In the Beginning...

[Agent327]

The Church has always been anti Astrology

Really? I seem to recall a story about three 'wise men' who saw a falling star and followed it to Bethlehem. I also seem to recall hearing that in church regularly.

 

[Old Hippy]

Did you miss the part where Sagan talked about the Chinese astrologers being executed if their predictions were wrong? He wasn't only talking about Christianity-based societies in this episode. Astrologers tended to go through cycles of being in fashion and being considered anathema and either banished or killed.

I'll just point out, that's not really anti astrology, just anti bad astrology

edit: upon rereading your post I think that was actually your point

 

[Arakhor]

I imagine that the Church was anti-astrology because it was seen as another form of divination and all sorts of pagan practices were outright banned under the 4th & 5th Century Roman emperors.

 

[Lexicus]

What is ironic about it? The truth?

What is ironic about it is that while saying it is a 'problem' when people live in fear of the stars, you clearly allow yourself to live in fear of Yahweh, an imaginary character invented by Bronze Age tribesmen.

 

[Arakhor]

Let's not get anti-theist here, please.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm not anti-theist, I'm anti-considering-primitive-mythology-to-be-real.

Edit: you know what, strike that. I'm not even anti-considering-primitive-mythology-is-real, I'm just anti-hypocrisy. If you're going to say it's a problem for other people to live in fear of imaginary stuff, don't do it yourself.

 

[Arakhor]

I'd agree with the sentiment of your last point.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Let's not get anti-theist here, please.

No need to be "anti-theist", but there's no reason to give any level attention to theological assertions about "the beginning" without evidence for them, at least not against any other random explanation that avoids falsifiable claims.

 

[timtofly]

What is ironic about it is that while saying it is a 'problem' when people live in fear of the stars, you clearly allow yourself to live in fear of Yahweh, an imaginary character invented by Bronze Age tribesmen.

I live in peace. Not sure where the other notion comes from.

I do not adhere to any religion, although without proof most skeptics here lump the Bible in with religion. If it is not science, then it is not religion. If it is not history, then it is not religion. You cannot have it both ways. The Bible was written about humans with real life experiences. it was not written by a religion to push a religion. I am not even pushing God, when I say that a human has something in common with God, but I guess it can be construed that way. If I am pushing God, let God do the pushing. I am just posting thoughts that are in my head.

Those who read my post will have to make all the judgment calls. I am fully aware that Christianity as a religion has been used to control and manipulate people just like any other religion on the planet. I would not call astrology a religion. I think that it is just a way to look at patterns and come up with coincidences. There have been many humans who developed a religion around their practices and beliefs.

Modern science and the methods used, did arise out of the failures of those who dabbled in religion. It did not "just happen".

 

[Arakhor]

I do not adhere to any religion, although without proof most skeptics here lump the Bible in with religion. If it is not science, then it is not religion. If it is not history, then it is not religion. You cannot have it both ways.

The Bible is unquestionably "about" religion. I'm not also not seeing how you're blithely equating religion, history and science as if they're the same thing.

 

[onejayhawk]

Tim has a point. Monotheism was critically important to the development of science. In a polytheistic/pagan/naturist world, any effect can be explained by a spirit/demon/god. It is no coincidence that the word deva can translate both as angle and demon. The concept of one God-over-all started the process of causal inquiry that eventually spawned scientific method.

I find it interesting that at least one person ascribed religious motivation to Tim. He's typically the other side of the fence, even antagonistic to religion in many areas. That does not mean his statement was not ironic.

J

 

[Sommerswerd]

I'm late arriving again. There are so many levels of irony stacked together that you could wrap it as a gift.

J

We may not be thinking of the same thing... but inasmuch as your comment is directed at mine, I agree with you... and assuming that we are thinking of the same thing... well spotted and stated

Funny thing, the truth is...

 

[onejayhawk]

I never said that I didn't believe that Jesus was the Son of God. I said that I don't believe in the Second Coming or any sort of Millennial teaching.

Please, if you have any pretense of scholarship, separate the two. It is like comparing oranges and orchids because they happen to fall on the same page of a dictionary.

We may not be thinking of the same thing... but inasmuch as your comment is directed at mine, I agree with you... and assuming that we are thinking of the same thing... well spotted and stated

Funny thing, the truth is...

The funny thing is, you are probably correct that we see different ironies. To me, the big one was not what was stating it, but whom. The reasons are given a couple posts up. The second irony is also detailed in that post. Someone assuming that Tim was religious is not just ironic, but hilarious. You get more as you dissect the statement.

I am glad you liked the turn of phrase.

J

 

[Lexicus]

Tim has a point. Monotheism was critically important to the development of science. In a polytheistic/pagan/naturist world, any effect can be explained by a spirit/demon/god. It is no coincidence that the word deva can translate both as angle and demon. The concept of one God-over-all started the process of causal inquiry that eventually spawned scientific method.

This is, of course, completely untrue. The 'process of causal inquiry' in fact has no correlation with acceptance of monotheism; the closest analogues to modern scientists existing in the ancient world were certainly polytheists. Anyone of any spiritual persuasion can use empirical methods to improve on technical knowledge, and that process has probably been going on since before modern humans even existed.

And of course monotheism can lead to vacant "Godiddit" explanations as readily as polytheism can (last I checked monotheism also allows for the existence of lesser supernatural beings like angels and demons, so your argument really makes no sense on that basis alone).

It is true that the modern concept of the scientific method arose from the belief that a benevolent god had created a universe orderly enough for humans to learn about it through rational inquiry. But that has nothing to do with the claim that monotheism in general was essential to developing the scientific method.

 

[Arakhor]

Please, if you have any pretense of scholarship, separate the two. It is like comparing oranges and orchids because they happen to fall on the same page of a dictionary.

The post you quoted has me referring to both as two things I didn't believe in. I didn't even use the phrase "any other sort". I also don't have any pretence towards theological scholarship.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Tim has a point. Monotheism was critically important to the development of science. In a polytheistic/pagan/naturist world, any effect can be explained by a spirit/demon/god. It is no coincidence that the word deva can translate both as angle and demon. The concept of one God-over-all started the process of causal inquiry that eventually spawned scientific method.

I find it interesting that at least one person ascribed religious motivation to Tim. He's typically the other side of the fence, even antagonistic to religion in many areas. That does not mean his statement was not ironic.

I'm sure that the progress towards modern medicine benefited from the prior use of leeches in some way and that the practice shed light on how things did and did not work, etc...

That doesn't mean we should still be using leeches to cure illness...

That being said, I'm at least open minded to having some half naked fire priestess straddle me and put them on me as part of some bizarre sex ritual
NSFW

Spoiler :

 

[El_Machinae]

Really? I seem to recall a story about three 'wise men' who saw a falling star and followed it to Bethlehem. I also seem to recall hearing that in church regularly.

Yeah, it's one of the Biblical paradoxes. They present certain heroes as having violated the laws that were given. The wise men were astrologers. Samuel ordered baby-stabbing.

 

[abradley]

Ptolemy = geocentrism. Copernicus = heliocentrism. Did you not pay attention to that part of the video? And over a thousand years before Copernicus came along, there were Greek scientists who were on the right track to figuring things out. There's an interesting segment in the first episode about Eratosthenes, and how he realized that Earth's surface is curved, not flat.

Yes, yes, yes.

So what really happened during Sagan's so called 1000 years?

The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown gives a good overview, including:

3. Mystical Woo-woo
But… didn’t Aristarchus and the Pythagoreans propose heliocentrism in ancient times? If only they had prevailed, we might have had Real Science™ millennia sooner! We'd be on freaking Mars by now! What was their evidence?

Well, you see, Fire is nobler than earth and the center is a nobler position. So fire has to be in the center. QED.

There are many names for this sort of thinking, but “scientific” is not one of them. Aristotle says of the Pythagoreans:

In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own.
– Aristotle, On the heavens II.13.293a

Today, we have answers to the objections listed above, many of them developed in the Middle Ages; but those answers depend on the most part on measurements and concepts that were not then available: force, mass, inertia, etc. For example, Oresme answered the Argument of the Winds by postulating common motion: the sphere of the air is also moving to the east along with the sphere of the earth. But he had no propter quid to explain why the air and the earth shared a common motion. You can't just say that if only A and B were true, then observation C would follow. You actually have to show that A and B are true. The Pope said as much to Galileo, and got mocked for his pains.

As for astrology, as I pointed out the church outlawed it early on, but then:

6. The Return of Mystical Woo-woo -- the 1530s
Ptolemy's math worked fine for a thousand years. It was "settled science," as we say today. But gradually, as the star tables were copied and recopied, copyist errors crept in and multiplied like loaves and fishes. This was not due to bugs in the Ptolemaic model, but to errors in the data itself.

The Italian Renaissance was a humanist reaction against Aristotelian obsessions with logic, reason, and natural philosophy. Greco-Roman art and literature were “rediscovered.” Platonic mysticism was revived, along with astrology, magic, Hermeticism, and Pythagoreanism. Natural science faltered*; but since astronomy was only mathematics, it prospered.
(Continued

As for the three wise men and astrology, don't know...go ask a Catholic theologian.

 

[abradley]

I'm sure that the progress towards modern medicine benefited from the prior use of leeches in some way and that the practice shed light on how things did and did not work, etc...

That doesn't mean we should still be using leeches to cure illness...

That being said, I'm at least open minded to having some half naked fire priestess straddle me and put them on me as part of some bizarre sex ritual
NSFW

Spoiler :

Leeches outdated:

The humble leech's medical magic
By Melissa Jackson
BBC News Online health staff

Leeches have a long medical pedigree (picture courtesy of Biopharm Leeches)
The latest endorsement for using blood-sucking leeches for medical purposes has come from the US government.
(continued)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3858087.stm

Don't know about the half naked fire priestess, sound interesting.

 

[Lexicus]

Leeches outdated:

Did you even read that article? Do you really think the US government is advocating using leeches to drain people of bad humors to cure diseases?