Dear david f,
>>Christianity was prominent in bringing about all of them.<<
Christianity, as an important contribution to our civilisation, was prominent in many things, good and bad. As said before, you cannot prove your statement by recreating the two millennia of history in a laboratory, leaving out Christianity, thus showing that things would be better.

My "logic" was that people who blame Jews or theoretical physicists (or some other groups they dislike for this or that reason) are also convinced that they are right, though, of course, I agree that different beliefs have different degrees of credibility (and numbers of adherents), and different arguments have different persuasive strengths.

You are certainly not the only one who sees the negative contributions of Christianity as outweighing the positive ones, neither am I who see it the other way around. Both interpretations of history have heaps of books by scholars and would-be scholars to support them. The issue here is not who is right and who is wrong but who can be more tolerant, and can formulate his position in such a way as to broaden the perspective of the holder of the opposite beliefs. Let us leave it at that.

George,
You bring to mind the original Aristotelian idea:
"The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."

In the absence of intellectual power, knowledge is not reflexive. Only man knows and, at the same time, knows that he knows. The sense cognition in animals, unlike sense cognition in man, is unaccompanied by reflexive awareness – herein lies the uniqueness of man and his original ‘sin’. Whilst it's insipid and inadequate to view of humans as merely blank books and in need of an outside influence to ‘stuff’ things up, most appear to accept that humans are all frail, fallible, occasionally weak-willed and inclined to be selfish. It is also recognised there is often a gap between conscience and action. What we often fail to recognise is how we arrive at these notions, through our culture, and the importance of their continuation.

The big negative of Christianity, throughout history, has been the evangelical zealotry practiced based too much on the antithesis of an Aristotelian idea - an idea which in itself was quite correct. From Aristotle’s ‘The Doctrine of the Mean’, the questions naturally arise, what is a “good” and, what is the difference between technical goodness and moral goodness? The ‘positive’ of Christianity is that the question was answered. Christianity has the ‘theory’ but unfortunately, all too often, not the practice – this certainly doesn’t supply, in principle, any reason for which a theory should be abandoned.

"The replacement of the Christian story with that of natural science has been a disaster for the spiritual and the existential"

Natural science is not replacing nor attempting to replace the Christian story or anything else.

Natural science is a discipline that seeks to understand and explain the physical world - it is not a religion.

Natural science asks questions. It does not assume that the Christian story is 'truth' just because we are told it is so. What a disaster for science if that is how our great medical, physical and engineering mysteries were approached.

Natural science does not claim to be all-knowing or perfect. Natural science is happy to change on the basis of new evidence.

Natural science merely states the obvious - show me the evidence.

Natural science cannot argue with rhetoric like "you must have faith" in the face of no evidence.

The truth of the Christian story is that it is only true to those who have that faith ie. belief without evidence.

The Christian story is not the only story.

(It is interesting how some religious folk try to denigrate science by referring to it as a religion as if the label that they are themseles supporting is so shaky as to be used against its detractors)

Pelican
Do you not see the crusading evangelicalism of the new atheists? They would make natural science the only story and are far more intolerant to other world views because they limit the validity of those views to those which describe the physical world. You seemed to have missed entirely the point of my article. I indicated that science has broken its bounds, that of enquiry into the physical world, and has become a total world view. That is not, as you point out, its purpose. If you read some of the excellent comments in this thread you will find out that we are not attacking science but its usage to promote a totalitarian view that cancels views on humanity that are not empirical.

Faith is not, or should not be, an exercise in closing your eyes and gritting your teeth in order to believe something that is comforting to you. Faith is simply, for example, to believe that your wife will tell you the truth. It is to give credence to a testimony that you trust. By trying Christian theology at the bar of empiricist reason you make a category mistake, Christianity was never about the nature of the physical world, but of the nature of our place in it as sentient beings threatened by death and idolatry.

Peter Sellick

DSM,

The parables are not treated as factual, rather as a moral guide. Likewise genesis follows the path that the universe was created as explained to nomadic tribesmen 4000 years ago, skipping the quantum mechanics and bio chemistry.

Many Christians have no issues combining the guidance of the bible with scientific reality. Those that claim that faith can only be demonstated by ignoring reality are not getting their guidance from the bible but rather from dogma generated by church leaders.

George wrote:

The issue here is not who is right and who is wrong but who can be more tolerant, and can formulate his position in such a way as to broaden the perspective of the holder of the opposite beliefs. Let us leave it at that.

Dear George,

I would rather not leave it at that. In discussing history as you pointed out we cannot replay the scenario adding or subtracting factors to absolutely determine causes. However, we can try with the evidence we have and our powers of analysis to determine what happened. Tolerance and broadening perspective are virtuous concepts but may reduce the explanation of what happened to a propaganda exercise. It is difficult to determine what happened in history, but we will get no closer to it if we impose moralistic constraints on the narrative.