Did religion hold back science? -- Bede vs. JLK

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

This thread has been set up for a formal debate between Bede and JLK on the following resolution:

Resolved: Religion has not held back the rise of science.

Bede will take the affirmative and JLK will oppose. The debate will last for 4 rounds and statements will be submitted concurrently, as agreed to from the parameters (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=88804). JLK and Bede will also provide links to personal blogs during the course of the debate that provide more in-depth commentary.

A Peanut Gallery (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=1733185#post1733185) is set up in the Science & Skepticism forum for the rest of us to comment on the debate.

Good luck to both participants!

Jason

[Bede]

The idea that there has been an inevitable conflict between science and religion is rejected by nearly all modern scholars of the history of science, indeed “historical study does not reveal science and Christianity locked in deadly combat.�(1). The conflict hypothesis was born with the anti-clerical diatribes of the French philosophes during the eighteenth century. “They did not simply discover what had previously been a latent conflict between science and religion, and bring it to light: to the contrary, they created a conflict and trumpeted it as a way of supporting their notions of truth.� (2). It was further developed during the nineteenth by the influential American authors John Draper and Andrew Dickson White. As I have shown here (http://www.bede.org.uk/conflict.htm), the widely believed myths about the church insisting the earth was flat, preventing dissection, burning scientists and trying to prevent learning have all been debunked.

I do not expect JLK to want to resurrect these old canards. Rather we should be seeking to ask whether religion has impeded the rise of science not by deliberate suppression, but rather by being a strongly antithetical worldview. Often we hear that science is based on reason and religion on faith (sometimes categorised as ‘blind’). As JLK has kindly provided us with some definitions we need to look at them to establish how science and religion might interact. In the definition of science, 2a and 2b are much more helpful as definition 1 is too loose – not wrong but too wide. The second definition tells us what we mean when we talk about modern science - it is a set of practices and assumptions developed over time and becoming what we recognise as science around about 1800. This was the date that ‘God’ ceased to be a working assumption of Western science and hence methodological naturalism accidentally was born. No one sat down and worked these practices out and most philosophical efforts to define them after the event have been a failure (falsification, for instance). They have evolved in an ad hoc fashion as the body of practitioners have found what works and what doesn’t. It is this ad hoc nature of scientific practice that led Paul Feyerabend to state that if there was any all encompassing scientific method (and there isn’t) it would be “anything goes� (3). It was Thomas Kuhn’s realisations about ‘normal science’ the authority of scientific practice which is much the more interesting side of his work – the special training of new members of this fraternity is what gives it the ability to operate and amend the body of practices (4). One of the most interesting points is that this practicality has meant science could jettison its philosophical underpinnings without ill effect – it relied on the fact it worked and not any basic axioms.

Religion is a much older construct. Here definition 1 is the most important. Note how philosophical world view comes top of the list. Religions do feel they need a rational and coherent explanation, which explains why there has been so many efforts at systematic theology (for instance Thomas Aquinas in Christianity and Al Ghazadi in Islam). We can reject these systems but we need to be very careful before we start throwing words like ‘faith’, ‘reason’ and ‘evidence’ about. Science is not based on reason but the fact it works, however unreasonable that seems. Most religions are based on rational systems but we have to accept that we do not always, or even often, agree on these things.

Nowadays, as we have seen, science has no need for a philosophy. But it does need disagreement and argumentation to test and advance its practices. Individuals usually follow research programmes for personal reasons and often have non-scientific motivations for trying to demonstrate new facts. Usually their efforts come to naught and they are ignored or even insulted. But sometimes science as a whole finds that something works and so must be subsumed. If necessary, axioms can be changed to make way for the new fact. Religion has been (and may still be) one of the most important pieces of philosophical baggage that individuals find to motivate them to go out on a limb. Science as a whole might be objective and brutally honest about failure, but individual scientists are not.

Here are some examples: Copernicus was trying demonstrate the heavens worked in a way consistent with their creation by God – “The wisest and most orderly workman of all� (5); Keplar was trying to show that God would not allow even the tiniest error in his workings; as for Newton, he “took it upon himself to show that a mechanical universe could not maintain itself without God’s continual supervision� (6); while Laplace was trying to show it could. Splitting creatures into species and then classifying them was a product of the mindset that believed everything came from the originals that left the Ark (7). Science ignores all this stuff and just picks up the bits that work and gets rid of the reasons they were tried in the first place. We hear a lot about parsimony and the need for beauty in equations but if that can’t be made to work no one is going to reject the theory if it works. The desire for an elegance is just one more individual foible that produces grist for the scientific mill.

The process of debate about wrong ideas, religious or otherwise, is just as important to the success of science as the occasional correct ones. The mistakes of creationists have helped hone evolution into the theory it is today by forcing other practitioners to look for explanations. The antagonism of the Huxleys, Haldanes and Goulds for creationism (and in the first two cases for theism per se) was an essential ingredient for their work from which science, as always, picked out the bits that worked. Likewise, atheistic attacks on the Big Bang hypothesis by Fred Hoyle and his acolytes led Christians to fight all the harder for it, although science no longer cares who was on which side at the outset. Consequently, in the definition of ‘held back’, I think that the point about ‘fertile research programs’ is much the more important part as it avoids the whole can of worms over realism.

Finally, let me thank JLK for taking part in this debate and I look forward to reading his first post.

(1) David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago, 2003), p. 5.
(2) Thomas H. Broman, ibid., p. 88.
(3) Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (Berkeley, 1975), p. 28.
(4) See the useful summary by Barry Barnes, The Return of Grand Theory to the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1984), p. 94.
(5) Nicolaus Copernicus, The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Prometheus, 1995), p. 6.
(6) William B Ashworth, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago, 2003), p. 83.
(7) Janet Browne, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago, 2003), p. 115.

[JLK]

Sincere thanks to all making this debate possible.
Readers with 20 minutes are encouraged to see the full ~15,000 word argument (http://evolve-sciligion.blogspot.com) before reading this disjointed 1400 word summary.




Three arguments for the negative:
1. Adherence to non-justified dogmatic traditions ultimately based only on human authority
2. The resources/time, devoted to the practice and refining the doctrine of the religion, refused to science
3. Intimidation or dissuasion of numbers of the class who had the training, skills, potential and interest to challenge the reigning orthodoxy.

=========================

Preliminary concessions/comments
1. Religions embracing the values and methods of science, and with no ontology that would conflict with established scientific theory, cannot "hold back science" by definition.

2. The rise of Science-as-We-Know-It-Today was a complex affair. When the AlternateHistory involves ripping out entire widespread long-lasting religious belief systems and squinting at an imagined AlternateUniverse, one realizes only the most careful general statements can be made.

3. Dogmatic adherence to highly justified beliefs is a Good Thing

4. "Whiggish history!?!" [1]
“The tendency to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.�
Opponents of dogmatic theology and religious apologists have practiced Whiggish history. [2,3,4]

==========================

Exemplars of Large Religions
Egyptian, Mesopotamian, the more sophisticated of the Americas’ religions practiced mythologies. emphasizing sacred numerology, propitiation and ritual, subservience to authority encouraged.

The Greek and Roman mythologies were full of rather capricious gods. Divination and superstitious omens were taken as aspects of nature. Nature to the Greeks:
“…contained an essentially irrational element: nothing in nature can be described exactly by reason, in particular by mathematical concepts and laws.� [5]
The Hindu religions employed maya - all that is sensed is illusionary, an external world of phantoms - not an encouragement to understand sense data. The concept of a vast age for humanity either engendered fatalism, complacency or dissuaded those who might have been inclined to search for explanations of nature.

The Chinese religio-metaphysical concept of Yin and Yang, while useful as a metaphor today, became a all-purpose tool of complete explanation for all phenomena exemplifying duality of any type. The Chinese religions (transcendental Buddhism assimilated into Neo-Confucianism) held both a near infinite age humanity and lacked of sense of causal succession, seeing every significance as forwardly and backwardly connected in time.

Islamic medicine and mathematics were unmatched in previous history. But according to Bede’s Eric Snow:

"…the Q’ran emphasized on the absolute (and arbitrary) will of God. …It asserted the doctrine of occasionalism, which sees the law of cause and effect as only occurring due to God's continual, direct intervention …if a rock lands on a toe, the resulting pain is only due to Allah creating it, not due to the properties of the rock and toe themselves.
"[..]..when we turn to study the actions of Allah in the Quran, we discover that he is totally capricious and untrustworthy. He is not bound by his nature or his word."
Islamic science held a weak view of the laws of nature and an orderly universe." [6]

The Islamic taboo on drawing representations of nature also created an impediment to science.

=====================

Four other religious beliefs are often raised to allegedly explain the failure of SaWKIT to arise in several of these civilizations.
1. The concept of all time as consisting of essentially eternal, strictly repetitive cycles
2. An "organismic" or vitalistic view of all nature
3. The beliefs that the heavens were utterly different from the earth in nature (some viewing them as divine and/or alive)
4. The closely related reliance on astrology, offering false confidence in its explanatory power

All, taken literally and dogmatically, appear to contradict SaWKIT although if highly modified they may not.

=====================

SaWKIT coalesced in Christian Europe. Some orthodox doctrines are
1. A triune God, angels, demons, Satan, all beings with various powers and natures, passionately involved in and swayed by human concerns and even beliefs about natural processes.
2. a linear view of time from creation to judgement/apocalypse,
3. a particular status for humanity and it’s "Fall",
4. to varying degrees, a creation narrative (or two) and a status for nature
5. several major historical events, the Bible as a unique revelation.
6. a future eschatology and life after death

Instances of significant Christian intimidation of major figures in the history of early science for strictly ontological claims are not as abundant or simple as the "unremitting warfare" model of Andrew White or Draper promoted. Bruno was burned at the stake for his then heretical Neo-Platonic mysticism, not for his advocacy of helio-centrism and life in many solar systems. But Roger Bacon, the medieval champion of experimentalism, was enjoined to send his book secretly and imprisoned by Franciscans for two years for "novelties" in his teaching. The problem is quantifying the number of persons not so dissuaded.

Exemplars of ontological conflict:
Copernicus challenged man’s status in an intermediate, befitting position between the "perfect" heavens and the depths associated with hell, to one of a rider of a planet among equals.

Jesuit scholastics were opposed to Galileo’s support for atomism, with all the metaphysical, social and spiritual consequences that they perceived would flow from Aristotle’s overturning, and because atomism conflicted with numerous Catholic justifications, including for example the doctrine of Transubstantiation [8]

Creationism has limited of the number of people with justified beliefs about humanity, the earth’s natural history and wastes scientific-educational time, resources and dissuades potential scientists.

Entities with vast potentialities, if not restricted to explainable, understandable, publicly investigable processes, make the work of understanding the limits of nature’s behavior and ontology more difficult.

Resources:
European classes of educated, privileged (the very people in the best position to advance natural understanding) spent vast amounts of time and resources in Christian theology, produced reams of literature, expensively and laboriously, rather than exploring nature. Newton spent certainly at least a third and perhaps half of his productive time engaged in theological writing, bible study, numerology and prophetical analysis (he predicted the apocalyse will occur in 2060 CE) [9] Virtually all of it is, apparently, justifiably forgotten. Had this time been better spent investigating nature?

Epistemology/value:
Galileo suggested God spoke non-conflictedly through both scripture and the "book of nature," the latter read authoritatively only with reason and sense, hermeneutic principles clearly at odds with the spirit of the Council of Trent. [7]

Does this encourage or dissuade the concept of defeasibility in ideas?
"Today we face a struggle which is lead by the Devil himself; it is founded on something both insincere and destructive; Malicious publications.
"The Holy Church, …appointed by God himself, …represents an infallible master… One must not claim that …the index of forbidden books is a permanent attack against the progress of science" [10]

The concept of the Second Coming and an individual’s Life in Paradise after death hindered the desire to study nature for significant numbers of adherents, particularly if that study proved difficult and unsuccessful.

Augustine, the greatest Catholic theologian(?) and St. Paul had several dissuading double-edged comments regarding the "exploration of the nature of things" [11] and the "wisdom of the world."

Finally, God Himself, Incarnate in Christ, said nary an unambiguous word encouraging the practice, methods or unique values of science beyond encouraging honesty and social ethics.

Religions of the 19th/20th centuries, like Leninism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, neopaganism, Scientology, etc. have all held back the continued rise of SawKIT


References
1. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Amsterdam Press, 1931)
2. John Draper, History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (New York: Appleton 1875).
3. Andrew Dickson White, A History of Warfare of Science with Theology (New york: Dover 1896)
4. Stanley Jaki, The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin (South Bend IN, Regnery Gateway 1979).
5. Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Univ. of Chicago Press 1974).
6. Formerly at http://www.sojourn.com/~revev/jaki.html but now at the creationist Revolution Against Evolution site http://www.rae.org/jaki.html
7. William R. Shea, "Galileo and the Church," in David C. Lindberg, Ronald L. Numbers, eds. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, 1986).
8. Pietro Redondi, Raymond Rosenthal Galileo: Heretic (Princeton Univ Press; 1989).
9. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press; 1983)
10. The Holy See, The Index of prohibited literature, 1848.
11. Augustine, Enchiridon 3.9, (Library of Christian Classics Philadelphia, 1955)

[Bede]

My thanks to JLK for his first post.

JLK gives three arguments to show that religion has held back the rise of science. I’ll deal with these individually but first we should be clear what we mean by science. I fear JLK is being highly anachronistic in implicitly defining science as a set of facts which we claim to be true, rather than a set of practices or a society of individuals. This means he is trying to check a list of the ‘true’ facts of science against the alleged facts of other systems and judging them accordingly. While we agreed in the definition to use the term justified true beliefs, these must surely be the predictions of a theory rather than the theory itself. The theory only provides a justification and does not have to be true to carry out this function. You can hardly say that in 1470, Regiomontanus did not 'know' what the movements of Mars were going to be just because he based his calculations on a model of Ptolemy’s which we now reject.

Moving onto to JLK’s specific arguments, he first stated:

1. Adherence to non-justified dogmatic traditions ultimately based only on human authority.

In his blogg, JLK admits that dogmatic adherence to well justified beliefs is a good thing. This puts him on the side of the inquisition against Galileo as they were supporting the well justified scientific orthodoxy of the time. However, I think JLK means here is that retrospectively he should be able to show that some religious thought was wrong and hence it must have led people into error. Of course, we also know much scientific thought was wrong and has led people into error (such as those anti- Copernicans, the long search for the aether and Newton’s theory of gases). Likewise, atheistic thought (like Hoyle’s Steady State Universe and Nott and Gibbon’s anthropology) has gone badly astray at times as well. So this argument depends on both our knowing in advance what the right answers are and also assuming the wrong ones held us back. The first assumption is bad historical methodology, the second is simply wrong. As I showed in my first post, science depends on all sorts of ideas and the wrong ones, wherever they come from, are as necessary as the right ones. They generate lines of enquiry, critical thought, rebuttals and research programmes. In any case, declaring which theories are true and which ones are not is simply not open to us.

2. The resources/time, devoted to the practice and refining the doctrine of the religion, refused to science.

JLK seems to imply here that if Newton did not spend so much time on alchemy he could have done more science. Ignoring the anachronistic slant of this, it assumes (wrongly) that you could take the religion out of Newton and have only pure rationalism left. If he had not cared deeply about God’s creation he would not have bothered write the Principiawhich is a rebuttal of Cartesian mechanism. What drove him to do the science that has survived the test of time was the same as what drove him to do the work we now reject. Take religion out of his life and there is nothing left. What people today find so hard to accept is how central religion was to early scientists and how much it not just inspired them but also provided them with the worldview in which it made sense to do science. Rationalist historians have long tried to minimise this aspect of their lives but private writings and public behaviour render the idea of a non-religious Newton or Boyle, Kepler or Faraday absurd. The further absurdity of this argument is best demonstrated by the claim that any art or leisure activity that is not science is detrimental to science because it is taking up time that science could be practiced in. Besides, we know that arithmetic, astronomy and natural philosophy were considered vital tools for theology in the Middle Ages which is why they were taught to all undergraduates. If no one had been doing theology, they would not have been doing science either.

3. Intimidation or dissuasion of numbers of the class who had the training, skills, potential and interest to challenge the reigning orthodoxy.

JLK admits most of the examples of this are myths (he may not be aware that evidence for Bacon’s imprisonment is very weak and that the novelties were over poverty rather than science anyway). But he does find a few pointers in Augustine, Paul and elsewhere. The fact is that the church has supported science through most of its history, most especially by giving it a haven in the Universities, insisting that it was necessary for theology (as Augustine admits) and funding large scale research programmes, mainly through the Jesuits. Given that so many great scientists before Darwin were utterly specific that their motivation for investigating nature was religious, it is hard to credit the idea that there were many who turned aside through fear of hellfire (the one example of a man who did give up science for a clerical career that I can think of was the early geologist Nicolaus Steno (1648 -1686)).

JLK provides some examples of ‘religious’ beliefs that he believes held up the development of science:

1. The concept of all time as consisting of essentially eternal, strictly repetitive cycles;
2. An "organismic" or vitalistic view of all nature;
3. The beliefs that the heavens were utterly different from the earth in nature (some viewing them as divine and/or alive);
4. The closely related reliance on astrology, offering false confidence in its explanatory power.

The problem here is immediately obvious to anyone who has read Aristotle. None of these four beliefs can possibly be described as anything other than natural philosophy that is believed for highly rational reasons. For instance, the eternal universe, the vitalistic view of nature and quintessent heavens are all found in Aristotle who can’t be called a religious thinker by any stretch of the imagination. Likewise, astrology is almost always found outside religious practice and is especially condemned by Christianity and Islam. JLK almost seems to be labelling any idea that is not part of modern science as ‘religious’ and has even expanded religion to include Leninism. Leninism is a strictly rationalistic and wrong system.

In summary, of JLK’s three arguments, the first fails because it wrongly assumes that only modern science has been rationally justified. The second fails because it is absurd to imagine you can just take religion out of someone’s life and assume they would happily get on with science. The third fails because it simply isn’t true.

[JLK]

Tacit concessions from silence
Since Bede...

begins by initially treating Christianity and religion synonymously/interchangably,
employs 3 of 7 references to When Science and Christianity Meet,
refers to the chiefly Christian term “faith�,
and says:we should be seeking to ask whether religion has impeded the rise of science not by deliberate suppression

…readers are invited to conclude
1. Non-Christian religions’ relationships to science are to be minimized and not to be the object of Bede's argument.
2. Bede is in silent agreement that religious beliefs and practices have occasionally suppressed science thru intimidation.

====================

Seven examples were offered for Bede's Contra-Proposition (Religion Assisted the Rise of Science)
Splitting creatures into species and then classifying them was a product of the mindset that believed everything came from the originals that left the Ark (7)

Browne/Bede is imprecise/incorrect. “Species� was Latin for Form, ala Aristotle, and thus was used by the Greeks without benefit of Ark stories. All cultures possess a folk taxonomy and a equivalent vague term. “Species� conversion to a reproductive definition was first made by botanist John Ray (1627-1705) based on Genesis 1, not the Ark [1]. Linnaeus, the first comprehensive classifier, waffled on whether a “created kind� was at species, genus or order level.[2] Buried in the Aristotelian concept of species/natural kinds as logical “essences�, Linnaeus generated word choices that afflicted biology for centuries and biological education today. Claddists/taxonomists wrestle with creating nomenclatures that better reflect evolutionary taxonomies.

Imagine an alternate history in which the printing press, the data of the age of exploration and prosperity provided another naturalist the opportunity to comprehensively classify, without Genesis dogma or Aristotle, based not on folk terms but on functional (or many other) descriptions. Crudely put, we may now be calling bats, “wing-fingered rodentlikes�. The Aristotelian essentialism of Linnaeus was and is a blight and pox that has held back evolutionary biology.

Copernicus was trying demonstrate the heavens worked in a way consistent with their creation by God – “The wisest and most orderly workman of all� (5); Kepler was trying to show that God would not allow even the tiniest error in his workings;

Both were Neo-platonists, Copernicus almost certainly inspired by the mystical specialness of the sun, Kepler a number-mystic trying to fit the 5 planets to the 5 platonic solids somehow. To the extent these are religious concepts, I concede these were useful/necessary. Bede has the burden of making the case that the boilerplate about God could not be eliminated for both’s motivational psychologies in alternate history.

as for Newton, he “took it upon himself to show that a mechanical universe could not maintain itself without God’s continual supervision� (6); while Laplace was trying to show it could.

Bede presumes La-(“I have no need for that [God] hypothesis�)-place, inspired by the dramatic success of mathematics, would not have attempted to show the orbital perturbations were stable due to periodicity without being motivated by a conception of God as unnecessary in their stabilization. This presumption against the counterfactual needs support. Simply assuming Laplace would have been unmotivated without Newton or God-as-Computationalist is Whiggishly Begging the Question.
Of these four, I concede Newton’s offerings were irrevokably, inseparably motivated by Christian religious concerns. Unless Bede can support a secondary indirect benefit, Newton’s failure, irregardless of motive, held back science. Every infertile failure holds back science unless it contributes in an alternate way.

The antagonism of the Huxleys, Haldanes and Goulds for creationism (and in the first two cases for theism per se) was an essential ingredient for their work...

Thus
the NSF, NIH etc should permanently, heavily fund pyramid power and Benny Hinn’s faith healing, in a we-destroyed-the-village-to-save-it or a Marxist what-harms-us-makes-the-revolution-bigger sort of way, so generations of outraged students and scientists will change majors and fields. Disputes among, and incompleteness in, demonstrably fertile theories possess enough mysteries and puzzles to inspire the brilliant Haldanes and Goulds.
this completely ignores the (a priori equal) opportunity cost of all the Haldanes and Goulds lost because of creationist dissuasion.
since Bede concludes by lauding fertility as the touchstone sine qua non of science, Huxley would not be much of a scientific loss since he performed more public propaganda against unfertile creationism rather than research.

atheistic attacks on the Big Bang hypothesis by Fred Hoyle...

Hoyle's prejudices, perhaps then and certainly later, made him an ideologue, abandoning the values/methods of, and dramatically holding back science. [3, 4]

...and his acolytes led Christians to fight all the harder for it

Evidence that their Christianity was a sine qua non? Non-Christians opposed SteadyStatism as well.

With words remaining, I’m…
======================

Entering epistemological swamps [5]

this ad hoc nature of scientific practice that led Paul (Against Method) Feyerabend,
Feyerabend is the nuclear energy of philosophy of science [6]. Read one way, he brilliantly saves science from the darkness of arrogant, positivist rigidity. Taken (incorrectly) another way, he fissions into an extremist postmodernist meltdown or annihilation of all knowledge. This pseudo-Feyerabend has become a favored ally of many pre-modernists in their attack on the success of (non-extreme, non-positivist) modernity/postmodernity. [7]

...to say if there was any all encompassing scientific method (and there isn’t) it would be “anything goes� (3).

But “not everything went�. We have memory. We can catalogue the (temporary?) failures to date, compare new offerings to the old and, to the extent they are the same, perform a probabalistic induction as to the likelihood of their success. While this induction is defeasible and permits the demonstration of their (second-generation’s) fertility, it’s still a sound, if done validly, probablistic induction.

Science as a whole might be objective and brutally honest about failure, but individual scientists are not. ...Science is not based on reason but the fact it works, …But it does need disagreement and argumentation to test and advance …we need to be very careful before we start throwing words like ‘faith’, ‘reason’ and ‘evidence’ about.

Carefully throwing caution to the winds:
Argumentation is currently done thru shared definitions and deduction (formalized in logics) and induction (in statistics/probability). That is “reason�. Not godly reason, not infallible reason, not exclusively reason, not indefeasible reason, but science is based in part on “reason�.
“Evidence� are those observational statements that have led to fertile research programs.
Nature itself is “honest about failure�.
Science is not “objective�, it is intersubjective.

=================

Debate techniques

I do not expect my opponent to want to resurrect these old canards.

Reference to numerous unasserted “canards not resurrected by my opponent� is recognized audience psychological gamesmanship.

science has no need for a philosophy…. science could jettison its philosophical underpinnings without ill effect – it relied on the fact it worked and not any basic axioms

Science needs/has a philosophy, that defined by its agreed definition.
The extent to which science actually had other “underpinnings� is partly Bede's Contra-Proposition at issue.

about 1800… ‘God’ ceased to be a working assumption of Western science and hence methodological naturalism accidentally was born.

MethodologicalNaturalism is a currently fashionable term-of-art coined by theologian Nancy Murphy as a polemical device against creationism. Bede is invited to precisely define it.

My own use of "nature" deserves a most general, plain-vanilla definition:
“Those nouns and verbs with justifiable properties(natures) that potentially justifiably have/do/will exist(ed).�

In the definition of science, …definition 1 is too loose – not wrong but too wide.

While Bede is permanently invited to present his definition, he did accept definition1 for this debate.

The terms “Jehovah personally�, “constructed�, “Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Egypt� did not have to be defined in the debate ongoing one door to the right because they are not abstractions like “science� & “religion�.
Even a debate proposition with two referents, one of which appears in no English dictionary, may be understandable without definition: “...misunderestimated.�, “The current President of the USA's feeling...�


References
1. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, (1691).
2. Carl Linnaeus, Genera Planterum, (1753) -advocated Created Kind=today’s genus (three years later he thought Kind = order.)
3. Robert Shapiro, Origins: A skeptics guide to the origin of life on earth, Chapter “Science as Religion� on Hoyle (New York : Bantam, 1986)
4. Hoyle’s unfounded ideological accusation that all Archeopteryx specimens were hoaxes led to wasted resources and creationist misinformation.
5. Swamps are the most interesting biological places on earth, but humans should be prepared before venturing for long there.
6. Universities favor mathematics and philosophy departments because the only expenses are salaries, ink and paper... and wastebaskets for the mathematicians.
Apologies for jokes in lieu of references. Bede’s rebuttals will be meatier than his opening.
7. Some noted my alleged 15,000 word argument was far smaller than advertised, I’ve now exposed more about pre/post modernisms and filled it out a bit.

[Bede]

I’m happy to admit there may have been rare occasions when people have been intimidated from doing science for religious reasons. But if ‘occasionally’ is the best JLK can do, then the debate has already been won by me as I have demonstrated far greater positive influences by religion on science. His ‘just-so’ story about sixteenth century naturalists anachronistically happening to hit on using the most modern classification systems is also rather a weak argument. We are talking about what happened in history and not what would have happened if JLK could travel back in time and tell them all how to do it. Mind you, I do not deny that classification of species was an interest of Aristotle and others independent of the Noah story. However, it is a fact that the desire to understand the flood story was an important impetus for counting and dividing species in the early modern period.

I do fear that JLK’s argument is predicated upon anachronism to the extent that he implicitly labels anything that anticipates modern science as ‘good’, and anything else as ‘bad’. He imagines that if we deprive people of religion they would turn into super-rational beings and start doing calculus. In fact, they would probably go straight down the pub and moan about how meaningless their lives were. His fantasy about Newton not wasting his time with theology or naturalists anticipating cladistics are both examples of this fallacy. JLK seems to have no understanding of the process by which we reached science as we know it and seems to imagine that somehow we could have cut a lot of corners if only we weren’t so busy singing hymns. His accusing me of ‘whiggishness’ is beyond irony.

I have been taken to task for not referring sufficiently to non-Christian religions so I’ll try and remedy that now. I want to consider what might be called the normal relationship between religion and science and will take ancient Greece as my example.

It is now appreciated that the image of the Greeks popularised by Raphael in his ‘School of Athens’ is a myth. Greeks were not especially rational people and the survival of so much Greek maths and philosophy is a function of what Arabs and Christians were interested in preserving rather than the interests of the Greeks themselves (1). Greek medicine was split between what we might very loosely and anachronistically call ‘scientific’ and ‘religious’. The former was the business of professional physicians who based their practice on the Hippocratic Corpus and were interested in natural causes and cures (2). The later was based around the temples of deities like Asclepius where the invalid would ask for a cure, usually affected through a dream, and give an offering in return (3). Clearly both these sources of healing were in direct competition and, as we now insist, both were based on totally erroneous methods. But the two happily co-existed for centuries with the two sides tending to compete within their own sphere rather than casting too many aspersions on the other. This happy compromise continued throughout the medieval period when Christ and his saints had replaced Asclepius. The only time the church seems to move in was to ban priests from being physicians in the 4th Lateran Council (at the insistence of professional physicians who saw this as unfair competition) and occasion crack downs on folk medicine. Even when the enormous novelty of human dissection was introduced into Italy in the 1300s, the church barely raised an eyebrow (4). In Islam, of course, miracles were officially unacceptable although the common people continued to pray at Christian shrines when need be. This meant that Islam did not have much of an official healing function and so had no reason at all to attack physicians.

We can see here that the relationship between naturalistic medicine and religion has, even across different religions, been one of ‘live and let live’. Religions have not sought to outlaw professional physicians even when they have found themselves in economic competition with them. This means that we can discount any sort of automatic epistimological conflict between religion and naturalistic methods, and furthermore note that an economic conflict is hardly fatal either. This leaves only power conflicts to explain occasional difficulties but even here the picture is complicated. The Catholic Church was defending Aristotelian science against Galileo’s attack simply due to the historical accident that had led it to use Aristotle as ballast for some of its supernatural claims. Even then, Bellarmine admitted that if Galileo could prove his case (and initially no one was arguing that he couldn’t suggest the hypothesis) then the Church would have to change its interpretations (5).

It is a well supported fact that many men of science were inspired by their faith and worked successfully within the metaphysical system supplied by Christianity. It is further a fact, admitted by JLK, that nearly all the alleged cases of church intimidation and suppression of science are mythical. It is a fact that through the universities, the Jesuits, even country parsons collecting butterflies and construction of cathedral observatories (6), the Catholic Church and its protestant offshoots gave science vast resources long before any government thought to do so. JLK’s counter that Benny Hinn deserves government funding ignores the point that it is precisely the government who should not be picking winners. Rather the scientific community allocates funding in the much same way as it determines scientific success.

I think what JLK needs to do to show religion has held back science is to demonstrate that there were long term infertile trends in scientific thought directly attributable to religion. Earlier, he unsuccessfully tried to do this by characterising some erroneous natural philosophy as religion (7). The more usual fallacy is to believe the church’s support for Aristotle was down to anything other than the fact that it was the best science available at the time and everyone knew it. Aristotle’s co-option for religious reasons came after his acceptance as science (which the church did not immediately accept) (8).

(1) For example, Aristophanes is thought to have written forty plays of which but only eleven survive, and he is the sole representative of the genre of Old Comedy. New Comedy faired even worse; none survived in the manuscript tradition although some has now turned up on papyrus. In contrast, two million words of Galen’s medical works have been preserved.

(2) See the introduction to Hippocratic Writings ed. GER Lloyd et al. (London, 1983).

(3) The first third of Robin Lane Fox’s Pagan’s and Christians (London, 1985) includes plenty of fascinating discussion of Greek cultic practices around the time of Galen.

(4) Katherine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’Renaissance Quarterly, 47:1 (1994).

(5) Quoted p. 99 Giorgio Santillana The Crime of Galileo (Chicago, 1955).

(6) JL Heilbron, The Sun in the Church (Harvard, 1999).

(7) “1. The concept of all time as consisting of essentially eternal, strictly repetitive cycles; 2. An "organismic" or vitalistic view of all nature; 3. The beliefs that the heavens were utterly different from the earth in nature (some viewing them as divine and/or alive); 4. The closely related reliance on astrology, offering false confidence in its explanatory power�.

(8) p. 77ff, Grant, Edward Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1996).

[JLK]

3 Points of Agreement

JLK is trying to check a list of the ‘true’ facts of science.. against the alleged facts… and judge…
many… scientists were… specific that their motivation for investigating nature was religious…
Rationalist historians [JLK's “positivist historians�] have minimised this [devotedly religious] aspect

==============================

Detail

evidence for [R]Bacon’s imprisonment is very weak -- the novelties were over poverty rather than science

the Church arrested others, there is evidence, however “weak�, and no clear evidence that Bacon was free following his charging. All his advocacy (whether social ethics, epistemology or specific ontological claims) would have been tainted and discouraged as the teaching of non-approved dogma. Bede has not denied Bacon was enjoined to publish his experimentalistic epistemology secretly.

============================

Epistemological Swamp

JLK’s …on the side of the inquisition against Galileo as they were supporting the well justified scientific orthodoxy of the time.

Their orthodoxy was highly infertile and inconcilient (“interbreeding�) with other sciences and thus was not “highly justified�. The Triumphal Positivists -Voltaire thru White/Draper- were wrong (and the inquisition right to the extent) that Galileo was also not “highly justified�, with no theory of telescopic optics, etc. Dogmatism was not yet justified by either side.

Bede has made the justification radically relative and meaningless. All internally coherent, unfertile orthodoxy is then “highly justified.�

this argument depends on both our knowing in advance what the right answers are and also assuming the wrong ones held us back.

False.
Initial non-dogmatism is valued until second-generation fertility is demonstrated. Only then the better answers become more apparent. While valuable for their educational history thus limiting future hypotheses, infertile hypotheses (unless some part assists in others fertility), in retrospect wasted resources if held too long.

wrong generate …enquiry, critical thought,…

Initially. My argument is against maintaining infertile ideas, and not against proposing “wrong� ones.

…and research programmes.

If fertile, the ideas were not completely wrong.

declaring which theories are[/aren’t] true is simply not open to us.

Only in advance of their fertility, all else equal.

“justified true beliefs�… must surely be the predictions of a theory rather than the theory itself.

The explanatory aspect of a theory can never be “God’s Truth� because of the finitude of language, explanations must always have referents larger than the theory, and the requirement of explanation not to end in mystery. That does not mean certain theoretical statements are not true, within the scope of the theory and any language of future theory, Bede’s narrower view that they have only been confirmed by past predictions notwithstanding.

The theoretical electron’s theoretical charge is 1.60217653 x 10^-19 ampere-seconds to within 0.00001%
Bede is welcome to demonstrate that is not true.


=================================

Bede's Contra-Positive

…it is absurd to imagine just taking religion out of someone’s life and assume they would happily get on with science… If Newton had not cared deeply about God’s creation he would not have bothered… Take religion out of Newton’s life and there is nothing left…. the idea of a non-religious Newton, Boyle, Kepler Faraday is absurd. …If no [medievalist] had been doing theology, they would not have been doing science.

No one, including Bede, has knowledge what these would have done without specific Christian theology. Clearly it is possible to do science without it. The world awaits the 10,000 volume work on Kepler exploring the alternative histories’ probabilities. Bede is motivated by the denial, known exaggerations, oversimplifications and propaganda of the positivists (Voltaire thru White/Draper) and assumes their error justifies his own assertions.

The mutually reinforcing spiral of technology, mathematics, exploration, prosperity, scientific knowledge all created an environment in which further advance could be made. It is equally possible that these devout men read prior successes back into their religion, using that in justifying future success. Motivations varied widely. Newton and Boyle took specific Christian ontologies like angels and demons, motivated by opposition to atheism. Kepler was more generic. The Christian “God� is so plastic (Logician/FormGiver/Architect/Engineer/Magus/Spirit) it could accommodate all the successes and be responsible for none of the inadequacies like aspects of Paracelsus’ and Van Helmont’s spiritual chemistry.

Bede adheres to the Great Man school of inevitable history in which only these could have produced science, motivated only by their motivations. The simultaneous, independent discovery (SID) of calculus by Newton and Leibniz and many other SID’s belie this view. The Proposition itself assumes that an alternate history is possible/imaginable. Bede has the responsibility of taking that seriously and supporting his assertions against alternate premises.

…hard to credit that many turned aside through fear of hellfire (I can think of only… Steno)

This dissuasion thru affirmative dogma pales in comparison to absent Christian encouragement. A focus on The World To Come vs. this mere Fallen Vale of Tears, & the absence of Biblical science ethos created an educated class until Bacon “who were so heavenly minded, they were little earthly good (re: natural investigations).�
Bede ignores lost opportunity cost, focusing only on the Great Men.

==========================

Debate Techniques

‘religious’ beliefs held back science:
1. time – eternal/cyclic;
2. "Organicism"/Vitalism
3. The “perfect?/divine?/unearthly?/alive?� heavens
4. astrology
1, 2, 3 are all found in Aristotle who can’t be called a religious thinker

(2) is Neo-platonic, not Aristotelian Forms.
The centuries long tradition of catholic scholasticism of Aquinas’ “christianized� Aristotle made much of Aristotle’s ontology, root and branch, part of Christian/Catholicism’s worldview, except eternal nature. Early Church Fathers' accepted finite cycles. Does anyone doubt that if nature had turned out to be Aristotelian, Bede would now be tightly holding Aquinas’s God, The Logician/Form Giver/Creationist, and declaring Aristotle independently confirmed Christian ontology?

None.. can possibly be described as anything other than natural philosophy

1, 2, 4 were more central to several eastern religious worldviews than any Ark story of Bede’s.
Bede’s rhetorical strategy will ultimately be to declare all non-transcendental religions to be “natural philosophies� the non-transcendental ontologies of the transcendental religions “natural philosophies�, except an Ark here or there leaving only the “transcendental� ontologies remaining. If he has been charitable enough to comprehensively define MethodologicalNaturalism, we will see if he has walled off the “transcendental� from science.

The absurdity of […resources/time wasted in devotional practice and doctrine] is demonstrated by the claim that any art or leisure activity not science is detrimental to science

Apparently the enormous Aztec constructions and ritualized doctrines of human sacrifice, ritualistic whirling self-flagellation rituals of a Sufi, the days a Zoroastrian spent finding the appropriate sacrificial animal, the decades an Ultra-Orthodox occupies Talmudically pondering the Talmud, or a Chinese with the I Ching, a Hindu memorizing the massive pantheon and mythos, Christian/Islamic sects’ intramural doctrinal/ritualistic squabbles are all mere non-religious …..“arts and leisure.�

JLK impl[i]ies… if Newton did not spend so much time on alchemy…

Alchemy closely fits “devotional/doctrinal religious practice�?
My referent was to the vast hours SirIsaac spent in eschatology, soteriology, sacred-numerology, anti-Trinitarianism, angelogy, demonology, etc. These must have been worthless since Bede is unaware of them.

JLK expanded religion to include Leninism. Leninism is a strictly rationalistic… system.
Religions feel they need a rational and coherent explanation… Most religions are based on rational systems


http://www.knls.org/images/ruspic03.jpg http://cshink.com/images/an-najaf-imam-ali.jpg
Tombs of Two Infallible Oracles with Infallible Eschatology [1]

astrology is almost always outside religious practice… condemned by Christianity/ Islam.

Apparently Egypt, Mesopotamia, MesoAmerica, China, Greece, Rome, etc. had no religions involving astrology. The zodiac and early names of cosmological objects are “outside� religious doctrine, apparently.

JLK is highly anachronistic in implicitly defining science as a set of [claimed true] facts, rather than a set of practices or a society.

Methods and public nature of science are firmly in its agreed definition.
Is Bede, comfortably in the avante garde Brave New World of radical postmodernism, denying science provides any knowledge? [2, 3, 4]

JLK admits…
“Admission� falsely implies my prior denial.
…immediately obvious to anyone who’s read Aristotle…. absurd… absurd… absurdity… by any stretch of the imagination… must surely… highly anachronistic… etc.
As I showed in my first post,

3. Religious intimidation or dissuasion of science
….it simply isn’t true.
we should be seeking to ask whether religion has impeded the rise of science not by deliberate suppression

“We should not ask about deliberate suppression� by religion since it either
never happened, or if it did…
never involved intimidation and dissuasion.

=============================

To Do

1). non-justified dogma ultimately based only on human authority.
…it wrongly assumes that only modern science has been rationally justified.
Rational(ly/ism/istic)

Bede is obligated to define “rational�, carefully avoiding words like “reason� and “evidence�, which he has told us are extremely problematic.

Mine: “the ability to find fertile solutions.�




References
1. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Regnery, 1952, 1987) A famous communist deconversion
2. Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science (Oxford University Press, 2000)
3. Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (Picador, 1999)
4. Paul R. Gross, Martin Lewis, Norman Levitt, The Flight from Science and Reason (New York Academy of Sciences; 1997)

[Bede]

My thanks to JLK for his participation in this debate. He had a very tall order in seeking to defend a position rejected by all professionals in the field of the history of science from a standing start.

Of his three pillars, none remain standing. Let’s remind ourselves of what they were:

1. Adherence to non-justified dogmatic traditions ultimately based only on human authority
2. The resources/time, devoted to the practice and refining the doctrine of the religion, refused to science
3. Intimidation or dissuasion of numbers of the class who had the training, skills, potential and interest to challenge the reigning orthodoxy.

For number three, he has no examples of Church intimidating scientists in a way that prevented them from doing fertile work, beyond Galileo whose case we all realise is not so simple as it would need to be. We are reduced to pleading for ‘weak’ evidence about Roger Bacon (it’s actually worse than that, but never mind) and appealing to nameless ‘others’. Bacon’s secrecy was enjoined by his patron the Pope as, like all patrons, he didn’t want to share his glory, especially not with the head of the Franciscans.

The second pillar has actually been knocked down by JLK himself in his insistence that we avoid whiggish history. While I don’t think that is what I am doing, it certainly is what he is up to. He has made repeated attempts to plead an alternative history where Newton didn’t waste his time, where religious resources were used on more ‘useful’ things and somehow people hit on the modern answers to questions by an unknown process that avoided any blind alleys. If I cannot use Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday and Copernicus’s explicit statements about how their religion helped their science then JLK certainly cannot use hypothetical alternative histories where their religion did not exist. That is the only way to compute any ‘opportunity cost’ so the term is meaningless within the bounds that JLK has set us.

JLK’s first pillar is that religion makes people believe things that are incompatible with science. That is the most misguided of all. As I explained in my first post, it is true that religions have self-consistent metaphysical frameworks that seek to explain the world and our place in it. It is also my belief that a reason that modern science arose only in Western Europe is that the framework of Christianity was exactly that required for science to make sense as a practical way of investigating the world. It is also true that religions (certainly when as widely defined as JLK prefers) are about the only things that can command widespread allegiance to their metaphysics. Ancient Greece, whose public religion made no philosophical demands, was swamped by large numbers of competing philosophies, none of which could manage the kind of general consent required to change a society. Thus, if you remove religion’s philosophical system, you don’t revert to science by default, you just get loads of ideas that no one can agree on. It was only Christianity being able to create a society-wide agreement to a fertile metaphysical framework that allowed modern science to develop. This means, of course, that I do reject the ‘Great Man’ school of history. What made modern science was not individual geniuses fighting against the foolishness of his society, but the metaphysical framework of that society providing everyone with an agreed and fertile starting point. The only thing that the men who actually made the advances do is provide confirmation of the importance of religion which we can assume was shared by their less famous brethren.

Obviously, I don’t want to waste too much time with JLK’s moaning about debate tactics or his rather infelicitous habit of changing the quote attribution function. But I want to address a couple of the rebuttals he makes. Firstly, he wants to show that Aristotelianism is unjustified and that dogmatism is only good once fertility has been demonstrated. But why does JLK suppose Aristotle went from being treated with suspicion by the church in 1210 to being accepted as the most important of philosophers by 1277? It was precisely because Aristotle was so fertile, opening so many doors, answered so many questions and cohered so well with nature as it was understood. With all that, of course sixteenth century intellectuals could treat the new philosophy as having to prove itself. The situation is the same today, and rightly so. Throw out Aristotle and you lose the explanation for all sorts of things as they were only explained within the system. Throw out QED and you won’t have an accurate figure for the charge of an electron as this only exists within the bounds of the theory. This also refutes JLK’s contention that medieval Aristotelianism can be treated as religion rather than natural philosophy. If it had been correct then modern science might well have arisen in ancient Greece and medieval Christians would deserve even more credit for their efforts to make it compatible with Christianity. I doubt, though, I’d be calling it independent correlation of Christian ontology.

JLK claims that before Francis Bacon the intellectual class was “so heavenly minded, they were little earthly good (re: natural investigations).� This is utterly untrue as any study of medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy will show.(1) Still, Francis Bacon is notorious for his gross generalisations to justify his polemic (he may be responsible for the angels dancing on a pinhead myth) and modern positivists are notorious for believing him.

Finally, I have been asked to define rationalism without reference to evidence or reason. Well, I aim to please and it is actually rather easy. Rationalism is what allows us to construct logically consistent systems from initially defined axioms. It does not allow us to determine those axioms and neither does it tell us if our system, despite being logically consistent, has a counterpart in the real world. Science requires a lot more than just rationalism which is why the word has become almost an insult in philosophical circles.

I hope that a few people have found the points of view expressed in this debate illuminating, No doubt the wider questions raised will continue to attract different answers.

(1) See especially, Edward Grant God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000) which has an extensive section showing the demarcation between physics and theology.

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

JLK,

Please note that the deadline to submit your concluding statement has passed. However, you're permitted a grace period, extending the deadline to Aug. 23.

Thank you for your consideration,

Jason

[JLK]

Bede opened with essentially a discourse on definitions, ruling religious suppression not a topic of discussion, decrying ancient terms “reason/�evidence� while advancing new ones. He has chosen to ignore my requests for definitions. Buried were 6 examples which I rebutted.

====================
Bede’s Defense

His accusing me of ‘whiggishness’ is beyond irony.

Richard Feynman: “…the easiest person to fool is yourself.� Bede doesn’t realize his advocacy is as whiggish as the Triumphal Positivists.

We are talking about what happened in history and not what would have happened if JLK could travel back in time and tell them all how to do it.

Bede believes in historical inevitability. Whiggishly. This enables Bede to ignore/deny all the lost opportunities.
S.J. Gould, who Bede has lauded, built an entire writing career on the “radically contingent� aspect of history, “playing the tape over would have given a different result.� Gould’s anthologies carry sermons against Whig views of history.

…the desire to understand the flood story was an important impetus for counting and dividing species in the early modern period.

The desire was to understand nature. The Flood was a framework.
If all the other factors were in place, the result would have been what? What would a Whig say?

JLK’s ‘just-so’ story about sixteenth century naturalists anachronistically happening on the most modern classification systems is also rather a weak argument. …

Not my argument. Bede’s early naturalists bequeathed the “modern� terrible Linnean system which Bede claimed descended from Arkeology and helped science.

JLK’s fantasy about… naturalists anticipating cladistics… [is a] fallacy.

Partly nested hierarchies were obvious to all civilizations including Aristotle’s.

It is a well supported fact that many men of science …worked successfully within the metaphysical system supplied by Christianity.

And?
“Metaphysical system� = specific Christian ancient “nature� ontologies which were mostly wrong
ontologies of God which are so plastic as to be useless
epistemological dogma about final authority of the Bible or/and Church

…[and] were inspired by their faith

Bede’s motivational argument is summed in this. Crudely put, many 16th-19th centurians felt a cycle of:
“Nature’s wonderful! God’s wonderful! Mathematics’ wonderful! Experiments confirm! Praise God! Nature’s…�

My argument is that this is just confirmation bias. A psychological cycle of reinforcement actually based on other factors. The referents to God were not needed for motivation, just the fertility of the process.

I have demonstrated far greater positive influences by religion on science.

To the exact extent the religion embraced science.
Bede is whiggishly giving vast credit for the desired result to Bede’s favored broadbrushed category “religion� rather than specific accommodations by Christianity.

through the universities, the Catholic Church and its protestant offshoots gave science vast resources long before any government

Some also condemned universities. See Andrew White’s introduction for his personal 19th century vilification for founding Cornell, today one of the world’s ~200 greatest.

JLK’s counter that Benny Hinn deserves funding ignores that government should not be picking winners. the scientific community [should] allocate funding in the much same way as it determines scientific success.

Bede’s unaware that specific NIH, NSF, etc. grants are virtually all allocated by scientists.
Government merely allocates giant amounts to general categories.
Bede’s Whiggish religious-importance argument advocates intentional frustration-inspiring Benny Boondoggles.


==========

Points of Agreement

JLK… seems to imagine that somehow we could have [accomplished more science] if only we weren’t so busy singing hymns.
The Catholic Church …use(d) Aristotle as ballast for some of its supernatural claims.
the relationship between naturalistic medicine and religion has, even across different religions, been one of ‘live and let live’. ..we can discount any sort of automatic epistimological conflict between religion and naturalistic methods..

JLK’s argument is predicated upon anachronism to the extent that he implicitly labels anything that anticipates modern science as ‘good [for science]’, and anything else as ‘bad [for science]’.

As far as methods and values, I explicitly do so. Bede uses “anachronistic� because his fashionably radical postmodernism does not believe knowledge/justification/values can be distinguished. Just power games played by orthodoxies?


===========

Debate Techniques

JLK unsuccessfully tried to… characterise some erroneous natural philosophy as religion.

If someone’s “ontology of nature� is essential to their worldview, it’s religious per the definition.

JLK imagines that if we deprive people of religion they would turn into super-rational beings and start doing calculus.

a fact, admitted by JLK, that nearly all the alleged cases of church intimidation and suppression of science are mythical.

My declaration, not “admission�, is that several of the most famous have been distorted and exaggerated. Other’s like Galileo’s atomism as a threat are little known.

JLK seems to have no understanding of the process by which we reached science as we know it
JLK’s fantasy about Newton not wasting his time with theology

Perhaps Bede’s an adherent of Newton’s voluminous forgotten theology.

=========

Conclusion

there may have been rare occasions… [when religions] intimidated science… JLK needs to demonstrate that there were long term infertile trends in scientific thought directly attributable to religion.

Deeply religious civilizations capable of science have existed +7000 years. Science exploded in only the last 200. Why?
Dogmatic adherence to human authority,
intimidation and dissuasions to threats to that authority, and
resources/time spent in uniquely devotional and doctrinal diversions held back science.

Why is this a plausible? Humans have evolved with five deep biological drives:
The Enormous Two: self-preservation, reproduction,
3. Habituation/ritual
4. Territorialism
and as social and teachable beings:
5. Hierarchy/authority/roles

Religion satisfies and regulates all those instincts.[1, 2]

Humans also have curiosity, but a curiosity evolved to pragmatically meet the Enormous Two. We did not evolve to be scientists but to be religious. Dogmatically religious. Curiosity’s clashes with authority and ritual practice/devotion/argumentation are inevitable.

That inductive claim is all a debate of 4000 words will allow adequate room for. But we can examine the debate itself (minus Bede’s unknown-to-me conclusion).

In his 2000 words of response Bede has conceded virtually nothing to my three arguments, dogmatically maintaining religions generated no great conflicts by authoritative dogma either
1. on what exists (ontology) or
2. how we are to go about knowing it (epistemology) or
3. what we should value (ethics) – including valuing the Self/happiness/desires vs. knowledge of nature
All the world’s religions barely exercised intimidation and dissuasion for 7000 years.
When science blossomed, Christianity, the ambient religion was Whiggishly responsible.

Bede began by dissuading us from discussing “religion’s suppression�.
Bede has assigned me the role of a proponent of inevitable/unmitigated warfare between science and all religions.
Bede has also studiously avoided defining terms and relies on ambiguities. Animism becomes “natural philosophy�, not religious ontology. His debate proposal itself read like

B: I propose a formal argument whose topic consists of just three concepts.
U: Alright....
B: Work to define them so I'm satisfied!
U: But...
B: I see no one dared accept my challenge!
U: But...
B: I am so confident of victory, that I think the whole thing is a mere formality, tremendous waste of my time which does not even merit me defining the words of my formal argument. Time's a'wasted! Next!

This definitional gamesmanship allows him to enlarge his rhetorical territory so that his self-preservation can never be contradicted or defeated.

Since dogma has its flaws, Bede has flirted with fashionable radical relativism - postmodernist denial that justification is possible, that science is just various orthodoxies jockeying for power and flirts with abandoning knowledge all together. That trendiness on campus might enhance his chances for reproduction.

I submit this debate has been a microcosmic example of religion’s power in holding it’s own, using the instincts it has used for 1000’s of years.

Science has to steer a course between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of radical relativism, never giving in to it’s own propaganda and self confidence like the Triumphal Positivists. It’s not easy, but we are learning how to do it. {3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

The outstanding question is: have resources and time been wasted in this debate?
A question only you the reader can answer.

Thanks to all involved, especially to Bede for promising to put this on his website and link to my never-yet completed essay. Enjoy Italy, Bede, and keep an eye peeled for accelerating masses, secure in your scientific knowledge, while taking pictures of the Tower.


References
1. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Basic Books, 2002)
2. Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (University of California Press, 1994)
3. Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Objectivity Without Illusions (Oxford University Press; 1995)
4. David Hull, Science As a Process: An Evolutionary Account (University of Chicago Press, 1990)
5. Alan Chalmers. What is This Thing Called Science (Hackett; 1999)
6. Larry Laudan, Progress and It’s Problems (University of California Press; 1981)
7. Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism: (Westview Press; 1996)
8. William Bartley, Gerard Radnitzky, Evolutionary Epistemology, Theory of Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge (Open Court, 1987).
9. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge; 2002)

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

This formal debate is now complete. We would like to thank Bede and JLK for their participation. This thread will now be closed.