Western science developed within the context of the Church itself

[struggle4progress]

Western experimental philosophy can be traced back to a monk, Roger Bacon. Copernicus was a churchman; his great work on heliocentrism was published with official Church permission; and it circulated freely for seventy five years before reactionaries within the Church launched a counter-attack, which led to a demand that a handful of minor sentences in the text had to be changed to express a view that heliocentrism was not an absolute fact but merely a convenient computational hypothesis. The great hero of scientific enlightenment, Isaac Newton, harbored many religious beliefs that most of us would regard as bizarre

When Heiberg, in 1900, famously found the text of Archimedes' letter to Erastosthenes -- describing how he actually discovered the formula for the volume of sphere, by decomposing it into lines and mentally weighing the lines on an imaginary lever -- it was easy to sneer, because the text had been idiotically overwritten in medieval times by a monk who wanted vellum for a prayerbook, so that Heiberg was reduced to reconstructing Archimedes' letter painfully, letter by letter. But the fact that monk found the text readily at hand, in a library he could access, means: someone had saved it there. Nor is it mere conjection to point out that Churchmen, even in medieval times, had been interested in such texts: the Benedictine monk, Adelard of Bath, had translated some Euclid from Arabic texts in the twelfth century

Similar remarks might be made about science and (say) Islamic civilization: classical Islam was not hostile to science, though one can certainly find anti-scientific zealots in Islamic history, just as one can find them in Christian history.

[damntexdem]

1. Because scholarship was largely limited to churchmen.

But churchmen scientists often had to fight the institution not just to research, but sometimes to keep their lives -- and some lost that fight. Good Catholic Galileo was supported by cardinals; but he still had a hard go with the Church.

But science did not take off until non-clerics could be educated and conduct their science independently of any religious institution. And even churchmen like Mendel did their work largely independently of the fact that they were clerics.

[trotsky]

8. An uninformed, illiterate populace was ideal for the church.

Don't want them reading the bible on their own, now do you? You filthy commoners just sit down and let us tell you what it says.

[struggle4progress]

9. For the possibility of general education, one should perhaps thank Gutenberg's

moveable type: earlier communication media were prohibitively expensive

[BurtWorm]

2. Follow the arc of scientific progress in the West before the rise of the Roman church and after.

That will tell you all you need to know about the effect of Christianity on science in the west.

[struggle4progress]

10. post hoc ergo propter hoc

[BurtWorm]

11. You don't think there was a direct correlation between the Age of Faith

and the decline of Greek science?

[struggle4progress]

12. First, one may question how much of a scientific culture the Greeks actually had.

We certainly owe them an enormous intellectual debt for the invention of syllogistic reasoning, which appears fullgrown and without much precendent in works like Euclid's Elements. Nor is there much doubt that the Greeks did some careful observational science (leading, for examnple, to works like those of Aristarhus) or some very limited experimental work. But mainstream ancient Greek science is contaminated thoroughly by idealistic tendencies and a belief that rationalization is the same as explanation. Moreover, the Greek culture did not produce much of high quality after the Roman conquest: Proclus, for example, is interesting to read -- but he is not of the order intellectually of the earlier Greek giants like Archimedes

[BurtWorm]

33. Aristotle. Epicurus, Democritus, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Empedocles, Euclid

No, not much of a science culture there.

[Soylent Brice]

34. !!

:spray:

[struggle4progress]

36. It is difficult, on any modern view to regard Empedocles, Democritus, or Epicurus

as scientists. They are speculative. The school of Pythagoras sought to understand the world in terms of numerological mysticism; again this is not science, on any modern view. Aristotle wrote an ancient version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica: it is thorough, well-organized, and logical -- but he regularly provides "explanations" that are mere rationalizations, not merely wrong (in the sense of leading to incorrect predictions) but without any experimental basis

Reread carefully what I wrote in the previous post: it is accurate

[BurtWorm]

37. Democritus and Epicurus (especially) are pioneers in the sort of naturalism

that leads down through the Renaissance and Enlightenment to modern science. As far as I know, there was nothing like it in the world before then, this way of looking at the universe that strips away the supernatural to get at what really goes on in nature.

[struggle4progress]

42. " ... The work of Democritus has survived only in secondhand reports,

sometimes unreliable or conflicting ... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democritus/

So it is really impossible to know for certain what he taught, but what remains is not scientific but idealistic and speculative, like much of the rest of Greek science

[struggle4progress]

43. Epicurus is a speculative inventor of explanations, but he does not

subject his explanations to practical tests:

... The Epicurean universe consists of but two elements, atoms and void ... Since their constituent atoms are constantly moving, macro-objects are constantly shedding them, and it is by the intermediary of these shed atoms that remote objects make themselves known to the senses ... Certain .. emissions
are the source of odors .. and others create auditory sensations ... And “thin, hollow films” of atoms—eidola4—which retain the shape of the object shedding
them, continuously form around macro-objects, travel swiftly through the air, and enter the eye, stimulating visual sensations ... Bailey and Rist note that ancient commentators attributed to the Epicureans the view that eidola must become smaller as they travel ... The longer the transit, the further
would the process of diminution be carried: hence it results that we do actually ‘see’ a distant tower the same size as a small stone close at hand ...
Problems in Epicurus' Theory of Vision
http://philpapers.org/rec/ANDPIE

Like much of ancient Greek "science," this is not only attractive for its logical structure, but also unattractive because the rationalization so seizes the imagination of its proponents, that they do not even contemplate a careful experimental investigation into the theory

[ChadwickHenryWard]

45. Oh wow,

Your post had me laughing aloud.

I think you're missing the point. Even if the rise of Christendom did not squelch the curiosity of the Greeks, you can't deny that there was a period of Christian-dominated thought that was inimical to science.

[moobu2]

3. What a laod of crap

science developed in spite of the Church would be more accurate.

[Warpy]

4. The most accurate is to say

science developed within the church and in spite of Rome.

Most of the earliest scientists were churchmen.

[old mark]

5. Religious people are very prone to giving themselves credit

where they deserve blame.

They love congratulations and praise for their "great works", conveniently forget the millions of people killed in the name of religion, especially christianity, for thousands of years. They feel "persecuted" idfyou tell them the truth about this, but they love feeling persecuted anyway.

mark

[struggle4progress]

13. If the Church were nothing but a constant impediment to rational thought and the

experimental method, how did the Western world get science at all? The Europeans and Mediterreans through most of their history knew nothing whatsoever of most of the continents in the world, so had no influence there: if the only major institution through most of their history was simply and uniformly opposed to knowledge, how did they obtain scientific dominance?

The history of Western science must surely be a complicated phenomenon, involving many issues, and if one wants to understand it sloganeering won't shed much light

[HeresyLives]

6. Surely, you jest.

[trotsky]

7. LMAO

But the fact that monk found the text readily at hand, in a library he could access, means: someone had saved it there.

Yeah, for the sole purpose of scraping off the ink that contained the scribblings of heretics and heathens, to be re-used as "blank" paper. Couldn't exactly run down to Staples for a ream of it back then.

Oh praise be to the wondrous church through which all knowledge (that they managed to miss suppressing or destroying) flowed.

:sarcasm:

[struggle4progress]

14. In the medieval period, a number of Greek texts were translated into Latin

Euclid in Medieval Europe
by Menso Folkerts
... First let us distinguish between translations of Euclid's Elements into Latin directly from the Greek and translations from the Arabic (which in turn had come from the Greek). We begin with the direct translations. The most important was that of Boethius <aka St. Severinus> , which has been made in about the year 500 ... http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/folkerts/folkerts.html

The Vatican Library & Renaissance Culture
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/math.html

[trotsky]

15. I suppose when you can't address the example at hand...

you have no recourse but to wave your hands, saying "Look over here! Look over here!"

Face it: the only reason that book was preserved was so that its paper could be re-used. The church had no use whatsoever for what was printed on it.

[struggle4progress]

16. ... Moses of Bergamo was one of these scholarly Italians in twelfth-century Constantinople; he is

the first Westerner known to have collected Greek manuscripts in great volume. If his own testimony is true, then the hunt for Greek manuscripts began two centuries before Guarino of Verona and Giovanni Aurispa. The Greek libraries of southern Italy were even closer to the Latins than those in Constantinople. Casole in Apulia, Carbone in the Basilicata, Stilo in Calabria, and Messina in Sicily had the most notable monastic libraries of the Italo-Greeks; the Cathedral Library of Rossano is still in possession of its cimelia, the famous sixth-century Greek purple evangelary ("Codex purpureus Rossanensis"), which was not "rediscovered" there by scholars until 1879 and which recalls the significance of southern Italy for the transmission of Greek texts. Not before the manuscript research of recent years has the astonishing volume and the high quality (manuscripts of the classics!) of Italo-Greek book production and transmission come to light. Manuscript by manuscript, a "translatio studii" from Byzantium to the West appears, whose line of textual transmission threads its way directly from the Macedonian Renaissance in tenth-century Constantinople, to the court library of the Norman and Hohenstaufen rulers of southern Italy, to the papal library of 1300; the Italian Renaissance picked up this thread as its starting point.

This hoard of Greek books first appears in 1295 at the end of a catalogue of the papal library: "Item Dyonisius super celesticam Ierarchicam in greco. Item Simplicius super phisicam Aristotilis . . ." With the exception of Dionysius the Areopagite (characteristically placed at the beginning of the list) and one other work, the twenty-three volumes all contain works of natural science and philosophy - a remarkable collection for the papacy ...

http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/Walter_Berschin_16.html

[darkstar3]

18. And what use did the church make of these manuscripts?

Did they collect them because they were interested in learning, imparting, and advancing on the knowledge contained in those scripts, or did they collect them in order to make sure they were read in the proper light?

[trotsky]

19. I suppose when you can't address the example at hand...

you have no recourse but to wave your hands, saying "Look over here! Look over here!"

[struggle4progress]

21. You blur together many different people over an immense span of time,

pick out the idiots and reactionaries, and then claim everyone was an idiotic reactionary. The Church, from the fall of the Roman Empire until the modern era, was a huge institution: it harbored much of the learning that remained in Europe, and there were a number of people within it who were interested in the best learning available in their time

[trotsky]

22. And you do EXACTLY the same thing....

picking out just a few examples of texts that happened to be preserved (instead of destroyed or overwritten) and want to believe that it is only out of the goodness of the church that we have ANYTHING left of ancient knowledge.

Too bad you just can't grasp your hypocrisy.

[struggle4progress]

23. One difference is: I actually give examples, with links. Another difference is:

I don't make sweeping generalizations

[trotsky]

29. LMAO

That pretty much sums up Christianity's attitude toward ancient works. If they can destroy it and reuse the components for themselves, great. Leave a bit behind so it looks good.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

46. I don't know what blame the Church has for that.

The iron bracings were needed for new construction. What specifically has Christianity or Christendom to do with the desecration of the Flavian Amphitheatre?

[darkstar3]

17. So what do you want, a cookie?

In medieval times, there was only one place where anyone interested in knowledge was forced to go: the church.

There were all kinds of occupations for laypeople who wanted to get by in life...Farmer, tradesman, roaming mercenary...but if you wanted knowledge, if you wanted to pursue scholarship, you could only go to the church.

Even the rich lords of the land needed the church for knowledge.

There are many reasons why the church would be the only entity preserving and/or pursuing knowledge. Do you think they did it because they wanted to advance that knowledge? I don't, and the reason why is right there in the OP: They chose to destroy scientific knowledge in the pursuit of their own theological ends. Your own article shows that the church revised a scientific document because it didn't fit with church doctrine. The fact that it took them seventy-five years to do so is irrelevant, they still squashed scientific knowledge in favor of doctrine.

So if the church was the only entity in medieval times with knowledge, why should we reward them for hoarding, controlling, and destroying it? Sure, some advancements were made during that time, but only thanks to the dedicated effort of remarkable individuals, and NOT the policy, structure, or actions of the church as a whole.

[struggle4progress]

20. What kind of a cookie is it?

[DeSwiss]

24. So?

While I'm more than sure that The Church would love to somehow edge it's way into the limelight among the things that are real, tangible and of value, in it's never-ending efforts the somehow gain support for their own reality. Which would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic. And I'm sure that they'd love to apply some of that luster and shine from science's reputation for honesty and integrity and spread it all over themselves to try and cover up the smell of decay and rankness. Oh yeah, of this I'm sure. But that would definitely be putting lipstick on a pig, now wouldn't it? Or maybe better put, lipstick onto the hardened and fetid carcass of a dead religion. DOA. So I sorry, but there won't any of that either. The Church must be hoist by it's own petard, once again. But it was a nice try. However, I'm afraid that The Church is still a hellhole of putrid, stinking inequity and should be outlawed at first opportunity. But that's just my answer to the problem, I'm sure there are plenty of others who could weigh-in similarly.

The Church, being predicated upon fairy tales and the stolen mythology and fables of others, has always preferred for science to be close by. It loves to be in the company of its betters, every chance it gets. However, science can neither verify for it, nor support religion's fanciful tales that are contained within the bible. So it's no help there. And any "context" that the Church lends to all this is purely incidental, and only due to the fact they unless supporters were found among the monarchy, then The Church back in it's heyday was the only game in town, so to speak. And they were the only other one's with a potential stake in supporting education and the sciences. Knowledge being power, and all that.

But we won't forget that "Other Context" of The Church's, now will we? They are also responsible for The Inquisition and the theft of property from countless of its victims of that atrocity. And it is at this point that The Chruch showed it's greatest interest in the sciences. Particularly the science of engineering -- as it had them to developed:


The Pear (yes, this was stuck in the place you think it was}


the Jesus Stretcher


and Strappado Torture

....just to name a few of those wonderful feats of religious engineering aplomb, along with a number of other party favors that they used to entertain themselves with, while on their Crusade of love for Jesus -- and of stealing the people blind.




- Now that's kind of science that is more to The Church's liking. It's practical science, that's results oriented.....

on edit: addendum

[struggle4progress]

25. The nastiness of human beings is almost enough to make one believe in Original Sin:

one finds it in many times and places

If you have a taste for that sort of thing, you can easily find photos on the web of people sawed in half in imperial China, burned alive on American streets, massacred without cause in El Salvador or Cambodia or the Philippines, burned by napalm in Vietnam; you can find photos of amputees from the colonial Congo and of death squad victims in Colombia; you find find the bones of the Douaumont ossuaryin short, you can find example after example after example from the modern era, with absolutely no church connection

It is not, and has not been, my contention that Church history is free of criminals, lunatics, or idiots. It is my contention that the kind of crap you spew ("That's the kind of science to The Church's liking!") is deliberately misleading and intended merely to provoke reaction rather than to shed light

[darkstar3]

26. And it is my contention

that your argument here is nothing more than cherry picking in a futile attempt to polish a turd.

You can attempt to absolve the church of its responsibility for the creation of such things as 'The Judas Cradle', but no matter what little good the church might have done for science in medieval times, that doesn't paint over the fact that they were in the business of shredding the asses of heretics.

And BTW, your entire previous post does nothing to answer the argument DeSwiss made, but rather attempts to attack him as a nasty person with a taste for violence. That's called ad hom, and it doesn't constitute an argument.

[struggle4progress]

28. You have an ugly habit of putting words into other people's mouths, in an ugly way

All those who lived hundreds of years ago have long gone to their graves, the innocent and the guilty alike. It is not within my power to bring any of them to trial for judgment or absolution: they are dead and buried, lo these many many years. The best that any of us can hope to do with respect to vanished times is to learn lessons from them that the participants themselves might not have learned in living through those times. To learn from those who went before, one must know something about them -- mere idiotic sloganeering will do do

[darkstar3]

31. So,

no answer at all to the fact that you are cherry picking, and more ad hom. :eyes:

[trotsky]

30. "cherry picking in a futile attempt to polish a turd"

BINGO!

[DeSwiss]

27. Shedding light is what you're doing, eh?

Well then carry on my sanctimonious sanctified friend. Don't let the facts or me get in the way of your attempted whitewash.


- Have a nice day.

[TZ]

32. Yes and the church so warmly embraced germ theory it took how

long for them to drop the "demons cause" disease bullshit, which actually STILL exists today! (AIDS is gods punishment etc etc). While people within a religous organization may have been science minded, religion has NEVER inspired any great scientific breakthroughs...Or am I missing a Pope Pasteur or Cardinal Darwin or Bishop Jenner somewhere...

[struggle4progress]

35. Pasteur was a practicing Catholic

[Leontius]

38. I appreciate your effort to educate but

I believe the effort is futile ignorance, half truth and outright lies suit their purpose and they will not abandon them to actually study the whole truth of the march of knowledge and science and the roadblocks religious and secular in nature placed in its path. Their agenda and prejudice is plain and will not accept any question of their truth.

[struggle4progress]

39. Yeah, but I learn a lot from it. The brilliant chemist Liebig, who also savagely attacked

proponents of the theory that yeast was alive and played a role in fermentation, was one of Pasteur's opponents in the war over the germ theory of disease: despite his brilliance in chemistry, Liebig was a nasty and rigid man, who did not like to have his authority challenged and who (unfortunately for science) was sometimes spectacularly wrong as he set out ruining the careers of people who disagreed with him

[laconicsax]

40. So what?

Are you making the claim that the Church, which still advances the demon theory of disease, played a positive role in Pasteur's discoveries?

Pasteur was lucky he didn't live 250 years earlier. If he had, the Church might have given him the Galileo treatment.

[struggle4progress]

44. Trotsky suggested the Church opposed the germ theory of disease; but, in fact, the Catholics

were very proud of Pasteur

[laconicsax]

47. Again, so what?

Pasteur's accomplishments aren't the Church's.

Use your own logic applied to the Inquisition--you can't credit the Church for an Pasteur's accomplishments while absolving them of blame for the Inquisition. Either the Church gets the credit for the former and the blame for the latter, or neither credit nor blame for either.

[struggle4progress]

48. So "Church opposed germ theory of disease" seems to be nonsense.

[darkstar3]

49. You're doing the exact same thing here

that Christians always do when good and bad things happen to them.

Why is it that when good things happen to every Christian I know, they say 'praise God', but when bad things happen, they blame themselves or other humans. God never takes the blame for cancer, lupus, staph, diabetes, and a myriad of other possibly lethal and definitely debilitating diseases.

It doesn't work that way. If God gets to take credit for the good shit that happens on his omnipotent watch, then he must also bear the blame for the bad shit that happens on his omnipotent watch. Without responsibility, there can be no credit.

Therefore, if the Catholic Church can somehow take credit for Pasteur's advancements, it must then be responsible for the actions of its adherents, and ergo it is also responsible for the Spanish Inquisition, and many other things besides.

[struggle4progress]

50. Actually, all I have done is to take on the canard that "religion is incompatible with science"

Western science arose in predominantly religious societies; the Church, as a general rule, did not oppose it, though one can certainly find in many times and places various anti-scientific people among the religious. Sweeping assertions, such as "the Church opposed the germ theory of disease," are simply false

I'm not sure how your post relates to my posts in this thread. I have not attempted to credit the Church for the achievements of (say) Pasteur: I simply pointed out that he was a Catholic and that (contrary to the idea that the Church opposed Pasteur) one can find evidence that many churchmen were quite proud of Pasteur's accomplishments

Your attempt to draw a link between Pasteur, or the germ theory of disease, on the one hand, and (say) the Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand, seems rather weak to me, and I do not think it contributes much to historical understanding

[darkstar3]

51. False.

As has been demonstrated repeatedly in this thread, the church often stood opposed to scientific progress, and many times took it upon itself to collect and destroy works of scientific merit. This proof is indisputable, and some of it even exists in your own OP.

Now, some of your posts in this thread have mostly been about praising the church for its role in assisting or codifying science. See #9, #14, and #16. It is clear that you are being very careful and deliberate in choosing your words, so that you can't be caught outright claiming that the church helped scientific progression, but the very apparent theme of every one of your posts in this thread is that we should be thanking the church for its contributions to science.

As for your current claim that all you are doing is attacking the canard that "religion is incompatible with science", your very own OP shows that the church often stood in the way of scientific advancement, and more has been shown in this thread to back up that case.

Now, think for a moment about the word 'incompatible' and how we use it with regard to computers today. For example, iMovie is completely incompatible with Windows. Given enough time and the right tools, you can mostly make iMovie work in Windows, but it won't be able to do nearly as much. Similarly, science is incompatible with religion. Given enough time and the right people, you can make some scientific progress inside of a religious framework, but you won't be able to do nearly as much.

The fact that a few good men managed to do anything right makes no difference at all with regard to the church's opposition to science, except to make those men heroes in spite of their religion.

As for my link between Pasteur on the one hand and the Spanish Inquisition on the other, it's dirt simple, and bolded in my original statement: Without responsibility, there can be no credit.

[rrneck]

54. the Church, as a general rule, did not oppose it...

Until it started to cost them money. The nastiness exhibited by the church had nothing to do with faith or god or satan. It was about money.

When people begin to discover they can do for themselves what they had been paying the church to do then the state supported brutality ramps up.

A personal, invisible, unprovable and amorphous god is always a threat to any religion's monopoly status. Science and religion only seem incompatible because religious leaders have to gin up some claim of objective proof about faith so they can have a product to sell. In truth, they're selling people something they've already got.

[trotsky]

55. No, I didn't.

Read your own thread.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

67. I'm sure I didn't read you right.

You must be thinking of the Pentecostal churches. The RCC doesn't talk about demons any more. Except for anything involving stem cells or cloning, they're actually pretty good in this day and age on science. Or, you know, AIDS. The Pope did intentionally lie about condoms spreading AIDS. Which is, you know, kind of evil, but other than that, they're okay. They endorse evolution and the proper age of the Universe. Demons just don't make sense in that context. That would just be silly.

[moobu2]

71. Doesn’t the Catholic church still practice exorcisms?

They only use science insofar as it gives their other ignorant superstitions legitimacy.

[Silent3]

41. Chemistry grew out of alchemy, astronomy out of astrology.

What's your point?

[ChadwickHenryWard]

52. This has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever heard:

"...a handful of minor sentences in the text had to be changed to express a view that heliocentrism was not an absolute fact but merely a convenient computational hypothesis."

So they only changed the parts they found doctrinally objectionable. And they are to be lauded for this? This is more than a little silly. Imagine the following claim: "Hitler is to be lauded for not killing all citizens of Germany - he only removed those citizens he found objectionable." It would do well to note that although the changes were allegedly minor, they were still factually inaccurate.

The mention of the Archimedes palimpsest is a bizarre inclusion. It makes exactly the opposite point: that the Church generally had no interest in preservation of scientific and mathematical knowledge. The fact that Archimedes' text was erased and replaced with something useless (a prayer book) tends to suggest that the work was only preserved because the medium (vellum) was valued, not the content of the work.

Even the mention of Adelard of Bath only serves to show that instead of being always outright hostile to scientific learning, they were sometimes tolerant of it. You have failed to show the Church encouraging or furthering scientific knowledge in any way.

[struggle4progress]

58. Of course, it is silly on any modern view, but the required changes did not affect

the scientific content whatsoever

With respect to the Archimedes palimpsest:

... Paleography .. can .. approximately date .... The Archimedes manuscript .. in the second half of the tenth century .. at Constantinople ... one place with a .. tradition of copying .. texts from antiquity ... Archimedes texts can be associated with .. Leo the Geometer .. cousin of John VII Morocharzianus, who was Patriarch in Constantinople between 837 and 843. In the 820’s, Leo was giving private instruction in Constantinople ... He .. took up the charge of .. Emperor Theophilus (829-842) to educate the public in the church of the Forty Martyrs in Constantinople .... In the Late 850’s .. Bardas, founded a school .. under Leo’s direction .. Two surviving manuscripts containing texts by Archimedes contain inscriptions praising Leo the Geometer ... But the years after the sack of Constantinople were not years in which there was a great need for the advanced mathematical treatises of Archimedes ... In 2002, Professor John Lowden of the Courtauld Institute, using Ultra-violet light, managed to decipher a colophon, on the bottom of folio 1 verso of the manuscript, which contains the date of April 13, 1229 ... http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/palimpsest_history1.html

[darkstar3]

59. You know, you're right,

they DIDN'T change the scientific content, just tried to invalidate his entire set of research by stating that it was 'just an idea'. There is exactly no difference between what they did there and what Kansas and Texas have tried to do with regard to evolution presented in the textbooks in their public schools. It is a disgusting attempt to discredit science in order to benefit faith, and there is absolutely no excuse for it.

Edit: emphasis.

[struggle4progress]

62. No, the church didn't object to Copernicus' work at all until it had freely

circulated for seventy-five years, and the objections occurred as part of the reactionary counter-Reformation. The objectors were unable to find much after loudly screaming, and they were beaten back to a position of complaining only about some non-essential philosophical points. With these removed, the text could still freely circulate, and anyone could examine Copernicus' mathematical model unmolested. It may be worth noting that Brahe had by that time proposed an alternate model, vectorially equivalent to Copernicus' model: in Brahe's model, the sun orbits the earth, and all other planets orbit the sun. If all orbits really were perfect circles, as both Copernicus and Brahe proposed, the only way to distinguish the two models would have been by observing a seasonal parallax for a star -- but that measurement was not accomplished until several hundred years later

[darkstar3]

63. From. your. own. OP.

to express a view that heliocentrism was not an absolute fact but merely a convenient computational hypothesis.

Yup, and evolution isn't an absolute fact either, merely a convenient explanation for the allegorical story of creation. :puke:

Haven't you had enough of this old and faulty argument yet?

[ChadwickHenryWard]

66. It absolutely did change the scientific content,

by contending that everything held therein was not true. I don't know why on Earth you should ever think that that is of no significance.

All that information is well and good, but the significant fact of the story is that the only extant copy of the work was intentionally erased, pursuant to the the judgment that the work was worth less than the paper it was printed on. The fact that is was preserved for some time is laudable, but becomes insignificant in light of the fact that it was intentionally erased. So it was preserved for some time, and of interest to some, but the relevant fact is that, when a conflict came up between scientific truth and religious scripture, it was religion that won out.

[struggle4progress]

73. "the only extant copy of the work was intentionally erased"???

your hallucinations don't qualify as history

[onager]

53. Completely ass-backwards "reasoning."

The last recorded astronomomical observation by the Greeks was by Proclus in AD 475, after which there are no recorded observations for over a thousand years, until Copernicus in 1543.

A similar gap exists in many sciences.

From The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman.

Freeman is an expert in ancient Greek and Roman scholarship. His book is an amazing indictment of Holy Ignorance.

Even believers will probably like Freeman. The foreword of his latest book attacks Richard Dawkins and "militant atheism."

[struggle4progress]

56. The date of Easter being set in the early fourth century as the first Sunday after

the first full moon after the vernal equinox, it is risible to assert no one in all Christendom heeded any astronomical phenomena from the late fifth century until the time of Copernicus. Ptolemy was available in Europe in the twelfth century

[darkstar3]

57. Or MAYBE they just decided to co-opt the Pagan festival

after which Easter is actually named? :shrug:

[struggle4progress]

60. Since Christianity began as a splinter cult in Judaism, and since the

major Christian holy day was near Passover, which is reckoned on a solar-lunar calendar, the formula "first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox" is obviously an effort to use solar-lunar events to retain a date near Passover and with a tie to the ancient Hebrew seven-day count

[darkstar3]

61. I suggest that you research the original Pagan holiday

The Christians kept the date and name verbatim because they wanted to do away with the original celebration and overwrite it with their own. Which is why there are years when Passover is over a month away from Easter.

[Leontius]

64. So that explains the different date for Christmas

in the Eastern Church than in the Western Church, different bunch of pagans to usurp the holiday from right, not the different way of calculating dates.

[darkstar3]

65. That's a false parallel

and you know it. The Eastern Church uses the Julian Calendar, so all of their dates are different. It may interest you to know that Resurrection Day falls on the exact same day as Passover in the Eastern Church, because they were insistent on sticking to the original script.

As for Easter in the Western churches, they co-opted wholesale the Pagan celebration of Eostre. German Pagans feasted in celebration of Eostre on the Vernal Equinox, which they could only mark accurately by lunar calculation, or full moons.

[onager]

68. Confirmed, since I just spent 4 years among Eastern Xians...

The original Eastern Xians - the Coptic Xians in Egypt, who were brutally suppressed by the "proper" Xians in Constantinople for a couple of centuries. (See "Arian Heresy.")

The Copts celebrate Easter on a different week than Western Xians. I will never forget Coptic Easter Week of 2006, when a huge religious riot blew up near my neighborhood in Alexandria and the Peaceful Believers were attacking each other virtually on sight.

That's one of the saddest things I've ever seen. My daily work commute went past the Coptic church at the center of those riots twice a day (All Saints' Church, in English). Until that giant shit-storm struck, I saw Muslims and Xians side-by-side every morning, talking, laughing, buying groceries and sending their kids off to school. Together.

I'll also never forget looking at a steel roll-down door in front of a Muslim-owned store, and wondering what made the weird marks in the metal. Then it occurred to me - an axe. Somebody was so crazed, they attacked the door with a f!cking axe to get at their neighbors.

OK, enough happy memories. On to Potted History.

According to history/legend - the Copts were treated so badly by the church in Constantinople, they cut a deal with the Muslims to surrender Alexandria in 641 CE.

In 640, the Muslims had conquered the old Roman Fortress Babylon in modern Cairo (which you can still visit on your tour of Egypt).

But Alexandria was a tougher nut to crack. It had hundreds of fresh-water cisterns underground, a nearly limitless supply of food from the nearby Nile Delta, as well as seafood from Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean.

Invasion from the north (the Mediterranean) faced one of the most treacherous coastlines in the world. (A few centuries later, the Crusaders would learn that the hard way.) From the south, invaders had to deal with the desert, then Lake Mareotis, a huge freshwater lake mentioned in the Iliad.

Invading from the west meant crossing the Libyan/Western Desert, which wasn't that easy for Rommel and Montgomery even in the 20th century. And coming in from the east meant a march thru very unfriendly territory, the Nile Delta, providing plenty of warning to Alexandria. (French king Louis IX learned that the hard way in 1249 - the Egyptians cut his supply lines/escape route, and ransomed him for a huge amount of money.)

The Muslim commander besieging Alexandria in 641 was Amr ibn Al-Asi, a strange combination of military leader, poet and philosopher. Again according to history/legend, he promised protection to Alexandria's Coptic and Jewish communities, and strictly lived up to his word.

According to one story, when Al-Asi caught two soldiers "requistioning" supplies from the locals in Alexandria, he had them hanged in front of his whole army. Pour encourager les autres, as Mr. Voltaire liked to say.

Enough history, and I am drunk. If sober, I would have made even less sense...

[Leontius]

69. Nope , sorry wrong

Furthermore, because the Julian calendar's lunar age is now 4 to 5 days behind the mean lunation's, Julian Easter always follows the start of Passover. The cumulative effect of the errors in the Julian calendar's solar year and the lunar age has led to the often-repeated, but false, belief that the Julian cycle includes an explicit rule requiring Easter always to follow Jewish Passover. (Quoted from the wikipedia article on date of Easter)

[darkstar3]

70. Oh, boy....

1. Wikipedia is not always accurate, and using it as a source of information is always very suspect.
2. So I was off by a few days thanks to the fact that I don't actually follow the faith of the Eastern Church. The point of my post still stands.
3. For you to seize on one little piece of incorrect minutiae in this post and attack it rather than actually answer the substance and point of the information just shows that you are desperate to avoid the truth that Easter started as a Pagan holiday.

[The Magistrate]

72. The Real Contribution, Sir, Is A Subtler Thing, Often Overlooked

That scholarship was a clerical monopoly in the Medieval period, to the point that a demonstration one was literate was considered proof at law of being a clergyman, guaranteed just about any intellectual work would be carried out under the penumbra of the Church. Thus, the fact that various 'proto-scientists' in the West were clergy, or availed themselves of documents preserved by the Church, is meaningless.

The genuine, hugely important contribution of the Church to the development of modern science in the West was the idea of natural revelation, condensed in the thought of St. Aquinas, that God was revealed in both Nature and Scripture, and that to study either was to study God. He believed this in a perfect confidence that the study of either revelation would confirm the other, which has not proved to be so, but the view set up the idea of testing alternate explanations, while making respectable and even holy the close study of the natural world. It is the true germ of science as we know it today.