This is the same "enlightened institution"   that put Pope Boniface VIII  on trial after his death.   The precident for that was of course the ninth century trial of Pope Formosus,  the cadaver  was dug up and put on trial  TWICE!!

What did he contribute to any of these?

Seems that his contribution was helping to stop the church from persecuting science by developing a theology that man could actually learn things through reason and not just divine revelation. Otherwise we might still be living in the dark ages.

Was this before or after they sentenced Galileo to house arrest?

http://www.catholicscomehome.org/epic/Epic_%20proof.pdf

Try it again I guess one needs the http://

I think it's kind of like when someone's local sports team wins, and they say "we won!"

Yeah. You won by sitting on the couch watching someone else do stuff. Pretty sure it's the same thing.

"Dude, we were totally there the whole time he was discovering science and stuff. We, uh ... gave him a place to stay and everything ... um ..."

Lame.

Hehe. Quite right.

Makes it a bit sadder, really.

They did let scientists examine the Shroud of Turin a little bit until the evidence was pointing to it being a lot newer than 2000 years old. Then they had to protect it's integrity.

They haven't figured out a way to make money by using the scientific method. Only taking credit for it helps them get back members that previously left.

Gregor Mendel the "father of modern genetics" was a Catholic monk who devoted his life to the study of genetics while living in a Catholic monastery  

spent no time in church, CLS? How pleasing to hear this. 

Regardless of which boomerang manufacturer it may have been who first exercised the empirical method 250,000 years ago, the keystone of the modern scientific method and its process of peer review, was the Oxford Circle and other experimenters who drove the enlightenment in the face of religious threat often at their peril - these men included Robert Boyle, Richard Lower, Thomas Willis, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and others, a group that went on to found the Royal Society with Issac Newton. 

Some empiricists have been churchmen but whether or not they were actual christians is a matter for debate. In any case, the catholic church, which only exonerated Galileo five minutes ago, can not be called the font of the scientific method. That the church owned the written word and the means and funding of higher education for 1500 years explains its involvement with learning up to the development of the printing press and highlights its failure to move forward past that point.  

In any case, Aquinas could not be called an empiricist in the modern sense of the word - he certainly would not have argued all knowledge comes from sense experience, though he did maintain some knowledge must be informed thus. Where Aquinas falls in my opinion, is his special pleading that when it came to god, truth could be established by logic. In this he projects Aristotlean concepts of illumination. In the light of neuroscience, none of this makes sense. 

Aquinas was a formidable scholar but he was not a scientist. Nor does appealing to his authority somehow elevate the church to a leadership role in scientific endeavour. But let's give jesus the last word on christianity's respect for empiricism shall we?

"Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."

John 20:29

You mean the church want's to claim they developed the methodology of "Question everything"??

Like fuck they did.

How do they know it wasn't the homosexuals who invented it?...

Algebra was fostered and developed by Arabs and Muslims, so by this standard Allah must be the one true god.

BULL SHIT

One's religious beliefs are not lab tested like the discoveries they make. And DNA is not dependent on one believing in Thor or Jesus or Apollo to understand and accept as fact.

"We contributed"

SO THE FUCK WHAT,

I write poetry, so the mere fact that I write poetry means that all poets are secret atheists?

Science is not dependent on god belief to understand. And for this church to claim it contributed to science is absurd considering that the religious dark ages kept discovery down for 1,000 years.

AND

Newton was a believer, but he also thought alchemy would become a lagit science. So being smart and right about some things does not make one right about all the claims they make.

This argument is just another attempt to prop up the absurd idea that there is a magical invisible super brain with magical super powers. SORRY, doesn't wash.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel: "Besides his work on plant breeding while at St Thomas's Abbey, Mendel also bred bees in a bee house that was built for him, using bee hives that he designed.[7] He also studied astronomy and meteorology,[6] founding the 'Austrian Meteorological Society' in 1865.[5] The majority of his published works were related to meteorology.[5]"

The man studied at the University of Vienna, he presented at scientific conferences, published in scientific journals, taught physics at the Abbey's School, discovered a number of new plant species. He understood very well the significance of his work, even if nobody else did at the time: "His experiments led him to make two generalizations, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which later became known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics: "The modern science of genetics, which seeks to understand the process of inheritance, only began with the work of Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century.[6] Although he did not know the physical basis for heredity, Mendel observed that organisms inherit traits via discrete units of inheritance, which are now called genes." The word "genetics" was only coined in 1905, with specific reference to Mendel's work, by one of his fans.

Let credit be given where credit is due.

And give some credit, too, to these people's own statements and demonstrations on the compatibility and mutual support of (natural) science and (Christian) religion, in their own lives and in general. Some Enlightenment-driving examples of which I give above, that clearly go beyond the mere lip service their society may have required of them. I note that, to accuse them of intellectual dishonesty - besides being merely speculative, if presented without support - would seem to tarnish the haloes ("the keystone of the modern scientific method" etc) under which they were first presented to this Discussion.

I was being flippant with the pea dinner. But Mendel, nevertheless, did not know anything about DNA-based genetics as we understand them. He did not claim or understand that his work was the key mechanism of natural selection. Nor can his work be in any way ascribed to his faith. 

Thanks for your clarification. There is a danger with (unacknowledged) flippant remarks in a public discussion, in that observers who are not themselves familiar with the subject in question may, contrary to anyone's intention, take them at face value.

I think that we can agree that, in 1866 when Mendel published his pea research, nobody knew anything about the chemical basis for heredity. Also, that the "quantization" of heritable traits was of immense practical importance in hybridization and other aspects of plant and animal breeding, even well before its incorporation into evolutionary theory (which took surprisingly long - from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesis: "The relevance of Mendelism to evolution was unclear and hotly debated [...] Many scientists believed the two theories substantially contradicted each other.[15] This debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians continued for some 20 years and was only solved by the development of population genetics [in the 1930's].&quot

Father Mendel (as a Canon, he was both priest and monk) was a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, that follow the Augustinian Rule and teachings from around the year 400.  From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinians: "Augustine of Hippo taught that 'Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love' (Victoria veritatis est caritas),[8] and the pursuit of truth through learning is key to the Augustinian ethos, balanced by the injunction to behave with love towards one another. [...] This balanced pursuit of love and learning has energised the various branches of the order into building communities founded on mutual affection and intellectual advancement." By his own light, and in the judgement of his colleagues and superiors (who were to elect him Abbot, in 1867), his scientific work (teaching, research, and societal) lay entirely within the mandate of this charism and of his religious life.

doing some homework on the Oxford Circle and other key figures who drove the Enlightment and I find my original position is insufficiently nuanced and does not accurately reflect the truth about these people. There are undoutedly christian scientists in this wider group who believed they were seeking god's truth, as well as outspoken atheists like Diderot, who was only released from the dungeons of Vincennes after swearing he would never write anything that prejudiced religion again. His crime? To propose thinking matter.

Thomas Willis clearly made no delineation between religion, science and philosophy. What Wren's religious convictions were is unclear. Newton had his own religious views, heretical, but godly. He apparently hung his beliefs on first cause and apparent universal design. Descartes was a staunch catholic but was loathed by protestants and catholics for his troubling ideas about the nature of reality. He spent most his time in the comparative safety of protestant Holland in fear of the inquisition.

But perhaps what's most informative to me is the lengths these fellows of the Enlightenment went to in order to assure the church they were not undermining its doctrine. Instead they claimed to be uncovering god's truth while in the process, perhaps unwittingly, they were creating a mechanism of scientific experiment the power of which ultimately called into question the existence of god in knowable space time.

I think Willis knew that to prove the brain was the seat of the person was akin to atheism - or as English philosopher Henry More put it when writing about the brain: "No spirit, no god." And I think it's clear that these men were afraid to be thought of as unbelievers.

So, I must concede the integral role of christian believers to early science but I still contend that empiricism as we know it would have been flagrant heresy in the 1660s, punishable by death, and as a result of this overarching threat, what the true convictions of these men were, we cannot tell. 

you make here in my last post.

Variously, I'm well aware it was Planck's post, as my comments more carefully read infer. I believe his assumption of mind behind matter is wrong and makes no coherent sense. But I like the quote of his I use as my tagline. I believe he was correct with that.

I do not agree Aquinas was a scientist. He was more theological philosopher than anything else, in my opinion.

I believe Willis and the Oxford Circle showed mind was matter - this was heresy at a time when things that undermined the church were considered blasphemous and blasphemy carried the death penalty. Much of what they learned directly contravened religious teaching. I believe Willis knew the danger of what he found. He went so far as to contrive a soul inside the mind and an additional soul located in the blood to support his findings and was always quick to assure he was no atheist. He did this for a pointed reason.

I'm fairly certain I've been mentioning those outside the Oxford Circle as we've talked about the Enlightenment period. I initially contended the Oxford men ushered in testable explanations and I hold to this. Of course others were involved but this does not underdo the achievements of this unusual association of exceedingly bright minds. They achieved more together than they would have done apart, I think. Their legacy is profound.

Astronomy and cosmology do use tools - telescopes, spectroscopy, radio telescopes and with unmanned exploration of nearby planets, much more. We don't explore space using reason alone.

As far as rationalism and empiricism is concerned, I believe sense data informs us of what we can know, as well as informing us how we can know it. Empiricism informs initial principles. I believe there is no innate knowledge though it appears we have an instinctual sense of certainty. This is a point of general contention, I agree. I think we discuss empiricism using language and labels to describe concepts we visualise using notions derived from earlier sense data. Maths is hairier.

Your argument that christianity is based on actual experience I can only suggest is subjective and the product of internal confirmation bias. I would argue christianity is a mental journey that is informed by interpretation of ordinary events as having divine origin. There are no testable explanations here.

Further, I say that there is no absolute certainty and that scientific truth as well as it can be known is established by testing hypotheses to build theories. There is no need for faith of the sort I feel you may be implying. One might expect a particular result if certain data remains consistent. The core elements of religious faith are not open to reinterpretation in the presence of new data. Not in the past, not now.

In the absence of proof the correct position is to stay judgement and await further evidence. But christian belief systems cannot manage this. The fundamental beliefs that underlie christianity, including the acceptance of ancestral sin, the sacrifice at calvary for salvation and eternal reward, and a range of associated and unsupported biblical truth claims, cannot be remade by new facts. Instead these central beliefs inform the interpretation of data, just as they did in the past, when finding mind was matter, not soul, was considered blasphemy against god.

Finally, I don't know what the figures are for believers and non-believers in science. I will have to consider this further. But I do believe that empiricism has never showed us positive proof for god. Instead we have contrived god through the reification of human mental concepts. And as I pointed out earlier, when it comes to matters like abiogenesis and first cause, I believe religious belief and a process of testable explanation must inevitably conflict. We consistently see that where data is not complete, religion appeals to complexity. 

Induction does not require faith - simply the application of statistical analysis, especially as exemplified by a the mathematical formula developed by the English Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes, to make it a fully rigorous process. In which case the "Problem of Induction" disappears - it arose from trying to apply a simpler form of logic to a context where many things are not simple true or false binaries, but have assessable levels of uncertainty attached.

Science does not require faith, except perhaps in the fundamental applicability of the Laws of Logic, which applies to every coherent analysis.

The quirks of human psychology revealed in the distribution of tendencies to believe in a God are interesting, but irrelevant to whether the beiief has any substance or not.

The God creator concept has little logical justification, and has enormous problems of infinite regress, which do not exist in the 'natural' framework, which recognizes the everyday experience of emergence, and the algorithm of evolution, where higher order and more complex things arise from simpler. The primitive 'God' myth no longer has explanatory power, rather it is now a strange claim requiring much demonstration of evidence for its existence, and how it would fit into what we now understand about the nature of existence. And the idea of a benevolent God flies in the face of pretty much all of history.

The accounts in the Bible do not in anyway demonstrate the existence of a loving God - at most they are testimony that some things happened which people at the time did not understand. We would need something far more solid than 2nd- or 3rd-hand eye-witness testimony to establish even the reality of what they reported with confidence, let alone establish anything whatever about the attributes and motives of a purported transcendent being. We have better evidence and more solid testimony for alien abduction and ET's than for the supernatural claims of the Bible.

"Nothing conquers except truth" also happens to be the the first principle of Psychological Warfare (as in, the 1948 textbook by Paul Linebarger - Science Fiction's Cordwainer Smith), that the best propaganda is the truth.

If one merely plugs in "testable explanation" for "truth", and "human feeling" for "love", that indeed is what you get, and indeed it then looks a little bizarre (for one thing, isn't "hate" also a "human feeling"? as well as "acid indigestion"?). But is that really what Augustine and most of his readers (including, those today) understand by those terms?

Here's one person's thoughts about this saying : http://victoriaveritatis.com/exegesis_vv.html .

To me, it suggests that the best human feeling (caritas = charity, selfless love) is rooted in reality, and is not a meaningless artefact; that the deepest investigations into the world cannot threaten that validity, and (in respectful disagreement with H.P. Lovecraft) we have nothing to fear from the truth, including that it might lead to horror, hatred and despair (where we have not brought these in ourselves); that science itself is a work of love, and (according to Augustine) no threat to the Christian Faith.

For those who still see no connection between the Search For Truth, and Love (also often expressed as a search, such as in the Song of Solomon), I lament: where's the Romance gone?

"I don't think you can actually approach material truth from a baseline of religious conviction without adopting deism": one not need go so far - free will is fundamental to Christianity - God permits Man to be Man - why shouldn't He let Nature be Nature?

"or incorporating severe bias particularly when it comes to first cause and abiogenesis." Hoyle and others raised accusations of such bias when Lemaître, a priest, first proposed the Big Bang - still going strong today, and if anything (what with the Big Rip), Bigger and Bangier. I admit its attraction to one honouring Genesis - but theologians have long cautioned (including, in Galileo's time) against committing the Church to any particular model of Nature, and have formally asserted (in a Council of the 12th century, I think it was) the freedom of God - who lives outside time and space altogether - to create whatever spacetime & contents He likes. Abiogenesis - as in, life from non-life? As in, "Let the Earth bring forth"? No prob - indeed, casual "spontaneous generation" was once thought to not only be scriptural, but still widespread.

"And I do believe the church has historically attempted to crush empiricism where it questions god." The Church encourages all kinds of talking to God, including asking Him the tough questions (and getting some asked back) - it's called prayer. "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord" (Psalm 34:8 ). Otherwise: pointing out flaws in alleged proofs of not-God? Declaring that certain individuals are not or no longer part of the Church, or speaking for it (i.e excommunication)? All that sort of thing can be done without attacking any part of Reason - indeed, that would be bad Theology, and worse Politics.

While attempting to brainwash and subjugate all of humanity.

This isn't a eulogy.

You can put lipstick on a pig all you want, but it's still a pig.

I guess you've never heard the term 'skunkworks'?

That's where conversations, theories and experiments are done that are hidden from the 'powers that be'.

If individuals made discoveries from money that was coerced or forced out of citizens by church rule, the glory should go to the individuals for their scientific achievments, and to have sympathy to those who paid in taxes to fund it.

Not the the Mob, or Mob bosses.

coerced, brainwashed, threatened, executed, critics, free thinkers and libertines....

I really hate it when believers, and I have seen this with Muslims and Jews as well, pick an arbitrary point in history and pick a famous smart person from that generation and try to jump the gap from their "contribution" to their god existing.

Lets take god out for a second to show how fucking absurd this tactic is.

The ancient Greeks were the first to use the word "atom", so does that mean their gods are real? And everyone knows that when they used "atom" back then, it was a concept of "the smallest imaginable thing". But that did not mean they knew what a proton or quark were.. It was just a concept, an idea.

NOW, lets take cars.

Henry Ford contributed to transportation, sure, but he was not responsible for the modern Lamborghini, and the wheel was around long before Christianity, much less cars.

If you want to know what a huge fallacy this tactic is, ask a 4 year old why the sky is blue. All they can do is say the sky is blue. They cannot tell you the scientific reason why we perceive the sky being blue.

"I invented the wheel. I contributed to transportation. Therefore I can build the space shuttle".

This is the same bullshit I even get from si fi fans. Some have claimed that Gene Rodenberry(sp) invented the modern cell phone.

NO, he was aware of microwave technology. And the idea of a hand held communication device was already around as an idea in the tech community. All Rodenberry did was pick up on this idea and popularize it in the show.

But not even the scientists were sure, at that time, if we could eventually do what we have now in cell phones.

If you look at the record of patents in the federal patent office, you will see far more ideas that do nothing and are absurd, than ideas that we find in the future being possible.

No deity/god/super natural being, by any name in human history, is true by default because those within the camps got lucky in discovering reality. Otherwise the sun is a god because the ancient Egyptians were master builders.

Also, I find that the idea of religion being connected to science is an old canard. We have at least two threads around here somewhere with a list of religious scientists that has been copy/pasted from some fundie site. One can tell the copy/paste from the fact that the lists are identical and stop with scientists born in the first half of the 1800's.

Really, I have to wonder what is up with stopping the list there? Can it be that fundies cannot wrap their minds around the idea that later scientists are just as capable as anyone else of the type of mental compartmentalization needed to do things like use the internet to deny science?

I believe that Max Planck and Georges Lematrie have already been mentioned as modern religious scientist. There are many more than that. Rather than reype what I have already done before, here is a partial list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science

Private prayer was commanded by Jesus (Matt 6:6), and encouraged from the earliest days of the Church (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_in_Christianity). Saint Paul did indeed caution about the uses and usefulness of ecstatic "speaking in tongues" (while also admitting that he was more prone to it than anyone), pointing out that it was not necessarily edifying to onlookers if it could not be interpreted, and suggested it was more suited for private than public worship (as opposed to something like song, in which everyone present can join); and, as with any other spiritual gift, including knowledge and oration, those who have it should use it for the benefit of all, and not for their own aggrandization.  Even so, he also said not to forbid it, and there have been various revivals of this practice (gereally, as part of movements to return to Christianity's roots - and so, to Christ), even within the Catholic Church, though in the latter, more in separate prayer meetings than in the middle of Mass. (For more on this, see CS Lewis's essay "Transposition", in the collection "The Weight of Glory" ).

Any heresy would lie in a primacy given to such "private revelations" above (and even instead of) the public one of Jesus's own life and teachings (being "Christians", and all).

Every organization has the right to decide on its own membership. If there was a Church (or Club) of Atheism, with a mandate to spread a particular message across nations and generations, it couldn't very well publicly include or subsidize those who persistently taught and defended Theism, could it?

I'm still not clear about how much of what you're saying about Willis et al is historical, and how much is supposition, whether by yourself or others. What are your sources?

What awakens my skepticism is your phrase "efforts to prove mind was matter" - it seems so unnecessary. What the "orthodox" of that place and time thought about the mind and soul, mostly followed various interpretation of Aristotle (via Thomas Aquinas; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism), that (roughly) a human being is a union of matter and form, just as a house is a union of material bricks and timbers, with a plan that is not material: that is, it is the same plan in the mind of the builder, written down on paper, or embodied in the final construction; it is what makes the house different from the initial pile of the same bricks and timbers, which is only a house in potential - it is the "actuality" of the house.

[Likewise, a story may first be set down quill to parchment; later mass-printed with moveable type; later still, stored on a hard-drive somewhere and flashed to your computer screen; always (if it's any good), remembered by those who have read it: it is the same story, though perhaps only "alive" in a human mind. In a computer performing a calculation, we have the immaterial software - an algorithm that can also be worked through by hand (though far more laboriously; yet, "computer" was a human job description before it was ever a machine) - that has become embodied in the material hardware of sparking microchips.]

"A soul is a form—that is, a property or set of properties—belonging to a living thing": mere growth, in plants ("vegetative soul" ); also motion in animals ("animal soul" ); also mind in humans ("rational soul" - whose capacity for knowledge would give it special properties, as argued by Aquinas in Summa q. 75). In studying dead bodies - as a Christian anatomist of the day might explain, to himself or anyone who asked - one may understand, even though the soul has departed, how it was able to be present in life - just as the gears and pistons inside a car are necessary for it to run (as can be seen even when the car has been switched off and dismantled), though not sufficient (as in a parked car, or one out of gas). That would have been enough for them.

If, by the way, you doubt that you can have a proper human being without a union of body and soul - well, Christianity agrees: hence the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body (the wooden house that has rotted or burned can be rebuilt of imperishable stone). It's a very materialistic religion, compared to some others (God likes matter - He made it); as well as an atheistic one (it was for atheism that Christians were thrown to the lions: for denying "the gods" - but One).

Also: classical materialists in the mold of Lucretius would not have maintained or tried to prove that "mind was matter", so much as that there's no such thing as Mind.

Also: there are more modern examples of neurosurgeons who not only dissect dead brains, but poke around living ones, and still believe in the human soul, and God - notably Wilder Penfield (see http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16878/), who was the first to stimulate brain centers and provoke reactions in living patients, was an Elder in the Presbyterian Church, wrote a biography of Abraham, and meditated on the relation of brain and soul.

I agree that truth includes "testable explanation" (which some might even further narrow to "tested explanation" ), but I think it extends beyond that. The statement "the cat is alive" can be true, without ever opening the box (as was, in fact, Schroedinger's own opinion). Galileo (d 1642) taught the truth of the heliocentric model (Copernicus before was more cautious) long before there was any test for it (namely, the Aberration of Light 1729, and Foucault's Pendulum 1851) - which would have silenced his critics, who were ready to modify interpretations of relevant scriptural passages _given good reason_ (see Arthur Kostler "The Sleepwalkers", 1959, Part Five) – not very "empiricist" of him, especially given his advocacy and good record of experiment-based conclusions elsewhere.

In Christianity, Caritas = Charitable Love is a function of the Will, rather than the Appetite: less a feeling than a choice. We don't have to wait for warm fuzzies towards someone before doing them a good turn (though they sure can help); we don't have to empathize with all the people of the world, to do something that might benefit each of them by just a tiny bit; we need not like the people who hate us, but we are commanded to love them.

It is perhaps no coincidence that knowledge "in the Biblical sense" was a synonym for the deepest expression of marital love.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth: "Philosopher and theologian Joseph Ratzinger, before his election as Benedict XVI, commented upon the relationship of truth with tolerance, conscience, freedom, and religion. For him, "beyond all particular questions, the real problem lies in the question of truth." [...] In his book Truth and Tolerance (2004), Ratzinger argued that 'truth and love are identical.' Possibly may be of help in explaining this doctrine, or at least giving something more definite to critique (I haven't read it myself).

Sure - Jesus was a picture of Roman tolerance but the period we are talking of saw Tyndale strangled at the stake and burned for daring to translate the bible into English. I believe you are defending a violent dogmatism that does not seem to be part of your nature, a church that is not your church. 

My key source for Willis is Zimmer's Soul made Flesh. It's a popular title but superbly researched as all Zimmer's work is. I've also read J T Hughes' beautifully illustrated Willis: His Life and Work. I prefer Zimmer. He squarely positions Willis amid the sectarian tumult of the English Civil War and he remakes the flux of ideas and religious conjecture that surrounded the Oxford Circle. It's in the perception of the world into which neurology was born that Zimmer outlines the fear of heresy in which these men worked. 

The point I again make is that Willis was the first to take the soul - the anima as it was called then - from the vacant spaces in the human brain where it was thought to be ethereally based - and to put it inside the brain's actual substance - what Willis called "The bowl of curds". He did this using Christopher Wren's intravenous method and Boyle's discovery alcohol firmed brain tissue, which jointly allowed him to preserve brains using alcohol so they retained their structure long enough to be dissected, thoroughly examined and their parts drawn by Wren and Lower. He also used Wren's method to inject dye into blood vessels and track the path of blood through the brain. 

Using these methods, Willis turned soul into flesh. He explicitly claimed that soul resided inside the physical brain and he was worried enough about what this meant to cover himself vigorously and to constantly deny his failure to find evidence of soul inside empty brain spaces made him an atheist. The only possible motivation for this is fear. 

Perhaps he was thinking of Giordano Bruno or Michael Servetus, two great men of early science who were burned as heretics at the stake for questioning what the church considered to be its own infallible truth. I'm not sure how this sort of behaviour from the church constitutes terms of membership, Graham, nor why you would defend or sidestep it. It's certainly not commensurate with the thoughtful character you show us here. 

I must again suggest you are defending something that you would find indefensible in real time. Now, I've happily conceded there were men of the cloth and true christians among the first empiricists - Bruno and Servetus were two such churchmen murdered for their scientific beliefs. I think there were many atheists or rationalists among the early empiricists but they were not at liberty to speak openly. Galileo sought to separate church and science. Diderot was an avowed atheist. All these men were persecuted. 

I'd love you to concede the church executed, imprisoned and bullied early empiricists and in doing so, threatened them all.

Review of Karl Zimmer's Soul Made Flesh By H. Richard Tyler

The soul was once thought to be an ethereal thing with an interface between the macrocosm — stars and planets — and the microcosm — the individual. Its home in the body was the heart and liver, and from there it was distilled from the blood via the rete mirabile at the base of the brain into the ventricles. The brain itself was believed to be unimportant except in its support of the ventricular system.

In his book Soul Made Flesh: the discovery of the brain — and how it changed the world, Carl Zimmer concentrates on the development of ideas throughout history that eventually established a role for the brain in the modern world. The focus of his study is an examination of the ideas that developed in late 17th-century England, but concepts that were popular in earlier periods, going back to the time of Aristotle, are also introduced. Many historical books focus on individuals’ lives, but it is often difficult to understand why or how their theories developed. By providing historical background and focusing on ideas, Zimmer makes a number of disparate individuals (alchemists, anatomists, astronomers, and physicians) seem almost to interact. He develops the connections among them and the weaknesses and strengths of their views on the role of the brain against the background of the time in which they lived.

In its beginning chapters, Soul Made Flesh describes in detail the theories of early philosophers and anatomists as well as alchemists and astronomers and discusses how each set the stage for the next scientific advance. Having provided this historical platform, Zimmer then focuses on events in 17th-century England. These were difficult times for the original thinker. The world was unstable; new thoughts and ideas were often in conflict with religious beliefs and nationalistic convictions and were a challenge to church doctrine and accepted Aristotelian views.

Nobody - myself included (I speak as one who saw the ravages carried out against children  under quasi-official state approval) has any great respect for the Church.

However, as much as it hs done all of the things that you say, the historical and the recorded scientific record very explicitly shows one thing: (I'll type slowly, because it appears that you read slowly): there have been groundbreaking scientists and theorists, fully funded in their studies by the Roman Catholic Church, who have made significantly huge discoveries.

It is idiotic to ignore the truth simply because there are other far more troubling truths in view. Had Osama Bin Laden invented a fusion chamber which was adequate to fuel the planet for aeons, that fact would persist despite his other atrocities.

In talking about LeMaitre - a gentle soul - it is instructive that he met with a tepid reaction when he proposed The Singularity - a fact that may be explained by the fact that he *was* a Catholic priest.  I've seen some of his papers in Leuven - ha had a very serious issue with how his theories would be heard. As it was it was the scientific community which took a long time to accept them - indeed there is record of a couple of PhD students who were drawing the same conclusions thirty years later who were entirely unaware of his work in the same field and who were close to deriving the same conclusions as he had. His cosmic microwave background - a testable prediction of his theory - was eventually proven.

He was a Roman Catholic priest.

Funded by the Roman Catholic Church.

He is the father of Big Bang Theory.

His propositions were largely ignored not by the Church but by science.

I am no apologist for the RCC; I've seen its evil at close hand, but it incorrect and erroneous to say that it has hindered or otherwise covered up scientific breakthroughs. To put it in its most blunt form: the RCC (or some -indeed many - of its clergy) may have broken through the rectums or other orifices of children. At the same time there were wholly innocent adherents who have contributed immeasurably to the understanding of our universe.

LeMaitre was one such. There have been many many others.