is there a way to scale how much religion has hindered science
Offline I really didnt know where to post this Query but i always believed Religion has been the biggest hinderence to scientific advancement and a wide array of fields i was curious if there is a compilation of differnt events where religion has stood in the way of a technological or medical science breakthrough (ie)
StemCell Research and such i am learning as i go and would like to see if someone has compiled such a list and if not see if someone would be interested to do it if possible i am still new
but i and anyone who has a reasonable thought can see that he reluctant persuit of Stem Cell Research is being impeded by religious ideologies which i find it a real shame so hold back a study that could very well save hundreds of lives if not more
i am starting to post more untill i get better at getting my point across i hope all well bare with me
Evolved Morality
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i would gladly take any productive critisism i am hopeing to learn more and more and become more involved so help is always apreciated
Evolved Morality
Why? You are the one buying into an ideology. You clearly have not even looked into the issue yourself. It is precisely an ideology to claim that religion is the enemy of science, an ideology which can be traced back directly to the Enlightenment. If you are truly a free thinker then why are you so constrained by a centuries-old reinterpretation of history formed on ideologies? Have you used your reason to arrive at the conclusion that religion is inimical to science, or have you bought into hackneyed rhetoric about Galileo, burnings at the stake, etc.?
If religious activists hadn't so ardently opposed the use of eggs in stem cell research, do you think that there would have been as much research into non-embryonic sources of stem cells?
This is not to say that religion never hinders scientific discovery. I am simply pointing out that the question is more complicated than you seem to be making it appear.
First, someone get their trigger finger ready for a "theist" badge on TPin.
Second... I've got an amazing book on this issue.
Here...
I'm guessing based on research without religion we'd currently have an average lifespan of 125, we'd have flying cars, would not be reliant on oil, but more importantly than the advancements of science... we'd be abundantly closer to world peace.
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I think this sums it up.
I didn't realize the labels came from without.
Nevertheless, I'd like to know how you measure scientific "advancement" on your little chart there.
Also, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were all egregious theists. Now religion means medieval western Christianity, or what?
I guess all the believers must have been busy discovering the cures for all the droughts and plaugues back when Copernicus was publishing his findings that we were not the center of the universe.
Religion tends to act as prophylactic to scientific inquiry by its nature, because religions tend to make specific empirical propositions, propositions which can later be properly investigated by a proper empirical methodology, ie a scientific one, which usually proves such empirical propositions as made by religions to be, well, wrong. However, since religion is so firmly culturally entrenched, this tends not be accepted because religion is treated as authoritatively divine, and so scientific inquiry based necessarily on knowledge which stands contrary to religious empirical propositions is hindered. It will be exceedingly difficult, for example, to train the next generation of biologists who don’t know about evolution, since evolution is to biology what the periodic table is to chemistry. The acceptance that a proper methodology has overturned religious empirical propositions can have one of three consequences societally:
The recognition that the religious proposition hence its accompanying theology, is false
Or
The rejection of the proper methodological result in favor of the religious proposition because it is so firmly culturally entrenched
Or
The invention of a vague and meaningless ad hoc like “Religious empirical proposition X is just a story, but the religious metaphysical propositions are still true” or “Since this is not literally true, it should be interpreted in an overly vague, metaphorical way”.
Stating the second is generally recognized as “fundamentalism”, while the latter is “religious liberalism”.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Yes, exactly. Astrology gave way to Astronomy, Alchemy gave way to Chemistry and so forth. People's initial beliefs caused investigation which helped lead them to making actual discoveries.
TPin, why don't you post an intro yourself then. Here's the link.
Are you kidding? Am I reading this wrong? Explain to me how people that have beliefs on how somethings works are motivated by that belief to invesitgate? I don't crack open my cell phone to see what's in there... of course my belief on how that works is based on verifiable evidence.
Ask the Muslim if religion have hinder science.
Baghdad should be the center of the scientific world today, look at it now. Saudi Arabia should of been the first on the moon, Egypt should lead the medical world.
But Islam collapsed after the golden age of Islamic science when science became the evil work of the Devil.
As Steven Weinberg pointed it out. Islam is now open to new technologies but not to pure sciences since it doesn't fit their Coranic view of the world.
As long as they will have this attitude towards pure sciences they will always have to rely on us to know how to do things.
You can't even think about making one single transistor without quantum mechanics and GPS will not work if you don't take in to account general relativity.
So it is maybe less obvious in our Western world what kind of harm religion as done to science, but in the Islamic world it is very obvious.
Si Dieu existe, c'est Son problème !
If God exists, it's His problem !--Graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne (France), May 1968
romancedlife.blogspot.com
im gonna get that book in a week or so when i have the extra cash
flow thanks brian and aiia for the chart and everyone else that posted i am looking into it with more detail now
outta curiosity i learn lol
thanks again for all the replys
great moriarty
Evolved Morality
Get the book "Remembering Hypatia"
Hypatia was the librarian at the Great Library, and was slaughtered for having the audacity to teach.
Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob around 400 AD.
Personally, I'd say Christians owe us at minimum 1600 years. The entire time we call the Dark Ages were willfully brought on by Christianity. We could have been on the moon over a thousand years ago, thanks, Jesus!
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. - Richard Dawkins
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server.
thanks for the recommendations i have lots of reading to do lol
Huh? What are the christian dark ages? What happened at that time when the scientific progress was not only hindered, but it plummeted? What technological advancements were lost? I suppose I could Google search it, but I can't really read complicated text in english. I just end up not understanding 70% of the issue.
Trust and believe in no god, but trust and believe in yourself.
The graph is meant to be farcical
The graph may be farcical, but is somewhat accurate.
Also, Athiest
If anything, the graph under represents religion's effect.
Think about it, thinkers around the time of the destruction of the Great Library were ALREADY working with ideas that included a round earth, an non-omnicentric earth, essential Newtonian physics and the idea of microsopic life.
How long did it take us to rediscover these things we take for granted? Who knows what else that library held, and who knows what we really lost - it is indescribable. The FEW surviving records we do have hint at the wonderous, and ideas that took centuries upon centuries to be rediscovered and fleshed out.
If you take the power of knowledge as and exponential entity - in that small seeds yield amazing results, the graph is conservative at best scientifically speaking.
Historically speaking it's an even greater tradgedy.
To put it into perspective, we essentially lost the collective knowledge of mankind when we lost that library, and we still haven't recovered and never fully will.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. - Richard Dawkins
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server.
The most important library containing the most advanced science in the world was burned to the ground. Much of the data was stored only at the library. In some cases where there were extra copies of the information the scientists who had the data were later murdered in the name of Christianity.
We'll never fully know.
As Yellow5 said, read the book "Remembering Hypatia."
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I am thoroghly confused. Is this the only area that religion has hindered science? Is the only instance of this when the Great Library at Alexandria was destroyed? Because if that is the case, then this seems like a highly ideological claim regarding how religion has set back science. From my very sparse research(Wikipedia), historians do not know who or why the Great Library at Alexandria was destroyed. The claim that it was only motivated by and perpetrated for religious means is merely one interpretation.
Yes, I remember now. I have heard of the library of Alexandria that was burned to the ground, but I have never heard that it was caused by a religious motivation.
This reminds me of something that happened to me last year. I wrote in a school history test about the cause of the cold war, giving the most widely accepted "east vs west" -explanation. I received critique from the teacher that history cannot be viewed from just one point. There are many interpretations to historic events, and one shouldn't think of one interpretation as the "correct one".
Trust and believe in no god, but trust and believe in yourself.
I would like to post several sources that I used after further investigation of the matter of the Great Library at Alexandria.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/malexanderlibrary.html
http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Library.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
I was unable to locate any sites that specifically blamed the Christians. All of these sites state that the Library was destroyed by one of four or five possibilities. I would like to know where you researched this topic, so that I may further my understanding of this issue.
Decree of Theophilus in 391
In 391, Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all pagan temples, and the Christian Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria complied with this request[14].
Socrates Scholasticus provides the following account of the destruction of the temples in Alexandria in the fifth book of his Historia Ecclesiastica, written around 440:
Evolved Morality
Let's fill in the rest of this now declared authority:
And before this there are two other records of destruction of the Library
There are many theories about what was the final destruction of the temple. The destruction of the temple, in my opinion was a combination of many factors, not simply the Christians. The conclusion reached in this article is that many centruies and a multitude of events and simple neglect resulted in the destruction of the Library. http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/malexanderlibrary.html
I would like to see a historically respectable source that points to Christians as the only cause of the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria.
Pffft. Religion is virtually synonymous with dogma, which is most certainly the enemy of science. Take the dogma out of religion, and what are you left with? Spirituality and philosophy. I can't see much room for what we term 'religion' without the whole 'take my word for it' angle.
I'm surprised the difficulties faced by DaVinci in his medical research haven't been mentioned... pretty sure that wouldn't constitute 'buying into hackneyed rhetoric'.
I have a single example that proves the opening post's assertion that religion significantly hinders the practise of science, and is apt to utterly cripple it, given the chance. As to the question of degree, you be the judge.
In the third century BC, Archimedes invented a form of calculus. But hang on, you say, Newton and Leibniz came up with it independently in the seventeenth century...
They wouldn't have had to, if it wasn't for religion. Such is the importance of calculus, that it's said that if Newton, DaVinci and other exemplars of the Renaissance had grown up knowing of Archimedes' Method, today we'd be on Mars, and have computers as smart as people.
Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_palimpsest
BTW, can someone tell me why the site can't send an account validation email to my hotmail address?
Kimmo
1. check junk mail
2. try clicking "register" for new account
3. If first two fail, try a different email address
4. If all else fails, keep posting under Kimmo
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
This post from todangst sums up the dark ages for us...
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring" -- Carl Sagan
I think Fish makes a very valid point, and I agree with Fish, that it's a far more complicated issue. Look at the Ottoman Empire during those "Christian Dark Ages." Ever wonder where we got the mechanical clock from? The Middle East. The Romans even had little steam-powered wheeled toys for their children to play with. Religion has often been a source of anti-intellectualism, but not the sole source. Communist regimes have historically been anti-intellectual.
However, just to speculate... I give you The Year 2008 in a World Where Reason Prevailed and Religion Never Flourished, and in which science and scientists were held in extraordinary regard by civilizations during their lifetimes:
A solar-powered helicopter on top of every garage, energy collected from the sun and beamed to Earth, ecological-technological integration, massive, space-saving, self-contained arcologies, geothermal energy, gene therapy, MEME THERAPY
, no world hunger, adequate birth control, a more humane political economy, more personal freedom and dignity. It's idealistic to think that no one's going to be better or worse off than anyone else, but I imagine that in a world where science and intellectual pursuits were held in high regard by the governments and the populations, we could expect fewer class antagonisms and a much more effectual, better-funded public education system. It is equally idealistic to suppose that all violence would be eradicated, but without religion as a motivating factor global violence would be significantly reduced... The use of public space would be maximized to allow for the naturalistic formation of communities once again.
You get the point.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
You've missed the mark there slightly. What we're buying into is a culture, and there's a difference. The culture is one of questioning, researching, and reasoning. In the context of that culture, finding multiple sources of evidence is better than "buying into an ideology."
You'll notice that the poster is looking for evidence by asking a question. That's part of the culture. In dogmatic circles, that's considered being pesky, but here it's encouraged.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Dogma goes along with book burning in the same way that butter goes with mashed potatoes. Maybe you were watching your weight at the time, but when you get the chance. . .BRING ON THE BUTTER!