http://www.friesian.com/romania.htm


It is noteworthy that the Venerable Bede (673-735) numbered Theodosius II as the 45th and Marcian as the 46th Emperors since Augustus. This is considerably less than the count we might make now and it interestingly implies that Bede possessed a sort of "official" list from which many ephemeral Emperors were excluded [note].


and following the note:


Bede identifies several Emperors by number. This includes Claudius, #4, Marcus Aurelius, #14, Diocletian, #33, Gratian, #40, Arcadius, #43, Honorius, #44, Theodosius II, #45, Marcian, #46, and Maurice, #54. This numbering works if we eliminate three of the four Emperors of 69 AD, the ephemeral Emperors of 193 and 218, a couple of them from the Third Century, most of the Tetrarchy and Constantian coregents, and, most importantly, all of the Western Emperors after Honorius. The latter is especially striking because Bede mentions Valentinian III: "In the year of our Lord 449, Marcian became Emperor with Valentinian and fourty-sixth successor to Augustus" [Bede, A History of the English Church and People, Penguin Classics, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, 1955, 1964, p.55]. Since Theodosius II was already identified as the 45th Emperor, there is no number left for Valentinian (Emperor since 425), let alone Constantius III or John, who had been legitimate Emperors of the West. From Marcian to Maurice, the numbers only work if we then ignore all the rest of the Western Emperors, out of nine of which four were even recognized by the East. So Bede doesn't recognize any.


Reading St. Isidore with this problem fresh in my mind, perhaps a year or so ago, I realised the solution to this problem of mysterious missing list of emperors --

If one looks at Isidore's Chronicon:

http://www.history.pomona.edu/kbw/h100y/chronicon.htm

the Tradition that Bede is following, and that solves those problems, should be quite evident.

Really, one could hardly get down to exact counts if one was not following *very closely* the textual tradition. Evidence, then, of despite?

The primary source, origo gentis romanae, is also worth a read compared to the rather garbled school text tradition that has come down to us about 'where the Roman people came from'.

http://tertullian.org/fathers/origo_00_intro.htm (Latin and English translation accessible from link given below).

can be found at the truly excellent site:

http://tertullian.org/, specifically: http://tertullian.org/fathers/

Anti-Christians will be pleased to find Porphyry and Zozimus' New History as well, though I would read them with discernment.

ADDED:

Isidore also has a condensed version of his Chronology in the 5th book of his Etymologiae --

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Isidore/5*.html#39

It is probably later than the Chronicon, as it includes an extra Visigothic king at the end (but of course that could be an interpolation).

[This last also runs down to the year 5857, which may interest some members of this forum.]

Finally, it is curious that the secondary sources do not mention Bede's _de Temporibus_ by name -- it could well be named for Bk. v of the encyclopedia of Isidore. In any event, it would be worth comparing its text to both his more famous history of the English Church, and to St. Isidore's chronology.

[Fade the Butcher]

The Church destroyed the Academy and constructed the University in its place. Considering the comparable progress of the two, I fail to see the loss.

The first universities were corporations modeled on the trade guilds that sprung up to meet the demand of the new cities and consolidating kingdoms of the High Middle Ages for skilled labor. The kings loved their new bureaucrats and were quick to draw upon their services . . . at the expense of the clergy. The power of the Church went into irreversible decline after Philip IV invaded Italy to overthrow Boniface VIII. Explain. How did the Church create the university? The universities were separate from the cathedral schools which continued to exist.

[Fade the Butcher]

The early scientific revolution was, in part, sparked by the natural investigations of the Spanish in their newly conquered American colonies, their need for the development of new machinery for the exploitation of resources, and biological and geographic information on their new lands. Spain, in all of history, is one of the most zealous Catholic nations to ever exist, and yet it did not hesitate, in all of its papal fury, to employ natural science and investigation for temporal benefits. Again, the hostility that Fade is invoking between faith and science is phantasmal, spurred on by an infantile agenda of destruction.

Of all Western nations, Spain and Portugal were amongst those who contributed least to the Scientific Revolution. The most important Spanish contributions to science and philosophy occurred during the Middle Ages when it was under Islamic rule and this brief golden age was crushed under a one-two punch of Christian and Islamic religious fanaticism. I have already mentioned elsewhere the destruction of tens of thousands of Islamic texts (many of them priceless translations of Greek classics) by Cardinal Ximenes in Granada. The retarding force in Spain was not any case of biological inferiority, as the nordicists imagine, so much as it was stiffling influence of Catholicism. Spain fritted away its wealth in the frivilous wars of the Counter-Reformation.

The reason for the decline in the authority of the Holy See over Europe was not the progression of natural science, which existed along side scholasticism in its glory, but the rise of nationalism and the liberal ideal in Catholic territories.

You're wrong. The controversy over heliocentrism was a huge embarrassment for the Catholic Church which severely undermined its credibility. It played a major role in preparing the way for the Enlightenment.

[Petr]

The Church destroyed the Academy and constructed the University in its place. Considering the comparable progress of the two, I fail to see the loss.
Amen. Whatever pagans/atheists do, Christians can do better.


Petr

[HrodbertPalatinus]

Perhaps you can consult John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University to understand better. Christianity upholds the humane ideal of liberal (non-servile) education and character-training against the modern annihilation of the meaning of education through utilitarian technicalism.

[Fade the Butcher]

Very little of what you write requires response, aside from noting that your distaste for something is an almost infallible guide to wisdom and truth. However, your implied calumny of the Venerable Bede does requires some correction. First, as usual, you cite only secondary sources devoid of references or in this case barely having even quotations. If you would just read the primaries (in translation if you must), you would see how false this characterisation is. Who could look at Bede's chronology and not know at a glance how dependent on Isidore's (both that of the Chronicon and that of Origines) it is. One might prove, as your author does, which of the two he in fact followed, and note how minor any discrepancies are. All the *Christian* authors agree on the order of the emperors -- it must have been official in their circles -- and usually in the years. To assert malice in choice of sources is, for your author, the pot calling the kettle black.

I lost my response so this reply will be brief: your accusations are baseless. Riché meticulously documents his sources in the accompanying footnotes, in the case of Bede, all of which are primary sources, and is even kind enough to provide excerpts of the original Latin. You have never read the book so you are in no position to pass judgment on it.

But enough -- it is clear you will have none of wisdom.

If Bede had never existed, science would not be any worse off for it.

There is more true wisdom left in Bede's humble computus than any half dozen Math professors in any university today, if only they knew it. Your strutting is ludicrous to those who know this, and only worth correcting as childish and unintentional, not a serious assay at understanding. It is so wide of the mark -- how could one have an instructor and colleague so plain-spoken and learned as the godly Hellenist wintermute, if you won't have Christian wisdom, and yet remain so stone-ignorant? Personally, I suspect some sort of ruse or deception, and that really, deep down, you don't mean it.

And people still wonder why this period is called the Dark Ages.

[Fade the Butcher]

Perhaps you can consult John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University to understand better. Christianity upholds the humane ideal of liberal (non-servile) education and character-training against the modern annihilation of the meaning of education through utilitarian technicalism.

This sums up the traditional Christian attitude towards the liberal arts quite nicely.

"Shamefully, they dared to examine the secrets of God in the Scriptures in a presumptuous way, motivated by curiosity and not by love. As a result they become heretics. God has decreed that the proud are not to be admitted to the sight of divinity and truth."
—Rupert of Deutz

^^ Here we see the negative attitude towards "vain curiosity" and an allusion to all the diatribes about the "sin of pride."

[Fade the Butcher]

Amen. Whatever pagans/atheists do, Christians can do better.


Petr

A thousand years of European history demonstrates otherwise.

[Petr]

This sums up the traditional Christian attitude towards the liberal arts quite nicely.
Fade pretends to oppose "essentialist" thinking, but again and again he thinks he can unerringly describe (with his infantile cherry-picking) what "the traditional Christian attitude" essentially is and always has been.

Fade does like to give lip-service to rational moderation every now and then, only to return to mindless bigotry right afterwards.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Fade pretends to oppose "essentialist" thinking, but again and again he thinks he can unerringly describe (with his infantile cherry-picking) what "the traditional Christian attitude" essentially is and always has been.

I never suggested that there was any single Christian attitude towards the liberal arts. That was, however, the predominant one into the twelfth century. This theme that curiosity is suspect and that secular knowledge is profane goes a long way towards explaining the backwardness of Europe in the Christian Dark Ages.

Fade does like to give lip-service to rational moderation every now and then, only to return to mindless bigotry right afterwards.

The pretensions of your repulsive cult would be merely a source of ridicule if such barbaric gibberish had not been taken as an invaluable source of scientific truth for fifteen centuries. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. Something in the neighborhood of 92% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists. That's in the United States. The percentage of atheists in the Royal Society in Britain are even higher.

[Micaelis]

The first universities were corporations modeled on the trade guilds that sprung up to meet the demand of the new cities and consolidating kingdoms of the High Middle Ages for skilled labor. The kings loved their new bureaucrats and were quick to draw upon their services . . . at the expense of the clergy. The power of the Church went into irreversible decline after Philip IV invaded Italy to overthrow Boniface VIII. Explain. How did the Church create the university? The universities were separate from the cathedral schools which continued to exist.

The University, although separate from the cathedral schools, was born out of the unification of professors from these schools, most notably Notre Dame:

(snip)To these two factors of internal growth and external advantage, a third had to be added before Paris or Bologna could become a university: it was necessary to secure a corporate organization. Both cities by the middle of the twelfth century possessed the requisite elements in the way of schools, sholars, and teachers. At Paris three schools were especially prominent: Saint Victor's, attached to the church of the canons regular; Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont, conducted first by seculars and later by canons regular; and Notre-Dame, the school of the Cathedral on the "Island". According to one account these three schools unived to form the university; Denifle, however (Die Universitäten, 655 sqq.), maintains that it originated in Notre-Dame only, and that this school therefore was the cradle of the University of Paris. This does not imply that the cathedral school as an institution was elevated to the rank of a university by royal or pontifical charter. The initiative was taken by the professors who, with the licence of the chancellor of Notre-Dame and subject to his authority, taught either at the cathedral or in private dwellings on the "Island". When these professors, in the last quarter of the twelfth century, united in one teaching body, the University of Paris was founded (For the older view, see PARIS, UNIVERSITY OF).
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15188a.htm

That this took place under the patronage of Christendom instead of heathendom or some band of atheists cannot be overstated.

[HrodbertPalatinus]

This dualism between Christianity and genuine "science" (i.e. natural knowledge) you have sophistically set up does not exist. In fact, traditional texts praise scientific knowledge of God's creation as a supernatural gift: "It is He who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements...for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me" (Wis. 7:17:22). Traditional Christianity also teaches that science and technology express man's dominion over creation. What the traditional authorities, with their knowledge of human nature, warn about in relation to natural science is

1) the confusion between ends and means (i.e. science should serve mankind, not vice versa)
2) the lack of fundamental moral criteria (e.g. non-consensual experimentation on human beings, etc.)
3) the disordered spirit of idolatrous fascination and obsession with created matter divorced from its transcendent Shaper

[Micaelis]

A thousand years of European history demonstrates otherwise.

Actually, that is the timeframe in which Europe developed and eventually reached the height of her power, expanding herself into some of the largest empires the world has ever seen. But I guess that would be a rather inconvenient fact for you. ;)

[Micaelis]

This dualism between Christianity and genuine "science" (i.e. natural knowledge) you have sophistically set up does not exist. In fact, traditional texts praise scientific knowledge of God's creation as a supernatural gift: "It is He who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements...for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me" (Wis. 7:17:22). Traditional Christianity also teaches that science and technology express man's dominion over creation. What the traditional authorities, with their knowledge of human nature, warn about in relation to natural science is

1) the confusion between ends and means (i.e. science should serve mankind, not vice versa)
2) the lack of fundamental moral criteria (e.g. non-consensual experimentation on human beings, etc.)
3) the disordered spirit of idolatrous fascination and obsession with created matter divorced from its transcendent Shaper

You are most certainly right. The scholastics saw nescience as something dark and gloomy, praising knowledge and the intellect, which led to the eventual formation of the University.

[Fade the Butcher]

The University, although separate from the cathedral schools, was born out of the unification of professors from these schools, most notably Notre Dame:

That's irrelevant. Your original claim was that the Church created the university. That was not the case at all. The model of the university was the trade guilds where artisans had banded together in corporations. Instructors who found employment at the cathedral schools simply took that model (which was derived ultimately from Roman law) and applied it to education. As for the cathedral schools, even they go back to the reforms of Charlemagne.

That this took place under the patronage of Christendom instead of heathendom or some band of atheists cannot be overstated.

The Roman Empire had municipal schools (all across the Empire), law schools (Beruit, Rome, Ravenna, etc), medical schools (Alexandria), schools of philosophy (Athens), and schools of rhetoric (Antioch).

Note: I just discovered this evening, via Durant, that Justinian's crackdown on philosophy extended to the rhetors.

[Fade the Butcher]

This dualism between Christianity and genuine "science" (i.e. natural knowledge) you have sophistically set up does not exist.

I don't see how the two could be more opposed. Science proceeds from inferences from the natural world drawn from reason, observation, and experiment to general principles and then on to deductions from these principles. Theology proceeds from faith in authoritative texts downwards to deductions about the natural world.

In fact, traditional texts praise scientific knowledge of God's creation as a supernatural gift: "It is He who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements...for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me" (Wis. 7:17:22).

That is, revelation from a supernatural god that is superior to the wisdom of the wise. Revelation has nothing to do with the scientific method.

Traditional Christianity also teaches that science and technology express man's dominion over creation. What the traditional authorities, with their knowledge of human nature, warn about in relation to natural science is

Which texts are you referring to? Who represents traditional Christianity?

[Micaelis]

That's irrelevant. Your original claim was that the Church created the university. That was not the case at all. The model of the university was the trade guilds where artisans had banded together in corporations. Instructors who found employment at the cathedral schools simply took that model (which was derived ultimately from Roman law) and applied it to education. As for the cathedral schools, even they go back to the reforms of Charlemagne.

Despite your logic not following, the conclusion is the same. The Church created the University, regardless of the model it employed.

The Roman Empire had municipal schools (all across the Empire), law schools (Beruit, Rome, Ravenna, etc), medical schools (Alexandria), schools of philosophy (Athens), and schools of rhetoric (Antioch).

Yes it did. The Roman Empire also converted to Catholicism and from that conversion mastered some of the largest empires the world had yet seen.

Note: I just discovered this evening, via Durant, that Justinian's crackdown on philosophy extended to the rhetors.

There is a difference between Eastern Orthodoxy, where the Emperor is the arbiter of faith, and Roman Catholicism, where that role is filled by the Pope. Although I have no real negative sentiments towards the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Roman Empire as it was, I could not support the banning of philosophy under any circumstance. This sentiment was carried by the scholastics into the development of what will be today our modern Universities.

[Fade the Butcher]

A great article below:

http://www.humanismbyjoe.com/Bible_Opposes_Knowledge.htm



Biblical Opposition to Knowledge
Introduction

Modern societies recognize the importance of science and education. They know that increased knowledge has enabled humanity to produce goods and services at ever-higher qualities and quantities. They also realize that further scientific advances provide the best hope for increasing economic prosperity.

Science and education are just as essential in the political and social spheres. To vote intelligently in a democracy, and otherwise participate effectively in the affairs of government, people must understand issues involving complex subjects in the physical and social sciences.

Moreover, scientific discoveries have enabled medical science to eliminate numerous deadly or debilitating diseases. As a result, average life spans in many developed countries have increased by 30 years or more in the last century.[1] The continuing progress of medical science offers the best prospects for conquering the health problems that remain.

On the personal level, education is usually essential for maximizing one's contributions to society, succeeding occupationally, developing a satisfactory philosophy of life, and attaining a comfortable standard of living.

Despite the importance of science and education, many Bible teachings are opposed to both. Throughout history, those teachings have impeded the advancement of knowledge and caused untold misery.

Unless the Bible is recognized as a stumbling block to intellectual progress, it will continue to lead many to be unconcerned about - or even opposed to - the increase and dissemination of knowledge.

The Scientific Method

The scientific method involves continually gathering data about the natural world through observation and experiment. Based on the data obtained, hypotheses are formulated to explain how the natural world operates. Hypotheses that withstand extensive further testing become scientific theories. If the theories are confirmed by even more rigorous testing, they can become scientific laws.

By providing an understanding of the forces of nature and the properties of matter, science enables people to use this knowledge for improving the world's condition. The forces and materials can be combined and harnessed in innumerable ways for the benefit of humanity.

But in order for the scientific approach is to be employed to full advantage, certain attitudes about knowledge are necessary. People should have a love and hunger for information about the world, confidence that human reasoning can understand the information, a belief that knowledge improves the human condition, a strong focus on this world, a strict requirement that all knowledge must be based on evidence and reason, and a view that natural laws are unvarying in their operation.

Because the Bible is opposed to all those attitudes, belief in the book will always impede scientific advancement.

Bible Opposes Knowledge of this World

Bible Disparages Knowledge from the Beginning

Opposition to knowledge begins in the opening chapters of the Bible. In the Creation stories, Genesis Chapters 2 and 3 state that God placed a fruit-bearing tree in the Garden of Eden.

The fruit gave knowledge of good and evil when eaten.[2] But this was the only fruit God forbade the first man and woman from eating. He warned that they would "certainly die" if they did so.[3]

After a serpent convinced the woman to eat the knowledge-giving fruit, and she had induced the man to do the same, God punished them all. The serpent was made to crawl on its belly and eat dust all the days of its life, the woman was sentenced to painful childbearing and having her husband rule over her, and the man was cursed to earn bread by the sweat of his brow until death.[4] And the man and woman were driven from paradise.[5]

Thus, in the opening story in the Bible, God is portrayed as forbidding the acquisition of knowledge and severely punishing the first humans, along with their descendants, for acquiring it.

Don't Trust Human Reasoning

The Bible teaches people to distrust and renounce their reasoning powers. This is seen in both the Old and New Testaments.

The Old Testament claims that people's reasoning abilities are unreliable and deceptive. It warns: "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death."[6] This pathway to ruin results, at least partly, from the fact that the "heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. . . ."[7]
In describing the vast superiority of divine thinking over human thinking, the Lord proclaims that "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. . . . For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."[8] That being the case, people cannot expect to understand God's methods.

Because human reasoning is so inferior to the Almighty's thoughts, "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man."[9] In fact, "It is plain stupidity to trust in one's own wits. . . ."[10] This is so true that "Cursed be the man that trusteth in man. . . ."[11]

As a result, the Old Testament commands people to "[p]ut all your trust in the Lord and do not rely on your own understanding."[12] These teachings are intended to have people shut down their reasoning powers and blindly follow religious dogma.
The New Testament is just as scornful of human knowledge. It views this world's wisdom as foolish and worthless: "If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. . . . The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain."[13]

Human wisdom deserves only to be destroyed and denigrated. God will "destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the cleverness of the clever."[14] And Jesus castigated Peter for thinking as men think rather than as God thinks.[15]
As is true in the Old Testament, then, human reasoning is depicted in the New Testament as inferior to divine wisdom and incapable of discerning it.

Because the wise in this world cannot apprehend the ways of God, only those having a childlike mentality should find Christian teachings attractive. Jesus said, "Let the children come to me . . . for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these."[16] And he prayed, "I thank thee, O Father, . . . because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."[17]

So to be right with God, a person should distrust human reasoning, reject human wisdom, become what the world considers a fool, adopt a childlike attitude, and blindly follow religious dogma. This attitude takes anti-intellectualism to the extreme.
No wonder St. Augustine, one of the most influential Catholic theologians of all time, taught: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind."[18] The founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, went further by calling reason "the Devil's bride" and "God's worst enemy."[19]

[I]No Use Studying a Fallen and Ending World[/I]

The biblical case against knowledge is strengthened by the idea that this world will soon end. Since the founding of Christianity, many in each generation have thought the Bible's end-time teachings applied to their age.[20]

It's understandable that they did. Jesus said the signs of the world's end will include false messiahs, nations at war, earthquakes, famines, plagues, and religious persecution.[21] The signs could apply to every generation.

When people view present world conditions as fulfilling these biblically prophesied signs, they naturally conclude, as the book of I Peter says, the "end of all things is upon us. . . ."[22] According to I Corinthians, this means the "time we live in will not last long. . . . For the whole frame of this world is passing away."[23]

Not only is the world passing away, but it will be destroyed. According to II Peter, "the present heavens and earth, again by God's word, have been kept in store for burning. . . ."[24] And the book of Revelation teaches that a new world will replace the current one: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had vanished. . . ."[25]

Christians are not to lament the earth's destruction. The New Testament says this world is under the dominion of Satan: "We know that we are of God's family, while the whole godless world lies in the power of the evil one."[26] Likewise, Jesus said his followers "do not belong to the world"[27] and "the world hates them because they are strangers in the world, as I am."[28]

There's little motivation to obtain an education and improve society when one believes that Satan controls everything - including society's educational institutions - and God will soon destroy this world and replace it with another.

[I]Bible Opposes the Idea of Unvarying Laws of Nature[/I]

The Bible also opposes science by rejecting the view that the world is governed by unvarying natural laws. The book alleges that supernatural beings frequently intervene in the world to alter the course of nature.

The Bible contains stories about a woman being turned into a pillar of salt;[29] a voice coming from a burning bush;[30] a talking donkey;[31] rods turning into serpents;[32] water changing into blood;[33] water coming from a rock;[34] a dead man reviving when his corpse touched the bones of a prophet;[35] other people rising from the dead;[36] the sun standing still;[37] the parting of a sea;[38] and iron floating.[39]
There are also accounts of the sun's shadow going back ten degrees;[40] a witch bringing the ghost of Samuel back from the dead;[41] disembodied fingers writing on a wall;[42] a man living for three days and nights in the belly of a fish;[43] people walking on water;[44] a virgin impregnated by God;[45] a pool of water that can cure ailments of those who dip in it;[46] and angels and demons influencing earthly affairs.[47]
These tales are inconsistent with the idea of fixed and immutable laws of nature. The Bible supports a worldview that includes supernatural beings who arbitrarily control occurrences on earth.

Under the biblical view, there's little reason to study the world, understand the laws of nature, and attempt to use this knowledge for improving the human condition. Rather, the thing to do is perform religious devotions in an attempt to influence supernatural beings - that is, to get them to act in ways benefiting rather than harming humans. They're the ones who control what happens on earth, and not any so-called immutable laws of nature.

Thus, prayer and religious rituals take the place of study, investigation, experimentation, and invention.

[I]Human Wisdom Brings Misery and Is Useless[/I]

The Bible claims that human wisdom produces misery, disappointment, and emptiness.

The writer of Ecclesiastes states that he applied himself to know wisdom. But he "came to see that this . . . is chasing the wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and the more a man knows, the more he has to suffer."[48]

Moreover, his learning turned out to be pointless: "So I said to myself, 'I too shall suffer the fate of the fool. To what purpose have I been wise? What is the profit of it? Even this,' I said to myself, 'is emptiness.' The wise man is remembered no longer than the fool, for, as the passing days multiply, all will be forgotten. . . ."[49]

By depicting the results wisdom in such negative terms, the Bible does not promote good study habits.

[I]Focus on Heaven Instead of Earth[/I]

The Bible dissuades people from obtaining worldly knowledge by telling them to keep their thoughts on heaven and not earth. It's hard to be wise about this world while oblivious to it.

The book of Colossians urges people to direct their thoughts far out into space (which may explain a lot of Christian philosophy). It tells Christians to "aspire to the realm above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God, and let your thoughts dwell on that higher realm, not on this earthly life."[50]

Paul declares that "our eyes are fixed, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen. . . ."[51]

Jesus gave Christians further motivation to shift their thinking to another realm by telling them to hate their lives in this world: "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal."[52]

Additionally, the book of Philippians urges Christians to be concerned only about Christ - not about the world - and to look forward to death. Paul explains: "All I care for is to know Christ, to experience the power of his resurrection, and to share his sufferings, in growing conformity with his death, if only I may finally arrive at the resurrection from the dead."[53]

The Bible therefore endorses an escapist attitude of putting out of mind the affairs of the world, daydreaming about Christ and another world, and eagerly awaiting death so that one's spirit can be magically transported there.

[B]Acquiring Wisdom the Bible Way[/B]

If human reasoning is unreliable, causes people to become fools, is geared to the useless study of a despicable world that's about to be destroyed, is less effective than religious rituals, brings misery, and should not be one's focus, what guidance does the Bible give for obtaining knowledge? Several alleged sources of information are advised, none of which is consistent with a scientific attitude.

[I]True Wisdom Is a Gift from God[/I]

One biblical way to acquire wisdom is to just sit back and let God bestow it on you. No need to bother with reading, studying, or going to school.

That's what happened to King Solomon, who is described in the Bible as the wisest person who ever lived. In response to Solomon's request for wisdom, the Lord said: "I give you a heart so wise and so understanding that there has been none like you before your time nor will be after you."[54] As a result, "all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which God had put in his heart."[55]

Knowledge came just as easily to Daniel and his three companions. The book of Daniel relates: "To all four of these young men God had given knowledge and understanding of books and learning of every kind, while Daniel had a gift for interpreting visions and dreams of every kind."[56]

Daniel vouched for the effectiveness of this didactic method by declaring that God "giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: He revealeth the deep and secret things. . . ."[57]

Joshua found that God can transmit the same gift through an intermediary. Deuteronomy states: "And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him. . . ."[58]

These examples confirm Ecclesiastes' teaching that "God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge . . . ."[59] Proverbs conveys a similar lesson by saying "the Lord bestows wisdom and teaches knowledge and understanding."[60]
The New Testament's prescription for obtaining knowledge is just as simple. James asserts: "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering."[61]

Those instructions are consistent with Jesus' promise to his followers: "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."[62] Nothing - not even knowledge or wisdom - is excluded from the things that can be obtained by merely praying and believing.

It's clear that receiving wisdom from God can be easier and less expensive than obtaining a degree from a mail-order diploma mill.

[I]Holy Spirit Gives Knowledge[/I]

Knowledge can just as effortlessly be received from the Holy Spirit. Jesus taught that "the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things. . . ."[63]

Christ further explained that the Holy Spirit "will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will show you things to come."[64] And the Holy Spirit "will confute the world, and show where wrong and right and judgment lie."[65]

This gift of the Holy Spirit will cause Christians to "all have knowledge."[66] As a result, "you need no other teacher."[67] The logical conclusion is that it's unnecessary for God's followers to obtain the world's education and knowledge, because they have a far better source of wisdom.

But Christians are warned not to be surprised when the educated people of this world don't appreciate the wisdom given by the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit's wisdom is different from worldly wisdom.

That view is expressed in a famous passage in I Corinthians. It tells Christians: "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. . . . [W]e have the mind of Christ."[68]
Because wisdom provided by the Holy Spirit is so unlike human wisdom, "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."[69] The world will therefore reject the Holy Spirit's wisdom and consider it foolishness.

The upshot of these teachings is that after you receive wisdom from the Holy Spirit, people will likely consider you a fool. But instead of viewing their feedback as indicating a possible problem with your thinking, the criticism confirms that you are right with God. The world's thinking is that of the "natural man," who cannot know the ways of God, which are "spiritually discerned."

If believers adopt those attitudes, they play right into the hands of unscrupulous religious leaders who encourage their followers to disregard scientific knowledge, ignore outsiders' criticisms, accept the most bizarre ideas, and think they are doing the will of God.

Religious demagogues thereby gain enormous power, usually to the enrichment of themselves and the fleecing of their flocks.

[I]Believe Without Evidence[/I]

The Bible claims that a valid method of obtaining knowledge is to believe statements without evidence. In fact, the New Testament says this approach is needed to attain salvation.

According to the book of John, Jesus taught: "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."[70] And the book of Mark attributes the following words to Jesus: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."[71] Nothing is said about needing evidence for the belief.

Instead, believing without evidence is extolled in the story of Doubting Thomas, the disciple who refused to believe in Jesus' resurrection until he could see and touch him. Jesus told Thomas that "because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."[72]

The book of Hebrews likewise says faith in the unseen is a valid substitute for proof. It describes faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."[73] So even if something is invisible, undetectable, and merely hoped for, its existence and reliability can be accepted by faith.

People having that mindset can adopt the most absurd propositions. No evidence is needed, and assertions can be accepted by faith alone.

Even the ideas of the insane would qualify as knowledge under this standard.

[I]Bible Is an Infallible Source of Knowledge[/I]

If people do decide to seek wisdom in this world, the Bible indicates they need look no further than its pages. It praises religious dogma as a source of wisdom, and says nothing about scientific inquiry.

In the Old Testament, the book of Proverbs teaches: "The first step to wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding."[74] Knowledge of the Holy One is contained in his divinely inspired book.

In fact, the book of Proverbs alone is a means "by which men will come to wisdom and instruction and will understand words that bring understanding, and by which they will gain a well-instructed intelligence, righteousness, justice, and probity. The simple will be endowed with shrewdness and the young with knowledge and prudence."[75]
The Psalmist writes that God's "commandments are mine for ever; through them I am wiser than my enemies. I have more insight than all my teachers, for thy instruction is my study; I have more wisdom than the old, because I have kept thy precepts."[76] The writer also says the "Lord's instruction never fails, and makes the simple wise."[77]

In the New Testament, Paul vouches for the reliability of God's words: "It is impossible that the word of God should have proved false."[78] Jesus' statement that "Scripture cannot be set aside" supports Paul's position.[79]

The book of II Timothy concurs: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."[80]
Hence, instead of using science to gain wisdom, people are encouraged to rely on and view as infallible a book compiled more than 1500 years ago. In that pre-scientific age, most of humanity - including the writers of the Bible - thought the earth is flat,[81] the sky is a solid dome,[82] the universe is only a few thousand years old,[83] and diseases are caused by demons.[84]

The Bible's writers held numerous other beliefs that science has disproved. Andrew White summarized the historical results of looking to the Bible for information about the world. "[T]here were developed, in every field, theological views of science which have never led to a single truth - which, without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow."[85]

The Bible is sure to continue producing beliefs that are just as wrong and harmful. Unfortunately, many Christians still subscribe to the view expressed by the famous evangelist Billy Sunday: "When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!"[86]

[I]Don't Plan What to Say, the Words Will Be Given to You[/I]

Even if one's attention is directed largely to another world, that doesn't prevent spouting off about things in this world. Despite the failure to study a subject, a person can pontificate on it - without even planning what to say - because God will provide the words.

Jesus promises as much in the book of Matthew: "And ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you."[87]

The same method is to be used by Christians who are forcibly brought into synagogues or prisons. Jesus tells them that their enemies "shall lay their hands on you, and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues, and into prisons. . . . Settle it therefore in your hearts, not to meditate before what ye shall answer: For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay or resist."[88]

According to the book of Ephesians, Paul sought divine assistance by asking Christians to "pray for me, that I may be granted the right words when I open my mouth. . . ."[89]

Through the biblical technique of not planning, preparing, or even thinking about what will be said, a person appears on a route to becoming a prattling idiot.

[FONT=Arial]Kill Those Holding Different Views (or at Least Avoid Them)[/FONT]

The Bible purports to contain infallible truth from God. If it does, there's no need to tolerate and learn from those having different ideas. Their misinformation can only lead hearers into error and heresy.

In the Old Testament, therefore, the Law of Moses does not allow the words of a blasphemer to have a hearing. Instead, the person is to be executed.[90] This punishment must be imposed even if the person is a friend or family member. The Israelites were told to have no pity and "stone him to death, because he tried to lead you astray from the Lord. . . ."[91]

The New Testament also promotes persecution. It ascribes to Jesus the statement: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."[92] This doctrine leads to the conclusion that those who promote non-Christian religious ideas are endangering people's eternal salvation.

That's an act worse than murder, because murder victims can still go to heaven, whereas heretics can't. So the purveyors of false religious views deserve the severest of punishments.

The New Testament indicates the punishment should be death. Because Jesus taught that it is "easier for heaven and earth to come to an end than for one dot or stroke of the Law to lose its force,"[93] he supported the Mosaic Law with its requirement of death for blasphemers.

Of course, many modern countries protect religious freedom and don't allow religious dissenters to be executed. But Christians can still avoid contrary views by following the Bible's instructions to shun adherents of other philosophies.

In the book of Titus, Christians are commanded: "A heretic should be warned once, and once again; after that, have done with him, recognizing that a man of that sort has a distorted mind. . . ."[94]

Similar instructions are contained in II John: "If anyone comes to you who does not bring this doctrine, do not welcome him into your house or give him a greeting; for anyone who gives him a greeting is an accomplice in his wicked deeds."[95]
Thus, if Christians cannot kill heretics, they can at least avoid and snub them. By doing so, they protect their beliefs from facts that might get in the way.

Rather than supporting the American principle of a marketplace of ideas, these Bible teachings encourage Christians to construct a fortress to keep out new and different ideas. It's a wall of separation between church and knowledge.

[B]Overall Biblical Attitude Toward Knowledge[/B]

The Bible's attitude toward knowledge can be summarized as follows.

The acquisition of knowledge was so evil in God's eyes that it caused him to curse all of humanity and the entire creation. Moreover, human reason is untrustworthy and should not be used. There's little point in studying the world, anyway, because it belongs to Satan and will soon be destroyed and replaced by another. Besides, superior results can be obtained from the assistance of supernatural beings. And pursuing knowledge of this world brings misery. People's main focus should be on heaven and not earth.

As for any knowledge needed while waiting for the new world to arrive, research and study are not needed. Wisdom is simply a gift bestowed by God and is available for the asking, such as by prayer. Another way God imparts wisdom is through the influence of the Holy Spirit. And wisdom can be obtained by relying on God's words contained in the ancient, pre-scientific writings of the Bible.

Because human reason is unreliable and God provides all necessary information by religious means, people should disregard evidence and logic in choosing their beliefs. They must rely on faith to believe religious dogma regardless of what their eyes, thoughts, or feelings tell them. They may not even consider the contrary opinions of others. They should kill the holders of those opinions if possible, and should at least avoid them.

Further, because God supernaturally provides knowledge, there's no need to plan what to say. Just start speaking whatever pops into your head, for God is supplying the words.

Could any philosophy be more opposed to science, learning, and intelligence? As Annie Besant wrote in the nineteenth century: "Never did a religion do more to foster ignorance, more to destroy learning, than has been done by the Church of Christ."[96]

[B]Conclusion[/B]

Science has enabled humanity to make enormous improvements its technological capabilities, material prosperity, and moral philosophy. These results led Carl Sagan to say: "Science is supported because it provides spectacular benefits at all levels in the society. . . ."[97]

Bertrand Russell similarly observed: "Almost all the changes which the world has undergone since the end of the Middle Ages are due to the discovery and diffusion of new knowledge."[98]

But the Bible contains numerous teachings opposed to scientific inquiry and the increase of knowledge. The teachings are dangerous and continue to produce harm.
Former Christian fundamentalist Richard Yao maintains: "Perhaps the unpardonable sin of fundamentalism is its effort to make people suspicious and afraid of their own minds, their own logic and thinking process. . . . If we cannot depend on our minds to process reality and make choices and decisions in life, then we are more likely to depend on fundamentalist preachers. . . . How can a democracy survive if all of us renounce reason, thinking and logic?"[99]

Harold Bloom states that the problems are not confined to fundamentalism: "Fundamentalism . . . is viciously anti-intellectual, but so, alas, is most American religion, of whatever camp."[100].

Bloom's observation will be true as long as American religion looks to the Bible for guidance. No other outcome is possible when people follow a book that instructs them to distrust and reject their sensory perceptions and reasoning abilities.

The Bible's anti-intellectual teachings are a recipe for being out of touch with reality - which is a path to ignorance, misery, and disaster.

Those irrational and harmful biblical ideas need to be replaced by science - with its methods of reason, observation, experience, and compassion.

Endnotes:

[1] Daleiden, Joseph L., [I]The Final Superstition[/I] (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1994), p. 435
[2] Genesis 2:9; 3:5,11,22
[3] Genesis 2:16-17; 3:2-3
[4] Genesis 3:14-19
[5] Genesis 3:23-24
[6] Proverbs 14:12
[7] Jeremiah 17:9
[8] Isaiah 55:8-9
[9] Psalms 118:8
[10] Proverbs 28:26
[11] Jeremiah 17:5
[12] Proverbs 3:5
[13] I Corinthians 3:18-20
[14] I Corinthians 1:19
[15] Matthew 16:23
[16] Matthew 19:13-15
[17] Matthew 11:25
[18] White, Andrew D., [I]A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom[/I], Vol. I (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1910), p. 25
[19] Lamont, Corliss, [I]The Philosophy of Humanism[/I] (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1979), p. 232-233
[20] Asimov, Isaac[I], Asimov’s Guide to the Bible[/I] (New York: Avenel, 1981), p. 1182.
[21] Mark 13:4-27; Matthew 24:3-31; Luke 21:7-28
[22] I Peter 4:7
[23] I Corinthians 7:29-31
[24] II Peter 3:7
[25] Revelation 21:1
[26] I John 5:19
[27] John 15:19
[28] John 17:14
[29] Genesis 19:26
[30] Exodus 3:4
[31] Numbers 22:28
[32] Exodus 7:10-12
[33] Exodus 7:19-22
[34] Numbers 20:11
[35] II Kings 13:21
[36] e.g., I Kings 17:21-22; II Kings 4:32-35; Acts 9:37-40
[37] Joshua 10:13
[38] Exodus 14:21-22
[39] II Kings 6:5-6
[40] II Kings 20:9-11
[41] I Samuel 28:3-15
[42] Daniel 5:5
[43] Jonah 1:17
[44] Matthew 14:26-29
[45] Matthew 1:20
[46] John 5:2-4
[47] e.g., Acts 5:19; Luke 11:24-26
[48] Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
[49] Ecclesiastes 2:15-16
[50] Colossians 3:1-2
[51] II Corinthians 4:18
[52] John 12:25
[53] Philippians 3:10
[54] I Kings 3:12
[55] I Kings 10:24
[56] Daniel 1:17
[57] Daniel 2:19-24
[58] Deuteronomy 34:9
[59] Ecclesiastes 2:26
[60] Proverbs 2:6
[61] James 1:5-6
[62] Mark 11:24
[63] John 14:26
[64] John 16:13
[65] John 16:8
[66] I John 2:20
[67] I John 2:27
[68] I Corinthians 2:12-13,16
[69] I Corinthians 2:14
[70] John 3:36
[71] Mark 16:16
[72] John 20:24-29
[73] Hebrews 11:1
[74] Proverbs 9:10
[75] Proverbs 1:1-4
[76] Psalms 119:98-100
[77] Psalms 19:7
[78] Romans 9:6
[79] John 10:35
[80] II Timothy 3:16
[81] White, Vol. I, 325-326; and Draper, John W., [I]History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science[/I] (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), pp. 163, 294
[82] Ecker, Ronald L., [I]Dictionary of Science and Creationism[/I] (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1990), pp. 69-70
[83] White, Vol. I, pp. 249-256
[84] White, Vol. II, pp. 67-70
[85] White, Vol. I, p. 325
[86] Hofstadter, Richard, [I]Anti-intellectualism in American Life[/I] (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 122
[87] Matthew 10:18-20
[88] Luke 21:12-15
[89] Ephesians 6:19
[90] Leviticus 24:16
[91] Deuteronomy 13:6-10
[92] Mark 16:16
[93] Luke 16:17; [I]see also [/I]Matthew 5:17-19
[94] Titus 3:10-11
[95] II John 1:10-11
[96] Gaylor, Annie Laurie, ed., [I]Women Without Superstition[/I] (Madison, Wisconsin: Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1997), p. 275
[97] Sagan, Carl, [I]The Demon-Haunted World[/I] (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), p. 383
[98] Seckel, Al, ed., [I]Bertrand Russell on God and Religion[/I] (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1986), p. 109
[99] Randi, James, [I]The Faith Healers[/I] (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), pp. 304-305
[100] Bloom, Harold, [I]The American Religion[/I] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 257

[Petr]

Note: I just discovered this evening, via Durant, that Justinian's crackdown on philosophy extended to the rhetors.
Durant is a very middlebrow source; suits you perfectly, chump.

Try this source instead for professional approach:

Post-Herulian Athens: aspects of life and culture in Athens A.D. 267-529 / edited by Paavo Castrén


See also:

Many scholars combine the above entry from Malalas with the following brief entry, also from Malalas, dated to the year 529 C.E. "During the consulship of Decius, the emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws."(7) Many scholars then argue that both entries pertain to the persecution of Hellenes and that part of this persecution of Hellenes involved the closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens. They argue further that the closing of the Academy in Athens was the catalyst for the seven Hellenic philosophers to depart for the Sasanian court.(8) However, no other Greek, Syriac or Arabic source besides Malalas reports that Justinian issued a decree prohibiting instruction in philosophy in Athens. Nor does Malalas himself specifically connect the suppression of paganism throughout the Byzantine Empire with the prohibition of philosophical instruction in Athens. Nor, according to Malalas' account, does it follow of necessity that the Academy in Athens was specifically targeted for closure for whatever reason.

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Medi/MediErha.htm


Petr

[Petr]

A great article below:

http://www.humanismbyjoe.com/Bible_Opposes_Knowledge.htm Spamming more Internet garbage. This piece cites theosophist nutcase Annie Besant as an authoritative source! Fade calls it "great" only because it's poisonously anti-Christian.

<insult deleted> Fade is just randomly grabbing poo from the Net and flinging it at Christians. And he formerly had the nerve to preach us about people who abuse the freedom of speech.


Petr

[Petr]

There is a difference between Eastern Orthodoxy, where the Emperor is the arbiter of faith, and Roman Catholicism, where that role is filled by the Pope. Although I have no real negative sentiments towards the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Roman Empire as it was, I could not support the banning of philosophy under any circumstance.
You should not swallow anything that dishonest Fade claims without biting. This "banning" has been blown out of all proportion by anti-Christians.


Petr

[Petr]

The pretensions of your repulsive cult would be merely a source of ridicule if such barbaric gibberish had not been taken as an invaluable source of scientific truth for fifteen centuries.
A member of bestial cult of Darwinism shouldn't accuse anyone else of barbarism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWXez0IbQE&mode=related&search=

What's wrong with barbarism anyways, hypocrite? You have never got around explaining that.

Something in the neighborhood of 92% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists. That's in the United States.
You were born to kiss the establishment ass. Anyways, I question your figures:


"Tyson spoke with an evangelist's zeal, and he had the heretics in his sights. Referring to a recent poll of US National Academy of Sciences members which showed 85 per cent do not believe in a personal God, he suggested that the remaining 15 per cent were a problem that needs to be addressed. "How come the number isn't zero?" he asked. "That should be the subject of everybody's investigation. That's something that we can't just sweep under the rug."

This single statistic, he said, gave the lie to claims that patiently creating a scientifically literate public would get rid of religion. "How can [the public] do better than the scientists themselves? That's unrealistic.""

http://richarddawkins.net/print.php?id=334


And those 85 % would be atheists and agnostics, pantheists etc.


Petr

[Petr]

The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 by H. Butterfield

pp. 98-99

In the system of Descartes God was another of those clear ideas that are clearer and more precise in the mind than anything seen by the actual eye. Furthermore, everything hung on this existence of a perfect and righteous God. Without Him a man could not trust in anything, could not believe in a geometrical proposition, for He was the guarantee that everything was not an illusion, the senses not a complete hoax, and life not a mere nightmare.

Starting from this point, Descartes was prepared to deduce the whole universe from God, with each step of the argument as clear and certain as a demonstration in geometry. He was determined to have a science as closely knit, as regularly ordered, as any piece of mathematics - one which, so far as the material universe was concerned, (and excluding the soul and and the spiritual side of things), would lay out a perfect piece of mechanism. His vision of a single universal science so unified, so ordered, so interlocked, was perhaps one of his most remarkable contributions to the scientific revolution.

...

The physics of Descartes, therefore, depends in a particular way upon his metaphysics; it provides merely the lower stages in an hierarchical system that definitely reaches back to God.

p. 100

Perhaps the most essential law in the physical system of Descartes was the law concerning the invariability of motion in the universe. Motion depended ultimately on God, and the law concerning the invariability in the amount of motion was a law which followed from the immutability of God.
And let us give newbies another opportunity to witness Fade's (quite breathtaking) ability to turn his coat - he used to pretty much agree with the above material, and now argues the precise opposite out of sheer childish spite.


6.) Irrationality. One of the greatest crimes committed by Christ-Insanity against our people was the cultivation of the malicious false doctrine known today as rationality. This crazy idea, previously unknown to most of our illiterate ancestors who had previously lived in small huts and died before the age of thirty, was propagated by the medieval Christian fanatic Peter Abelard who was the primary culprit behind the invention of inductive reasoning. This stupid new idea later went on to become the backbone of experimental science, a dogma that had begun to circulate amongst ANGLO-SAXON Christians like William of Ockham, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon. These Christians even invented those places known to us today as UNIVERSITIES which institutionalized destructive ideas like SCIENCE and RATIONALITY. However, we Nazis should never forget that it was the Christian lunatic Rene Descartes who tried to logically prove the existence of YHVH who was responsible more than any other man for the triumph of rationality. It was RATIONALITY which caused Aryan man, as Dr. Goebbels and the Führer Adolf Hitler so eloquently pointed out, to lose contact with the animal side of life. And it is this animal side of life to which Nazism seeks to return. Hitherto, at the insistence of rational men, we have tolerated the existence of critical thought and free and open debate. But no more! In the Nazi state of the American future, YOU lemmings shall march to THE PARTY LINE!

http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=12299&highlight=descartes


Petr

[Petr]

The oversimplifying ridiculousness of the stuff he posts is self-evident, and I wonder how a seemingly relatively intelligent person can believe such cheap modernist propaganda and this pseudo-elitist, pretentious mythology of the "heaven-storming scientist". He would seem to have better sense and wisdom. There is definitely some sort of strange psychological element (or perverse self-amusement) in this new overdone self-identity as phobic anti-Christian and quasi-Bolshevistic hyper-progressivist.
I also suspect that Fade is either pretending at least part of his act, or having a mental breakdown due to his compulsive ideological bed-hopping and lack of real aim in life:


I went through such a phase last fall, but I ultimately pulled myself out of the funk I had fallen into. As for Zizek, I have heard of him, but have yet to read any of his work. I spent several years searching for a philosophy flexible enough to accomodate my racialist views, but powerful enough to provide a systematic critique of liberalism. No philosophy I examined seemed to suffice: postmodernism, libertarianism, paleoconservatism, objectivism, fascism, national socialism and so on.

http://thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2847&page=5&highlight=funk


On that same thread, written in last January, Fade had many deep thoughts:

The Soviet Union also attempted to reduce life to economics. The Soviets emphasized the development of heavy industry in order to produce material goods. Who does this remind you of?

Medieval Europeans generally lived in harmony with their environment.

http://thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=26138&postcount=33


Petr

[Macrobius]

I lost my response so this reply will be brief: your accusations are baseless. Riché meticulously documents his sources in the accompanying footnotes, in the case of Bede, all of which are primary sources, and is even kind enough to provide excerpts of the original Latin. You have never read the book so you are in no position to pass judgment on it.

I assume 'Riche' means:

Pierre, Riche. Education and Culture in the Barbarian West:From the Sixth
through the Eighth Centuries. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1976.

(I missed the full citation if it was given above).

As to your other claim: Science would suffer greatly if contrafactuals were in fact true!

Best Regards

-M.

P.S.: Here is someone else who has read the book: http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:JUWCGcR5hjcJ:www.lagrange.edu/resources/pdf/citations/history/The%2520Venerable%2520Bede.pdf+riche+bede&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a

P.P.S: Looks a bit pricey -- I'll check the library copy:

http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;cc=acls;view=toc;idno=HEB01530.0001.001

[Macrobius]

That is, revelation from a supernatural god that is superior to the wisdom of the wise. Revelation has nothing to do with the scientific method.


How would you *demonstrate* your last assertion on the basis of the modern scientific method alone, *without* using either philosophy (metaphysics) or revelation of a higher wisdom?

[Macrobius]

A thousand years of European history demonstrates otherwise.

If you were to undertake a proof that Marxism was, in fact, a form of Christianity, I might be inclined to your point of view. Otherwise, it is indefensible.

European history did not stop in 1915, and jump instantly over the intervening years to Crick and Watson and the discovery of the Transistor, then stop forever frozen in a triumphant Pax Americana, right before Sputnik. It moved on. We all have to live with the 20th century and now the 21st -- eras in which Europeans are not even nominally Christian -- so forgive me if I find a need to wait a bit before passing this judgment.

'Europe', still less European Science, without even nominal Christianity is just getting started.

[Fade the Butcher]

How would you *demonstrate* your last assertion on the basis of the modern scientific method alone, *without* using either philosophy (metaphysics) or revelation of a higher wisdom?

Deducing scientific truth from the Bible IS NOT part of the practice of science in our own times.

[Fade the Butcher]

If you were to undertake a proof that Marxism was, in fact, a form of Christianity, I might be inclined to your point of view. Otherwise, it is indefensible.

Indefensible? Is that right? If that is so, you should have no problem describing for us all the Christian accomplishments in science during the first millennium. Western Europeans clung to Galen, Aristotle, and Ptolemy into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

European history did not stop in 1915, and jump instantly over the intervening years to Crick and Watson and the discovery of the Transistor, then stop forever frozen in a triumphant Pax Americana, right before Sputnik. It moved on. We all have to live with the 20th century and now the 21st -- eras in which Europeans are not even nominally Christian -- so forgive me if I find a need to wait a bit before passing this judgment.

The Bible is an obstacle to scientific progress, not an asset. It plainly says on dozens of occasions that the sun moves around the earth. It also clearly states that the earth is fixed and does not move. These passages were cited to condemn Galileo. Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Kepler's New Astronomy were also banned.

'Europe', still less European Science, without even nominal Christianity is just getting started.

How does one apply the Eucharist, Trinity, Incarnation, or Resurrection to any natural problem?

[Fade the Butcher]

A member of bestial cult of Darwinism shouldn't accuse anyone else of barbarism.

Evolution is merely a scientific theory about the natural world. It is always open to falsification. Evolution is not accepted on the basis of faith either. No one is promised eternal life in heaven or eternal damnation in hell for believing or not believing in it.

What's wrong with barbarism anyways, hypocrite? You have never got around explaining that.

Barbarism is a lower stage of social development. In this respect, it is similar to Christianity, but only at a superficial level. Living as an illiterate farmer or soldier in a rural agricultural environment is not necessarily ideological. It takes Christianity to positively exalt ignorance, simplicity, poverty, and blind unthinking obedience. Thus, as I pointed out in the other thread, we find former members of the Roman aristocracy who once lived comfortable lives living in the most degraded form of barbarism in the deserts of Egypt.

You were born to kiss the establishment ass. Anyways, I question your figures:

It doesn't really matter whether it is 85 percent or 92 percent. Both figures illustrate the same point: that elite science in America is overwhelmingly an atheist enterprise.

And those 85 % would be atheists and agnostics, pantheists etc.

There is little difference between any of these. Virtually all of them are materialists who reject truth by revelation.

[Fade the Butcher]

And let us give newbies another opportunity to witness Fade's (quite breathtaking) ability to turn his coat - he used to pretty much agree with the above material, and now argues the precise opposite out of sheer childish spite.

Reasonable people are always open to changing their minds when presented with new evidence. That's how science advances and why theology doesn't. I don't assume my conclusions on the basis of faith, if that is what you are getting at.

[Fade the Butcher]

Try this source instead for professional approach:

This is one of the worst arguments you have made so far. Virtually all historians accept that Justinian closed the Academy: Durant, Grant, Lloyd, Norwich . . . even that Christian apologetics website you are always quoting.

[Fade the Butcher]

Spamming more Internet garbage. This piece cites theosophist nutcase Annie Besant as an authoritative source! Fade calls it "great" only because it's poisonously anti-Christian.

I really enjoyed the article. It sums up quite nicely what I have confirmed in my own investigations. The Bible is clearly a profoundly anti-intellectual document and the manner in which the church fathers cited it confirms this point. Paul's injunction in Corinthians to "destroy the wisdom of the wise" and to "avoid the profane sciences, so-called" and "keep only what has been committed to thy trust" in Timothy was invoked to justify the rejection of secular knowledge.

L'il Ape Fade is just randomly grabbing poo from the Net and flinging it at Christians. And he formerly had the nerve to preach us about people who abuse the freedom of speech.

The article goes a long way towards explaining why Christians contributed so little to science for fifteen centuries.

[Macrobius]

And let us give newbies another opportunity to witness Fade's (quite breathtaking) ability to turn his coat - he used to pretty much agree with the above material, and now argues the precise opposite out of sheer childish spite.


He used ALL CAPS? I think I like the New Model Fade better. Easier on the eyes....

[Fade the Butcher]

I assume 'Riche' means

Yes. The full citation has been given a dozen times now. See especially Ch.3 "Christians and the Antique School at the Beginning of the Sixth Century," Sec.2, "Opposition to Christian Classical Culture" and Sec. 3, "The Solution: A Uniquely Religious Culture."

[Fade the Butcher]

I also suspect that Fade is either pretending at least part of his act, or having a mental breakdown due to his compulsive ideological bed-hopping and lack of real aim in life:

What is the purpose of your life? Tell us how you know this.

[Fade the Butcher]

You should not swallow anything that dishonest Fade claims without biting. This "banning" has been blown out of all proportion by anti-Christians.

Justinian closed down the schools of philosophy in Athens and, apparently, the schools of rhetoric as well.

"Justinian closed the schools of the rhetoricians as well as of the philosophers, confiscated their property, and forbade any pagan to teach. Greek philosophy, after eleven centuries of history, had come to an end."

Will Durant, The Age of Faith (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1950), p.123

"When Justinian closed down the Platonic Academy at Athens in 529 he did so not to eliminate a thread but to advance his idea of a uniform Christian community in which a handful of pagan intellectuals had no place.

Thomas Brown, "The Transformation of the Roman Mediterranean, 400-900," George Holmes (ed.), The Oxford History of Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.49

"The Great King Chosroes I of Persia - known to his subjects as Anushirvan, 'of the Immortal Soul' - had occupied the throne since 531. Of all the great Sassanian Kings, perhaps of all the Persian rulers throughout history, he was the most illustrious and is still the best remembered. As a statesman, he reformed and reorganized every branch of government and completely revised the fiscal system; as a general, he created the first standing army loyal to the King alone and pushed forward his frontiers till they extended from the Black Sea to the Yemen, from the Oxus River to the shores of the Mediterranean; as an intellectual, he had given - even before his accession - an enthusiastic welcome to those pagan Greek scientists and philosophers who had drifted to Persia after Justinian's closure of the School of Athens in 529."

John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p.2001), p.228

"But the level of achievement was seriously affected in A.D. 529, when, on religious grounds, the emperor Justinian ordered the closing of Plato's Academy in Athens, forcing a number of philosophers to depart the Byzantine Empire and move to the East. After that natural philosophy and science played a minor role in Byzantine intellectual life."

Edward Grant, Science and Religion: From Aristotle to Copernicus, 400 B.C. - A.D. 1550 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), p.228

"We see the results in the invitation issued by the Persian king Khusraw I about 531, to the philosophers of the Academy in Athens (expelled by a decree of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian), to settle in Persia."

David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), p.164

"Moreover after the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Emperor, pagan philosophers and scientists had not only an unfavorable climate of opinion to contend with, but also, on occasions, legal sanctions. The most famous instance is Justinian's edict of 529 closing the Academy at Athens and forbidding pagans to teach: if they were not baptized, they were liable to exile and confiscation of property."

G.E.R. Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p.169

[HrodbertPalatinus]

Just because something lies OUTSIDE the realm of science does not mean it does not exist or is insignificant. Religious philosophy deal with the purpose of life, which is not a "testable hypothesis". Is philosophy therefore "unscientific"? The search for a deeper understanding of the world takes different forms: science, art, philosophy, religion. They all deal with different and non-contradicting realms: science asks how in relation to physical phenomena, art asks who and religion asks why. Whether a bigoted progressivist positivism would believe it or not, science and religion share the same human motivation: curiosity and love for the natural world and all its beauty. Listen up Fade, if you can: science and religion are merely different, not contradictive of each other. Science and religion are as different as apples and oranges and there is no conflict between them. Science, art and religion are not mutually exclusive. Mental health is characterized by a holistic synthesis and understanding of each realm. There is no contradiction in being religious and being scientific. Cosmic beauty, cosmic purpose and cosmic order all relate to each other. The leading physicists of the 20th century were wholly sympathetic to a mystical and esoteric-Christian worldview. If you would like to escape the intellectual dead-end you are in right now, a decent start would be acquiring from the library Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Greatest Physicists, edited by K. Wilber.

[Petr]

I really enjoyed the article. It sums up quite nicely what I have confirmed in my own investigations.
"Investigations..." :rofl:

L'il Fade likes to use big pretentious words. We are all painfully aware how completely your pseudo-scholarship is controlled by your pre-existing bias.

Deep down of it, you are bashing and belittling ancient Rome just because you dislike Sulla. You are obsessively bashing and belittling Christianity just because you dislike me.

(Fade has admitted that is was my personality that almost single-handedly turned him against Christianity.)


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Deep down of it, you are bashing and belittling ancient Rome just because you dislike Sulla.

I haven't bashed or belittled ancient Rome at all. My point in those debates was simply that the Romans contributed little to science. That's a widely accepted fact. Both us watched the premiere of the second season of Rome the other night on television and enjoyed it.

You are obsessively bashing and belittling Christianity just because you dislike me. (Fade has admitted that is was my personality that almost single-handedly turned him against Christianity.)

True, in part. I had given little thought to Christianity prior to your incessant attacks upon Darwinism early last year. As an atheist, religion was not a subject I had been really interested in. Most of my posts have traditionally been about other subjects. You alerted me to the threat posed by Christian fundamentalists to civilization and scientific progress. I have spent much of the last several months studying Christianity in greater detail, and as I have learned more about that religion, I have re-evaluated by former positive opinion of it.

[Petr]

I haven't bashed or belittled ancient Rome at all.
LOL I'd like to see whether Sulla or Ebus agree on that one.

Once again we have caught Fade with a direct lie. Bad move Fade, you should have just continued telling half-truths that you couldn't get burned from.

Pay attention, folks, Fade really is this dishonest. Read through these two long threads:


http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=7418&highlight=jutland

The real savages were the Romans, not Germanic peasant farmers, who developed an entire sport out sadistically torturing and murdering people in their games.

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=7493&highlight=rome+overrated


You called Rome "one of the most overrated cultures of all times".

Both us watched the premiere of the second season of Rome the other night on television and enjoyed it.
Who gives a shit? Utterly irrelevant.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

LOL I'd like to see whether Sulla or Ebus agree on that one.

I don't consider my argument that the Romans were not around to "civilize" Northern Europe over five hundred years after the demise of the Empire as "bashing the Romans."

Once again we have caught Fade with a direct lie. Bad move Fade, you should have just continued telling half-truths that you couldn't get burned from.

See below.

Pay attention, folks, Fade really is this dishonest. Read through these two long threads:

Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were murdered in the Colosseum alone. I haven't renounced by abhorrence of that peculiar savage practice at all.

You called Rome "one of the most overrated cultures of all times".

That's true. The Romans are overrated. They accomplished little in science and their high culture was almost exclusively literary (and heavily indebted to the Greeks here, too). That is not to say the Romans accomplished nothing at all. Even if the Romans extended pre-existing Mediterranean technology to new areas (baths, aqueducts, sewer systems, good roads, etc.), that in itself was an accomplishment. The Romans were great engineers and good lawyers. I'm more than willing to grant that point.

Who gives a shit? Utterly irrelevant.

You are misrepresenting my position on the Romans. I have argued with Sulla and Ebusitanus mostly about two things: 1.) whether or not the Romans made significant contributions to science and technology and 2.) whether or not the Romans civilized Northern Europe.

[Petr]

I don't consider my argument that the Romans were not around to "civilize" Northern Europe over five hundred years after the demise of the Empire as "bashing the Romans.
Nobody cares about your pathetic sophistry.

"This is what it has ended up to...a long list of personal attacks on your opponents "lack of wisdom", reposting refuted lines, ignoring the facts presented again and again, changing subjects as you get refuted trying to wriggle yourself out of the corner you have placed yourself with your outlandish claims and flooding the thread with huge cut-paste most of which are totally taken out of context. This is Fade´s "victory" in debate...for years now I dare to say."

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=7493&page=6&highlight=rome+overrated

Do you feel pissy now that your selective memory has once again been exposed?


Petr

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Yes, that "debate" took us nowhere because it already started on wrong premises and frankly, one grows tired of talking to a wall.
science and advances do not apear out of a vacum like Fade used to tell us in regards to the magic north european development. Rome drank heavily from Greece on much but so alos took from other cultures like the carthaginian, celtic, iberian, etc... That is not to say they did not perfect and kept devolping this very science. Roman architecture was several steps ahead of the Greek one they inherited through conquest and influence. Much the same ended up happening to the magic north europeans who did not just happen to invent stone bridges, complex domes, etc...
It is true that much got destroyed by the barbarians but knowledge (more precisely the practical one) was not just forgotten but lived on weakly on the new masters in the west and more brightly through the byzantine empire.

[Fade the Butcher]

Nobody cares about your pathetic sophistry.Do you feel pissy now that your selective memory has once again been exposed?


Petr

No, I don't. You simply either 1.) lack the intelligence to follow the discussions we have been having or 2.) are deliberately misrepresenting my position on Rome. I can easily cite half a dozen sources to establish my claim that the Romans were not interested in science and contributed little to it. Greek remained the language of science and mathematics on through the Roman era. The Romans compiled encyclopedias of Greek science, for example, Pliny's Natural History, Seneca's Natural Questions, Virtruvius' On Architecture, and Celsus' On Medicine, but made little in the way of original contributions. Roman education was also almost exclusively literary (similar to the Chinese): training with the grammarian and rhetor prepared the individual for a life in public service in the Empire. Higher education in law (in Latin) or medicine, at Alexandria and philosophy, at Athens, (in Greek) was also available.

As for the argument the Romans civilized Northern Europe, I find this untenable. First, the Western Empire collapsed centuries before the rise of cities in the High Middle Ages. Second, Medieval cities were constructed out of wood and radically differed from Roman cities. Third, the secular education system had been allowed to collapse and education available in the tenth century was exclusively in the hands of clerics. Fourth, the technological knowledge necessary to construct great structures was lost in the intervening centuries, which is why the aqueducts and baths had fallen into decay (no one knew how to repair them) and why they were cannibalized for stone (because stone cutting techniques had been lost). It wasn't until the fifteenth century that Western Europeans rediscovered how to build domes. It would certainly have been nice if this knowledge was preserved, but most of it wasn't after the decline of the cities, and civilization was setback centuries as a consequence.

I have criticized many aspects of Roman civilization that I find unsavory (above all, turning murder into a sport), but it hardly follows that my opinion of the Roman Empire is 1.) either entirely negative or 2.) that I deny the Romans contributed anything to civilization. Also, I have given clear reasons why I entertain the beliefs that I do, and my opinions about the Romans are hardly motivated by hostility either to Sulla or Ebusitanus, both of whom I respect and admire.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

But that knowledge was NOT lost dear Fade no matter how much to trumpet it again and again. Medieval cities did not autogenerate themselves overnight. You talk like Romanic churches, multi arched bridges, domes, basilicas, sculptural stone cutting, roads, just poped into some ignorant north european´s mind out of thin air. Basic logic would tell you that traveling as far as the Rhine, Danube and the Neatherlands would show any enterprising stone mason how to build such marvelous things like stone bridges. All the while you still have a Byzantine Empire who kept this "lost" knowledge very much alife. Basilicas, sculpture, bricks, tiles, kept on getting produced, clearly for any traveler to see and learn from. Arab primitives learned quite some from their looted roman/byzantine towns...apparently germans (for that matter) where not capable of this.

Fade keps trying to tell us that since Germans liked to build with wood, that there is no relation to anything that this same dweller might find just strolling through the nearby heap of ruins. Romans, build mostly in wood themselves besides a few vital buildings like Basilicas, city walls, fountains, bridges, etc...Interesting enough these same objects kept on getting built in stone in these dark ages.

http://www.exeter.gov.uk/timetrail/object_images/2_19a.jpg
Roman standard frontier barrack made out of wood and mud plus the tiled roof we are so used at seeing in north europe.

http://www.aboutromania.com/Perugia18.jpg
Medieval waterworks in the form of public fountains.

http://www.fotosearch.com/comp/AGE/AGE035/A24-381526.jpg
Nice medieval stone bridge.

http://www.colonialvoyage.com/viaggi/capraia9.jpg
Medieval paved road...yes, manintenance and growth of pre-existing roman road network and new milage was not something "lost".

http://www.celtiberia.net/imagftp/im53245954-Baños59.jpg
Nice Visigothic church in stone and tiles...looks like a Basilica to me?

http://www.stlouis.art.museum/modig/images/Jpegs/AR0226.JPG
Where on earth did this medieval knowledge come from?

It goes on and on...but you get the drift.

[Macrobius]

This is one of the worst arguments you have made so far. Virtually all historians accept that Justinian closed the Academy: Durant, Grant, Lloyd, Norwich . . . even that Christian apologetics website you are always quoting.

I recommend, so the argument doesn't become diffuse, that you stick to Emperors who were Orthodox in some sense. [Read up on the repudiation of Chalcedon in incidents culminating in Justinian's 'Three Chapters', which incidents were occuring within a few years of closing the Academy.] Defending or attacking every emperor in all of Byzantine history would take some time. I propose we exclude those who (1) were Arians, Nestorians, or notoriously anti-Calcedonian, or supportive of those positions; or (2) iconoclasts.

There are no non-Chalcedonian Christians here, that I know of, so that should be a minimal functional definition without dissent, embracing Orthodox, Catholics, and Calvinists and quite a few more. Personally, I feel no need to defend Theodoric or the Isaurians. Theodosius is fair, but he was notoriously disciplined by St. Ambrose. I think we would do better to stay away from political figures altogether -- their actions are not easily correlated with religious doctrine, politics being what it is. We should concentrate on theologians, philosophers, mathematicians.

If we were discussing the politics of the Byzantine empire, rather than Orthodox Christianity, your discussion would make sense. I won't buy anything along the lines that the tenor of a Christian society is expressed in its politics either. Would it be fair of me to point out that the Scientific world view and Materialism were admirably expressed in 20th century Marxism, with state support, and pin the political actions of Marxism on Modern Science? Yet, that procedure would be more reasonable, as at least the heads of state were materialists and supported science, unlike example emperors who were *against* Chalcedon.

Justinian, having not yet publically turned against Chalcedon when he closed the Academy (but only just) is a very weak example. Stalin when he was still in seminary? Not your *strongest* case against Orthodox Christianity.

[Fade the Butcher]

But that knowledge was NOT lost dear Fade no matter how much to trumpet it again and again.

This will require another trip to the library. I was planning on returning some books anyway today. More on this later.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

You can save yourself your trip Fade, we have gone through this to the point of boredom.

[Fade the Butcher]

You can save yourself your trip Fade, we have gone through this to the point of boredom.

No, I find this notion of yours that Medieval cities made of wood and daub, with open sewers in the streets, composed of homes with dirt floors, inhabited by beer guzzling, long haired, Germanic-speakers in pants were based on Roman models quite interesting. Personally, I don't think the Romans themselves would have confused the two for a second, and that they would not have hesitated to describe such cities as barbarian. I mentioned above that the aqueducts and baths fell into ruin because knowledge had been lost of how to repair them. Also, Roman buildings were cannibalized for stone all across the West (much of the Collosseum was ripped apart) because stone cutting techniques had been lost. By the tenth century, Latin wasn't even spoken in Rome itself. I will expand upon this and provide citations when I reacquire my sources.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Here we have again Fade at his best....

Now...would you believe that there were cities and towns across the earstwhile roman empire that, gasp!, did have open sewers in the streets, composed of homes with dirt floors, inhabited by beer guzzling, long haired, Germanic-speakers in pants?
Not every roman dwelling was the Palatine Hill Fade...but you knew that one already, right? I recently visited the ruins of roman Numantia in central Spain..where...sweres ran through open streets, buildings were still made mostly of wood and mud and no aqueduct reached them.
So...since not every German town looked like Rome or had seven hills we have to asume no relation can be drawn. In the same light we have to asume that since Rome was not build in the Agean that there is no relation between Rome´s Temple of Jupiter with the Athenian parthenon, right?

Romans adapted quite well to their northern outposts and towns like in the Neatherlands or along the Rhine at vanished towns like Cologne, Salzburg, Mainz, Strassbourg, Imperial Aachen, etc, etc...They ended up drinking beer and wearing trousers and long armed tunics.

http://www.comitatus.net/trooptypes_files/image015.jpg

lets just forget, like Fade likes, everything else from bridges to churches, to sculptural carvings, wall paintings, tiles, fountains, paved roads, city walls, towers, etc, etc...

All this means nothing for Fade...becasue? because the XII Legion did not walk in Copehaguen :D

Fade tries to tell you that not only were Germans unsofisticated but they were also dumb like a brick. Muslim invaders did not loose a beat in adapting whatever they found amongst the ruins of the Byzantine cities that fell to them. Germans, so would Fade have us believe, would not. Complicated multiarched bridge buidling knowledge was given to them by Wotan himself. Not only that, but apparently they were soooo dumb, that although they were Byzantium´s neighbors for centuries, no knowledge of the applied science still used there all this time, could have been of any use to these iluminated Germans. Columns? Is that what you call them? Multistory stone churches that micmick the roman basilicas that were the first churches...pure concidence. Bricks and tiles...Hey...Thor told the Germans how to bake them.

Please stop with this non-sense. Being wrong is not a bannable offense here.

[Fade the Butcher]

Here we have again Fade at his best....Now...would you believe that there were cities and towns across the earstwhile roman empire that, gasp!, did have open sewers in the streets, composed of homes with dirt floors, inhabited by beer guzzling, long haired, Germanic-speakers in pants?

It does seem rather counterintuitive. After all, the Romans associated such buildings and customs with barbarism for centuries and took pains to stress how superior and different their civilization was to such forms.

Not every roman dwelling was the Palatine Hill Fade...but you knew that one already, right? I recently visited the ruins of roman Numantia in central Spain..where...sweres ran through open streets, buildings were still made mostly of wood and mud and no aqueduct reached them.

Ebusitanus could always dispatch any lingering confusion that surrounds this subject by citing a single historian who claims that Medieval cities in Northern Europe were based upon classical models or even resembled them in the remotest way.

So...since not every German town looked like Rome or had seven hills we have to asume no relation can be drawn. In the same light we have to asume that since Rome was not build in the Agean that there is no relation between Rome´s Temple of Jupiter with the Athenian parthenon, right?

German towns actually looked a lot more like larger versions of the German villages they evolved from than anything found around the Mediterranean in classical timees. The Germans themselves went on speaking German, eating Germanic foods, and drinking Germanic beverages.

Romans adapted quite well to their northern outposts and towns like in the Neatherlands or along the Rhine at vanished towns like Cologne, Salzburg, Mainz, Strassbourg, Imperial Aachen, etc, etc...They ended up drinking beer and wearing trousers and long armed tunics.

Of course. That had everything do with the fact that barbarians came to serve in overwhelming numbers in the Roman army, especially near the frontier as limitani. Much of depopulated Northern and Eastern Gaul had already been settled by Germanic immigrants legally established within the Empire before its demise.

lets just forget, like Fade likes, everything else from bridges to churches, to sculptural carvings, wall paintings, tiles, fountains, paved roads, city walls, towers, etc, etc...

The story of the city in Late Antiquity involved the end of a political tradition, the end of a pattern of urban design related to the political tradition, the end of a particular ideal of what makes for the good life, the end of a secular ideal of education, and in many cases a shrinkage of population. All this happened within the context of collapsing structures of an empire and of the associated economic system. It abundantly merits to be described as decline."

J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.415

"Houses whether urban or rural were generally built of wood, with their roofs supported on posts and/or dry stone foundations. Houses of this kind, if built by craftsmen, can be as functional and comfortable as those of stone, but they certainly require a narrower range of building skills. It has been suggested that stone quarries and quarrying techniques did not continue in use in Italy beyond the sixth century, presumably if building stone was needed it could be taken from the building of earlier times. Medieval quarrymen had to start from scratch. They used simpler techniques than those of classical times, and seem not have rediscovered the technique of stone-cutting by horizontal trench. Bricks with Roman dimensions are found in use until the Lombard period, that is until around the end of the sixth century. Medieval bricks have different measurements (1 ft x 1/2 ft) and appear in the ninth century. They seem to mark a new start in brick building.

As we have seen fine pottery disappeared from many parts of Italy. In the North this was not replaced by new locally manufactured ware. Regional pottery used pre-Roman techniques. The quantity of pottery in use was reduced very substantially, and so has the number of functional forms. Sometimes bowls and plates of pottery were replaced by 'testi', large flat pottery plates made at home, also by wooden tableware. Elsewhere in the North soapstone vessels reappeared and their manufacture developed into a fine craft. In many regions such skills as making of slips and glazes seem to have been lost. Early medieval documents refer to manorially manufactured pottery. Specialist centres of metal production disappeared, together with the distinction between miners and smiths. In the tenth century, metal working was a craft performed by peasants on estates. There appears to have been a breakdown and dispersal of glass-making, bronze-working, and iron-working industries. All became small-scale quasi-domestic activities.

Vessels in glass, wood, and soapstone, were not necessarily functionally worse than their ceramic predecessors. But as the plants producing them were small and family run, the advantages of large-scale specialized production had been lost. Blowing of glass, working of iron, bronze, or gold on a domestic scale were widespread. Water power came to be used to work a lathe to hollow out soapstone ware. This was an important technological innovation. Perhaps the outstanding change was not so much the loss of technology, as the end of its application to specialized production for the market."

Ibid., pp.387-388

All this means nothing for Fade...becasue? because the XII Legion did not walk in Copehaguen

Your logic is something like this: The Romans lived in cities. Germans came to live in cities five hundred years after the Western Empire ceased to exist. Therefore, German cities were based upon Roman cities.

Fade tries to tell you that not only were Germans unsofisticated but they were also dumb like a brick.

Ebusitanus presents us with a mystery: why did Germans come to live in cities five hundred years after the demise of the Western Empire? Why not during the Empire when Germania was closely in contact with it?

Muslim invaders did not loose a beat in adapting whatever they found amongst the ruins of the Byzantine cities that fell to them.

The Muslims destroyed Alexandria and Carthage.

Germans, so would Fade have us believe, would not. Complicated multiarched bridge buidling knowledge was given to them by Wotan himself. Not only that, but apparently they were soooo dumb, that although they were Byzantium´s neighbors for centuries, no knowledge of the applied science still used there all this time, could have been of any use to these iluminated Germans. Columns? Is that what you call them?

Another bankrupt argument: the Romans built bridges. The Germans built bridges several centuries later. Therefore, the Germans learned how to build bridges from the Romans who no longer existed.

Multistory stone churches that micmick the roman basilicas that were the first churches...pure concidence. Bricks and tiles...Hey...Thor told the Germans how to bake them.

Why were Roman buildings for centuries cannibalized for stone if knowledge of stone cutting techniques had survived?

Please stop with this non-sense. Being wrong is not a bannable offense here.

You're simply mistaken. Advanced Roman engineering techniques, even things as simple as cutting stone and creating bricks, did not survive the deurbanization of the Early Middle Ages.

[Macrobius]

Bricks with Roman dimensions are found in use until the Lombard period, that is until around the end of the sixth century. Medieval bricks have different measurements (1 ft x 1/2 ft) and appear in the ninth century. They seem to mark a new start in brick building.



Ah yes, the Lombards -- those well-known Orthodox Christian destroyers of science in the West.

[Petr]

This is one of the worst arguments you have made so far. Virtually all historians accept that Justinian closed the Academy: Durant, Grant, Lloyd, Norwich . . . even that Christian apologetics website you are always quoting.
All your sources are offering mere second-hand repetitions of mainstream view which has not gone unchallenged by professionals who have concentrated deeper on the topic:


Post-Herulian Athens, edited by Paavo Castrén

p. 142

2. Some Non-Conformist Views

Though historically possible and widely accepted, the traditional view has met with doubts and criticism over a century. (12) A number of modified or alternative theories have appeared. Bréhier was of the opinion that the Neoplatonic school "died away for want of pupils and perhaps of professors." (13) In his History of the Later Roman Empire, Bury argued against the point a) of the traditional view.

p. 143

In the 1960ies Alan Cameron, in an article which has directed much of later scholarly discussion, argued at length for the opinion that the Academy survived the intermezzo caused by Justinian's edcit of 529 and the short study trip to Persia. (17) Blumenthal argued in 1978 that a "closure" of the Academy was even less probable than Alan Cameron had argued, though Justinian's legislation affected it "somehow." (18) Férnandez cannot discover any consequences of the 529 edict whatever: the "legendary" exodus to Persia was not caused by the edict, which was quickly and completely forgotten. (19) From time to time financial considerations have been added to the discussion. Gerostergios argues that the Academy was not closed, rather it went bankrupt because of actions taken by Justinian. (20)

...

Consequently we seem to have three main interpretations of the events of 529: a) an edict was issued and the "Academy" closed; b) no edict was issued, but the "Academy" was closed nonetheless; c) there was no "Academy" to close.

Sort of like I'd argue that there was no library in Serapeum for Christians to destroy in 392.

Other interesting points:

p. 146

What is striking is that Proclus was "Christianised" in common opinion in less than one hundred years; it would be unfair to limit this favourable attitude towards Proclus to Malalas alone. Such "Christianisations" were not altogether unknown in Late Antiquity, (33) and later Byzantine legends delight in presenting Athenian philosophers as prophetic persons helpful to the Christian emperors. (34)

p. 147

Gregorovius is of the opinion that Malalas contradicts himself as to the teaching of law in Athens. Only shortly earlier he had told his readers that a "monobiblion" of Justianian's new codex was sent to Berytus and Athens. Did the Emperor change his mind about legal studies in Athens so quickly? (38) If Malalas is correct in both points Justinian can hardly be accused of enmity against Athens itself. If he had been planning actions against semi-pagan Athens for a long time, as the traditional view supposes, he is unlikely to have honoured the faculty of law there by sending one of the few copies his masterpiece.

p. 153

In a letter to a colleague (76) Aeneas (of Gaza) states that present day young Athenians do not frequent their own schools, such as the Academy and the Lyceum, but "consider it worth while", to visit Syrian schools instead. They are even said to think, that the two philosophical schools mentioned (nowadays) are "among us", that is, in Syria. Aeneas seems to mean that the Athenians considered foreign schools to be better than their own, which is rather nonsensical if the Athenian schools had been closed by Justinian.

p. 157

a) The closing of the so-called Neoplatonic school is very poorly attested in contemporary literary sources, as far as explicit statements are concerned. Neither Justinian's admirers nor his critics paid attention to the event. We have nothing more explicit than one third of a sentence in Malalas' Chronographia.



Yes Fade, please don't start crying now at this blow to your ego: you do not know everything. There does indeed exist a great scholarly dissent to such clichés as "Christians burned the library of Alexandria" or "Justinian banned philosophy".


Petr

[Petr]

It is true that much got destroyed by the barbarians but knowledge (more precisely the practical one) was not just forgotten but lived on weakly on the new masters in the west and more brightly through the byzantine empire.
And we must remember that the splendor of medieval Islamic culture (sciences included) was very much based upon goodies and resources violently stolen from Christendom. Byzantium had to do without the scholars of Syria or the grain of Egypt (the latter had been the source of food for ancient Roman masses).

Here is a good example of how practically no part of medieval Byzantium was really "safe area" outside the walls of Constantinople itself: the vicious sacking of the second-most-important city of the empire by hit-and-run Islamic pirates:

A proto-typical Muslim naval razzia occurred in 846 when a fleet of Arab jihadists arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome (p. 421), sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained. But perhaps the largest and most infamous of the naval jihad campaigns during this period was the sack and pillage of Thessaloniki in 904. During July, 904, under the command of the Muslim convert Leo of Tripoli, more than ten thousand Cretan Arabs, Syrians, and North Africans briefly sieged, and then captured Thessaloniki, slaughtering and enslaving its inhabitants (some 22,000 slaves were taken), and causing great physical destruction to the city. John Cameniates provided an eyewitness account of these events, recorded in his chronicle. Cameniates, his elderly father, and his brother, taken prisoner while they tried to escape by the ramparts, were spared their lives because they promised their captors a large amount of money. They were marched as prisoners through the city, and thus witnessed the terrible carnage of their fellow townspeople. Cameniates narrative reveals that (p. 604):

The Thessalonians tried to escape through the streets, pursued by the Saracens, who were unleashed like wild beasts. In their panic, men. women, the elderly, and children, fell into each other’s arms to give each other one last kiss. The enemy hit with no mercy. Parents were killed while trying to defend their children. No one was spared: women, children, the elderly, all were immediately pierced by the sword. The poor wretches ran through the town, or tried to hide inside the caves; some of them, believing they could find refuge inside a church, would seek shelter inside, while others tried to scale the walls of the ramparts, from where they jumped into the void and crashed to the ground. Nuns, petrified with fear, with their hair disheveled, tried to escape, and ended up by the thousands in the hands of the barbarians, who killed the older ones, and sent the younger and more attractive ones into captivity and dishonor… The Saracens also massacred the unfortunate people who had sought refuge inside churches.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22314


Petr

[Der Sozialist]

German towns actually looked a lot more like larger versions of the German villages they evolved from than anything found around the Mediterranean in classical timees. The Germans themselves went on speaking German, eating Germanic foods, and drinking Germanic beverages.




What about the Franks?

[Fade the Butcher]

Ah yes, the Lombards -- those well-known Orthodox Christian destroyers of science in the West.

The Lombards were Christians.

[Sulla the Dictator]

German towns actually looked a lot more like larger versions of the German villages they evolved from than anything found around the Mediterranean in classical timees. The Germans themselves went on speaking German, eating Germanic foods, and drinking Germanic beverages.


The Germans learned advanced masonry techniques. By themselves. Without a record of it. How....unprecedented.

[Der Sozialist]

The Germans learned advanced masonry techniques. By themselves. Without a record of it.
The Frankish empire almost reached the Elbe by 600—the old low Franconian languages were Germanic languages but they were eventually replaced by old French somewhere after the 7th century—probably closer to the 11th century refuting Fade’s argument that all knowledge from Rome was lost during the dark ages.

[Sulla the Dictator]

The Frankish empire almost reached the Elbe by 600—the old low Franconian languages were Germanic languages but they were eventually replaced by old French somewhere after the 7th century—probably closer to the 11th century refuting Fade’s argument that all knowledge from Rome was lost during the dark ages.

Oh, there's no doubt Fade's argument is incorrect. While he mentions the use of Germanic language in speech, he forgets that the writing was in Latin. :p

[Fade the Butcher]

What about the Franks?

I wasn't referring to the barbarians that settled within the Empire (with the exception of the Anglo-Saxons). The number of invaders was rather small compared to the indigenous inhabitants. The Anglo-Saxons are the only group of barbarians that rejected Roman civilization and completely destroyed what had existed before. English is a Germanic language. The common law evolved out of Germanic law. Germanics beyond the Rhine remained outside of Roman civilization during and after the fall of the Empire. These populations still speak Germanic languages in our own times.

As for the Franks, Northern Gaul resembles in some ways the Anglo-Saxons in Britain (this area was heavily settled by barbarians, albeit legally, by 430 a majority of its population were already Franks). By the seventh century, Northern Gaul had become "Francia" and was culturally distinct from Roman Gaul south of the Loire. After the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire, the range of Romance expanded at the expense of Germanic which was pushed back towards the Rhine. Hugh Capet and Otto II (late tenth century) were unable to communicate with each other and had to rely upon translators.

I'm not sure how Northern Europe was civilized by the Romans from the grave half a millennium after the demise of the Western Empire, especially areas that were never part of the Empire to begin with. This region was never civilized by the Romans at the height of their power and influence. Roman culture had deteriorated to such an extent that Latin was not even spoken in Rome itself by the tenth century. Even in Italy we see a sweeping change of building materials as Roman technological knowledge is lost in the process of deurbanization.

[Fade the Butcher]

The Germans learned advanced masonry techniques. By themselves. Without a record of it. How....unprecedented.

Such techniques had been lost even within the Empire itself. That's why Medieval Europeans spent centuries cannibalizing Roman buildings for quarried stone.

[Fade the Butcher]

Oh, there's no doubt Fade's argument is incorrect. While he mentions the use of Germanic language in speech, he forgets that the writing was in Latin. :p

Writing was the preserve of small minority of clerics. The vast majority of the population remained illiterate well into the Early Modern Era which makes a farce out of the notion that their culture was deeply transformed by Latin. It wasn't.

[Fade the Butcher]

All your sources are offering mere second-hand repetitions of mainstream view which has not gone unchallenged by professionals who have concentrated deeper on the topic:

That's right: the mainstream view. There is nothing controversial about Justinian shutting down the Academy in Athens. It is widely accepted. Even your ridiculous Christian apologetics sources doesn't deny that.

Yes Fade, please don't start crying now at this blow to your ego: you do not know everything.

You haven't presented any evidence that the mainstream view is mistaken. It is unreasonable to assume the massive state sponsered persecutions of pagans by Justinian and his successors combined with specific laws targeted against philosophers and Malalas's account do not adequately explain the matter.


There does indeed exist a great scholarly dissent to such clichés as "Christians burned the library of Alexandria" or "Justinian banned philosophy".

Yet more evidence that Christians are pathological liars. Orosius, a hostile source in his History Against the Pagans, mentions the destruction of libraries in Alexandria and confirms that it occured. Ammianus confirms the library was in the Serapeum. Bishop Epiphanes as well.

[Macrobius]

The Lombards were Christians.

Rather, the Lombards were the first of the invaders to not have a significant Arian Christian element. Vandals held the previous record, having a significant

Let's line that up:

Goths -- Christian but heretical Arians -- damaged but did not destroy the Western Empire -- eventually became Orthodox Catholics under Recared in Spain; Italy reconquered by Romans until the Lombards

Franks -- ?? -- became Orthodox Catholics from Clovis on was it?

Vandals -- first significantly pagan attackers -- sacked Rome and Carthage both and took Northern Africa; were fought back by Goths and Romans

Lombards -- essentially all pagan -- knocked Roman culture back to the point they forgot how to make bricks for two centuries

[Fade the Butcher]

Rather, the Lombards were the first of the invaders to not have a significant Arian Christian element. Vandals held the previous record, having a significant

False. The leadership of the Lombards were Arians. A good percentage of them as well when they entered Italy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombards

The Lombards were devoted Nordic pagans; their origins are based around the myth of Godan (=Odin) and his wife Frea (=Frigga). The Lombards remained pagan until the 4th Century AD, when they were Christianised by Arian monks of the Gothic peoples, during their Migration Period from the Lower Elbe lands to Noricum. Many, however, remained pagan; only a handful of Lombard war chiefs and their followers had really been Christianised by 493 AD. It is uncertain who was the first Christian king of the Lombards. By 568 AD, when the Lombards conquered the Italian peninsula, most of the Lombards were still pagan, although a majority of the nobility and their kings became Arian Christians. Faroald I, the conqueror and first duke of the Duchy of Spoleto, remained a pagan until he had a moment of divine revelation during a battle and became a Christian. It is believed that under the rule of Agilulf (590-615 AD) all of the Lombard population became Christians. Because of the long pagan history of the Lombards and their loose adherence to the Arian Christian church the Christianity of the Lombards was always influenced by paganism.

Let's line that up:

No problem.

Goths -- Christian but heretical Arians -- damaged but did not destroy the Western Empire -- eventually became Orthodox Catholics under Recared in Spain; Italy reconquered by Romans until the Lombards

The Visigoths and Ostrogoths were Arians. The former until 589 in Spain (violent religious persecutions followed). The latter until their demise in the Gothic war with the Byzantines. Italy was ruined in the wars launched by Justinian. The Lombards invaded Italy as a mixed band of Arians and pagans in the late sixth century, were all Christians by the seventh century, and were all Catholics by the eighth century.

Franks -- ?? -- became Orthodox Catholics from Clovis on was it?

Yes. The Franks converted to Catholicism immediately to Catholicism after Clovis.

Vandals -- first significantly pagan attackers -- sacked Rome and Carthage both and took Northern Africa; were fought back by Goths and Romans

No. The Vandals were Arians. They launched vicious persecutions of Catholics when they arrived in North Africa.

Lombards -- essentially all pagan -- knocked Roman culture back to the point they forgot how to make bricks for two centuries

I addressed this above. Italy had been destroyed by two decades of warfare between the Goths and Byzantines. The economy of Italy had long been hollowed out as economic production shifted to the provinces. By the fifth century, there were 40 million Gauls, but only 6 million Italians. Italy was a consumer society not unlike contemporary America. This explains the shift towards the crude pottery of the sixth century. As international trade broke down, the economy localized, and much technical knowledge had been lost during the centuries of dependency.

Note: You forgot the Burgundians. They were also Arians.

[Der Sozialist]

I'm not sure how Northern Europe was civilized by the Romans from the grave half a millennium after the demise of the Western Empire,
The Germanic tribes assimilated many things from the Romans—one of which was the Church. After all, the law of the Church was modeled after Roman law—more specifically, the Roman Law Corpus Juris Civilis was adopted by arising monarchies (12 to 13 century) to add legitimacy to the destruction of feudalism.

The Church maintained and transmitted much of Roman administrative system and culture. Do you have an another explanation why old Frankish, a Germanic tongue, eventually evolved into old French, a Latinate tongue, hundreds of years after Roman rule ended in Northern Gaul?


especially areas that were never part of the Empire to begin with.This region was never civilized by the Romans at the height of their power and influence.
Did the Spartan hoplite ever set foot in Rome?

Roman culture had deteriorated to such an extent that Latin was not even spoken in Rome itself by the tenth century. Even in Italy we see a sweeping change of building materials as Roman technological knowledge is lost in the process of deurbanization.
We do have a written record of Latin—people do learn it in schools. Latin was spoken throughout churches all over Europe.

[Sulla the Dictator]

Writing was the preserve of small minority of clerics. The vast majority of the population remained illiterate well into the Early Modern Era


The ignorance and pathetic nature of post-Roman populations is irrelevant. When we discuss civilization in Medieval times, we're talking about a tiny minority of people. You're making a false distinction.

The fact is that written language was Latin. History was recorded in Latin. Government edicts were recorded in Latin. Letters were written in Latin. Diplomacy was conducted in Latin. Architecture was done in Latin, and later, Latin was the language of your beloved science.

Everyone who mattered read or respected Latin. Even the ignorant nobles were expected to know SOME Latin. Indeed, Latin achieved a dominance in post-Roman Europe that Greek never achieved in the Classical world, despite its proliferation. While Greek was popular in historical and philosophical tracts, these were often also reproduced in Latin, and the State wrote in its own language.

[Sulla the Dictator]

I'm not sure how Northern Europe was civilized by the Romans from the grave half a millennium after the demise of the Western Empire, especially areas that were never part of the Empire to begin with. This region was never civilized by the Romans at the height of their power and influence.


Its quite simple, really. The barbarians encountered a higher culture and aped it, much as the various people who conquered Egypt did. Civilization is seductive for people who create nothing.


Roman culture had deteriorated to such an extent that Latin was not even spoken in Rome itself by the tenth century.


Why would the 40,000 or so survivors bother? It isn't too far from the truth to say that the barbarian invasions of Rome were the End of the World. I can see why Christians thought that at the time.

[Fade the Butcher]

The Germanic tribes assimilated many things from the Romans—one of which was the Church. After all, the law of the Church was modeled after Roman law—more specifically, the Roman Law Corpus Juris Civilis was adopted by arising monarchies (12 to 13 century) to add legitimacy to the destruction of feudalism.

The Justinian Code was rediscovered in Italy around the late eleventh century and the study and adoption of Roman law spread in subsequent centuries. The first cities and towns though date back to the tenth and eleventh centuries. Civilization had already emerged in Northern Europe before Roman law was known. England was already a rich kingdom by the time of the Norman Conquest and never bothered to adopt Roman law. As for the Church, it had indeed survived the Dark Ages, and Christianity had spread across Northern Europe. Whether Northern Europe was "civilized" by the Romans is another matter altogether.

The foundation of civilization is everywhere surplus wealth; wealth derived from agricultural production. It is wealth that precipitates urbanization and division of labor which creates even more wealth through trade - not worthless prayers in monasteries. Civilization emerged in Northern Europe when it did because new technology was introduced that made agriculture more productive, specifically, the three field system, heavy plow, horse shoes, and the horse collar. The Church had nothing whatsoever to do with this, nor did a few idle clerics who happened to speak Latin and lived as parasites off the backs of the peasantry.

The Church maintained and transmitted much of Roman administrative system and culture.

The Church did nothing of the sort. The roads, aqueducts, ampitheatres, and baths had everywhere fallen into horrific decay. The municipal schools had ceased to exist everywhere by the early eighth century. Education had become the preserve of a small minority of clerics trained in episcopal schools with an entirely different curriculum. Did the church raise armies to defend the realm? What did the Church add to society of any value?

Do you have an another explanation why old Frankish, a Germanic tongue, eventually evolved into old French, a Latinate tongue, hundreds of years after Roman rule ended in Northern Gaul?

Old French was a Romance tongue spoken by commoners in Roman Gaul. Latin had everywhere degenerated into the Romance languages. It's spread into Northern Gaul merely reflects the fact that it was the predominant language in post-Carolingian France.

Did the Spartan hoplite ever set foot in Rome?

The Greeks colonized Sicily and Southern Italy -- Magna Graecia -- and were in direct contact with the Romans for over a thousand years. In contrast, the Roman Empire had ceased to exist for half a millennium before the first cities ever emerged in Northern Europe.

We do have a written record of Latin—people do learn it in schools. Latin was spoken throughout churches all over Europe.

Latin that even the common people in Southern Europe could not understand; to say nothing of Northern Europe. Do the Germans, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and so forth speak either Latin or a Romance language?

[Fade the Butcher]

The ignorance and pathetic nature of post-Roman populations is irrelevant. When we discuss civilization in Medieval times, we're talking about a tiny minority of people. You're making a false distinction.

Once again, the foundation of civilization is surplus wealth; wealth that was created by largely illiterate merchants and peasants farmers, not by a small minority of idle monks whose major contribution to society was to "pray" for its well being.

The fact is that written language was Latin. History was recorded in Latin. Government edicts were recorded in Latin. Letters were written in Latin. Diplomacy was conducted in Latin. Architecture was done in Latin, and later, Latin was the language of your beloved science.

This returns us to the question of who was literate in Northern Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries and what role did they play, if any, in the emergence of civilization there. The answer is a small minority of clerics who were capable of reading the Bible the writings of the church fathers; people who had rejected the world and were living in monasteries while illiterate farmers were creating virtually all the wealth of society.

Everyone who mattered read or respected Latin. Even the ignorant nobles were expected to know SOME Latin. Indeed, Latin achieved a dominance in post-Roman Europe that Greek never achieved in the Classical world, despite its proliferation. While Greek was popular in historical and philosophical tracts, these were often also reproduced in Latin, and the State wrote in its own language.

This excludes well over 90% of population. In other words, the productive sector of population that did virtually all of the work. The ability to compose poetry or to study letters is nice, but really has nothing whatsoever to do with building cities or doing the work that actually makes civilization possible.

[Fade the Butcher]

Its quite simple, really. The barbarians encountered a higher culture and aped it, much as the various people who conquered Egypt did. Civilization is seductive for people who create nothing.

There was no civilization to ape or copy in the tenth century. Civilization had ceased to exist hundreds of years before. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the ability to of a small group of people to read the Bible had anything to do with the emergence of civilization in Northern Europe.

Why would the 40,000 or so survivors bother? It isn't too far from the truth to say that the barbarian invasions of Rome were the End of the World. I can see why Christians thought that at the time.

By the tenth century, Latin wasn't even spoken in Rome itself; the most distinctive feature of Roman civilization. But somehow the Romans civilized millions of people from beyond the grave, taught them how to live in houses constructed of wood and daub, from beyond the grave half a millennium after their demise.

[Fade the Butcher]

I have finally solved the mystery. A group of monks prayed to the Christian God to bless Louis the German (840-76) and civilization magically appeared out of nowhere. :p

We pray that you bestow on King Louis unending prosperity.
We pray that you bestow on him life, health, and victory. Hear us! . . .
We pray that you restrain the heathens steadfast in their savage religion. Hear us!
We pray that you humble the pagan heathens. Hear us!

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Another bankrupt argument: the Romans built bridges. The Germans built bridges several centuries later. Therefore, the Germans learned how to build bridges from the Romans who no longer existed.

So...no bridges were build between the fall of rome and the Xth century? There are roman bridges still standing today but we are to believe that Wotan himself gave these germans the knowledge to make carbon copies of the bridges that were still standing all around them. Are you freaking serious? Of course not...its just ol´Fade.

To bad its in German but it explains you quite well how Germans build their bridges and from where they took the knowledge. No magic Wotan here.


Why were Roman buildings for centuries cannibalized for stone if knowledge of stone cutting techniques had survived?

Romans cannibalized all sorts of older buildings they found. I would say that every single civilization up until this last century cannibalizted older building material. Roman walls are full of older celtic, etrustcan or greek remains. Much of the same can be found on churches all over europe and beyond. The idea that "stupid as a brick" germans used existing building material does not make them incapable Fade.
Where does this idea come from anyhow? Byzantium, Rome´s inheritor was still there building with roman/greek know-how for centuries still. How could that knowledge be lost? Is a joke.

You're simply mistaken. Advanced Roman engineering techniques, even things as simple as cutting stone and creating bricks, did not survive the deurbanization of the Early Middle Ages.

You are the one who will run through a wall before accepting he has been uttering pure non-sense. Because a brick gets baked with different measurements than the classical roman does not mean the technic to bake it was just invented. Romans learned from Greeks, Muslims learend from Byzantium, applied that knowledge and moved on to their own styles. Germans not....everything was gifted to them by Thor.

How can you even post this with a straight face? This is pure trolling.

http://www.exeter.gov.uk/timetrail/object_images/2_19a.jpg
Roman standard frontier barrack made out of wood and mud plus the tiled roof we are so used at seeing in north europe.

http://www.aboutromania.com/Perugia18.jpg
Medieval waterworks in the form of public fountains.

http://www.fotosearch.com/comp/AGE/AGE035/A24-381526.jpg
Nice medieval stone bridge.

http://www.tarraconensis.com/villa%20del%20rio/puente04.JPG
Visigothic bridge...where did they get the knowledge from?

http://www.colonialvoyage.com/viaggi/capraia9.jpg
Medieval paved road...yes, manintenance and growth of pre-existing roman road network and new milage was not something "lost".

http://www.celtiberia.net/imagftp/im53245954-Baños59.jpg
Nice Visigothic church in stone and tiles...looks like a Basilica to me?

http://www.stlouis.art.museum/modig/images/Jpegs/AR0226.JPG
Where on earth did this medieval knowledge come from?

http://www.giorgiozanetti.ca/bricks/brickpreface.html

When the Western Empire declined and Byzantine architecture advanced in the northern Italy and the East, by grafting itself upon the regional schools of Roman architecture, the use of brick became even more extensive than it was at the height of the Roman power. Just as the great organic system of Byzantine construction, both in the disposition of its masses and in the balancing of its static forces, grew out of the Roman vault, so also was derived the manner of employing brick in the wall structure. As Ravenna, Aquileja, Thessalonica, and Constantinople, the great centers took on a continually greater development, tending afterwards to spread toward the most distant regions of the Eastern Empire

[Petr]

That's right: the mainstream view. There is nothing controversial about Justinian shutting down the Academy in Athens. It is widely accepted. Even your ridiculous Christian apologetics sources doesn't deny that.
There's nothing ridiculous about my sources. Fade is just throwing a childish ad hominem tantrum because I've busted through too many of his pretentious claims.

Yet more evidence that Christians are pathological liars.
The only proven liar around here is you.

You have spinned an outrageously exaggerated holohoax story about how Christians supposedly caused the Dark Ages with their persecutions. I'm certainly going to be a "denier" to that.

You have (out of sheer petty wish to provoke) questioned the historical existence of Jesus Christ. Well, as I've shown, His existence has a lot more documentation behind it than the wild-eyed atheist propaganda about Christians burning the library of Alexandria or Justinian banning (all) philosophy.

Orosius, a hostile source in his History Against the Pagans, mentions the destruction of libraries in Alexandria and confirms that it occured. Ammianus confirms the library was in the Serapeum. Bishop Epiphanes as well.
Mind giving us the original citations (like I've done with Malalas) so we could draw our own conclusions?

Ammianus spoke about library in the past tense before Theophilus' raid.

Ammianus describes the temple in glowing terms in his Roman History and says of the library:

In here have been valuable libraries and the unanimous testimony of ancient records declares that seven hundred thousand books, brought together by the unremitting energy of the Ptolemies, were burned in the Alexandrine War when the city was sacked under the dictator Caesar.[95].

http://www.bede.org.uk/Library2.htm

This page deals expertly with all the evidence available - (original citations can be seen with pop-up function) :

http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm

In his aside on the Great Library, he says something of significance which is both an eyewitness detail and suggests that his fellow Christians are in the wrong. He says "…there exist in temples book chests which we ourselves have seen and when these temples were plundered these, we are told, were emptied by our own men in our own time." His statement that there was no other major library in Alexandria at the time of Caesar's expedition is interesting and would seem to count against there being a Serapeum library at that time.

This is Orosius - not any real libraries, just some books in temples that Christians did not even destroy but took for themselves.

The story that Theophilus destroyed a library is clearly a fiction that we can very precisely lay at the door of Edward Gibbon. It is in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that we first find the allegation made. Gibbon seems mainly concerned to clear the Arabs of the responsibility of destroying the library and allows his marked anti-Christian prejudice to cloud his better judgement. His excellent footnotes show he had exactly the same sources as we do but drew the wrong conclusions.


Petr

[Petr]

You are the one who will run through a wall before accepting he has been uttering pure non-sense.
Fade is a phenomenally sore loser.


Petr

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Well...that applies to you too Petr. Never seen someone so irrationally defending Noah´s Ark real existence :p

[Petr]

Well...that applies to you too Petr. Never seen someone so irrationally defending Noah´s Ark real existence :p
I may believe in some things that the mainstream considers eccentric, but I still try to behave rationally. It's sort of other way round with Fade.


Petr

[Macrobius]

False. The leadership of the Lombards were Arians. A good percentage of them as well when they entered Italy.[/i]

You must be used to disputing with persons who deny that it was (heretical) Christian barbarians who destroyed the Western Empire. I am not one of them. The harmful role of Arianism in both gutting the West and currently in the propagation of Modernism are both fully supported by me.

I believe our dispute is party about the significance of Christian leaders vs. rank and file. I think we agree that the vast majority of the early invaders were Arians, with mostly Arian rank-and-file. We only start to disagree materially about the Lombards, who were my initial point.


The Visigoths and Ostrogoths were Arians. The former until 589 in Spain (violent religious persecutions followed). The latter until their demise in the Gothic war with the Byzantines. Italy was ruined in the wars launched by Justinian. The Lombards invaded Italy as a mixed band of Arians and pagans in the late sixth century, were all Christians by the seventh century, and were all Catholics by the eighth century.

Yes, obviously all were eventually Christianised and Catholicised. After they did the damage. I was only speaking at the point of maximum damage, i.e., the time of invasion.


No. The Vandals were Arians. They launched vicious persecutions of Catholics when they arrived in North Africa.


My claim is the Vandals were the first of the invaders to have any significant pagan rank and file at all, as opposed to the thoroughly Arian Goths. It is very definitely agreed that (1) many Vandals were Arians, and (2) that included some or most of their leaders. The claim is that the mass of Vandals were not 100% Arian or anything remotely close, like 70 or 80%. Furthermore, that they were the first of the Germanic tribes (leaving aside Britain and northern Belgium/Gaul, which is a special and distant case for anything 'Eastern') to have a significant pagan element in the rank and file. Even so, the Vandals were *much* more Christian (Arian) than the Lombards.

Any historical claims at this distance are hard to document, but both you and I should now cite real evidence, not second-hand accounts, if we wish to pursue this. I am refering only to the early 5th century (Alaric, the siege of Carthage, the states established at that time), so later on is not relevant.

Burgundians I would have to look up.

[Petr]

You must be used to disputing with persons who deny that it was (heretical) Christian barbarians who destroyed the Western Empire. I am not one of them.
First of all, you should know that Fade will use any possible excuse to set up strawmen that give him a chance to refute arguments that no-one has ever made.

Secondly, like today's Africans, "Christian barbarians" were for centuries more like barbarians than they were Christians.

Eventually Christianity did begin to concretely change their behavior:

The church's resistance to secular bullies was not merely a means of protecting its own power. Its humanitarian and civilizing mission was meant to benefit directly the mass of peasants as well. The barbarian challenge had largely been thrown back by the end of the tenth century, but habits of lawless pillage and private warfare endured. As David Landes writes, "The tenth and eleventh centuries were filled with baronial brigandage, eventually mitigated by popular, Church supported revulsion and outrage that found expression in mass `peace' assemblies; and from the top down, subdued by stronger central government allied with urban interests."39

These peace assemblies, which in some respects resembled modern mass demonstrations, were instigated in south and central France by local bishops, and they quickly spread. In every locale they were led by clergy. Bishop Fulbert of Chartres declared in his lyrical verses: "The spear is made into a pruning hook and the sword into a plowshare; peace enriches the lowly and impoverishes the proud. Hail, Holy Father, and grant salvation to all who love the quiet of peace."

The church's efforts to rein in the lingering warrior spirit even helped create the code of chivalry. Christopher Dawson explains, "The ancient barbarian motive of personal loyalty to the war leader was reinforced by higher religious motives, so that the knight finally becomes a consecrated person, pledged not only to be faithful to his lord, but to be the defender of the Church, the widow and the orphan.... In this way the knight was detached from his barbarian and pagan background and integrated into the social structure of Christian culture."40
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0062.html


Petr

[Sulla the Dictator]

Once again, the foundation of civilization is surplus wealth; wealth that was created by largely illiterate merchants and peasants farmers, not by a small minority of idle monks whose major contribution to society was to "pray" for its well being.


Peasant farmers? No. Merchants, yes. And what you neglect to mention is that in the case of illiterate nobles or merchants, these men employed scribes. Who wrote in Latin. So their literacy is irrelevant to a discussion of the supremacy of the language for higher civilization.

You contradict yourself here. What does the literacy rates of the Medieval world matter? You admire a Greece rife with ignorant helots and an Alexandria stuffed to the gills with slaves and lowborn tradesmen. The Romans were probably the most generally literate people until modern times, and you don't think too highly of them.


This returns us to the question of who was literate in Northern Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries and what role did they play, if any, in the emergence of civilization there. The answer is a small minority of clerics who were capable of reading the Bible the writings of the church fathers;


LOL It wasn't a madrassa, where the texts were memorized. They were literate and conversant in Latin. As were all educated people. Education in Latin, of course, continued to mark the educated from the uneducated until the early 20th century.


people who had rejected the world and were living in monasteries while illiterate farmers were creating virtually all the wealth of society.


Amusing. Because the role of the Church that you describe, ascetic contemplator of otherwordly knowledge, has all the flavor of a Buddhist temple and nothing at all of the character of the ACTUAL Medieval Church. Which was, I'll remind you, active in both foreign and domestic affairs down to the parish level.



This excludes well over 90% of population.


So what? The historical creators of Civilization have nothing to do with the majority. It wasn't the Nile dependant farmer who designed the pyramids, or the olive growing Greek tenant farmer who built the Parthenon, nor was it the latifunda slave who designed the Forum. These people were the classical equivalent of machines.

To credit them is vaguely Marxist. Why not credit your computer for everything our modern civilization achieves.


In other words, the productive sector of population that did virtually all of the work.


Yes, like oxen or tractors. Irrelevant.


The ability to compose poetry or to study letters is nice, but really has nothing whatsoever to do with building cities or doing the work that actually makes civilization possible.

Hmmm....why yes it does. Since the methods of building cities, the methods of agriculture, the knowledge of plants and crops, and the secrets of contruction lie in the language that the minority can read.

And that they can read it is what allows them the comfortable life they live. There is a reason they are in positions of authority, and there is a reason they use the langauge.

[Sulla the Dictator]

There was no civilization to ape or copy in the tenth century.


The remnains of Rome existed all over the place. Not that it matters, since there was no time warp between the 5th and 10th century. The five hundred years inbetween was plenty of time for the population to mimic their betters.


Civilization had ceased to exist hundreds of years before. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the ability to of a small group of people to read the Bible had anything to do with the emergence of civilization in Northern Europe.


You once spoke very highly of a historical event some people call the Carolingian Renaissance. Would you care to talk a little bit about what that was, and who its sponsor was?

Some albino Abbot, I'm sure....something to do with prayer too, no doubt. :p


By the tenth century, Latin wasn't even spoken in Rome itself; the most distinctive feature of Roman civilization.


Yes. There is no doubt that the barbarians destroyed Rome, and the people living amongst the rubble degenerated. That has nothing to do with the proliferation of Roman culture, however.


But somehow the Romans civilized millions of people from beyond the grave, taught them how to live in houses constructed of wood and daub, from beyond the grave half a millennium after their demise.

Well, its not really a debatable matter. Even before the fall of Rome, the Germans living across from the Roman frontier began to mimic Roman building techniques. It doesn't require conquest, Fade, just good sense. If you were a BB noob, I wouldn't need to OCCUPY your computer room and subjegate you in order to get you to use the quote function or italics or bold print. You would see them used, agree that they are useful things for your posts, and learn how to use them yourself.

It would be utterly false if you were to claim, "I had no idea that anyone used these before me. I came up with these uses myself."

[Petyr Baelish]

Atheism is not necessary for scientific procedure in any way. It is just a morbid, disgusting worldview.


This is patently false. Methodological naturalism, which is, in a very real sense, a form of atheism (given that it excludes supernatural entities as causal agents) is absolutely integral to the scientific method and any informed understanding of science.

[Petr]

Just one comment; I am not going to tastelessly resurrect this thread on this sideshow topic.

Methodological naturalism, which is, in a very real sense, a form of atheism (given that it excludes supernatural entities as causal agents) is absolutely integral to the scientific method and any informed understanding of science.
Fanatical atheists like you have really been overplaying your hand lately, like by equating methodological naturalism with atheism:


Have you begun to notice as we continue our transition into the post-wedge world, that the arguments used against the ID Movement are slowly being taken off the table to conveniently make room for the Anti-Religion Movement?

Now, science apparently CAN address supernatural causes.

Now, science and evolution apparently DO lead to atheism.

Now, there is apparently NO difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

http://telicthoughts.com/same-arguments-different-movements/


Wiser unbelievers are horrified by your crudeness - Dawkins narrates:


I had a meeting with Eric Rothschild, who was a lead lawyer in the Pennsylvania evolution case, and he said, “Thank goodness we didn’t call you as a witness,” I would have handed the case to the other side.

http://telicthoughts.com/the-coming-twilight-of-the-post-wedge-world/
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Medieval/Texts/Procopius/SecretHistory.html


Petr

[Petyr Baelish]

Fanatical atheists like you have really been overplaying your hand lately, like by equating methodological naturalism with atheism

Methodological naturalism is a form of atheism. It excludes all supernatural explanations of natural phenomena a priori, which is why your ID gurus found it so threatening, and tried to alter the very defintion of science to escape its implications.

Now, there is apparently NO difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

This is precisely the conflation your beloved Creationist/IDist frauds attempted to create, in order to wedge the patently religious ID doctrine into Pennsylvania classrooms. As I said before, methodological naturalism is a form of atheism in that it completely discounts supernatural entities as causal agents of natural phenomena. That you are (apparently, much like your creationist gurus) incapable of grasping the distinction between methodological and metaphysical naturalism, the reason why methodological naturalism is a necessary component of a functional scientific method, and why this forever excludes ID from the realm of science is something you'll have to resolve yourself.