Since Sells is taking the rare path of actually discussing the thread rather than just leaving readers to flounder, as usually happens at blogsites, I hope he will spare just a couple of moments to answer a previous question concerning Aristotle and empiricism. Also perhaps a comment concerning the Leibniz Clarke debate as to underlying stakes also, from a slightly different perspective than already offered. Tried to come to make sense over some time concerning Clarke/ Newton and Leibniz, but was defeated utterly.

Lev
I have already apologised for my misrepresentation of what is taught in Australian universities, although, conditioned as I am by science departments, it is not such a big mistake. Teaching comparative religion or the sociology of religion is a far cry from a sympathetic treatment. Traditions can only be really understood from the inside. I am certainly not averse to the study of philosophy, I am doing quite a lot of it myself, it is just that it is not theology and when it tries to be it makes an arse of itself.

George.
The Enlightenment as the bastard child of Christianity. Certainly there is much truth in this. Linear view of history, progress, etc. What I was trying to get across was the multiple nature of the phenomenon we call the Enlightenment. It seems to me that science and technology would have done very nicely without Descartes and Locke who are the real bugabears. We could have had natural science without the idea of autocratic epistemology and the subsequent isolation of the individual and fragmentation of community. Theology and philosophy were coming along quite nicely as well. Of course this is a broad thing to argue but the early astronomers had done a lot without Descartes and Locke with the help of William of Ockham and Francis Bacon. Newton himself was at first a Cartesian and that did orient him towards mechanism and mathematics but he did not take up Locke’s extreme epistemology.

Waterboy
Nice precise of the centrality of narrative to human self understanding. I like the bit about “what a dubious creature the church is” . Having been involved with the church for 20 years I can vouch for that. I comfort myself by knowing that although the church is pretty awful its Lord is not.

Johnj
Aristotle is not a man to be written off lightly. For example, his ethics has become important in the works of the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre. However his attempts at natural science were limited by his understanding that the world was inherently purposeful. The Greeks thought that the cosmos was the product of mind or contained mind. This gave them a teleological view that limited their investigation of causality. If an apple fell to earth it did so because it is the nature of apples to do so. Christianity used Plato’s scheme of transcendent ideas to hold that these ideas existed in the mind of God. If God were creator he must have had some idea of what he was going to create. William of Ockham suggested that for God to be absolutely free then he could have created any world that he like and could reverse his decisions. This made the world contingent, i.e. it was not necessary as it was for Aristotle. That means you can not simply think your way into the causality of the cosmos because you did not have knowledge of the ideas of God, you had to actually go out and observe and perform experiments. For Aristotle the world was not contingent, it was ordered towards a telos, a goal. This is why he is blamed for holding up natural science for 2000 years or so. I am always willing to be surprised, so if you know anything about Aristotle that I do not please let me know.

Sells,

The "Enlightenment" is part of the age a reason, an age where we learned to challenge all and any assumptions. Descartes' and Locke take this to the extreme and challenged the assumption of their own existence. A better understanding was gained through identifying which assumptions were or were not worthy of being made. I'm not surprised that you feel Christianity is harmed by it. As with many religions, it is based on blind faith and baseless assumptions, which usually vanish in the light of question and reason.

Your criticism of Descartes' "Discourse on Method" that it was published after the start of the scientific revolution could be equally applied to the gospels, as they were published well after the time of Christ. The value lies in the clear articulation of ideas, reasoning or stories not in the assertion that they are the absolute beginning.

Autocratic epistemology does not form the basis of natural science but is rather an application of the scientific process on to thought and knowledge. Like astrology yields a better understanding of the stars, autocratic epistemology yields a better understanding on the application of thought and reasoning.

"I comfort myself by knowing that although the church is pretty awful its Lord is not."

Then why do you champion the traditions and heritage that is the 'dubious creature' rather than seek your own way to the Lord?

Historical Enlightenment simply means that Christian Faith without reason could not have brought on the Enlightenment that produced the Liberal or Democratic existence that the West now lives under.

St Thomas Aquinas fore-saw this in the 11th Century after agreeing to the Search for Enquiry, peddled through Europe by Christian monks who were influenced by Muslim scholars who still believed in a mixture of Islamism and Socratic Reasoning.

Thus from Aquinas’ thesis grew the Rennaissance, then the Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment, which in the early stages triggered the English 1688 Glorious Revolution which after rendering religious autocracy to a semblance of its former power, led the way to the Western ruling institutions we now exist under.

The historical tragedy was that while the barbarian Germanic West did greatly profit from Christian leaders like Aquinas, accepting Greek philosophy to balance faith, the Muslims, as the West grew stronger, descended into a Dark Age similar to what the Western Christians had existed in before Aquinas accepted the need for Christian faith to be toned down by reason.

It is so interesting that many liberal Jewish thinkers accept the above, as do most modern Christians and it is a pity that the most warlike persons on both sides today are those that are strictly fundamentalist, not using the pure simplicity of reason as Nelson Mandela has done in South Africa, both he and Bishop Tutu forgiving those who practiced elitist arparthaidism.

Indeed, foregiveness is a mental jewel so precious, and it is said that to find pure reason in Christianity we have to go back to the Sermon on the Mount, whom some say that Socrates the former militarist Hoplite could have preached the same doctrine which hundreds of years later could have found its way into the Great Library of Alexandria where the wise men who influenced the Nazarene Jesus might have learnt their wisdom.

Sells,
"science and technology would have done very nicely without Descartes and Locke ". I think one of the disadvantages of history, including history of ideas (as opposed to much of natural science) is the impossibility of laboratory experiments, to see what would happen if you left out one ingredient. It is hard to tell how 20th century Europe would have looked like without Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.

I certainly cannot imagine how mathematics would look without Descartes' idea of co-ordinates in geometry, and probably the same could be said about his philosophy: For instance, the mind-body dualism served us well for centuries although today we see it as a simplification of a more complex problem, not unlike Newton's physics turned out to be a "simplification" of Einstein's. Nevertheless, I believe without Newton there would not have been an Einstein, without Descartes (and Kant) no contemporary philosophies of science, and the Christian world view (including the variety of theologies associated with it) would not have evolved from its Medieval form.

The "isolation of the individual and fragmentation of community" as you put it is an extreme or degenerate form of what has become the crucial characteristic of the western civilisation: a respect for the individual, or rather person. It somehow expands on the promise "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise. " (Lk 23:43) made to an individual, which, as far as I know, He never made to a community.