Has Religion Slowed Scientific Progress Through History?

I once heard an old-timer saying that the first time he met a sincere Communist was when he was allowed abroad after the thaw for first time and visited Finland.
True, I guess what I'm saying only applies in the earlier era. Under Brezhnev it had become a pretty total farce.
 
@aronnax

The central point I've made is this 'the Ottoman Empire is not representative of Muslims or Islam'. Now I could have responded in full and ripped that argument to shreds. But I figured I'd just let the argument wither on the vine for obvious reasons. That's not worked, I had hoped thought the dangers of extrapolation are obvious. However, willful ignorance isn't an outcome I'm satisfied with either. But balancing that out is a chronic lack of time or the inclination to write a huge post when a bit of reading would suffice. So I guess, I'll just resort to name dropping and hope that acts as a sufficient prod to learning: tarsh.

Plotinus said:
There's a big difference between saying that there is historical progress in some elements of society, or at certain periods in history, and saying that history as a whole is a story of general and universal progress. The latter seems an unreasonable claim but the former does not.

It was a condemnation of the former, and not the latter, that should have been clear. I'm actually not sure how you could have read it any other way.
 
I always thought existence of progress is universaly acknowledge fact. That it doesnt follow always in the same line or doesnt follow straight line but rather seem to go in circle or zig-zag seems pretty obvious as well. The main reason perhaps is that its focal point changes...
 
It was a condemnation of the former, and not the latter, that should have been clear. I'm actually not sure how you could have read it any other way.

Maybe I got hold of the wrong end of the stick somewhere. What I meant was that the OP envisaged "progress" in a way not open to the kind of criticism Dachs made.

That's the Hegelian model, yes?

It sounds like Origenism to me!
 
True, I guess what I'm saying only applies in the earlier era. Under Brezhnev it had become a pretty total farce.

Well it was because of Brezhnev that the Soviet progressive arc of Permanent Revolution about-faced into retrograde motion and stasis. I think, however, that the concept you described earlier is still very applicable for this period, just as there were certainly many sincere Christians in the Church even whilst there was a Pope in Avignon and another in Rome (or even the brief period of time when a third appeared in Pisa!).
 
That's the Hegelian model, yes?
What little I know of Hegel I quite disagree...

It sounds like Origenism to me!
I would be interested to learn the connection with Origen if there is any...

What I understand the ancient Greeks were emphasizing the philosophical aspects of progress. In later ages the supressed religion took revenge and used philosophy and science as it slaves. Nowadays we are getting the fruit of this yet another supression again and the idea of progress is almost exclusively accepted only on the scientific line.
To understand this well one has to see the root and dynamics behind the progress I guess and not only its surface appearance.
 
I know the Catholic Church suppressed a lot of scientists during the Renaissance.

Like who? The only one I can think of is Michael Severtus, and that's only because he thought the best place to state that the circulatory system exists to deliver air to the rest of the body was in a series of heretical musings about the mystical qualities of air.
 
Like who? The only one I can think of is Michael Severtus, and that's only because he thought the best place to state that the circulatory system exists to deliver air to the rest of the body was in a series of heretical musings about the mystical qualities of air.

Galileo. The fact that he was a Catholic doesn't change anything.
Even now, Christian groups are preventing the teaching of evolution in American schools.
If you ask me, religion (all religions) should be taught in school from a factual viewpoint, as well as evolution.
 
Galileo. The fact that he was a Catholic doesn't change anything.

Galileo's house arrest had almost nothing to do with the actual science. Forty years after his house arrest, Jesuit astronomers proved heliocentrism, with actual data that Galileo couldn't provide at his trial regarding why he couldn't account for parallax shifts in his model. The Jesuits were certainly not persecuted for this.

If you ask me, religion (all religions) should be taught in school from a factual viewpoint, as well as evolution.

There's no such thing as "religion."
 
Galileo's house arrest had almost nothing to do with the actual science. Forty years after his house arrest, Jesuit astronomers proved heliocentrism, with actual data that Galileo couldn't provide at his trial regarding why he couldn't account for parallax shifts in his model.
Perhaps.
That doesn't necessarily make it fair that he was put under house arrest.
Aside from religious authority, his ideas didn't catch on due to a very literal interpretation of the Bible.

There's no such thing as "religion."
ReligionS.
Happy? I added the "s".
 
Perhaps.
That doesn't necessarily make it fair that he was put under house arrest.
Aside from religious authority, his ideas didn't catch on due to a very literal interpretation of the Bible.

The house arrest happened because Galileo was blithely insulting the political authority, which was considered a crime in basically every monarchy of Galileo's day.

And, although some people took a hyper-literalist interpretation of Scripture, most did not; since in the Augustinian tradition, there's four valid ways to interpret the Bible. Biblical Fundamentalism is a phenomenon that really didn't occur until much later, and primarily as a result of a rejection of all extra-biblical traditions, including the intellectual schools of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and their like.

ReligionS.
Happy? I added the "s".

If the singular doesn't exist, then neither does the plural. "Religion" is not a real thing. It's a word that originally had meaning a few centuries ago, but its usage has shifted to refer to what many people are vested into considering a universal phenomenon.
 
@aronnax

The central point I've made is this 'the Ottoman Empire is not representative of Muslims or Islam'. Now I could have responded in full and ripped that argument to shreds. But I figured I'd just let the argument wither on the vine for obvious reasons. That's not worked, I had hoped thought the dangers of extrapolation are obvious. However, willful ignorance isn't an outcome I'm satisfied with either. But balancing that out is a chronic lack of time or the inclination to write a huge post when a bit of reading would suffice. So I guess, I'll just resort to name dropping and hope that acts as a sufficient prod to learning: tarsh.

I disagree with your central point and had you posted a wall of text, I would have read it and responded back to the best of my ability until I was proven otherwise. Though I do not appreciate your term of 'willful ignorance' since that is a personal attack. Nevertheless, I agree with you that I also do not want to write back large posts.

What's tarsh?
 
Perhaps.
That doesn't necessarily make it fair that he was put under house arrest.
Aside from religious authority, his ideas didn't catch on due to a very literal interpretation of the Bible.


ReligionS.
Happy? I added the "s".
He insulted the Pope, publicly. Even to this day, insulting a ruling monarch will get you hanged in many countries around the world. Thailand, from memory, flogs people who insult the king. Now, you can easily claim that the Inquisition was too harsh by modern standards in locking up Galileo for what basically amounted to sedition - and I'd agree with you - but at the time most secular rulers would have had him beheaded in a public square. He got off very easily compared to most who behaved as he did. Even in modern times, he'd be guilty of libel for his comments.

As for heliocentrism not catching on, that had nothing to do with it contradicting the Bible - it doesn't, even by a strict interpretation - and everything to do with the fact that Galileo's "proof" was actually incorrect, and demonstrably so. As LS stated, the Jesuits proved heliocentrism after Galileo's death, and the church immediately accepted it. Even many who believed in heliocentrism found Galileo's proof laughable. For one thing, it posits only one tide a day, when any idiot can see that there are two. And I'm sure there were other mistakes that people more knowledgable than I am could point out.

Religion as a term has lost most of its meaning these days. Theism is the more scholarly acceptable term now. Religion has become too diffused since the collapse of organised religion and the rise of personal, eclectic and syncretic belief systems on such a large-scale. I wouldn't be as against you using the term as LS is though, but then again, I'm not a philospher or a theologian. LS and Plotinus are. But if you want to teach "all religions" - by which I'm assuming you simply mean all the major global theological movements - in school, you'll have to extend it by about ten years. There are four major strands of Buddhism, let alone all the other religions out there.
 
Even in modern times, he'd be guilty of libel for his comments.
Are you sure about that? Going by my recollection of Hannam's account, it seems like Galileo's biggest insult was placing the Pope's argument (that even if Heliocentricism could be definitively demonstrated, we'd have no way of knowing for sure that it wasn't just God making it look that way when it wasn't) into the mouth of a foolish character with the intent of making the Pope look foolish. Insulting, but not libellous.
As for heliocentrism not catching on, that had nothing to do with it contradicting the Bible - it doesn't, even by a strict interpretation
Not quite. The Psalms occasionally speak of God firmly establishing the foundations of the Earth which cannot be moved, but the language is pretty clearly poetic and very few theological authorities of Galileo's day adhered to anything like modern-day Biblical literalism to begin with. One notable exception was Cardinal Bellarmine, who used those passages to oppose Copernicianism, but he'd died by the time of the trial anyway.
 
Religion as a term has lost most of its meaning these days. Theism is the more scholarly acceptable term now. Religion has become too diffused since the collapse of organised religion and the rise of personal, eclectic and syncretic belief systems on such a large-scale.
The real reason you can't talk about about "religion" is that the "breakdown" of organized religion isn't a modern thing, it never was the norm.
The effective spread of Christianity, and the clear lines divided between it Islam and Judaism, while retaining their central similarities created the idea of religion, especially of religion as separate from philosophy, in western thought, and shaped western perceptions of how others thought for centuries.

We decided, kind of abruptly, that Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras were philosophers, not religious thinkers, and then went around trying to fit every thinker in the world into religious or philosophical, not to mention the incredibly stupid attempts we we made to fit "Shamanism" into this model.
 
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