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Not at all. The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a

Not at all. The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century. And the Gutenberg press was far less important than the invention of cheap paper.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
The catholic Counter-Reformation was equally enthusiastic about burning witches, particularly in Southern Germany.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  By equally, do you mean at least one order of magnitude less? And even your counter is a response to the reformation. I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    I mean that several of the largest witch trials in human history were Catholic, particularly in southern Germany. Witch trials were a regional phenomena, not a catholic or protestant one. There were many witch trials in protestant Scotland, but few in the protestant Netherlands. There were many witch trials in catholic Germany, but few in Spain. Attributing the witch trials to the protestant revolution itself is bad history. > I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside. I'm not christian either.
irrational 4y ago
So if the Protestant revolution never happened and the Catholic Church still had political control over much of the world, you still think the scientific revolution would have happened? I have my doubts.
Tuna-Fish 4y ago
> The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century. Witchhunts were bad, but this is really not correct. For the specific case of the steam engine, Torricelli had made some of the most important basic discoveries in Italy[0], but these came to nothing in Catholic Europe because his discoveries disproved an unimportant minor point of Catholic dogma, so it was unsafe to continue work with them. (The existence of a vacuum was for some insane reason held to be heretical, so no actual research into devices that worked using vacuum, such as atmospheric steam engines, could be done.) There was plenty of insane fundamentalism in Protestant Europe, but crucially, it was fragmented. The part that doomed science under Catholicism was not that Catholics were less learned or more supersticious than Protestants (because they really weren't), it was that in Catholicism there was a single person who ultimately decided what it was okay to think, and this person was just as dumb and fallible as the rest of us. In contrast, in Northern, Protestant Europe the baseline of education and knowledge was much lower, but every King or Princeling managed the rules of thought and discourse for their own domain, so there was always some place somewhere that was willing to accommodate new ideas. [0]: Starting with one of the most important viewpoint shifts in science history: "We live submerged under an ocean of air."

MichaelCollins 4y ago

The catholic Counter-Reformation was equally enthusiastic about burning witches, particularly in Southern Germany.

olddustytrail 4y ago
By equally, do you mean at least one order of magnitude less? And even your counter is a response to the reformation. I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I mean that several of the largest witch trials in human history were Catholic, particularly in southern Germany. Witch trials were a regional phenomena, not a catholic or protestant one. There were many witch trials in protestant Scotland, but few in the protestant Netherlands. There were many witch trials in catholic Germany, but few in Spain. Attributing the witch trials to the protestant revolution itself is bad history. > I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside. I'm not christian either.

irrational 4y ago

So if the Protestant revolution never happened and the Catholic Church still had political control over much of the world, you still think the scientific revolution would have happened? I have my doubts.

Tuna-Fish 4y ago

> The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century. Witchhunts were bad, but this is really not correct. For the specific case of the steam engine, Torricelli had made some of the most important basic discoveries in Italy[0], but these came to nothing in Catholic Europe because his discoveries disproved an unimportant minor point of Catholic dogma, so it was unsafe to continue work with them. (The existence of a vacuum was for some insane reason held to be heretical, so no actual research into devices that worked using vacuum, such as atmospheric steam engines, could be done.) There was plenty of insane fundamentalism in Protestant Europe, but crucially, it was fragmented. The part that doomed science under Catholicism was not that Catholics were less learned or more supersticious than Protestants (because they really weren't), it was that in Catholicism there was a single person who ultimately decided what it was okay to think, and this person was just as dumb and fallible as the rest of us. In contrast, in Northern, Protestant Europe the baseline of education and knowledge was much lower, but every King or Princeling managed the rules of thought and discourse for their own domain, so there was always some place somewhere that was willing to accommodate new ideas. [0]: Starting with one of the most important viewpoint shifts in science history: "We live submerged under an ocean of air."