How many centuries has religion held back scientific progress?

sxt

How many anti scientific centuries were there?

Montroseee

inb4 350

pablomakaveli

The church often aided science rather than inhibit it. You've got the copying of manuscripts here after the fall of Rome as one example of that.

Dont let that stop your tirade though.

Montroseee

pablomakaveli wrote: »

The church often aided science rather than inhibit it. You've got the copying of manuscripts here after the fall of Rome as one example of that.

Dont let that stop your tirade though.

That won't halt OP's agenda

fergiesfolly

How many threads are started in here that could've been prevented by a bit of pre-emptive googling?

Duggy747

If religion didn't hold back science then we could've had the hoverboard from Back To The Future II ready for purchase in 2015.














.....probably......

sxt

pablomakaveli wrote: »

The church often aided science rather than inhibit it. You've got the copying of manuscripts here after the fall of Rome as one example of that.

Dont let that stop your tirade though.

I accept that,but in the main, these religions held back scientific progress for centuries?

Iwasfrozen

sxt wrote: »

I accept that,but in the main, these religions held back scientific progress for centuries?

Not really that's a myth if anything the church aided progress because it united Europe and spread technology across countries. It also kept Latin alive as a linga franca.

Madam_X

Duggy747 wrote: »

If religion didn't hold back science then we could've had the hoverboard from Back To The Future II ready for purchase in 2015.














.....probably......

Something I've been meaning to ascertain. What, in BTTF2, has come true? Skype. What else?

Chucken

Madam_X wrote: »

Something I've been meaning to ascertain. What, in BTTF2, has come true? Skype. What else?

Being consumed with personal electronics.

sxt

Iwasfrozen wrote: »

Not really that's a myth if anything the church aided progress because it united Europe and spread technology across countries. It also kept Latin alive as a linga franca.

Galileo's scientific discoveries were "banned" as heresy for over a hundred years? That is a major set back !

Chucken

sxt wrote: »

Galileo's scientific discoveries were "banned" as heresy for over a hundred years? That is a major set back !

Was it not Copernicus(catholic monk) many Protestant theologians were upset over?
The Church had no problem with this.

Airitech

The various churches kept the knowledge of the classical periods of Greece and Rome alive through the Middle Ages. Islamic scholars made huge advances, particularly in mathematics around this time.

The religious orders were the only people prepared to educate and provide healthcare to the poor in many parts of the world (including here) until relatively recently.

Without religion science and knowledge in general could well be a few centuries behind. I say this as a lifelong atheist.

johnnyskeleton

Duggy747 wrote: »

If religion didn't hold back science then we could've had the hoverboard from Back To The Future II ready for purchase in 2015.

There's still time

sxt

The Library at Alexandria was in charge of collecting all the world's knowledge ( 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC)

Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria: Julius Caesar's fire in the Alexandrian War, in 48 BC; the attack of Aurelian in AD 270 – 275; the decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in AD 391; and the Muslim conquest in AD 642 or thereafter.

The Dagda

sxt wrote: »

Galileo's scientific discoveries were "banned" as heresy for over a hundred years? That is a major set back !

But on the positive side the whole paedo industry got a great shot in the arm!

It's an ill wind...

Chucken

sxt wrote: »

The Library at Alexandria was in charge of collecting all the world's knowledge ( 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC)

Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria: Julius Caesar's fire in the Alexandrian War, in 48 BC; the attack of Aurelian in AD 270 – 275; the decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in AD 391; and the Muslim conquest in AD 642 or thereafter.

And? Your point?

sxt

Chucken wrote: »

Was it not Copernicus(catholic monk) many Protestant theologians were upset over?
The Church had no problem with this.

Your right..

"In 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture",[105] and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.[c]"

Seachmall

The church tried to suppress the decimal number zero because they thought the manuscripts that discussed it were Arabic when in fact they were Hindi.


That shit's hilarious on so many levels.

sxt

Chucken wrote: »

And? Your point?

Religious conflict and warfare ended in the destruction of Earths biggest Library which had all the accumulative knowledge in Scientific/Mathematics/ Medicine/engineering/astronomy etc..

Airitech

sxt wrote: »

Religious conflict and warfare ended in the destruction of Earths biggest Library which had all the accumulative knowledge in Scientific/Mathematics/ Medicine/engineering/astronomy etc..

Theophilus burned the Library of the Serapeum, an offshoot of the Great Library attached to a temple. Plain old warfare destroyed the Library of Alexandria. If you are going to copy pieces of Wikipedia you could at least read the whole article.

Here's a piece from the journal Nature: http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2011/05/18/science-owes-much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages

Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.

Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

Chucken

sxt wrote: »

Religious conflict and warfare ended in the destruction of Earths biggest Library which had all the accumulative knowledge in Scientific/Mathematics/ Medicine/engineering/astronomy etc..

Do you think the aul wars were done just to get rid of the knowledge?

666irishguy

Zero to very little as far as I can see. As others have said, at times it helped preserve knowledge. Keeping that in mind perhaps a much better question would be; "how many centuries did roaming hordes of barbarians hold back scientific progress?" The Huns and co, triggered the dark ages and essentially held up any major learning for about 2-400 years and essentially destroyed civilization across a large part of Europe, North Africa etc. Who knows where the world would be scientifically if Rome never fell?

opinion guy

Its interesting that you all talk about this in the past tense, when even today there are places in the world where religious dogmatic belief is taught in preference to science - e.g. creation theory being taught in shcools in America instead of evolution theory

9959

Airitech wrote: »

..... printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period....

Love the above, imagine the heated debates over a couple of pints of mead, forget The Beatles v The Stones, or Blur v Oasis, we're talkin' the big one here, Printing v Accountancy.

Chop Chop

Atheism, it's so diverse, it comes in many forms in many threads. It seems it can be integrated to any discussion here in AH.

Loads of back slapping and circle jerking. It gets boring after a while.

9959

Chop Chop wrote: »

Atheism, it's so diverse, it comes in many forms in many threads. It seems it can be integrated to any discussion here in AH.

Loads of back slapping and circle jerking. It gets boring after a while.

Atheism...it's omnipresent.

Wibbs

666irishguy wrote: »

Who knows where the world would be scientifically if Rome never fell?

Maybe not so far ahead. Maybe even more backward. Empires have a habit of stagnating. Rome was already stagnating, hence one reason for it's fall in the western empire. China might be informative in this respect. China is an empire as much as a nation. Yes China innovated, sometimes in truly breathtaking ways, but these innovations were usually followed by long periods of stagnation, a fallback to the status quo and tradition* When the western nations started to show up in China in any numbers in the 18/19th century it was a medieval kingdom in many ways

Why? Well when you're the biggest empire around you don't have to innovate much. However when Rome falls you end up with loads of little nation states competing against each other for advantage. Innovation really kicks off at such times. War or the threat of war breeds far more innovation than extended peace. With extended peace the tendency is to not rock the boat. Look at the 20th century. A crazy amount of stuff we take for granted today was developed/perfected in WW2. We stood on the moon because of WW2 and went there in the first place because of a "cold" war.







*their religions/philosophies may have something to do with that too. The idea that nature is perfect and man must become like nature to be balanced is subty different to the western vibe. In this neck of the woods man is above nature and can control it. Gives a different tack to things.

Cavehill Red

Wibbs is right. The notion that Rome fell, causing 'dark ages' for centuries is a myth propounded primarily by the likes of Edward Gibbon.
In reality, almost all classical knowledge was preserved by religious authorities, expanded upon by religious authorities and propagated by religious authorities.

Specifically, and this is something we as a nation ought to be proud of, the Irish monks were central to the preservation and propagation of classical knowledge during the pre-medieval period.

As previously mentioned, Islamic scholars (especially those attached to Abū Ja'far al-Ma'mūn's House of Wisdom in Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries) expanded upon the science of the ancients, developing many scientific techniques of their own, as can be seen from scientific words which still carry their Arabic roots - algebra, alcohol (distillation was an Islamic invention - they made perfume via that method), etc.

As an atheist myself, I get tremendously dismayed to see this sort of kneejerk, unthought-out attempt to beat up on religion. In fact, to me it smacks of the very lack of critical thinking that those responsible would be the first to accuse religious people of.

pablomakaveli

opinion guy wrote: »

Its interesting that you all talk about this in the past tense, when even today there are places in the world where religious dogmatic belief is taught in preference to science - e.g. creation theory being taught in schools in America instead of evolution theory

No ones saying that isnt problem but its more of a recent phenomenon than being the rule throughout the centuries. Nor does it instantly the dismiss the positive influence that religion has played in scientific progress.

ejmaztec

If there had been a lot more wars, we'd have had our hover-boards years ago.

I think that it was down to WW2 that we can stick things in a microwave.

ejmaztec

Chop Chop wrote: »

Atheism, it's so diverse, it comes in many forms in many threads. It seems it can be integrated to any discussion here in AH.

Loads of back slapping and circle jerking. It gets boring after a while.

I'm wondering how many centuries these "agenda" threads have held back the fun that used to be in After Hours.

opinion guy

666irishguy wrote: »

Who knows where the world would be scientifically if Rome never fell?

Don't be ridiculous Rome didn't fall - it merely morphed into the Catholic Church

pablomakaveli wrote: »

No ones saying that isnt problem but its more of a recent phenomenon than being the rule throughout the centuries. Nor does it instantly the dismiss the positive influence that religion has played in scientific progress.

Hmmm I don't really think its a recent problem - see the Church v Gallileo

I didn't say it did dismiss the positive influence of the Church in certain time periods. Yet it is a current problem - and it very much is a problem by the way. Personally I think religion and mystical thinking is on the rise again - see the rise of Islamists in the middle east replacing ousted dictators. See the recent resurgence of Iona/Youth Defence on the back of the Savita tradegy - and by the way Youth Defence have had a massive influence on scientific thinking on abortion in Ireland:
http://www.youthdefence.ie/latest-news/major-medical-symposium-in-dublin-concludes-that-abortion-is-not-medically-necessary-to-save-the-life-of-a-mother/
This conference was run by the same guy who runs Youth Defence as you can see in the comments

Airitech

opinion guy wrote: »

Don't be ridiculous Rome didn't fall - it merely morphed into the Catholic Church



Hmmm I don't really think its a recent problem - see the Church v Gallileo

I didn't say it did dismiss the positive influence of the Church in certain time periods. Yet it is a current problem - and it very much is a problem by the way. Personally I think religion and mystical thinking is on the rise again - see the rise of Islamists in the middle east replacing ousted dictators. See the recent resurgence of Iona/Youth Defence on the back of the Savita tradegy - and by the way Youth Defence have had a massive influence on scientific thinking on abortion in Ireland:
http://www.youthdefence.ie/latest-news/major-medical-symposium-in-dublin-concludes-that-abortion-is-not-medically-necessary-to-save-the-life-of-a-mother/
This conference was run by the same guy who runs Youth Defence as you can see in the comments

None of that is holding back scientific advancement though. Society considers research far too important now. Religion no longer has the influence to impede scientific research even if it wanted to, particularly in developed countries where the bulk of research takes place.

Seachmall

Airitech wrote: »

Religion no longer has the influence to impede scientific research even if it wanted to, particularly in developed countries where the bulk of research takes place.

Stem Cell research?

Airitech

Seachmall wrote: »

Stem Cell research?

That's more an ethical issue than just a religious one. Religion is bound to come down on one side of that argument but they are not alone in that.

Seachmall

Airitech wrote: »

That's more an ethical issue than just a religious one. Religion is bound to come down on one side of that argument but they are not alone in that.

While I'm sure there are secular opponents to embryonic stem cell research I'd suspect the vast majority of opposition stems from religious opinion and is supported by religious organisations.

I don't think the opposition is overpowering and I'm not suggesting concerns should be dismissed simply because they are (or may be) founded in religious belief but it is a case where religion is impacting progression in a scientific field.

G Power

too many!!

Cavehill Red

Seachmall wrote: »

While I'm sure there are secular opponents to embryonic stem cell research I'd suspect the vast majority of opposition stems from religious opinion and is supported by religious organisations.

Since you're clearly a fan of the scientific method, perhaps you might wish to provide some evidence for this?

Seachmall

Cavehill Red wrote: »

Since you're clearly a fan of the scientific method, perhaps you might wish to provide some evidence for this?

"I'd suspect", a phrase akin to "I believe" or "I think".

Often used when the poster wants to make clear he's not making a factual claim but instead is conveying an opinion he currently holds.

DEFTLEFTHAND

Religion and science can coexist. People in the know respect each other, they don't engage in petty name calling.

Cavehill Red

Seachmall wrote: »

"I'd suspect", a phrase akin to "I believe" or "I think".

Often used when the poster wants to make clear he's not making a factual claim but instead is conveying an opinion he currently holds.

So, it's more like a belief you have that isn't based on any evidence then.
That reminds me of something...

Seachmall

Cavehill Red wrote: »

So, it's more like a belief you have that isn't based on any evidence then.
That reminds me of something...

It's based on the idea that the arguments opposed to stem cell research are synonymous with the arguments opposed to abortion and the idea that the largest opponent to abortion, at least in this country, is the Catholic Church.

However, I'm more than willing to be corrected on the matter and will make the point that, from my opinion, why people are arguing against stem cell research is less important than the arguments themselves.

The phrasing of the sentence you quoted (in particular the two words you conveniently left unemphasisyd) was explicitly to make the point that it's not something I'm claiming to know for sure nor a belief I hold to be absolute and therefore it is not comparable to faith-based beliefs as you're implying.

Do you have any more tediously pedantic points you'd like to make?

Cavehill Red

I'm sorry that you find being held to account for your beliefs to be tedious.

Seachmall

Cavehill Red wrote: »

I'm sorry that you find being held to account for your beliefs to be tedious.

I find having to address being quoted out of context for the sake of making an irrelevant point tedious.

I also believe the guy who had a break down in the other thread is genuine and it wasn't set up.

Would you like me to outline my position on that too?

Truncheon Rouge

religion is organised spirituality, nothing more.

political hierarchies, sectarianism, tribalism and controlling the plebs is something else. and absolutely doesnt require religion to exist....oil, money, race, economics will all work fine.


Although op has a reasoned point.

Sergeant

It's a well-known fact that the Pope has personally suppressed development of hover-buggies.

Cavehill Red

Seachmall wrote: »

I find having to address being quoted out of context for the sake of making an irrelevant point tedious.

It's not irrelevant to ask you to provide evidence for your statements. That's standard practice across the whole of boards and indeed in all formats of civilised debate.

Seachmall wrote: »

I also believe the guy who had a break down in the other thread is genuine and it wasn't set up.
Would you like me to outline my position on that too?

This, on the other hand, appears to be utterly irrelevant. A cynic would perhaps conclude that this is an attempt to derail the discussion from your faith-based line of argument.

Seachmall

Cavehill Red wrote: »

It's not irrelevant to ask you to provide evidence for your statements. That's standard practice across the whole of boards and indeed in all formats of civilised debate.

Evidence is required when someone makes a claim they state to be true. I made a claim, and later provided a reason for that claim, based on my own interpretation of the arguments. I also pointed out that I acknowledge that the interpretation to be ultimately irrelevant to the arguments opposing stem cell research and made it clear I was open to being corrected.

This, on the other hand, appears to be utterly irrelevant. A cynic would perhaps conclude that this is an attempt to derail the discussion from your faith-based line of argument.

"Faith based" would imply I hold my arguments to be infallible and without reason.

WoollyRedHat

fergiesfolly wrote: »

How many threads are started in here that could've been prevented by a bit of pre-emptive googling?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+many+threads+are+started+in+here+that+could%27ve+been+prevented+by+a+bit+of+pre-emptive+googling%3F

Cavehill Red

Seachmall wrote: »

Evidence is required when someone makes a claim they state to be true. I made a claim, and later provided a reason for that claim, based on my own interpretation of the arguments. I also pointed out that I acknowledge that the interpretation to be ultimately irrelevant to the arguments opposing stem cell research and made it clear I was open to being corrected.

Allow me to correct you with a cornerstone tenet of science - correlation is not causation unless proven so. I await your proof.

Seachmall wrote: »

"Faith based" would imply I hold my arguments to be infallible and without reason.

If you believe it and are incapable of providing supporting evidence it is an article of faith, no more.