Thanks, there goes my chance of it being a day where I don’t think about the Roman Empire.
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… people who never think about any empire just can’t be trusted
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That’s debatable. Europeans were navigating entire oceans and developing major new technologies like firearms before Martin Luther ever got his thing going. Leonardo Da Vinci had a brilliant mind for science and he lived almost his entire life before the Protestant Reformation.
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I’m not sure if that’s entirely true… Social teachings are pretty thoughtful, as is the theology of Dr. King, of Quakers, etc…
Except, many Catholics ALSO contributed to that well of knowledge…
And yet… again, people square the two. They embrace science and faith. On a daily basis. Sure, science “won”, but mainly because many people of faith were able to find ways to change their doctrines to accomodate… so… did it “win” or was the whole conflict just sort of our manufactured historical drama that simplifies how historical processes actually happened.
Well… yeah. That’s how historical change works as we’re living through it. It’s only in hindsight we can see how that change happened and discuss/speculate as to why… We don’t know what will happen, but it seems pretty likely that religion is going to continue to change and evolve to accommodate other ways of thinking about the world. It seems to me that it fills need in human life that other things don’t. It’s true other things have emerged to try and do the same, and for some people it’s been more than enough… but if you look at some of the things (nationalism, consumerism, fandom, etc)… some tried them out and found them wanting.
So… I don’t know.
Obligatory…
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… and they were going to Alpha Centari: a tri-star system where there is no proof of a habitable planet. They were going on Faith™ that there will be one (never mind a tri star system could not support a planet with a stable orbit).
See also Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson which made a pretty good case for the fact that life support systems on a generation ship will just break down. Where the ship would be a giant metal tomb of dead humans after the 6th or 7th generation.
But, no, seriously. Your Faith™ will get your descendants to your new, blue and green home planet.
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True. The part of what used to be Catholic dogma that asserted the Pope’s infallibility in astronomical matters is no longer considered a matter of religion. There was a conflict between that worldview and reality. The Church was wrong. Eventually, it admitted this and withdrew from parts of what it used to consider its scope. Therefore, this is no longer a conflict. It would still be a mistake to look at that history and pretend there was not a conflict between religion and science, that there are not such conflicts today, and that there will not be such conflicts in the future.
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That’s a different sci-fi franchise with its own streaming TV adaptation…
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I guess I wonder who you see as doing the manufacturing, then? Because the Church in Galileo’s time definitely acted as though it felt threatened by scientific knowledge in a way it didn’t in Copernicus’ time. Not everyone, not uniformly, but it was still there. If anything I would say there was real conflict, it bothered some people more than others, but it has many times been enough to spark plenty of violence right up until the people able to reconcile their beliefs became the predominant faction.
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Okay… well, no one said that. But the conflict comes from people choosing to make it a conflict, not from the two just… existing together. History is never just stuff happening cause… it’s people making choices out of particular circumstances in which they find themselves. Much of the conflict came from internally within Christendom. Besides which the existence of said conflicts do not negate the fact that the vast majority of people square this issue every day, on an ongoing basis. You just can’t sort of cherry pick narratives like that, as it does a disservice to our understanding of what happened in the past. No one here said there was NO conflict, just that conflict was not and is not inevitable. 
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Of course. It’ll always be about people. Nothing happens in society except as it happens through people. I… don’t think I said otherwise? But all that squaring and reconciling includes lots of people giving up deeply held, cherished beliefs, losing what some/many of them they considered load-bearing pieces of their worldview, based on their being told about discoveries they don’t really understand. I think some conflict was inevitable, because I don’t think you can expect so many humans to go through those kinds of repeated reconcilings (and resulting crises of faith) without some of them turning to various forms of conflict.
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For the record Proxima is a whole light-month away from the other two stars and has at least one confirmed planet. It’s not habitable, but because it’s much too close instead of because its orbit is unstable, and there’s still lots of room for others in theory.
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And of course we also see those kinds of conflicts crop up all the time with non-religious societies, like how the aspirationally atheist Soviet Union suppressed entire fields of science for ideological reasons.
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To add, I think it is probably worth emphasizing that a lot of what people see as the conflict between religion and science comes from choosing to fit examples to that narrative.
For instance it’s absolutely true for instance that Galileo was condemned for going against the church on heliocentrism. But Giordano Bruno was a non-scientist killed in a purely religious controversy. Hypatia’s and Socrates’s deaths both had to do with politics rather than philosophy, and Protagoras’s trial for impiety was a later story that may never have happened at all. And the torching of the Library of Alexandria by Christians or Muslims, depending on who the teller wanted to make look bad, was definitely never a thing. Even so all of them have been held up at one point or another as examples of the endless conflict between religion and science.
People fight over stuff a lot, so you can always find a pattern of conflict if you want to.
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See, e.g., Abominable Science! by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero, where on page 292 it says
Most of the active explorers seeking Mokele Mbembe [a purported sauropod-like creature in the Congo] have a nonscientific agenda: Young Earth creationism (the evangelical Christian belief that Earth was created about 6,000 years ago by God, as described in the book of Genesis). […]
Mokele Mbembe, in particular, is an idea that Young Earth creationists like [William] Gibbons find natural and attractive: “To the Bible believing Christian, the idea of dinosaurs living with man in the past or even some still living today, is scientifically possible. Christians know that God made all the animals, including dinosaurs, about 6000 years ago.”* But the creationists’ fascination with Mokele Mbembe is not merely that its existence seems plausible within a creationist worldview, but that its existence has important ideological or theological ramifications. For some reason, creationists believe that the discovery of a dinosaur in Africa will overthrow the entire theory of evolution.
* William Gibbons and Kent Hovind, Claws, Jaws and Dinosaurs (Pensacola, Fla.: CSE, 1999)
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I just want to poke my head up (in expectation of getting it shot off), and point out that saying that all the great scientists of the middle ages and renaissance were believers isn’t saying as much as you might think when it was literally illegal to be an atheist.
Yeah, people who were able to publish works which moved scientific thought forward were going to be, publicly, at least plausibly theistic, because if they expressed personal atheism, then they were going to have a whole bunch of other problems to deal with.
Can we at least settle on the proposition that science and religion are to large extent orthogonal?
And that there’s a really big bias going on: claiming the existence of medieval scientists who were professed (Christians/Jews/Muslims) doesn’t really say a lot when almost all of everyone in Europe and the MENA was an active member of one those religions, because they would literally be persecuted and forced to recant or be killed if not?
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Everyone knows that Galileo got in trouble with the Church for claiming that the Earth orbited the sun and not the other way round. In actual fact, he got into trouble not so much for making those claims as such but for publishing them in a really inept and ill-considered manner that could be construed as making the Pope look stupid. The Pope and Galileo actually used to be quite good friends, but that was taking things too far and there were appearances to be upheld, so Galileo did get into considerable trouble over it. (Not as bad as it could have been – he wasn’t burnt at the stake like other people who had made similar claims before him –, but still, quite considerable trouble.)
As far as the concept of science and religion being orthogonal goes, the Vatican at the time had astronomers on staff who were definitely not stupid people and were able to recognise a good idea when it came their way. Also, the science of measuring the movements of heavenly bodies had advanced to a point where it became increasingly clear that the traditional methods of calculating orbits with the Earth at the center of the universe and everything else moving around it on circles moving on other circles might no longer be able to explain the actual measurements, so at some point something had to give. (Kepler’s idea of using ellipses instead of circles for the orbits also helped because it made the measurements match the theory that much better.)
It did take the Catholic Church a number of centuries to make it official, but today, Scripture notwithstanding, it no longer has a beef with Galileo and colleagues and their heliocentric ideas – which is just as well because if religion denies science, it does tend to make religion look stupid in the end, and, unlike in the 17th, in the 21st century the Pope is no longer in a position to get scientists into serious trouble if the Church looks stupid in a scientific debate.
There was already trouble before the Dialogue though. For instance the reason it is a dialogue is because he had been forbidden from writing something presenting the movement of the Earth as if it were fact, and was only allowed to present a comparison. Obviously the comparison being “one is smart and the other is for simpletons” made the trouble much worse, but the church was still plainly against openly questioning Aristotle’s physics at the time.
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Yes, because I would argue (Foucault has entered the chat, sorry folks) that it’s ultimately about power, not about faith. If the church (or a king, prince, sultan, etc) thought that a particular field would be beneficial to them, then, they absolutely endorse and condone. If it was seen as a threat for whatever reason (contradicting a widely accepting church teaching for example, at a time when the church was not just a church, but a structure of real violence based political power), then you could end up in jail for printing it. As long as we have centralized centers of power, this kind of thing is going to happen, and it does not matter if that center is religiously oriented or secular.
they do… and of course, I think the development of the modern field fo history drove a lot of how we view that, too. The overly central focus on empires, states, great men, often via the lens of conflict, with the nation-state being the inevitable historical conclusion led many historians of the 19th and early 20th century to self-select for those narratives. It made conflict seem like the primary, if not only engine of history. Even Marx fell into that pattern of thinking. While he certainly expanded who we think about when we think about historical actors, he still made conflict the center piece of his narrative. Just of a different kind, that wasn’t always about violent conflict…
And that doesn’t mean that they were all just pretending for the authorities either. It’s still relatively true… and of course, no one said ALL. Not a one of us said all. It doesn’t undercut the reality that (once again) plenty of people of faith are also scientists.
I’m sorry, but it’s a historically problematic proposition to say that people only professed faith because of fear of death. Was that true for some… of course! But people have all sorts of reasons for what they do, some of which isn’t just driven by fear. And ultimately, we can only really go with what is in the sources. Unless we have contradicting sources on an issue like whether or not someone is truly faithful, it makes sense to accept them at their word if we have it written down somehow. And of course, we absolutely need to interrogate that source, too. Something from their own hands, that was obviously not forced by some outside force, maybe a diary discussing a point of theology, or their relationship to their faith, will be a stronger source than something written by someone else, maybe seeing them at church one day… There is no singular experience to draw from. But we do know the churches of Europe and the religious centers of Islam in the MENA played a substantial role in the development of modern scientific fields. I’m not sure anyone can say otherwise…
Right. The church absolutely had a hand in the development of modern science. They were not just standing in the way of progress yelling stop… But for some, the teleological narrative is a hard one to shake. And the idea of going from a demon-haunted world to a secular, rational one is quite a compelling narrative that helps us to feel superior to people in the past…But history just… isn’t progressive in the way people imagine. All we can really say is that things change, and historians dig into the reasons for those changes and seek to understand it and to share that with the public and to argue about it…
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Copernicus – whose day job was Roman Catholic church canon in what is today Poland – had published his main work, De revolutionibus, in which he proposed that the Sun was at the centre of the solar system, in 1543, and his ideas were openly discussed and reasonably well-received even by the Church at the time. Towards the end of the 16th century, his book actually became required reading at various Catholic universities. It took the Catholic Church until the “Galileo affair” 70+ years later to do something about De revolutionibus: In 1616, a decree was issued saying that the book should be changed to stress that what it proposed was a mere idle hypothesis and speculation, and to avoid the impression that it attempted to describe the actual world. (The original, uncensored version remained on the index of prohibited books until 1835.)
One reason for this is that Copernicus’s ideas, while revolutionary, were not a huge practical improvement on the prevailing theories at the time (Copernicus’s solar system was still based on circular orbits with epicycles, like the traditional Ptolemaic system and the more modern one put forward by the Danish court astronomer, Tycho Brahe), so it was easy to shrug them off as fanciful, unscientific, and unnecessary. It did take the efforts of Galileo, Kepler, and finally Newton to establish the heliocentric system as clearly superior to the previous ones, at which point the Catholic Church had bigger fish to fry. (In fairness it should also be said that the Protestant churches at the time weren’t too hot on Copernicus and his ideas, either. The great man himself was not personally affected by all the controversy, though, having died very shortly after the first copies of De revolutionibus had come back from the printer.)
I never said they did.
I’m not even attempting to say “there were people of faith and people of science, and they were different people.” Most people of science were people of faith, because most people were people of faith. But that didn’t happen in an epistomological vacuum either. Faith was socially enforced, and faith was legally enforced (or at least the public performance of it), and there were legal consequences for being orthodox insufficiently well, and we have lots and lots of instances of people being publicly unorthodox in various ways –whether from conviction, from ignorance, or from apathy – and getting punished for it, from local social opprobrium up to execution.
So, yes, pretty much everyone was a person of faith, and indications are that most people were sincere in it. But given the context, saying “all these people were people of faith” doesn’t actually prove much, in a Bayesian sense. It’s the null hypothesis for medieval life.
Also, while I wouldn’t say that the Church was opposed to the idea of scientific progress in theory, in practice what they liked was engineering progress. Remember, the establishment of the Church had systems, set up over centuries in various places, dedicated to finding deviations from orthodoxy and stamping it out: the priest was supposed to be guiding his parish, the bishop doing visitations on the churches and chapels, the archbishop calling the bishops in for ecclesiastic courts and synods, etc. There was a lot of room in that process for someone to err on the side of “I don’t get it, it’s probably heresy”, and the best case was for the idea (and the proponent) to end up pleading their case to a court or a synod, and that was a political matter as much as a theological one. Explanations of fact were OK, that’s how bestiaries and natural histories worked. But as soon as you started getting into the why instead of the how, you risked bumping into some heresy or other, and the only way to find out whether a new idea was heretical or not was to run it up the chain and see whether, ultimately, the Pope and the college of Cardinals agreed with it or not.
I suppose the point of the argument there was that the Church wasn’t necessarily an opponent of science on any theological basis, but the politics of it tended to the delicate.
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