Hi AJ Phillips,

"Secular fundamentalists, eh?

Who are these people who believe ...and why would they be “pissed off” with that suggestion?"

They are hanging around with the homophobics who fear sameness and most of the Christian fundamentalists who just get the description as a pejorative description which doesn't literally apply. A secular fundamentalist like Dawkins would be pissed off because they would hate the idea that Christianity might have produced anything positive.

”Required”?

You get back to that one.

"And what is your proof ...?"

There is none. It was an opinion that no other religion at the time was either in a position or had a perspective which would allow it. I haven't proved anything. But I believe that Stark, George, and StevenlMeyer have a point.I was explaining why I believed it made sense and why I agree.

<<The orderly Yahweh ...enables the birthing of a scientific approach.>>

"Oh, so now it’s just “enabled”?"

If something is required it would certainly enable.(?) That does raise an interesting point. Was it necessary to have the relevant perspective or did it just help? At that time in history it still looks like it would have been necessary. A few civilisations came so close sometimes for a long time but never birthed it. It sure looks like that was needed. Do you have any reason to think that another civilisation would have broken through? If so why didn't any? Greek knowledge had been passed around but in no other religious system had it had that result.

"Okay, so before it HAD to be a "Christian perspective", but now it’s just any perspective that creates an expectation that things are orderly and rule based."

Yes to both. At the time it had to be the Christian perspective. I believe only Christians and Jews had that perspective at the time and Jews weren't in the position to do it. They didn't have the knowledge needed to build on.

"I do believe you’ve just discredited your own argument, mjpb."

I do believe you are being overly literal and pedantic for sport.

The contribution of the Greeks to knowledge was not merely practical, it was also their approach to analysis. To the Greeks, Dialogue was important, for example. So if I say, for example, Simplicus (representing the Pope) debates another and the Simplicus looses, its still a fair discourse. The Church of Olde would not allow this. Just ask Galileo and that's centuries after the DA.

Were one to seek the roots of Englightenment, it would be found in the popular reation to Feudal Society to Monarchy and the Church, ultimately fueling individualism. Freeing people from Kings and Popes allowed idenpendent thought. Market capitalism, industrialisation and
entrepreneurism produced surpluses, so the Enlightenment could be put into practice, to benefit of Science and Humankind.

Apart from basis organizational models that can be found in the stories of most civilizations, before Newton we have very little true Science. Techonlogy and Experiment, perhaps, but not Science. [Copernicus and Galileo were not quite there.]

George,

There’s no need to apologise, and yes, I specifically had a problem with the word “required”.

mjpb,

My point about “Secular fundamentalists” is that there is no such thing as a “Secular fundamentalist”. If you meant “Atheist fundamentalist”, then that’s even worse, because there is no doctrine for atheists to strictly adhere to the literal interpretation of.

<<A secular fundamentalist like Dawkins would be pissed off because they would hate the idea that Christianity might have produced anything positive.>>

You’re misrepresenting Dawkins. I’ve heard him in an interview say that he acknowledges the positives that religion has produced.

The important thing to remember though is that that doesn’t saying anything about the truth of religious claims, nor does it mean that any of those positives couldn’t have come about by some other means.

<<If something is required it would certainly enable.>>

I know.

My point was that you went from “required” to a mere “enabled”.

<<At that time in history it still looks like it would have been necessary. >>

Well, it might have sped things up a bit.

<<Do you have any reason to think that another civilisation would have broken through?>>

You’re thinking here is too narrow, mjpb. You’re only considering the already existing civilisations in our already known history.

Statistically speaking, the chances that we would have NEVER started studying what we now refer to as “science”, is incomprehensibly (and probably infinitesimally) small when you think of all the events that had to occur throughout history for you to be born. It’s beyond what our minds can grasp, but it gives you an idea of how silly it is to suggest that science would never have come about without Christianity. In fact, one could argue that it was inevitable with or without religion.

<<I do believe you are being overly literal and pedantic for sport.>>

Words are important, and if we are to have a productive discussion and understand each other correctly, then we need to be careful with the wording we choose.

Dawkins acknowledges that his position is fallible in the God Delusion – hardly doctrinaire.

I tried to find Rodney Stark on the History of Science Society’s 2008 Bibliography Index – nothing. Also, no Rodney Stark on the university databases, I tried.

Kepler, centuries after the DA applied early science, computing the orbit of Earth, as if he were on Mars. Kepler’s Third Law states:
“The squares of the periods of any two planets are proportion to the cubes of the distances from the Sun.”

This is theory which can be applied and tested on planets that unknown to Kepler. The Church of the Dark Ages didn’t think like this. Even in Kelper’s time, the notion of elliptical orbit stood opposed the Catholic Logos, which stated orbits must be true circles. On issues of dogma, the Church was like a dog with a bone or a Sells with a trinity, no debate is entered into. As I have mentioned on other threads, Vatican astronomers would not look through Galileo’s telescope.

p.s. Kepler, along with his fellow Lutherans, had to escape Catholic persecution.

Strangely, a more militant and secular view focuses on the ‘illegitimate’ birth of science with Christianity becoming its ‘whipping boy’. Supposed warfare is seen to exist between science and religion, bringing to the fore, for example, such episodes as the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" where agnostic lawyer for the defense, Clarence Darrow quite rightly embarrasses William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, who had transformed himself into some "sort of Fundamentalist Pope" ( H. L. Mencken},was the ‘front’ man presenting the Christian Fundamentalist view.

Yet despite this false dichotomy, modern science arose among avowedly Christian clerics, theologians, monks, and professors of medieval and renaissance Catholic universities and monasteries. One should therefore ask, if science gradually arose during the medieval and Renaissance periods and Christianity and science are now seen as totally incompatible, what has occured? After all, both Galileo and Copernicus maintained the sun was at the center of the solar system, not the earth - they were neither skeptics or unbelievers. The remarkable truth (and uncomfortable for some) is that the world view of Christianity was absolutely necessary for the rise of modern science.

A direct tie between Christian metaphysics, its rejections of various classical Greek philosophical conceptions, and the birth of a self-sustaining science is able to be seen. A historiography of science needs to honestly face the problem as to why three great ancient cultures (China, India, and Egypt) all display, independently of one another,a similar pattern regarding science i.e., the stillbirth of science in each of them in spite of the availability of talents, social organization, and peace, which are after all, the standard explanatory devices furnished by all-knowing sociologies of science on which that historiography relies.

If science is to exist, explanations of natural phenomena must avoid a priori of pseudo-scientific"explanations" that really do not describe the causes,such as astrology. A pantheistic view hinders science. It is also hindered if the reality of the basic orderliness of the universe ("the external real world")is denied. We will not investigate carefully what is considered not to really exist,or that which will be changed at whim by the God(s),or nature herself.