tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5071813.post4883373573474466476..comments2024-03-25T02:16:16.247-07:00Comments on Christ the Tao: Evil Christianity, AgainUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5071813.post-38165781779098522962018-12-15T02:12:54.249-08:002018-12-15T02:12:54.249-08:00Obviously the historians, scientists, and philosop...Obviously the historians, scientists, and philosophers of science I mentioned (not "apologists," let's read correctly, please) ought to take the intuition of random Internet skeptics more seriously when they offer historical arguments. Their bad. David B Marshallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04029133398946303654noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5071813.post-44443436969445874632018-12-14T22:20:25.823-08:002018-12-14T22:20:25.823-08:00Why did it take a thousand years? Why did it happe...Why did it take a thousand years? Why did it happen only in the Catholic parts of the Xian world and not the Orthodox parts? It must have been something other than Xianity. I suspect that it was (re)discovering the works of philosophers like Aristotle, with the curious side effect that many academics became Aristotle-thumpers, almost as if Aristotle's works were some additional books of the Bible.<br /><br />It also seems like those Xian apologists were making those late-medieval philosophers in their likeness. Much like making the Bible in one's likeness, presenting it as completely agreeing with what one claims.Lorenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13984896453534621864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5071813.post-85748462558693175512018-12-05T16:31:01.888-08:002018-12-05T16:31:01.888-08:00Loren: Numerous historians, scientists, and philos...Loren: Numerous historians, scientists, and philosophers of science have explained the important role Christian thinking played in the dramatic reemergence and development of science in the late Middle Ages. (Beginning far earlier than many secularists credit.) If you've read those works, you should credit or otherwise deal with their arguments. If you haven't read them, you should. Four works are cited here, Stark's overview in For the Glory of God is also worth reading: <br /><br />https://christthetao.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-christ-liberates-humanity-123-proof.html<br /><br />As for your question, "Where is there anything like scientific methodology in the Bible," that's easy to answer. The Bible is full of instances of verification and falsification by experimental evidence. The cases of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, and Gideon and the sheep skins, come to mind immediately. But one could easily write a book describing the many instances in the OT and NT. Indeed, our True Reason does a bit of that, including my chapter in the New Testament, which you might like to read. David B Marshallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04029133398946303654noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5071813.post-6813185583517655722018-12-04T19:06:01.965-08:002018-12-04T19:06:01.965-08:00Here's a linguistic clue. Where do many of our...Here's a linguistic clue. Where do many of our technical words and word parts come from? Not Hebrew, but Latin and Greek. The First Scientific Revolution was in Greece and Rome, and as Richard Carrier noted, it went a long way before it was cut off by the Crisis of the Third Century, with all its strife. The Second Scientific Revolution was started off by rediscovery of the works of the first one in the Catholic parts of Europe, complete with trying to make that revolution theologically acceptable. It did not happen for a thousand years after Constantine, and it did not happen in the Eastern Orthodox parts of Europe, despite the Byzantine Empire being much richer and much more stable than most of the rest of Europe. John Philoponus was very exceptional, and he got in trouble for advocating a conception of the Trinity that the theologians disliked.<br /><br />Where is there anything like scientific methodology in the Bible? Consider Francesco Redi's classic experiments about the spontaneous generation of flies. He'd been studying insects quite a lot, and when he turned his attention to flies, he noticed that rotting meat attracts the same sort of fly that emerges from rotting meat. Could flies be like large animals in being produced only by other flies? He experimented, and his experiments are classics of experimental design. Keeping flies away from rotting meat keeps flies from being produced from it, even if that meat's smell is allowed to escape and attract flies. He also tried putting dead flies on rotting meat. No flies. Only live flies make flies, he concluded.<br /><br />Or how Benjamin Franklin invented lightning rods. He had been researching static electricity when he noticed that lightning looks like giant electric sparks. So he flew a kite in a thunderstorm and noticed that it got electrically charged. That gave him an idea for protecting against lightning. He knew that electricity likes to travel through metals. So he got the idea of putting up a metal rod. Lightning would prefer to travel through it instead of through a building, and the building would be safe.<br /><br />What did the theologians prefer? Often ringing church bells: "Vivos voco / Mortuos plango / Fulgura frango" - "I call the living / I mourn the dead / I break the lightning" (Friedrich Schiller, my translation) But that got a lot of bell-ringers killed by (you guessed it) lightning. A certain Rev. Thomas Prince argued that God had gotten so frustrated by lightning rods in Boston that he caused some earthquakes. Defenders of lightning rods tried to argue that they were not heretical and that using them was no different from protecting against any other sort of bad weather. Many owners of churches were reluctant to put up lightning rods, and they only gradually relented. In Brescia, Italy, there was once a large quantity of gunpowder stored in a church. But one day it got hit by lightning, and ... BOOM!!! Much of the city was devastated and many people were killed or injured. The Catholic Church stopped objecting to lightning rods after that.Lorenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13984896453534621864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5071813.post-21978952979232379282018-12-02T17:51:48.587-08:002018-12-02T17:51:48.587-08:00It is true that many of the great advances in huma...It is true that many of the great advances in human well-being have occurred in the West, but is this due to Christianity or other factors unique to the West, such as ancient Greek philosophy?<br /><br />I believe that the only way to determine whether it was Christianity that produced the many advances in medicine, politics, economics, science, and social justice that we now enjoy in the modern world is to evaluate the reaction of Christianity to each new advance in medicine, scientific discovery, medical discovery, and social justice movement. Did the advance in question occur because of Christianity or in spite of it? Everyone can do this exercise on their own. Pick a modern advance, then check out how Christianity reacted to it.<br /><br /><br />Garyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02519721717265344702noreply@blogger.com