5 ms·

Any proof of that? and not that e.g. part of it grew on religious nations/people despite of religion?

by notgood 10y ago

dorfsmay 10y ago
Look into the history of the first universities. And note that I'm a naturalist, I don't care for religions, but you can't pretend they didn't shape our societies.
rayiner 10y ago
Science as we know it is the structured pursuit of knowledge, mostly through organized institutions. In the western tradition, those institutions grew out of the Catholic Church. It was a logical outgrowth--the Church provided a ready-made organizational framework and a profession (the priesthood) whose job it was to sit around and think about things. If you had to point at a profession that comes closest to being what "scientist" grew out of--it'd be the clergy. Galileo studied at the University of Pisa, which was created by Papal edict. He wanted to enter the priesthood when he was young.
- notgood 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832764
BjoernKW 10y ago
Many scholars were religious people, monks even like Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics. While that doesn't prove science wouldn't have developed without these people (which can't be proven either because we just have this one history to look at as a model) it shows that not only are these matters not as opposed to each other as they're often seen today but that organised religion and science indeed frequently thrived together and nourished each other. In medieval times the Islamic world used to be quite keen on science and progress as well. It's only in modern times that Islam has become increasingly conservative and backwards (as in Salafism, which quite literally as about wanting society to be like it was in the day when Muhammad still lived) again.
candiodari 10y ago
Sure. How about the entire history of western science since the Roman Empire ? Without the church, there would have been far less research (mostly happened within the church, mostly by order of the Vatican), we would have wiped out the scientific knowledge several times in history (mostly, but not exclusively during revolutions, when monasteries saved entire libraries containing scientific knowledge), and scientists have been explicitly wiped out as a matter of state policy several times, when again the church saved large numbers of them. And that's ignoring that, even today, a university that doesn't originate within the catholic church, or is even still part of it (like my alma mater) is still not very common. Even today, at least organizationally, very significant amounts of scientific research still happen within the catholic church (as in the boss of the boss of the boss of the boss of the scientist is the pope). Today. Honorable mentions go to several ecclesiastical orders, most famously the Jesuit priests. Sadly, Christianity is the exception here. While, yes, most religions had their priests do some form of scientific research, most religions wiped out the scientific knowledge they amassed, rather than protecting and safeguarding it, famously the burning of the great library of Alexandria by one of the main sources of islam, caliph Omar (who for instance is the source of sharia, as in the law system called sharia) [1] In my opinion this happens because in most religions there is no separation of church and state, like Christianity first had because of it's fights with the Roman Empire. This meant that the church could continue when the empire split, fell or otherwise had issues (and could remain popular when the state failed, as states inevitably seem to do), that the Catholic church had a constant and functional international organization from AD 200-300 onwards or so, and it remained functional and separate from states until ... well it's still going, isn't it ? And even today, neither faithful nor atheists would say that the catholic church is the state, anywhere except perhaps Vatican city (and even there, it's mostly the Italian and Swiss state). In most religions, when a revolution happened, the revolution was as much against the religion as it was against the state, meaning the priests were the first to get their heads chopped off and books burned. This is not to say that Christian priests escaped that fate every time, but often they did. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_Alexandria#Muslim_conquest_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...
- notgood 10y ago
  >Without the church, there would have been far less research (mostly happened within the church, mostly by order of the Vatican) You would have to prove that such curious people didn't gravitate towards the church instead of other place because _they were already_ financing such research, meaning, that the research wouldn't have happened in another place/group if the church didn't exist. The best place to do science is one which takes nothing for granted, in which people is free to doubt event their own existence if their ratinalizations lead them to believe so; that's pretty much the opposite of religion and the church, where there is a bunch of dubious "facts" that cannot be doubt, such as "There is a God, God is smart, There was Jesus, He made some miracles". The other thing is that each single scientist that the Church killed may have discovered something even bigger had they not been killed, perhaps setting back science for decades or even centuries; and an even worse outcome was fear, because they inserted fear from then on in all researches of the same subject, for example I wouldn't have dare to say the earth gravitates around the sun the years after Galileo was killed; so you would have to "calculate" if what they did for science was bigger than what they did against it.

Any proof of that? and not that e.g. part of it grew on religious nations/people despite of religion?

by notgood 10y ago

Any proof of that? and not that e.g. part of it grew on religious nations/people despite of religion?

Look into the history of the first universities. And note that I'm a naturalist, I don't care for religions, but you can't pretend they didn't shape our societies.

rayiner 10y ago

Science as we know it is the structured pursuit of knowledge, mostly through organized institutions. In the western tradition, those institutions grew out of the Catholic Church. It was a logical outgrowth--the Church provided a ready-made organizational framework and a profession (the priesthood) whose job it was to sit around and think about things. If you had to point at a profession that comes closest to being what "scientist" grew out of--it'd be the clergy. Galileo studied at the University of Pisa, which was created by Papal edict. He wanted to enter the priesthood when he was young.

notgood 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832764

BjoernKW 10y ago

Many scholars were religious people, monks even like Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics. While that doesn't prove science wouldn't have developed without these people (which can't be proven either because we just have this one history to look at as a model) it shows that not only are these matters not as opposed to each other as they're often seen today but that organised religion and science indeed frequently thrived together and nourished each other. In medieval times the Islamic world used to be quite keen on science and progress as well. It's only in modern times that Islam has become increasingly conservative and backwards (as in Salafism, which quite literally as about wanting society to be like it was in the day when Muhammad still lived) again.

candiodari 10y ago

Sure. How about the entire history of western science since the Roman Empire ? Without the church, there would have been far less research (mostly happened within the church, mostly by order of the Vatican), we would have wiped out the scientific knowledge several times in history (mostly, but not exclusively during revolutions, when monasteries saved entire libraries containing scientific knowledge), and scientists have been explicitly wiped out as a matter of state policy several times, when again the church saved large numbers of them. And that's ignoring that, even today, a university that doesn't originate within the catholic church, or is even still part of it (like my alma mater) is still not very common. Even today, at least organizationally, very significant amounts of scientific research still happen within the catholic church (as in the boss of the boss of the boss of the boss of the scientist is the pope). Today. Honorable mentions go to several ecclesiastical orders, most famously the Jesuit priests. Sadly, Christianity is the exception here. While, yes, most religions had their priests do some form of scientific research, most religions wiped out the scientific knowledge they amassed, rather than protecting and safeguarding it, famously the burning of the great library of Alexandria by one of the main sources of islam, caliph Omar (who for instance is the source of sharia, as in the law system called sharia) [1] In my opinion this happens because in most religions there is no separation of church and state, like Christianity first had because of it's fights with the Roman Empire. This meant that the church could continue when the empire split, fell or otherwise had issues (and could remain popular when the state failed, as states inevitably seem to do), that the Catholic church had a constant and functional international organization from AD 200-300 onwards or so, and it remained functional and separate from states until ... well it's still going, isn't it ? And even today, neither faithful nor atheists would say that the catholic church is the state, anywhere except perhaps Vatican city (and even there, it's mostly the Italian and Swiss state). In most religions, when a revolution happened, the revolution was as much against the religion as it was against the state, meaning the priests were the first to get their heads chopped off and books burned. This is not to say that Christian priests escaped that fate every time, but often they did. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_Alexandria#Muslim_conquest_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...

notgood 10y ago
>Without the church, there would have been far less research (mostly happened within the church, mostly by order of the Vatican) You would have to prove that such curious people didn't gravitate towards the church instead of other place because _they were already_ financing such research, meaning, that the research wouldn't have happened in another place/group if the church didn't exist. The best place to do science is one which takes nothing for granted, in which people is free to doubt event their own existence if their ratinalizations lead them to believe so; that's pretty much the opposite of religion and the church, where there is a bunch of dubious "facts" that cannot be doubt, such as "There is a God, God is smart, There was Jesus, He made some miracles". The other thing is that each single scientist that the Church killed may have discovered something even bigger had they not been killed, perhaps setting back science for decades or even centuries; and an even worse outcome was fear, because they inserted fear from then on in all researches of the same subject, for example I wouldn't have dare to say the earth gravitates around the sun the years after Galileo was killed; so you would have to "calculate" if what they did for science was bigger than what they did against it.