"Virtually all historians of science, including Crombie, Lindberg, Grant, Jaki, Goldstein and Heilbron, have concluded that the Middle Ages produced a scientific revolution."

webby, the middle ages lasted a thousand years. i'm not sure how you can attach the word "revolution" to any period of that length.

no matter. i'm skeptical but generally curious. if you provide me with one (and please, only one) good reference on this, i'd be very keen to read it.

GZ: << Personal experience, independently verifiable by others, is objective evidence >>

What rubbish. I think you just made up your Ouija spirits story. The fact that you can't/won't produce any verification just adds to your lie.

<< I asked you to provide evidence that, lies about Jesus are at the same level of deception as Mohammed's lies. >>

GZ, that was in response to me asking you to demonstrate why the fairy stories you believe about Jesus are true, when it is your self-stated mission to prove to the world that Islam is based on what you call a "lie". To me - and any other atheist - they are of exactly equivalent validity and credibility, i.e. zilch. They are myths and legends written down thousands of years ago and fought over by credulous zealots ever since.

You can't prove that the Jesus myths have any more veracity than the Mohammed myths, simply because they don't. They're all fairy stories.

<< please provide TWO OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE on evolution, within the narrow limits of your scientific knowledge, of course >>

Another well-worn tactic of the prevaricator - change the subject. I have no intention of attempting to educate you about the theory of evolution, if for no other reason than you don't seem intellectually capable of understanding it.

You're just another dishonest, Islamophobic Christian idiot. Fortunately, like the others who infest this site, nobody in their right mind believes anything you write here.

Dear GZ,

If your powers of logical deduction lead you agree with creationists, then what objective evidence are you basing this on?

By stating that you have no problem with evolution as a "theory", you are going back to the old and fallacious argument that evolution is “just a theory”. May I remind you that a theory is the highest order a scientific hypothesis can obtain. Even gravity is a theory. The term “theory” is used differently in science terms than it is in every day terms. Even so-called Creation “Scientists” will tell you not to use this argument, as it is invalid.

I could just as easily argue that the Earth is flat; gravity is just a theory; that what you observe as gravity is merely my god pushing the earth upwards and that all the pictures you see of a round earth are an optical illusion. By doing this, I would be no better or worse than creationists.

There is an overwhelming amount of scientifically verifiable evidence for evolution - I’ve mentioned some of it here. There is nothing “flippant” about the use of the term “evidence” in regards to evolution. As I have said a couple of times before, it is one of the most solid scientific theories we have. Try finding something, anything that disproves it. It would earn you a Nobel Prize. Many scientists both Religious and Atheist have tried, but none have ever succeeded.

But again, please state your evidence for creationism? Why is evolution false? No one else has been able to disprove evolution. Perhaps you can earn yourself a Nobel Prize here.

Dear Philo,

Thank you for clarifying what you meant by “power”. I could agree with that.

As I said earlier, most mutations are neutral, a small percentage are bad, and a small percentage are good. Your 99.9% figure is absolutely incorrect and sounds made-up.

A human zygote averages 128 mutations alone. If 99.9% of them were bad, we wouldn’t be here.

Sorry Philo, but if evolution was that easy to disprove, then it would have been abandoned many years ago.

Webby and BB,

Please forgive my interruption here, but if you are going actually to do some research, can I just point out something that might save you looking in the wrong places?

What were previously referred to as The Dark Ages date from around the fall of the Roman Empire (approximately 400CE) to approximately 1,000CE. However, historians no longer use the term Dark Ages for many reasons - one of which being that there was indeed a great flowering of Monastic art, education, music, and in husbandry.

The Middle Ages (or Medieval Period)is the term usually given to the period dating from the Norman Invasion in England (1066) until the Fifteenth Century. The Sixteenth century to the Eighteenth Century is referred to as the Early Modern period and preceded the Industrial Revolution.

I sincerely don't mean anything more by this post than perhaps narrowing your search down a little for both of you.

hi romany,

i did a quick wikipedia to check on "middle ages", but take your word for it. but i think the relevant period is not "middle ages", but the *long* period in which europe was under strong christian rule. say 500 to 1500, give or take a century or two? you can divide the period 500-1500 into large sub-periods, but i would then ask the same question of those sub-periods. in any case, the use of the word "revolution" seems out of place.

the question as i see it (paraphrasing my original question to webby), was there significant scientific or mathematical progress in europe during the long period of strong christian rule? it would seem that webby says yes. i presume the answer is no (and would then ask why), but am genuinely interested to hear what webby has to say.

bushbasher>>if you provide me with one (and please, only one) good reference on this, i'd be very keen to read it.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_inheritance

The laws of inheritance were derived by Gregor Mendel a 19th century MONK conducting hybridization experiments in garden peas (Pisum sativum).

Between 1856 and 1863,he cultivated and tested some 28,000 pea plants.From these experiments he deduced two generalizations which later became known as Mendel's Laws of Heredity or Mendelian inheritance.

He described these laws in a two part paper,"Experiments on Plant Hybridization"that he read to the Natural History Society of Brno on February 8 and March 8, 1865,and which was published in 1866.[2]

Mendel's conclusions were largely ignored. Although they were not completely unknown to biologists of the time, they were not seen as generally applicable, even by Mendel himself, who thought they only applied to certain categories of species or traits.

A major block to understanding their significance was the importance attached by 19th Century biologists to the apparent blending of inherited traits in the overall apperance of the progeny, now known to be due to multigene interactions, in contrast to the organ-specific binary characters studied by Mendel.[1]

In 1900, however,his work was "re-discovered" by three European scientists,Hugo de-Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von-Tschermak.The exact nature of the"re-discovery"has been somewhat debated:De-Vries published first on the subject,mentioning Mendel in a footnote,while Correns pointed out Mendel's priority after having read De-Vries's paper and realizing that he himself did not have priority.

De-Vries may not have acknowledged truthfully how much of his knowledge of the laws came from his own work,or came only after reading Mendel's paper.Later scholars have accused Von-Tschermak of not truly understanding the results at all

but here is only one of many

http://www.mendelweb.org/MWolby.html

recall we have our days marked in the'gregorian'calender

[maths to verify'holy-days',writing to record'sacred/texts';education has its roots in the many'educational/churches'at the time[later the stars were discovered[the earth'rotating'around the sun etc[all by priests

[ok they got'disbarred'for hericy[but]were priests none the less when they founded the \'roots of science'and'WROTE'it down[so that even now we can'READ'what they'wrote';..whilst they too were figuring it all out,from the limited'human'perspective