DWill wrote:. . . The degree to which religion should be "credited," if at all, is a question that has puzzled me for a while, and it's a controversial one. Is religion then to be castigated for the bad stuff in a given era but never credited for anything good? If it didn't cause the good, could it really have caused the bad?

Taking science as an example, we know that early on the Church did some persecuting of people like Galileo, and that today there is still much inexplicable denial of evolution in the U.S. But some make the claim that Christianity provided a fertile medium for science to develop despite these counter-examples. So this is a claim that religion can be a positive force for progress. The attitude, say some, is that the church in Europe encouraged investigation into the wonders that God had created. Darwin's recommended career choice was the clergy, the passion for naturalism being no impediment. Gregor Mendel of course was a monk.

I think we can never answer the question of the nature of our debt, if any, to Christianity. We can only have beliefs not based on enough evidence. To answer it would require a point of view that no individual could ever command. One of my favorite passages is from Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote: "The whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management."

geo wrote:
I have heard too many times that science owes a debt to religion, specifically Christianity, and it makes less and less sense to me. It's true that the ancient scribes painstakingly copied many of the Greek texts that would have otherwise been lost. But I think we can view this simply as different people at different periods of our history saw the value in copying them down. Did it really have anything to do with religion which is only a cultural extension of ourselves? And the idea that Christianity created fertile ground for science to take root seems silly to me. It's human nature to seek ways to understand the world. We've been doing it from the beginning of time. Both religion and science seem to arise from our innate curiosity.

Going off on a tangent here, but Stephen Hawking, in his new book, argues that traditional philosophy is dead and that it is up to science to come up with answers. This may be true to a point, but I think a better argument is that theology is dead and always has been. If our concept of god is something that resides only in our imaginations, then theology would be nothing more than a series of thought experiments. These thought experiments in of themselves can yield nothing in the end. What truth or meaningful fact was ever derived from theology? Even if God was real, theology has not yielded a single truth about him or the universe in which we live. And so it seems to me that theology exists only to rationalize our (probably imaginary) concept of God. And though religion provides a kind of framework that lends cohesion to like-minded social groups, it is nothing more than a cultural extension of ourselves, and is neither responsible for the hatred and violence nor morality and peace. It seems sort of schizophrenic to talk about it as if it were some separate entity.

DWill wrote: Thanks, geo, for your response. You appear to be saying that neutrality concerning the effect of religion--good or bad--is the position most consistent with the facts. I think of the "debt" question somewhat in the manner of the debt that amphibians owe to fish--that the latter built on the former to a considerable extent. It doesn't make sense to me that cultural evolution would occur without the distinct imprint of previous forms on succeeding ones. This seems to be Wright's position as he states it early in his book. Not that that is decisive in any way, but just to relate the post to the nominal topic. In the second half of the "Moral Imagination" chapter, he also says that one benefit of religion is that it can direct or activate the moral imagination, which often doesn't work without a boost of some kind once a level of social organization beyond the hunter-gatherer is reached. This has nothing to do with science, obviously, but might relate to the second half of your post. I don't know what exactly we are to call theology. I think I know what you mean, the metaphysical system that a religion says defines ultimate reality. I agree that these might be interesting but are irrelevant. I wouldn't agree that everything a theologian says is irrelevant, though. I found quite a bit of insight in Reinhold Niebuhr's book The Irony of American History, a book that inspired Andrew Bacevich as well as Barack Obama. Hitchens views some theologians of past eras as intellectual giants on whose shoulders we stand, despite what we can see as the limitations of their worldviews.