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Original discussion thread for "SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY"

#130: April - June 2014 (Non-Fiction)
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stahrwe

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Original discussion thread for "SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY"

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Dr. Stacy Trasancos has authorized a limited license, at no cost, to members of BookTalk.org to discuss her book, Science Was Born of Christianity - The Teaching of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki.

The following conditions apply to this license:

THIS IS A SPECIAL EDITION OF THE BOOK, SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY – THE TEACHING OF STANLEY L. JAKI BY STACY TRASANCOS.

IT IS LICENSED SOLELY FOR USE BY MEMBERS OF BOOKTALK.ORG FOR DISCUSSION ON THE BOOKTALK.ORG SITE.

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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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Please thank Dr Trasancos for this kind gesture.

I plan to download soon (on my mac)

:)
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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Thanks Dr. Trasancos and Stahrwe. ;-)
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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There is some jockeying of definitions at the start. I only gave it a cursory glance, and will read more later. I'm always skeptical of shoehorning concepts by setting parameters on definitions. For example, science isn't necessarily exact. There are fields that deal in probabilities. Science is also partially semantic, in the creation of models.
Solid reasoned discourse, including philosophy and theology, does not need quantification
from exact science to support it, since those discourses ought to be able to stand on their own
merit
At some point, all reasoned discourse must have some sort of anchor to reality. If we're to talk about 'something', then the status of that something is required before we start chopping it up with logic. The status doesn't need to be quantitative, it could be qualitative. Tried and true processes ensure the base material that we reason about is sound.
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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Even though almost all historians of science now support the contributions of the Roman Catholic Church during and before the Middle Ages, even Catholic historians of science are reluctant to embrace Jaki’s theological argument that the Christian worldview was responsible for the birth of science.
I've known that historians have said this about Christianity facilitating science, but I'm not too sure that we have to concede the point on that basis. Is the agreement really as nearly universal as she says? This would be the matter to look into first, before we even get to her claim that the religion gave birth to science. There could be other explanations for the success of science if the correlation between the two even holds up.

There is a list of objections to the science/religion nexus on the evolutionistrue website.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com ... f-science/
Last edited by DWill on Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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Chris, Are you going to set up a sub-forum and chapters for this discussion? I think this is way too much for one thread...
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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There's no question in my mind that religion was crucial in bringing about long periods of social stability that allowed intellectual and artistic achievements to take place. It’s another thing to say that Christianity “gave birth to science” especially when you consider that so much of the groundwork for science came long before Christianity. Indeed, the Enlightenment was a rejection of the Church’s authority on matters of science and rationality. While Catholics in Rome were banning books and forcing Galileo to cease and desist his theories on heliocentrism, the scientific movement was moving to the Protestant north where new ideas were better tolerated.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/

I don't think the idea that science was born of Christianity is something you're going to find in most history books, or at least not stated in such simplistic terms. (However you will find it on Conservapedia (http://www.conservapedia.com/Christianity_and_science)). As such it seems more like religion apologia than actual history, an idealization of a time when science and religion were intermingled and when the Catholic Church did actually veto scientific knowledge.

So I’m not sure I’ll read Dr. Stacy Trasancos’ book, but here’s an article by Fr. Jaki that probably goes into many of these ideas. For example, Jaki claims that much of science is based on supernatural revelation in the Bible. Jaki also seems fairly entrenched in what he calls a “cultural contest” between science and religion. (Read what Jaki says about Carl Sagan and tell me he doesn’t have some sour grapes).

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/s ... c0005.html

I guess I see a fairly liberal definition of what constitutes religion and what constitutes science. For most of humanity it wasn’t possible to separate the two, so what’s the impetus to look back on history and do that retroactively? The Bible includes a lot of history and myth that represents human experience. Much of the source material actually predates Christianity. And, by the way, so does the idea that we should be kind to one another. Some people may believe the idea of altruism is Biblical, but we also see its beginnings in the animal kingdom.

There seems to be an agenda to rack up points for religion when, in fact, science is a very human endeavor. Ever since humans started tinkering with things and trying to figure out how things work, they were dabbling in science to some degree.

Edit: (Perhaps) a relevant quote by William James:

"It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.”
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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Did you read the Jaki article?

Where did you obtain the William James quote?

I am unclear about your decision not to read Dr. Trasancos' book.
Do you believe you already know all the facts surrounding the history of science and Dr. Trasancos/Jaki/Duhem are wrong?
That is a significant claim given Dr. Jaki's, and Dr. Duhem's reputations and Dr. Trasanco's research.


The premise of the book is not that religion (Christianity) provided a period of stability which allowed for scientific progress. The premise of the book is that prior cultures were inhibited by attitudes which prevented science from progressing. These impediments were eliminated by the church.

You also are falling for the urban legend about Galileo and his trial. The reasons for it, along with the Bruno affair and others, including the Flat Earth Myth, are misrepresentations in order to promote an attitude of dismissal toward Christianity.

These comments are my own and do not include guidance from Dr. Trasancos other than from my reading of her book so I am solely responsible for the above.
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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Stahrwe wrote:The premise of the book is that prior cultures were inhibited by attitudes which prevented science from progressing. These impediments were eliminated by the church.
I'm seeing a bunch of correlation and speculation in forming the argument. I read most of it, through Roger Bacon's bit. Every Egyptian had a certain mindset? I would think there are hundreds if not thousands of other variables that were every bit as instrumental in why science failed in earlier cultures, and why it eventually reached critical mass in the middle ages. In many of the earlier cultures, the intellectual infrastructure simply wasn't in place. Not to say the progress of science was linear, but that much of what came before was necessary for critical mass to occur. To use Jaki's analogy, some branches had to grow to fruition to find the anomalies at the tips.

Muslims made contributions to science that were directly motivated by their religion. Islam was a better womb for science than Christianity. The medical contributions were science, and no definition shifting will change that. In both Islam and Christian areas, the adherence to aristotelian physics seems to have been the main impediment. It was a paradigm that needed anomalies for people to shift away from it.

I don't see how cyclical ideologies are supposed to have caused stillbirths. Much of nature is in fact cyclical. Why would this hamper understanding? Sure, there's correlation, but showing causation is a different animal.
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Re: SCIENCE WAS BORN OF CHRISTIANITY FULL TEXT LIMITED LICENSE

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What counts as science is to a large degree determined by the historical context.

The translation movements undertaken by Christianity and Islam were monumental in both preserving and building natural philosophy into what we today call "science"

Theological considerations of the monotheistic religions were the lens each used to help understand the natural world. Monotheism did NOT disdained the practice of "science" in the manner that has been popularized today - the conflict between science and religion. That's simply false and something modern historians dismiss as ahistorical.

As I've said many times before, the Galileo saga is the poster child for the mythical conflict thesis. There were many practicing scientists during Galileo's life that were neither persecuted or exiled. Galileo's unfortunate predicament was largely his own doing. This is not something I'm personally promoting as an apologist. It's a historical FACT.

The unfavorable political climate, Galileo's unkind portrayal of his friend (Urban), and his refusal to present heliocentrism as a hypothesis lacking corroborating evidence (there were other natural philosophers at the time that did not accept it as fact) ultimately sealed his fate.

Contrary to what some people believe, Galileo was not thrown into a dungeon and fed bread and water for the rest of his life. He actually was subjected to a hospitable "house arrest."

The historical interaction between religion and science is highly complex. It's easy and intellectually lazy to toss blanket statements around in an attempt to demonize religion.
Honest research will enable you to expose the frauds that play this game.
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