Has Religion Slowed Scientific Progress Through History?

Lord Baal said:
There are four major strands of Buddhism, let alone all the other religions out there.
I would not oppose this if I got to teach Classical Southeast Asian Saivaite Hinduism. ReligiousOrgies4Lyfe.1

1. There is some debate as to whether these were literal or symbolic orgies. Who cares its still awesome.

aronnax said:
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.

You fought me a on side issue, which I admitted to not caring about, and extrapolated the experience of a single political unit out to that of a whole religion. Using that logic I could talk about the American Right being representative of all Christians... which someone else is doing in this thread.

aronnax said:
What's tarsh?

Read this for a start.
 
The Galileo thing was far more complex than common received wisdom thinks. There are a number of reasons for this, including the ones that have already been pointed out.

Galileo was a Catholic, just as much as the Pope was. To cast the dispute as one between science on the one hand (represented by Galileo) and religion on the other (represented by the Pope and the other church leaders) is therefore arbitrary at best. It assumes that "religion" is more closely represented by the leaders of the church rather than its members. There is no basis for that assumption.

Galileo's views were rejected by the majority of scientists of his day - not for religious reasons but because the evidence simply didn't support them. From the point of view of contemporary scientific consensus, the church leaders were going with the majority.

The dispute wasn't actually about which model of the solar system is the best. It was really about what astronomical models are. The prevailing view at the time was that astronomical models don't purport to describe reality. Rather, they are mere models with a primarily predictive function. Whether the sun "really" goes around the earth or vice versa doesn't make much difference and probably isn't knowable anyway. What matters is whether talking as if the sun goes around the earth explains the visible astronomical phenomena better than talking as if it's the other way around. Galileo, however, insisted not only that his model explained the phenomena better, but that it was a literally and factually accurate account of reality. That was regarded not only as impious (because it involved a claim to knowledge that only God should have) but scientifically hopeless and naive. Plus, of course, Galileo's alleged proof for the truth of his model (his theory of the tides) was completely wrong.

Does all of that excuse placing Galileo under house arrest for his publications? Not by our standards, no doubt, but by the standards of the time it was pretty mild treatment for pretty provocative behaviour on his part. Galileo's worst enemy was really Galileo himself.

We've only been conditioned to think of this as a matter of "science versus religion" because that's how anti-religious writers of the nineteenth century such as Dickson White presented it. Influenced by the contemporary dispute over Darwinism, they assumed that historical disputes could be interpreted in the same way, and they made out Galileo and others to be sort of early Darwins, secular scientists whose views were opposed by reactionary fundamentalists. These were the same people who popularised the myth that in the Middle Ages people thought the world was flat, a myth which fitted in with their own prejudices but was quite insupportable by the evidence.

Lord Baal said:
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.

Theism is quite distinct from religion. Religion is a social phenomenon. Theism is a belief. It is possible to be religious without being a theist and it is possible to be a theist without being religious. It's a common western assumption to think that "religion" and "belief in God" are virtually synonymous, but that's because we're so used to the western monotheistic religions.

I don't see any reason for saying that organised religion has collapsed. Perhaps in parts of the west, but that's a pretty small deal on a global scale.

Certainly the term "religion" is very hard to define, but it's always been that way - there's nothing special about circumstances today that make it that way. It's like Wittgenstein's "games". There's no definition of "game" that includes all, and only, what we usually call games. But it still has meaning. Similarly, I don't know any definition of "religion" that includes all, and only, what we usually call religions, but that doesn't mean the word is meaningless.

Gorakshanat said:
I would be interested to learn the connection with Origen if there is any...

Origen apparently taught a modification of the Stoic view, which was that at the end of history there is a great conflagration, and then a new world is born, which is an exact copy and repetition of the previous one. So history repeats itself, and then again, and so on for ever. Christians also believed that at the end of history there will be a new heaven and a new earth, but that these will be better than the current ones, and permanent, so they had a much more progressive understanding of history. Origen combined these two ideas. Like the Stoics, he believed that after the end of this world there will be a new one which will be much like this one, and after that one another, and so on. But unlike the Stoics, he did not believe that each one would be exactly the same as the previous one. He believed that each one would be a bit different, and a bit better. The Stoics thought that in each world, every individual would be reborn and do the same things that they did in the previous one. Origen also thought that every individual would be reborn, but the form of their rebirth would depend on what they did in the previous world - i.e. a good person would be better placed and a bad person worse placed. Because evil is finite, the general trend of every individual would be upwards, although not necessarily straightforwardly so. There would therefore be a vast succession of universes, each one slightly different from the previous one, with the same souls reborn in each one, sometimes in a better condition, sometimes in a worse condition, but overall getting better and better. Eventually all souls would achieve perfect goodness and be permanently united to God, and the succession of worlds would end. That's why it's best thought of as a spiral - it combines the circularity of the Stoic conception of history with the progressiveness of the Christian one.
 
Certainly the term "religion" is very hard to define, but it's always been that way - there's nothing special about circumstances today that make it that way. It's like Wittgenstein's "games". There's no definition of "game" that includes all, and only, what we usually call games. But it still has meaning. Similarly, I don't know any definition of "religion" that includes all, and only, what we usually call religions, but that doesn't mean the word is meaningless.

I find it curious that you say that "religion is hard to define." My belief is that there is no such thing as "religion" and the reason why there's over a hundred scholarly definitions floating around is because it's not a real thing, and sociologists have to constantly cherry pick convenient criteria for a definition in order to shoe-horn several interrelated cultural-philosophical-spiritual-(et al.) phenomenon into a single mechanism.

I mean, think about just how significantly different Judaism is from Buddhism is from the indigenous Aztec "religion." They don't just disagree on metaphysics and practice, but the fundamental way that a worshiper interracts with his "religion" is entirely different. The only reason to try and pidgeonhole these entirely different things into a single word is so that one can imply that all spiritual beliefs are of the same nature. This frequently has a malicious motive, and even when it doesn't, it still leads to a butt-load of argumentative compromises that are entirely unnecessary.
 
You say there's no such thing as "religion", and yet in defending this view you're still able to give examples of Judaism, Buddhism, and indigenous Aztec religion. That indicates that you understand that these three things are examples of what we call "religion". Now your point is that they're all very different. Certainly they are. But why does that mean that the word "religion" doesn't mean anything? Doesn't the fact that you can pick out examples of "religion" in the first place, with the expectation that I will agree that these are examples of "religion", itself prove that the term has meaning and that we can meaningfully talk about "religion" in general, even if what we say is that different religions are very different?

Of course I agree that "religion" isn't some kind of "thing" floating around out there, but that's true of most human concepts. There isn't an object called "love" - it is just an abstraction - but we know what the word "love" means. Similarly, there's no such thing as religion in the sense that the word "religion" has no referent, unless you're some kind of Platonist, but nevertheless it seems pretty plain to me that people use and understand the word to a tolerably reasonable degree.
 
You say there's no such thing as "religion", and yet in defending this view you're still able to give examples of Judaism, Buddhism, and indigenous Aztec religion. That indicates that you understand that these three things are examples of what we call "religion". Now your point is that they're all very different. Certainly they are. But why does that mean that the word "religion" doesn't mean anything? Doesn't the fact that you can pick out examples of "religion" in the first place, with the expectation that I will agree that these are examples of "religion", itself prove that the term has meaning and that we can meaningfully talk about "religion" in general, even if what we say is that different religions are very different?
It only indicates that he understands all three as being generally recognised as "religion", though, not that he sees anything about these practice-belief systems as authentically demanding or even supporting such an indentification. Similarly, if you lived in a society in which (say) chairs, ducks and electric typewriters were all described as "qwijibos", you'd be able to make the same sort of comparison, but that doesn't imply that you think "qwijibo" is a meaningful category. (That's overstating it rather horribly, of course, because Judaism and Buddhism genuinely do have a level of intersection that isn't the case with a duck and electric typewriter, but you get my point.)
 
You fought me a on side issue, which I admitted to not caring about, and extrapolated the experience of a single political unit out to that of a whole religion. Using that logic I could talk about the American Right being representative of all Christians... which someone else is doing in this thread.



Read this for a start.

I don't think you got the whole of my argument because I said I could have given other non-Ottoman examples.

I will give the article a read. Though not now. During the weekend.
 
It only indicates that he understands all three as being generally recognised as "religion", though, not that he sees anything about these practice-belief systems as authentically demanding or even supporting such an indentification. Similarly, if you lived in a society in which (say) chairs, ducks and electric typewriters were all described as "qwijibos", you'd be able to make the same sort of comparison, but that doesn't imply that you think "qwijibo" is a meaningful category. (That's overstating it rather horribly, of course, because Judaism and Buddhism genuinely do have a level of intersection that isn't the case with a duck and electric typewriter, but you get my point.)

What does "meaningful" mean? Is the fact that an expression has meaning insufficient to make it meaningful? If by meaningful you mean 'real', then as per the basic premise of structuralism, meaning does not necessarily have to correspond to anything real.
 
It only indicates that he understands all three as being generally recognised as "religion", though, not that he sees anything about these practice-belief systems as authentically demanding or even supporting such an indentification. Similarly, if you lived in a society in which (say) chairs, ducks and electric typewriters were all described as "qwijibos", you'd be able to make the same sort of comparison, but that doesn't imply that you think "qwijibo" is a meaningful category. (That's overstating it rather horribly, of course, because Judaism and Buddhism genuinely do have a level of intersection that isn't the case with a duck and electric typewriter, but you get my point.)

In that situation, "qwijibo" would be a meaningful category. It would mean something that's a chair, a duck, or an electric typewriter. Of course it would be an arbitrary category, not based on any reasonable similarity between those things, but it would still have meaning, and people in that society could use the word "qwijibo" to each other and understand each other perfectly. It would also be true to say that "qwijibo"s exist. They just wouldn't form a natural kind. In the case of religion, LightSpectra seems to be saying that (1) religion isn't a natural kind - which may well be true - and inferring from that (2) the word "religion" is meaningless. My point is that (2) doesn't follow from (1), and moreover (2) is surely false, and demonstrated to be false every time people successfully communicate using the word "religion", as in this very conversation.
 
Ok, my bad, "meaningful" was entirely the wrong word to use. I should have said "non-arbitrary", so I guess my post should just be mentally edited to read that way instead. :blush:
 
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.

Do you happen to be familiar with a thing called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

D'Alembert (mathmatician), Kepler, Copernicus (astronomists and mathmaticians), Darwin (medic and early biologist), and so many others. The social sciences would have been totally frozen if the Catholic Church could have had its way, and the other sciences severely delayed, The Index is very damning evidence, try to dispute that if you can.
I've seen lists of the contentments of the notable private libraries of portuguese 18th century nobles, and it was depressing: lives of saints and theology i general made up more than half of each. The libraries of the university were similarity affected, ass it was under religious control: much of the scientific developments which were laying the foundation of the industrial revolution, for chemistry, physics, biology (especially biology) and even mathematics or all things was forbidden by the Church, actively persecuted by the inquisition. Corresponding with some notable european scientists were grounds for a process, with several people having to flee to England or France! Even some music got forbidden! Absolutely disgusting.

The very first Christians were all Jewish, and Judaism -- until very recently -- was almost entirely uninterested in what happens after death. So saying that Christianity was established to exploit "fear of death" is ridiculous.

Not only is it not ridiculous, it is very much correct. Your attempted counter, otoh, is indeed ridiculous. Early christians believed in afterlife and judgment. The kind of judgment they believed in indeed changed over the centuries: first they believed that one would wait until a "judgement day" which might even be collective, then (around the 11th century?) things got more personal and belief shifted to a judgment on deathbed, with depictions from that time showing people dying with angels and daemons waiting for the soul. Over all this time the concern wth burial on holy ground and with baptizing babies was a constant, as those were commonly held as two conditions (though burial in holy ground eventually shifted from condition to privilege for those baptized) for "resurrection" and access to heaven.
 
Do you happen to be familiar with a thing called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

D'Alembert (mathmatician), Kepler, Copernicus (astronomists and mathmaticians), Darwin (medic and early biologist), and so many others. The social sciences would have been totally frozen if the Catholic Church could have had its way, and the other sciences severely delayed, The Index is very damning evidence, try to dispute that if you can.
I've seen lists of the contentments of the notable private libraries of portuguese 18th century nobles, and it was depressing: lives of saints and theology i general made up more than half of each. The libraries of the university were similarity affected, ass it was under religious control: much of the scientific developments which were laying the foundation of the industrial revolution, for chemistry, physics, biology (especially biology) and even mathematics or all things was forbidden by the Church, actively persecuted by the inquisition. Corresponding with some notable european scientists were grounds for a process, with several people having to flee to England or France! Even some music got forbidden! Absolutely disgusting.
I don't really know to what extent the industrial revolution can be attributed to the scientific revolution. They're more like two separate developments that later intersected, rather than the one necessarily preceding the other. Arkwright, Cartwright and Watt did not in any particularly significant sense follow on from Newton, Galileo and Descartes.

/pedant
 
I don't really know to what extent the industrial revolution can be attributed to the scientific revolution. They're more like two separate developments that later intersected, rather than the one necessarily preceding the other. Arkwright, Cartwright and Watt did not in any particularly significant sense follow on from Newton, Galileo and Descartes.

/pedant

I thing that's an important issue. But I disagree that the industrial revolution didn't follow the scientific revolution. I know that much has been made of the lack of institutionalized research universities in England until very late, and the supposed practicality of british industrialists,. But lets not forget that (for example):
- Watt started out as a manufacturer of precision instruments for scientists;
- sea trade which enabled the movement of raw materials and products to and from the industries depended on mathematics and astronomy;
- metallurgy depended on the advancements of chemistry and thermodynamics;
- the study of gases (17th-18th centuries, the beginnings of modern chemistry) was fundamental for the development of thermodynamics;
etc.
I simply do not believe that the industrial revolution could have started earlier than the 18th century, even had england lost all its forests and turned to coal much earlier. It took a lot of science to develop the steam engine: metallurgy for resistant materials, thermodynamics to know how to improve the efficiency in order for to to be competitive with more traditional power sources, fine instrument making for fundamental stuff like clocks, even the social sciences which suggested new ways to organize labour!
 
Those are fair points, yeah. I guess that's the problem with this topic, we're always trying to walk the line between a Whiggish "progress" model on the one hand, and a hard-headed "we duhn't need none of thy poncy 'sar-yunss' oop North" model on the other. :dunno:
 
Galileo's worst enemy was really Galileo himself.
This would seem to me quite a universal truth and up to date; something that can be said of anybody...


Thanks for the details about Origen. And I believe I have read something simmilar coming from some eastern system of philosophy...

My wiew: If the origin of the world is the Spirit which is involved in the Matter than in the purest sense the progress would simply mean manifesting out the Spirit once more. That could be done on more or less straight line but rather in spiral (considering influences and workings of many forces...). After all ,depending on point of wiew, it can be wiewed as one and the same.
 
You say there's no such thing as "religion", and yet in defending this view you're still able to give examples of Judaism, Buddhism, and indigenous Aztec religion. That indicates that you understand that these three things are examples of what we call "religion". Now your point is that they're all very different. Certainly they are. But why does that mean that the word "religion" doesn't mean anything?

Because they're so radically different that lumping them into a singular word is pointless, and frequently serves a malicious motive to do so.

Imagine if someone started using the word "fascistoid", and you found out that the meaning of this word is "the dictator of a country with a fascist government, OR the banana fruit." These things have almost nothing in common. But then, to top it off, you found out the man who started using the word this way is the CEO of a corporation whose primary business competition are banana producers. At that point, even using the word "fascistoid" is serving his personal interests -- since now everybody who hears the word is automatically mentally associating wicked governments with bananas.

Whenever somebody says that "religion" is caused by, or causes something, I'll always shoot back "there's no such thing as religion" because it's a stupid thing to say. The fact that over 100 definitions for "religion" is floating around in the world of sociology academia means that whenever somebody wants to attribute a universal phenomenon to "religion", there's going to be exceptions. There's really no point in lumping every one of these things into one word.
 
(Given that the word "fascist" is so commonly used in a manner nigh-on as sloppy as that, I'm trying to figure out if that is bad example, or a very good one. :hmm:)
 
(Given that the word "fascist" is so commonly used in a manner nigh-on as sloppy as that, I'm trying to figure out if that is bad example, or a very good one. :hmm:)

That was intended.
 
Do you happen to be familiar with a thing called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

D'Alembert (mathmatician), Kepler, Copernicus (astronomists and mathmaticians), Darwin (medic and early biologist), and so many others. The social sciences would have been totally frozen if the Catholic Church could have had its way, and the other sciences severely delayed, The Index is very damning evidence, try to dispute that if you can.
I can't say that I'm familiar with it, but I'll look into it some time. I know that Kepler was a devout protestant who tended to make his astronomical texts heavily-laden with religious discussion, so his censorship may have had more to do with that.
Whenever somebody says that "religion" is caused by, or causes something, I'll always shoot back "there's no such thing as religion" because it's a stupid thing to say. The fact that over 100 definitions for "religion" is floating around in the world of sociology academia means that whenever somebody wants to attribute a universal phenomenon to "religion", there's going to be exceptions. There's really no point in lumping every one of these things into one word.
It's definitely pointless in this context, but as broad as the word "religion" is, it does have uses elsewhere.
 
Because they're so radically different that lumping them into a singular word is pointless, and frequently serves a malicious motive to do so.


Whenever somebody says that "religion" is caused by, or causes something, I'll always shoot back "there's no such thing as religion" because it's a stupid thing to say.

Religions are all almost the same. What realy makes the difference is the individual human nature.
 
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