Has Religion Slowed Scientific Progress Through History?

Could you explain why?

Look up what the scientific method is - it has nothing to do with religion. Same with science as a whole.

If you think that science is "against" religion or whatever, that's fine. But science does not "define itself" to be "against" religion. Religion isn't mentioned in any good definition or description of science that I've ever seen.
 
@Warpus, scientists themselves wouldn't think of it in that way, but nonetheless that's what happens, because our very definition of religion functions as the reverse imprint of what "science" does (which is why people struggle to come up with coherent definitions for "religion"). From this point of view "Scientific method" isn't important in itself, but rather how we classify scientists and the body of observations and theories they have accumulated about the universe.
 
Pangur Bán;11337669 said:
@Warpus, scientists themselves wouldn't think of it in that way, but nonetheless that's what happens, because our very definition of religion functions as the reverse imprint of what "science" does (which is why people struggle to come up with coherent definitions for "religion"). From this point of view "Scientific method" isn't important in itself, but rather how we classify scientists and the body of observations and theories they have accumulated about the universe.

Your initial claim was that "science defines itself to be against religion"

That is just nonsense; science does no such thing, even if it could.

If you now want to say that "religion defines itself to be against science" I'd probably also disagree. Science and religion are doing their own things, independent of eachother - That there is some conflict doesn't mean that one is defining itself to be opposite of the other.
 
If you think that science and religion are naturally distinct and uninvolved spheres, how do you explain the fact that no other culture outside of post-Medieval Europe has independently developed this sort of categorical distinction in the first place? Why did it only occur to Renaissance Italians, and not to 1st century Greeks, 10th century Iranians, or 14th century Mexica to group certain kinds of thought and knowledge together into the family of "religion" and other kinds into "science", when all of them had more than enough of each for such a distinction to be possible?
 
If you think that science and religion are naturally distinct and uninvolved spheres, how do you explain the fact that no other culture outside of post-Medieval Europe has independently developed this sort of categorical distinction in the first place? Why did it only occur to Renaissance Italians, and not to 1st century Greeks, 10th century Iranians, or 14th century Mexica to group certain kinds of thought and knowledge together into the family of "religion" and other kinds into "science", when all of them had more than enough of each for such a distinction to be possible?

Of course the history of the two have lots of overlap, but I still don't see how you could with a straight face claim that science defines itself to be "against" religion.
 
It's not just a case of overlap, it's the fact that no culture outside of post-Medieval Europe having developed the distinction in the first place. That's a distinction which you seem to accept as sensible, even self-evident, so why did it never occur to any other cultures to make the distinction?
 
Of course the history of the two have lots of overlap, but I still don't see how you could with a straight face claim that science defines itself to be "against" religion.
Well, science wasn't defined in its modern, current, form until the 19th c. to start with, by people like William Whewell and Auguste Comte. But roughly speaking, it was defined as a better knowledge system, one making religion obsolete.

Loads of 19th c. scientists did tend to define themselves and their activity as a better, as in truer, alternative system of knowledge when compared to religion.

Thomas Huxley defined "agnostic" to self-describe after being hammered by the CoE for over a decade for "atheism", but he certainly was against organised religion.

The German evolutionist zoologist Ernst Haeckel defined a whole damn materialistic belief system, his "monism", to specifically supplant all kinds of religion. That wasn't seen as entirely daft at the time. Comte's followers even formed "Positivist Churches" with sermons and hymn singing, but certainly no god. The Brazilian Positivist Church is still around and has put a statue on Comte's grave in Paris. And as a philosophy Comtean positivism was The Philosophy in all of South America in the 19th c.

Ernest Renan in a famous quote, that did apply to a great many 19th c. "men of science", self-descried as someone who had "built his science on the ruins of his childhood faith".

Late Victorian age anthropological pioneer E.B. Tyler and his successor Frazer both adherred to a view of human knowledge (vaguely Comtean possibly) as progressing from magic, to religion, to science, meaning they positioned these as necessary progressive steps in a teleology of human knowledge according to which magic and religion both were essentially just modern science, but progressing from sets of faulty premises.

That last bit was reasonably widely generalisable for the 19th c.
 
Look up what the scientific method is - it has nothing to do with religion. Same with science as a whole.
There is by now a pretty solid sociology of science, the main point of which is a stock of evidence of how the scientific method has next to bugger all to do with actual research.

Scientists engaged in experimental research, in particular, engage in practial problem solving, with nothing that seems to differentiate what they are actually doing from any other kind of practical knowledge.

It's to a point where a rough conceptual distinction has been introduced between "science" (mostly ideological constructs) and "research" (what scientists really do).
 
Your initial claim was that "science defines itself to be against religion"

That is just nonsense; science does no such thing, even if it could.

If you now want to say that "religion defines itself to be against science" I'd probably also disagree. Science and religion are doing their own things, independent of eachother - That there is some conflict doesn't mean that one is defining itself to be opposite of the other.

You've not really grasped the point I was making, which is my fault. Let me rephrase again ... neither science nor religion actively define themselves against the other; neither are independent agents in any case, but rather cultural constructs. What I am saying is that both constructs are dependent on each other for their meaning in our culture ... it has nothing to do with "conflict" as such nor what scientists think they are doing. Also, what Verbose says! :)
 
It's not just a case of overlap, it's the fact that no culture outside of post-Medieval Europe having developed the distinction in the first place. That's a distinction which you seem to accept as sensible, even self-evident, so why did it never occur to any other cultures to make the distinction?

Why did it never occur to the cultures of the new world to make use of the wheel, its shape being so self-evident?

Things develop upon other things. Ideas can only follow after some prior ideas. Science as an "autonomous" area is part of what makes the modern world modern, a different era. It was invented once, perhaps, in a single place (very much arguable, but I'll admit it) - then it spread. Now it's all over the world.

There is by now a pretty solid sociology of science, the main point of which is a stock of evidence of how the scientific method has next to bugger all to do with actual research.

Scientists engaged in experimental research, in particular, engage in practial problem solving, with nothing that seems to differentiate what they are actually doing from any other kind of practical knowledge.

It's to a point where a rough conceptual distinction has been introduced between "science" (mostly ideological constructs) and "research" (what scientists really do).

I hereby declare your sociology of science an ideological construct! :p
 
I hereby declare your sociology of science an ideological construct! :p
Well, you would, if you're in principle opposed to construcitivst sociology or history.:)
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Natural-Knowledge-Constructivism-History/dp/0226302318

The point is after all that socioogists and historians have started actually trying to look at what scientists, researchers do, when doing science. Not what they say they do, not what they or anyone else thinks they should be doing, but at the at times both messy and directionless, but curious, groping around to work out how the world works they are involved in.

Then it's a known problem that when sociologists and historians talk about their own research they tend to go straight into representational presentation - which is the same problem scientists have when talking about what they do, and which is what the meta-analysis is trying to push beyond.

Nice bit of ironic mirroring going on there.:)
 
Why did it never occur to the cultures of the new world to make use of the wheel, its shape being so self-evident?

Because without large domesticated animals, the wheel isn't that useful.

"The wheel" is always listed along with fire as one of the first 2 things humans invented, but in reality is showed up recently and saw limited use.
 
Well, you would, if you're in principle opposed to construcitivst sociology or history.:)
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Natural-Knowledge-Constructivism-History/dp/0226302318

The point is after all that socioogists and historians have started actually trying to look at what scientists, researchers do, when doing science. Not what they say they do, not what they or anyone else thinks they should be doing, but at the at times both messy and directionless, but curious, groping around to work out how the world works they are involved in.

Then it's a known problem that when sociologists and historians talk about their own research they tend to go straight into representational presentation - which is the same problem scientists have when talking about what they do, and which is what the meta-analysis is trying to push beyond.

Nice bit of ironic mirroring going on there.:)

I think it would be useful to invoke the old strategy/tactics distinction about the conduct of warfare: I can agree that scientists more often than not have only a vague "strategy" in mind for their work. But when it comes to doing a controlled experiment they must follow a careful "tactic", and there the scientific method is used. They can stumble upon some result, or aimlessly search for something unusual, but once they catch one the method of formulating some hypothesis to explain it and then test that hypothesis still gets applied. The scientific method is still the "tactic" that they must use, before daring publish anything.
 
Verbose is right that the term "scientific method" exaggerates the distinctiveness of the "scientist" category. Essentially it's just code for "a group of heuristics supposed to be practiced by people classified as scientists", all of which are also used by other people both now and before the concept of "scientist" came about. Most people struggle when it comes to deconstructing more than a little part of their own their cultural "reality", but here it is pretty easy to do.
 
I think it would be useful to invoke the old strategy/tactics distinction about the conduct of warfare: I can agree that scientists more often than not have only a vague "strategy" in mind for their work. But when it comes to doing a controlled experiment they must follow a careful "tactic", and there the scientific method is used. They can stumble upon some result, or aimlessly search for something unusual, but once they catch one the method of formulating some hypothesis to explain it and then test that hypothesis still gets applied. The scientific method is still the "tactic" that they must use, before daring publish anything.
Except they don't actually use it when doing research, not in the perfomative sense which is where the interest is from a constructivits pov. The actual performative analysis just tends to get sandbagged by the representational language of science, with "the scientific method" as the most widely dispersed vehicle.

I still think Sir Peter Medawar (medicine Nobel Prize laureate 1960) was pretty much on the money about this already in 1964.

Question: Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Answer: Yea, pretty much.

At least in the sense that the research strategies and publication strategies are different. Sometimes radically so. Which is in great part why you will never be able to become a research scientist by reading yourself to any kind of useful knowledge.

http://contanatura-hemeroteca.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/medawar_paper_fraud.pdf

And were back at the distinction between perfomative analysis of "what scientists do" as opposed to representational (semiotic) analysis, and presentation.
 
That last bit was reasonably widely generalisable for the 19th c.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The perspective you mention was certainly a widespread one, but like most new perspectives it coexisted with the older one as well, which was a more Enlightenment-era belief in the harmony of natural philosophy with religion and science as a pious pursuit. Just think of all those Victorian clergymen naturalists.
 
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The perspective you mention was certainly a widespread one, but like most new perspectives it coexisted with the older one as well, which was a more Enlightenment-era belief in the harmony of natural philosophy with religion and science as a pious pursuit. Just think of all those Victorian clergymen naturalists.
Apologies in advance, if I go a bit into the long form here.:)

Sure, but there's a time element there, and by common 19th c. continental European consent already in the early part of the century, the British, and their Amercian cousins, were regarded as peculiar in their insistance on mixing religion and science like that.
It's like the old story of Napoleon asking the astronomer Laplace (the mathematical bulldozer who developed his cosmology jointly with Kant, and crunched all the numbers Newton couldn't be arsed to, since he had all this alchemy to sort out) where god fit into his system, to be told by Laplace, that there was no need for any such hypothesis in it. Whether the story is actually true or not, it wouldn't be told in a British context from the same period.

And even in the UK I'd say the clergymen naturalists (like Sedgewick, who was a frikkin bishop-geologist, Norwich iirc) were going out beginning from around 1850. The future of science in the UK did belong to the Huxleys, the first professional scientist in the UK, who had to invent his own profession and was seriously at loggerheads with the CofE (which insisted that a man without religion by necessity had to be a virtuless scoundrel, meaning Huxley lived his life as an object lession in irreligion not making you a Bad Person per se).

Someone like Huxley, in his biographer Adrian Desmond's expression, broke the British upperclass moratorium between clergy and the "gentlemen of science" (wealthy and leisured, think Lyell and Darwin, who even discussed the misfortune of a clever chap like Huxley not being wealthy and leisured, like them, but having to work for a living, cutting into his usefulness as a researcher) of "trading intellectual arms across the aisle" to the lower classes. Certain segements of the British working man absolutely loved Huxley's irreverent materialism, since he was indirectly telling them church authority was a sham. And while the CofE naturalists were on the out from mid 19th c., the "gentlemen of science" had a bit more staying power, but were constantly falling behind continental Europe's systems of national education and new emphasis on scientific research (the French in the first half of the 19th c. and more importantly the Germans in second). From the British university reforms to catch up in the 1880's the gentleman scientists had also had their day compared to the academic professionals in Huxley's mold.

And not focusing on the UK, the pattern was still similar that from around 1850 the lines were drawn sharper. French republicanism took hold there with the revolution in 1848, and that republicanism was directly anti-church, as in opposed to Rome. (Though that did mean we get interesting groups of oppositional French Catholic monarchist scientists around as well, and neither side ended up much liking the Second Empire anyway.)

While in Germany from around 1850, along with the liberal demands for unification (since it didn't work out the bloody revolutionary way in 1848), there was also a generation of new Young Turks mixing their liberal politics and science, specifically gunning for the early 19th c. German idealistic "Naturphilosophie" in favour of mechanistic materialism directly and aggressively opposed to religion. Ludwig Büchner wrote their statement of program (iirc in 1854) with the title "Kraft und Stoff", "Power and Matter". Aside from Büchner, these were individuals like the young Rudolf Virchow (his analysis of the conditions of Silesian miners is still a classic in social-medicine-as-politics-by-other-means, later Reichstag leader of the liberal opposition to Bismarck, who even wanted to try killing him in a duel to get rid of the man), the anatomist Carl Vogt (condemned to death in his absence for his activities in 1848 and relocated to Switzerland), and Ernst Haeckel, the Monist, and Darwin's German bulldog.
It wasn't really a coincidence either that Bismarck, in his usual way of trying to co-opt the issues of the oposition to his kind of German Empire, ended up declaring the "Kulturkampf" against in particular Catholicism, with the Jews thrown in for good measure. ("Gegen Rom und Juda!") It did leave Lutheran Protestantism as sort of the default religion least problematic to 19th c. scientists, and many saw it precisely like that. Then again it was pretty seriously de-clawed from the fire-and-brimstone-Old-Testament kind of thing it had previously been in its history.

So, yes certainly the 19th c. was every bit as divided on most issues as our present times. However I would still say that there was a 19th c. ongoing gradual professionalisation and institutionalisation of science and research in the hands of new professional groups dedicated to it. And these groups had at least a reasonably consistent attitude (with exceptions certainly, there always are) towards traditional religion, ranging from verbally violent confrontation to at least marginalising it. A lot of the bad-mouthing of organised religion from the 19th c. did after all come from this group. They weren't necessarily arguing in good faith either, but they were in some ways strikingly successful in giving religion a bad name.:scan:

And just FYO, my specific interest in these things circles around 19th c. discussions between self-styled scientists (doctors, anatomists, zoologists mostly) about human origins and race - where it's palpably obvious that religion was a major influence, with the aggressive ideologues of race claiming to be especially scientific for having a jaded view of non-European humanity, while slamming their adversaries (more generous towards non-western man) for simply being stuck in old patterns of irrational religious thinking. It's an intersting situation in the history of science, since the bunch aggressive towards non-whites tend to be traditional Great Men of Science. Except of course today we think they got that one just plain wrong. While their adversaries, traditionally written of as religious old fogies, today can be seen to have been making some excellnt points, regardless whether part of their motives were religious or not.:)
 
Except they don't actually use it when doing research, not in the perfomative sense which is where the interest is from a constructivits pov. The actual performative analysis just tends to get sandbagged by the representational language of science, with "the scientific method" as the most widely dispersed vehicle.

I still think Sir Peter Medawar (medicine Nobel Prize laureate 1960) was pretty much on the money about this already in 1964.

Question: Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Answer: Yea, pretty much.

I finally got around to read the paper and I very much agree with it. Except for one thing: the scientific method described there is nothing like the scientific method taught to me! What I learned explicitly mentioned an "hypothesis" step before the experimentation - the purpose of the experimentation being to prove of disprove the hypothesis. Implicit in this hypothesis step is, of course, some prior observation, but that was a given: science is iterative, and I always saw that acknowledged.

Judging from the meaning I learned it would seem that paper was attacking a strawman. But I can believe that the meaning of "scientific method" has changed over the past few decades, possibly as a result of this kind of discussion.
 
Only the 12th-16th century Catholic Church slowed a progress.

In the ancient times religion was one of the thing caused societies to organise and the settle around holy or religious places.
I know that the Egyptians and the Preclassic Greeks progressed into significant civilizations thanks to their religious centralization.
As far as I know, religions in ancient India demanded knowlegde from the people, and exposed people to philossophy (Buddha's dogma, the Vedas..). The same thing happened later in China of course, with Confucious and Laozi.

In Classical Greece and Rome there is no need to explain of course. At least until 100 AD.

Early Islam in the Caliphate encouraged the mathematicians and philossophers.

In ancient Mesopotamia the religion didn't encourage anything, but it didn't harm the technological progress at all.

And don't forget - part of the human progress is the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures. Without religion, we would have stayed way behind in this field.
 
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