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Originally Posted by asaris
That's a distinctly modern point of view. In the worldview of the ancients, science had no justification. There was simply no reason to do what we know of as science. Aristotle came closest, but he's still obviously quite a long ways away. Charles Taylor has some excellent essays in Philosophical Arguments on this.
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Science was important as far back as our hunter/gatherer phase of development. Without science, how could we have developed better spears? How could we have tracked heard patterns? How could we have decided what part of an animal had what use? How could we have made fire?
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Originally Posted by asaris
What about the Christians that condemned the inquisition? Or those that criticized slavery? It's impossible to deny that, especially with respect to the second, Christians played a leading role in eradicating a particular evil. And it's also impossible to deny that Christians played a leading role in perpetuating these and other evils. This is why I say that you simply can't just say that Christianity has been on the whole a negative influence or a positive influence.
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I'm taking apart an argument, not making one of my own. I'd like to make sure people aren't misled by incorrect or incomplete information. Frankly, I don't care if Christianity is beneficial or not. All that matters to me is that belief in god is illogical. That's the only point that should matter between atheism and theism.
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Originally Posted by asaris
That's not really fair, though I do admire you combining two old canards into a single paragraph. Rome was never the center of philosophy -- as Arendt notes, there was only one Roman who was truly a philosopher, and that was Augustine. Even if you include some of the Stoics like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, there's no one of the rank of Plato or Aristotle or even Descartes. And the heyday of Rome had long passed by the time when Rome fell. There's no reason to believe that Christianity was responsible for Rome's fall -- it was rotting for at least 100 years before its fall, and almost certainly more. Don't forget, Rome was [under tyranny] for 400 years before its fall, not the golden land you so [nostalgically] portray. And the so-called Dark Ages were not the Hobbesian wasteland you want either; the only reason people portray them this way is the mythology of "The Eternal City".
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Stoicism had it's roots earlier than Rome, but it was widely accepted by Romans.
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Originally Posted by asaris
Okay, so how does a belief in the existence in the supernatural breach our understand of science? You say that religion assumes as fact the supernatural, while science continually develops. First, you misunderstand religion. While we do have certain tenets we're committed to, like the resurrection, most of us would also say that as time goes on, our understanding of God deepens, so that practices that were once seen as okay are now understood to not be the best way of expressing our devotion to God. (C.S. Lewis has an interesting take on this idea in That Hideous Strength.)
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You either believe in the rules of science without exception (allowing for development and new understanding) or you partially believe in the rules of science and accept exception (supernatural). The first is me, the second is theists. The tenents you mention are exceptions to the rules of science. When you have exceptions to rules, you are admitting that the rules don't always apply.
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Originally Posted by asaris
Second, you have an overly idealized notion of science. Science doesn't develop because people become convinced of new views. Science develops because the people who had the old views die off. (I think it's Kuhn who has a good discussion of this. Maybe it's Popper.) Third, even assuming you were correct about religion being either unchanging or significantly more resistant to change than science, that doesn't entail any effect of religion on science. You assert it does, you even promise a long list, but you don't give any reason for thinking this is the case. If I'm just not understanding you, perhaps you could give your argument in logical form? I'm dense enough that I sometimes need help like that. (But please, spare me empirical evidence of a general claim. Even if you could compile an arbitrarily long list, it wouldn't prove your point.)
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God is your religion, science is mine. Science develops because we always are testing and searching. Standard Model was replaced by String Theory, which is being replaced by M Theory...all in less than 30 years. As far as I know, 3 quantum theories in 30 years is hardly a theory per generation.
I mentioned the church being against medicine and physics several times. The fact of the matter is that the Bible was written when science was much younger. As such, scientific facts in he Bible are outdated. Take mollusks, for example. Once upon a time, they were difficult to clean and led to infection and sickness. They were banned in Deut. Now, we have methods of cooking that makes them clean and safe. Likewise, women who are menstruating are said to be unclean and to be avoided. Now, women are able to control any bleeding and are perfectly safe to be around, with no real threat of spreading blood-transfered disease. A more prevalent issue could be abstinence (or even celibacy). It's clear that without protection, STDs could spread easily if left unchecked and there could be unwanted pregnancies. Now, however, it's quit different. Between condoms and pills and spermicide, and other contraceptives, the risk of transfering STDs and becoming pregnant are much lower (though some idiots choose to ignore modern contraceptives). Up until 1930, all Protestant denominations were against contraceptives. The Catholic Church is still against them.
These examples represent what I'm talking about. The reason behind this is pretty straight forward. The Bible was written between about 2500 years ago and about 500 years ago. It was writted and revised in the frame of the time. The problem is that we're missing a half a millennium of scientific development. That's why when things like stem cells, something not specifically mentioned in the Bible, are brought up, people get confused. They try to make comparisons to ancient law that is no longer based in science, and that creates problems. Then when the reasonable argument can't be made, it falls to the ultimate problem: Christian morality. For some reason, people think the Bible has one moral standard by which one can live his or her life. The reality, of course, is that the Bible is all over the place with morality. I wonder how anti-stem cell people would respond when the story of god telling Abraham to sacrifice Issac.
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Originally Posted by asaris
WHAT!?!?! You mean to say that, because if Christianity were a minority, it would be discriminated against in a way we don't even treat Scientologists, it's not true? That's just insulting.
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It's true. I would suggest that without precedent and numbers, religion would be nothing more than a whisper. And Scientologists are discriminated against quite a bit, though they bring a lot of it upon themselves.