- Religion was a repository of much of society's rational and scientific thought for most of its existence. For example, the Ten Commandments and most of the laws in the Bible are very rational and, except for the first two, address important earthly issues. "Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification." Giving life a purpose is very rational.
Charles Brown For most of its history the Bible was the only written or one of very few written documents, books, "the" book, in its society. So, religion is the repository of literacy, literally, writing. To the extent rationality and science are optimally located in writing , religion therefore was correspondent with them. There was lots of biological science in those people working in domestication of plants and animals, agriculture and animal husbandry in the same early societies. Some of that gets written down, as with Jacob and the speckled sheep in Genesis with some knowledge of Mendelian principles from genetics, knowledge of speckled sheep skipping generations, and the like.
Religious kookism threatens a new dark age.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-10/don-t-let-the-dark-ages-happen-here
The Middle East was once a bastion of scientific enlightenment, but the rise of religion played a key role in turning the region into a cultural backwater.bloombergview.com- You, Deathray Jones, Rocky Bellenger, D Lee Christy-Photo and 31 others like this.
Daniel Borchers The "scientific enlightenment" was a product of Christian thinking. Advances in science were largely due to people of faith (Christian) who sought to understand the handiwork of God in His creation. Scripture and science went hand-in-hand. See "Cosmos: A Cosmic Lie" at http://t.co/IMKDX6WekU.
brotherwatchblog.wordpress.com
Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey is the Obamacare of science. Proponents of universa... See More
- Jonathan Walters so either I just got blocked for sarcasm or someone deleted their comment, either way, hahaha
- Jonathan Bradley All you have to read is this to see the logical fallacy in Daniel's blog:
"Why are those theories unprovable? Because no one living here today was alive at the birth of the universe or the birth of life. Science observed neither event and can never recreate either event....See More - Jonathan Walters much of modern science isn't based on logic, it's statistics based. For a non heavy math view of it, look up 'theoretical minimum' a series of video lectures by phsyicist Leonard Suskind of Stanford to get a high level view of the topic.
It isn't just Quantum Mechanics though, as one gets deeper into the world of science, it becomes more and more probabilistic and less deterministic. 
Jeff Cav For how religion screwed over the west's early enlightenment:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Closing-Western.../dp/1400033802...See More
www.amazon.com
A radical and powerful reappraisal of the impact of Constantine’s adoption of Ch... See More- Jonathan Bradley Oh hey someone wrote a book! What an absurd premise. Study some of the things Romans did to each other and you might feel better about Constantine's influence. Interestingly enough there would be no Renaissance if it wasn't for the fact that the church kept literacy and knowledge alive during the dark ages. I'm not even religious but lets give some credit where its due.
- Charles Brown Daniel Borchers The "scientific enlightenment" was a product of Christian thinking. Advances in science were largely due to people of faith (Christian) who sought to understand the handiwork of God in His creation. Scripture and science went hand-in-ha...See More
- Jonathan Walters And it's quite probable that if Newton didn't believe in god, he would have also 'discovered' the theory of relativity (probably just the special theory, because the math for the General Theory didn't really get developed until the late 19th century.
- Charles Brown "Why are those theories unprovable? Because no one living here today was alive at the birth of the universe or the birth of life. Science observed neither event and can never recreate either event.
//// No one living now was alive at the time of anything in the _Bible_, so.. - Charles Brown No one living now was alive at the time of the US Civil War. So there is no way of proving it took place.
- Jonathan Bradley Interestingly enough, most of Newton's discoveries were byproducts of his search to transmute common metals into gold.
Valerie Curl Gonna have to get that book. I knew that the spark that set off the Renaissance came from the Middle East, but there is a lot of info in this book that is totally new to me. Sounds fascinating.
Joe McHugh I'm no historian but I believe the acceptance of the church (through most prominently Aquinas) of Aristotle's logic (not his specific science) made the church a force of reason in the West.- Jonathan Walters Wouldn't the reformation also have an impact on this. Something that Islam has yet to experience in any appreciable form.
- Bruce Bartlett Modern nutcase fundamentalists came along fairly recently, within the last 150 years or so.
Chris Scruton 'Just' a theory.
Do people have any awareness that a theory in science is more than a hunch or a hypothesis?...See More- Jonathan Walters Because much advanced science is probabilistic rather than deterministic, much of what we work with today, quantum mechanics, theory of relativity, theory of evolution, will pretty much never be proven. It's not really possible to do so (though quantum...See More
Miller James Sullivan The church was opposed to The Enlightenment and created the Dark Ages by controlling the government. The Illuminati was a group of enlightened people and like pagans (who's only crime was they were not christian) they were re-branded by the christian l...See More
Michael Bindner The Illuminati were the Catholic left of their time. Some currently Catholic leftists, like me, enjoy pushing the buttons of the wanker kooks who fear such things by announcing our membership. The real cause of the Dark Ages was actually the prohibition on interest - although I would strangely prefer that employee-owned cooperatives make interest free home mortgages to their members.
Ian Goodfriend as our interest rates continue to decline, and more services that we used to pay for become free on the internet, will we enter into a new dark age?- Ian Goodfriend http://variety.com/.../government-issues-bleak-jobs.../
variety.com
The U.S. economy has seen a steady erosion of jobs in the motion picture and sou... See More - Ian Goodfriend artists will stop producing art if they can't earn a meager living through their art. And thus the next dark age begins ...
- Charles Brown Jonathan Walters
It isn't just Quantum Mechanics though, as one gets deeper into the world of science, it becomes more and more probabilistic and less deterministic/////// Yes, see Marx's use of scientific laws as tendencies in political economic science, in _Capital_. - Charles Brown Religion was a repository of much of society's rational and scientific thought for most of its existence. For example, the Ten Commandments and most of the laws in the Bible are very rational and, except for the first two, address important earthly issues. "Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification." Giving life a purpose is very rational.
- Charles Brown For most of its history the Bible was the only written or one of very few written documents, books, "the" book, in its society. So, religion is the repository of literacy, literally, writing. To the extent rationality and science are optimally located in writing , religion therefore was correspondent with them. There was lots of biological science in those people working in domestication of plants and animals, agriculture and animal husbandry in the same early societies. Some of that gets written down, as with Jacob and the speckled sheep in Genesis with some knowledge of Mendelian principles from genetics, knowledge of speckled sheep skipping generations, and the like.
"On Tuesday evening more than 3 million people tuned in to watch "Science Guy" Bill Nye debate Ken Ham, founder of the biblically literalist Creation Museum ...youtube.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyZjX2e7Kx8
Thursday, September 11, 2014
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