Three Cheers For the Church?

[BeholdTheTruth]

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/101999sci-astronomy-cathedrals.html

 

[infornography]

interesting. Not unexpected to be honest, but interesting all the same.

The church was the primary if not only major body of scientific knowledge and pursuit for much of history, to find that it also studied astronomy is not at all surprising, especially given the stated reasons.

 

[ceo_esq]

I read the book that is the subject of the article in the OP (John L. Heilbron's The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories) last year. It had come up in one of the other R&P threads.

At that time I cited a few pertinent passages from Heilbron's text, which are useful in setting the oft-misunderstood historical record straight:

The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably all other, institutions.

...

The charge that the Catholic Church contributed nothing to the advance of natural knowledge after the trial of Galileo but unreasoning opposition ... cannot be sustained. Many learned clerics rated, or affected to rate, mixed mathematics, including astronomy, as having ... no fundamental connection to the rest of the body of knowledge, including the truths of faith. This consideration explains ... [why] most of the papers published by clerics in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy of Sciences up to 1720 concerned mathematics and astronomy. The Church judged these studies to be neutral and also useful, and supported them. The work of the meridian makers shows that men whose careers were underwritten in whole or in part by the Church could contribute importantly to the development of astronomy, that is, to the leading sector of natural knowledge during the seventeenth century. This proposition is not intended as an apology for the Catholic Church, but as a correction to the view, found even in the best modern historians, that the Church's action in the matter of Galileo made "Copernican astronomy a forbidden topic among faithful Catholics for ... two centuries." ...

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic Church supported a great many cultivators of science. ... The courts and households of the big ecclesiastical patrons, the popes and cardinals, afforded many openings for the learned. The great orders, especially the Jesuits, supported some of their brethren as writers, mathematicians, architects, and engineers. Lay patrons would often share the burden with ecclesiastical ones. The careers of the builders of meridian lines in Italian cathedrals provide a sampling of these niches. The sample discloses the existence of a widely based support for a "scientist's role" ... in Catholic countries during the Scientific Revolution.

The second development probed with the help of the meridian lines is the working of the censorship of astronomy books after the condemnation of Galileo. The soundings suggest that upper administrators of the Church, and even many of the cardinals who ran the Index of Prohibited Books and the Holy Office, recognized that Urban VIII had made a bad mistake and that the best policy would be to ignore Copernican writings unless pushed to intervene. Even the Jesuits were teaching heliocentrism before the end of the seventeenth century, using the convenient fiction that it was a convenient fiction. Those willing to call a theory a hypothesis could publish any astronomy they wanted. So flexible was the system that in 1741 the Church licensed a reprinting of Galileo's Dialogo although it still stood on the Index of Prohibited Books and was to remain there for another eighty years.

A useful symbol of the effective relationships between the leading astronomers of the church, the system of clerical patronage, the legacy of Galileo, and the progressive institutions of early modern science is Francesco Bianchini's Hesperi ac phosphori nova phaenomena of 1728. The protégé of five popes, for one of whom he built the meridian line in Santa Maria degli Angeli, Bianchini was the first to make a reconnaissance of the surface features of Venus. He succeeded through patience, astounding eyesight (Venus' constant cloud cover is opaque in the visible spectrum), and costly instruments paid for from income from sinecures given him by his popes and from gifts from the Catholic king of Portugal. In keeping with the style used for the moon, Bianchini named the features he saw on Venus after people, among whom Portuguese dignitaries figure prominently. But we also find a strait named after Gian Domenico Cassini, the builder of the meridian line in San Petronio, equally observant as a Catholic and as an astronomer; a large sea to honor Galileo, "the prince of all [astronomers]"; and promontories named after the academies of science of Bologna and Paris, the one in a papal province, the other in a secular capital, in return for their vigorous and complementary promotion of observational astronomy. The naming loses nothing of its symbolic value by the fact that the named features do not exist.

 

[c4ts]

Creationists have creation science theme parks, a museum where they conduct experiments, and journals where they can publish papers. Does that mean they're not opposed to science, too? Given enough time and the degree of rulership and funding the Roman Catholic Church had I'm sure they would come up with legitimate discoveries (evolution omitted).

Well, I suppose the comparison is somewhat over the top. It's not like the Roman Catholics founded their entire religion on proving heliocentricism wrong and blaiming it for the evils of the world.

 

[Dr Adequate]

Nice snow job.

And yet, there are the facts ...

 

[scimystic]

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/101999sci-astronomy-cathedrals.html

Good post. This is one of those interesting realizations that has been around for a few years but is now really coming out of the closet. Throughout the Renaissance the Church was not at all opposed to science or rational philosophy. It did, as your article points out, actually jump in and help. Why? Because it had no doubt whatsoever that the discoveries of these resurgent branches of learning would support its dogmas. The thought that its entire belief structure might be a pile of ...... was just too weird to occur. It took our Bishops and Popes around 250 years to figure out what the Mullahs had realized in regard to their branch of rational philosophy (Falsafah) about 400 years earlier: That this Greek based stuff was (A) not going to conform to their expectations, and (B) couldn't be controlled. Islam realized its mistake in time, and shut down free thought by killing most of the leading Faylasufs and forbidding the rest - under threat of the same fate - to write anything that could in any sense be taken to contradict the Koran. 'Our' guys weren't quick enough* off the mark. By the beginning of the 16th century the damage was done. The genie was out of the bottle and no way was going to be forced back in. Copernicus published in 1512. Galileo started spreading his terrible heresies towards the end of the century. Empiricism, and soon after The Royal Society, took off in England. And the rest, as they say, is history.



*OK, to give them credit, there was another major complicating factor. Early Christianity had incorporated an enormous amount of Platonism. Such that a thousand years later the rediscovered Greek manuscripts that jump started the Renaissance seemed strangely familiar and attractive to medieval Christianity. Especially those of Plato himself. It was sort of like rediscovering an old flame, grown more beautiful with the intervening years. Most of the Greeks (even Aristotle) The Church could have taken or left. But Plato was part of its soul. The Church couldn't reject him. And it couldn't, or couldn't quickly enough, separate him from the rest of Greek thought. A problem for them, but very fortuitous for us.

 

[c4ts]

The church believed in astrology, so improving the predictions of planetary motion was important. At the time there was no difference between astronomy and astrology. Perhaps Kepler was more acceptable because of his early mysticism.

 

[ceo_esq]

Throughout the Renaissance the Church was not at all opposed to science or rational philosophy. It did, as your article points out, actually jump in and help. Why? Because it had no doubt whatsoever that the discoveries of these resurgent branches of learning would support its dogmas.

It might be more accurate to say that the Church had no doubt that the scientific discoveries were, in Heilbron's words "neutral and also useful", that is, that they would not contradict any dogmas, which turns out to have been true.

It took our Bishops and Popes around 250 years to figure out what the Mullahs had realized in regard to their branch of rational philosophy (Falsafah) about 400 years earlier: That this Greek based stuff was (A) not going to conform to their expectations, and (B) couldn't be controlled.

I think by the 14th and 15th centuries the Church had already realized which aspects of Greek philosophy were not compatible with Christianity and had discarded them. Fortunately for the rest of us, the parts which were not compatible with Christianity were also the parts inimical to the rise of science.

Islam realized its mistake in time, and shut down free thought by killing most of the leading Faylasufs and forbidding the rest - under threat of the same fate - to write anything that could in any sense be taken to contradict the Koran. 'Our' guys weren't quick enough* off the mark. By the beginning of the 16th century the damage was done. The genie was out of the bottle and no way was going to be forced back in. Copernicus published in 1512. Galileo started spreading his terrible heresies towards the end of the century. Empiricism, and soon after The Royal Society, took off in England. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What "damage" was done? Having midwifed the birth of science, the Church does not appear to have had any sustained interest in putting that "genie" back in the bottle.

*OK, to give them credit, there was another major complicating factor. Early Christianity had incorporated an enormous amount of Platonism. Such that a thousand years later the rediscovered Greek manuscripts that jump started the Renaissance seemed strangely familiar and attractive to medieval Christianity. Especially those of Plato himself. It was sort of like rediscovering an old flame, grown more beautiful with the intervening years. Most of the Greeks (even Aristotle) The Church could have taken or left. But Plato was part of its soul. The Church couldn't reject him. And it couldn't, or couldn't quickly enough, separate him from the rest of Greek thought. A problem for them, but very fortuitous for us.

While I obviously recognize the influence of Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought on early Christianity, I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Of the "rediscovered" Greek texts that contributed to the renaissance of the 12th and 13th centuries, surely the most important and most frequently commented texts were Aristotelian. And of course Latin Christianity had never incorporated wholesale any branch of Greek philosophy (Platonic or otherwise).

The church believed in astrology, so improving the predictions of planetary motion was important.

Why do you suggest the Church "believed in astrology"? The Church's rejection of astrology is well-known. Indeed, St. Augustine penned one of the first great skeptical attacks on it.

 

[scimystic]

It might be more accurate to say that the Church had no doubt that the scientific discoveries were, in Heilbron's words "neutral and also useful", that is, that they would not contradict any dogmas, which turns out to have been true.

Let me see if I've got this straight: Are you saying that science and the standard Christian dogmas (as extracted from the Bible, and as propagated by most modern Christian sects) are not logically exclusive?

I think by the 14th and 15th centuries the Church had already realized which aspects of Greek philosophy were not compatible with Christianity and had discarded them. Fortunately for the rest of us, the parts which were not compatible with Christianity were also the parts inimical to the rise of science.

I can sort of agree with your first sentence, but I'm not at all sure about the second. I could find grounds for agreeing that Aristotle was inimical in a sense, in that his system seemed so large and comprehensive, and his authority so massive, that it did rather intimidate everybody for a couple of hundred years. But in the end it was also a positive example: (A) that such an enormous internally consistent system of knowledge could be built, and (B)of a template for some of the useful organizing principles for doing so. I think that a pretty good case could even be made for the statement that Aristotle's system provided the basic skeleton for our science. As to the rest of the Greeks: Which would you say were inimical (to science). The one who would best seem to me to fit that bill would be Plato*. But I have a feeling that you are not going to agree. And I think that we do agree in any case that the Church never seriously considered discarding him.

*The later Plato, of the 'Republic'. Not Socrates' appealing young student.

What "damage" was done? Having midwifed the birth of science, the Church does not appear to have had any sustained interest in putting that "genie" back in the bottle.

Let’s start with Reason v Dogma: Latin translations of the Greek and Arab texts recovered during the first 100 years of the Reconquista were pouring out of the main translation center at Toledo from around 1150. Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Democritus, Plato, and of course, reams of Aristotle. This all got gobbled up by the monasteries and universities, and by 1277 Dogma was already in serious trouble. The Church had to issue its famous 'Condemnations', against all of the learning centers, but especially Paris. A list of 219 things that could now not be said (let alone written). To give just a few of these - from Jennifer Michael Hecht's book 'Doubt':

#152. That theological discussions are based on fables.

#153. That nothing is known better because of knowing theology.

#154. That the only wise men of the world are philosophers.

#175. That Christian Revelation is an obstacle to learning.

#37. That nothing should be believed unless it is self-evident or could be asserted from things that are self-evident.

The Church didn't condemn such propositions for its amusement. It condemned them because they were being said and written. Would it already, at this point, have liked to put the genie back in the bottle? What were these condemnations an attempt to do?

Now for Empiricism v Dogma: This didn't start to get serious until about 1450, as the ‘Age of Discovery' got rolling. But by 1500 we were aware of a whole 'New World', of which there had been no mention in any Christian scriptures. In 1512 Copernicus removed the earth from the center of the universe, and showed it instead to be one of several planets orbiting the sun, which was judged by the Church [not me] to be fundamentally incompatible with its dogma. By the 1580's Tycho Brahe's observations had established that the universe is enormously larger than our solar system. [Why, if the whole apparatus was just set up for us?]. In 1608 Galileo built his telescope and started seeing things that massively supported Copernicus and Tycho; so was given the choice by the Church of shutting up or being incinerated. In 1642 Galileo died, and Isaac Newton was born. Newton’s discoveries, which were/are all reductible, through mathematics, to repeatable physical observation, basically blew the medieval Church’s concept of God out of the water. We could suddenly understand as natural everything from tides to rainbows to the motions and positions of the planets. ‘God’ survived Newton, in the minds of educated people, but he was no longer Christianity’s God. He was now the remote ‘First Cause’ God of Deism. So we’re now in the early years of The Enlightenment. Things are about to get really bad for Christian dogma. John Locke has turned empiricism into a philosophy. The Royal Society is churning out scientific papers in London, and the British Geological Society is collating numerous empirical discoveries which indicate that our planet is older, by at least a couple of orders of magnitude, then the 5,800 years so carefully calculated by Bishop Usher from the Bible. In general none of this new knowledge was compatible with Christian dogma. At every point of intersection (i.e., where both systems address the same question) they were in conflict. The heaviest blow fell in 1859, with Darwin’s first publication of “On the Origin….”. This presented Man himself as a natural phenomenon. Its opposition to existing Christian dogma was total, and the Church fought it tooth and nail. In just a few more years we also had Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which was in total opposition to the Bible’s proposal (‘demons’). To jump all the way forward to the present: We now live in a universe that is observably over 14 billion years old, and vast on a scale that we can hardly comprehend. We can see (A) that the dogmas of Christianity are internally logically exclusive, and (B) that they comprise one set of such answers - that is in logical opposition to at least twenty or thirty other such sets that are still being maintained now, and which are all in logical opposition to at least twenty or thirty thousand other such sets that have been embraced by our various clans/tribes/city-states/nation-states during the past seven thousand years, and (C) that Christianity is in its origins and history and structure and psychological appeal no different from all of these other thousands of such systems that we have rejected.

‘The Church does not appear to have any sustained interest in putting the genie back in the bottle.’? I think that we must be talking about some different Church, or different genie.

While I obviously recognize the influence of Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought on early Christianity, I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Of the "rediscovered" Greek texts that contributed to the renaissance of the 12th and 13th centuries, surely the most important and most frequently commented texts were Aristotelian. And of course Latin Christianity had never incorporated wholesale any branch of Greek philosophy (Platonic or otherwise).

I'm not sure what your're not sure of, but I'd generaly agree with these observations.

Best regards,

Keith

 

[Jorghnassen]

Ooh. scimystic is about to have an all-out fight on the history of science and christianity against ceo_esq. This is going to be interesting...

/I stay out of these, my (lack of) knowledge of history and historiography being at cause
//not to mention my firm belief in John Gabriel's Greater Internet ... Theory

 

[RandFan]

Excellent, thanks guys.

 

[ceo_esq]

Let me see if I've got this straight: Are you saying that science and the standard Christian dogmas (as extracted from the Bible, and as propagated by most modern Christian sects) are not logically exclusive?

I don't know about most modern Christian sects; I thought we were referring to the dogma of the Catholic Church. And yes, so far as I am aware, such dogma and science are not logically exclusive.

I could find grounds for agreeing that Aristotle was inimical in a sense, in that his system seemed so large and comprehensive, and his authority so massive, that it did rather intimidate everybody for a couple of hundred years. But in the end it was also a positive example: (A) that such an enormous internally consistent system of knowledge could be built, and (B)of a template for some of the useful organizing principles for doing so. I think that a pretty good case could even be made for the statement that Aristotle's system provided the basic skeleton for our science. As to the rest of the Greeks: Which would you say were inimical (to science). The one who would best seem to me to fit that bill would be Plato*. But I have a feeling that you are not going to agree. And I think that we do agree in any case that the Church never seriously considered discarding him.

I cannot see how Christian philosophy was any more wedded to Platonism (or rather Neoplatonism) than to the thought of Aristotle (or "The Philosopher", as he was reverently known in Christian philosophy); indeed I think the influence of Platonic philosophy probably peaked with Augustine. Certainly there was no aspect of Greek philosophy (natural or otherwise) that Christian thinkers were not prepared to transform or jettison altogether due to some perceived incompatibility with reason, experience or revelation. Aristotle's specific case I discuss further below.

Let’s start with Reason v Dogma: Latin translations of the Greek and Arab texts recovered during the first 100 years of the Reconquista were pouring out of the main translation center at Toledo from around 1150. Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Democritus, Plato, and of course, reams of Aristotle. This all got gobbled up by the monasteries and universities, and by 1277 Dogma was already in serious trouble. The Church had to issue its famous 'Condemnations', against all of the learning centers, but especially Paris. A list of 219 things that could now not be said (let alone written). To give just a few of these - from Jennifer Michael Hecht's book 'Doubt':

...

The Church didn't condemn such propositions for its amusement. It condemned them because they were being said and written. Would it already, at this point, have liked to put the genie back in the bottle? What were these condemnations an attempt to do?

I'm glad you brought up the Condemnation of 1277, because it is a good example of something I was trying to point out. Forgive me if, rather than reinventing the wheel, I borrow here from material I drafted some time ago for another thread.

Regarding Greek (and particularly Aristotelian) natural philosophy, one of its problems vis-à-vis the development of science was that it contained several built-in conceptual constraints, yet at the same time purported to be a sort of "Grand Unified Theory". Plus, Aristotle's theories were so carefully rationalized, and contained so many empirically unverifiable ideas (many good, some bad), that for many centuries they dissuaded natural philosophers (especially, for example, in the Islamic world) from adding to or detracting from the substance of Aristotle’s work.

As I have argued before, the interaction of Christianity with Aristotelian natural philosophy was not one of either wholesale rejection or uncritical acceptance. To a large extent, the challenges posed to certain parts (especially the theoretical constraints) of Aristotle's work by Christian philosophy freed up European scholars to think outside the Aristotelian box, while still incorporating many benefits of the Aristotelian corpus. We have already alluded to the theological condemnation in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris of a number of Aristotelian principles. While this was not a papal condemnation, it obviously carried authority over Paris, which was the center of European natural philosophy by that time. Edward Grant (in The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts) says that many arguments which

... derive[d] from the impact of God's absolute power as expressed in the Condemnation of 1277 reveal a method by which natural philosophers transcended the bounds of Aristotle's confining principles and broke free to consider possibilities they might not otherwise have contemplated.

By emphasizing God's absolute power to do anything short of a logical contradiction, the articles condemned in 1277 had a curious, and probably unintended, effect: they encouraged speculation about natural impossibilities in the Aristotelian world system, which were often treated as hypothetical possibilities. The supernaturally generated alternatives, which medieval natural philosophers considered in the wake of the condemnation, accustomed them to consider possibilities that were beyond the scope of Aristotle's natural philosophy, and often in direct conflict with it. The contemplation of hypothetical possibilities that were naturally impossible in the Aristotelian world view was so widespread that speculation about them became an integral feature of late medieval thought.

Grant argues that Christian theological notions of an omnipotent God creating the universe

… became a convenient vehicle for the introduction of the introduction of subtle and imaginative questions, which often generated novel answers. Although these speculative responses did not lead to the overthrow of the Aristotelian world view, they did … challenge some of its fundamental principles and assumptions. They made many aware that things could be quite otherwise than were dreamt of in Aristotle's philosophy. … We can be certain … that the condemnation expanded the horizons of Aristotelian natural philosophers[.]

Thus, the fact that certain aspects of Aristotelian natural philosophy conflicted with Christianity, and were accordingly rejected by medieval theologian-philosophers, fortuitously and gradually paved the way for a number of wrong Aristotelian assumptions to be replaced (with theological encouragement) with better models.

It says something about the significance of the modification of the Aristotelian worldview as a result of its exposure to Western Christianity that Pierre Duhem, the French thermodynamicist-turned-historian, located the very birth of modern science in the Condemnation of 1277. Although I personally would not go so far as to agree with that assessment, Duhem has a serious point.

The import of the Condemnation of 1277 for the history of science is, accordingly, very nearly the opposite of what your post suggested. As Professor Grant points out, it fortuitously had the net effect of expanding the horizons of science rather than contracting them.

Now for Empiricism v Dogma: This didn't start to get serious until about 1450, as the ‘Age of Discovery' got rolling. But by 1500 we were aware of a whole 'New World', of which there had been no mention in any Christian scriptures. In 1512 Copernicus removed the earth from the center of the universe, and showed it instead to be one of several planets orbiting the sun, which was judged by the Church [not me] to be fundamentally incompatible with its dogma.

Copernican astronomy was never judged by the Church to be fundamentally incompatible with its dogma, so far as is known to us from history. And indeed, if we look carefully at the substantive content of that dogma, it is very difficult for us to deem it incompatible with Copernican astronomy, either.

By the 1580's Tycho Brahe's observations had established that the universe is enormously larger than our solar system. [Why, if the whole apparatus was just set up for us?].

Again, this does not appear in any way to have implicated the Church's dogma.

In 1608 Galileo built his telescope and started seeing things that massively supported Copernicus and Tycho; so was given the choice by the Church of shutting up or being incinerated.

Query whether that accurately conveys what was going on in the Galileo affair, but let's move along to your next point.

In 1642 Galileo died, and Isaac Newton was born. Newton’s discoveries, which were/are all reductible, through mathematics, to repeatable physical observation, basically blew the medieval Church’s concept of God out of the water. We could suddenly understand as natural everything from tides to rainbows to the motions and positions of the planets. ‘God’ survived Newton, in the minds of educated people, but he was no longer Christianity’s God. He was now the remote ‘First Cause’ God of Deism.

Newton's scientific thought certainly was a sea change for the medieval natural philosophers' concept of the physical universe, but I find no evidence that it blew the medieval Church's concept of God out of the water.

One of the most important ideas (important to the rise of science, anyway) that Christianity contributed to pre-existing natural philosophy was the de-supernaturalization of the physical universe. Thus, whereas Aristotle would not necessarily have expected heavenly bodies to be bound by the same laws as matter on earth, and might attribute intelligences or "motive spirits" to their movements, Christianity rejected all that. For the Christian, all created matter belonged to the same natural order and could logically be expected to behave according to the same rules. And medieval natural philosophers had natural - generally speaking, exclusively natural - explanations (whether or not correct) for tides, rainbows and planetary motion.

So we’re now in the early years of The Enlightenment. Things are about to get really bad for Christian dogma. John Locke has turned empiricism into a philosophy. The Royal Society is churning out scientific papers in London, and the British Geological Society is collating numerous empirical discoveries which indicate that our planet is older, by at least a couple of orders of magnitude, then the 5,800 years so carefully calculated by Bishop Usher from the Bible. In general none of this new knowledge was compatible with Christian dogma.

I'm really beginning to think that you have a very particular definition of Christian dogma, because I don't see how any of this - the empirical aspects, anyway - is incompatible with Christian dogma (and I am referring here, for the sake of historical continuity, to Christian dogma as it existed in, say, the high Middle Ages - not to modern "fundamentalist" dogma).

At every point of intersection (i.e., where both systems address the same question) they were in conflict. The heaviest blow fell in 1859, with Darwin’s first publication of “On the Origin….”. This presented Man himself as a natural phenomenon. Its opposition to existing Christian dogma was total, and the Church fought it tooth and nail.

Really? The historical record does not seem to have preserved many (if any) traces of the Church mounting a fierce institutional opposition - and I'm inclined to think this is probably because the dogma was not directly implicated.

I'm not sure that there are any points of intersection(Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" and so forth.)

In just a few more years we also had Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which was in total opposition to the Bible’s proposal (‘demons’).

I disagree that the Bible (or Christian dogma, for that matter) puts forward a "demon theory of disease", albeit that it does speak of demons. More importantly, however, even in the Middle Ages, five or more centuries before Pasteur, medicine was conceived as a rational system whose theory and practice had no real place for "demons". (I wrote a post about it here.) Germ theory did not replace "Bible-based medicine", because there was really no such thing as the latter.

To jump all the way forward to the present: We now live in a universe that is observably over 14 billion years old, and vast on a scale that we can hardly comprehend. We can see (A) that the dogmas of Christianity are internally logically exclusive, and (B) that they comprise one set of such answers - that is in logical opposition to at least twenty or thirty other such sets that are still being maintained now, and which are all in logical opposition to at least twenty or thirty thousand other such sets that have been embraced by our various clans/tribes/city-states/nation-states during the past seven thousand years, and (C) that Christianity is in its origins and history and structure and psychological appeal no different from all of these other thousands of such systems that we have rejected.

I must provisionally disagree with (A), agree with (B), and profess not to have enough information to answer (C) definitively (in each case, as they relate to the traditional form of Christianity).

‘The Church does not appear to have any sustained interest in putting the genie back in the bottle.’? I think that we must be talking about some different Church, or different genie.

I suspect this is the case, because the "Church" you're speaking of does not seem to me to have a real-world referent (though it appears to resemble certain modern fundamentalist sects in the United States). If by "genie" we mean broadly the achievements of the scientific enterprise, then we're on the same page; we just have a different understanding of the relationship of the genie to the Church.

Best,

ceo

 

[RandFan]

I disagree that the Bible (or Christian dogma, for that matter) puts forward a "demon theory of disease", albeit that it does speak of demons.

Well you would agree wouldn't you that the bible ascribes demons as the cause of certain afflictions, correct?

Matt 17:15-18

Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.

And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.

Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.
And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.

 

[ceo_esq]

Well you would agree wouldn't you that the bible ascribes demons as the cause of certain afflictions, correct?

I agree that the Bible attributes to demons the power to induce physiological symptoms (or insanity, as in the example you gave), but not in any systematic way that led to this being a diagnostic principle of medicine as of the medieval period. The theoretical framework of pre-modern medicine in the West came from Greek natural philosophy, not Judeao-Christian demonology, so far as I have been able to determine after having consulted a number of sources in preparing the post I linked earlier on this subject. Interestingly, this seems to have been true where mental illness was concerned as well. I realize that this is at odds with popular historical myths concerning the time period in question (which I used to accept as well).

 

[RandFan]

I agree that the Bible attributes to demons the power to induce physiological symptoms (or insanity, as in the example you gave), but not in any systematic way that led to this being a diagnostic principle of medicine as of the medieval period. The theoretical framework of pre-modern medicine in the West came from Greek natural philosophy, not Judeao-Christian demonology, so far as I have been able to determine after having consulted a number of sources in preparing the post I linked earlier on this subject. Interestingly, this seems to have been true where mental illness was concerned as well. I realize that this is at odds with popular historical myths concerning the time period in question (which I used to accept as well).

I'm not really sure how to respond to your post except to say that today we don't jump to the assumption of demons when someone exhibits such symptoms. I seriously doubt any one concluded that an individual who exibhtied such symptons in the past was not diagnosed as having demons. Let's be honest, health care today doesn't consider demons and in the past what could be construed as health care did.

 

[ceo_esq]

I'm not really sure how to respond to your post except to say that today we don't jump to the assumption of demons when someone exhibits such symptoms. I seriously doubt any one concluded that an individual who exibhtied such symptons in the past was not diagnosed as having demons.

"In the past" is a bit vague. But if you mean to suggest that, say, six or seven hundred years ago medical practitioners "jumped to the assumption of demons" in the presence of "such symptoms" (by which I assume you mean the mental illness symptoms alluded to in the Gospel passage) - it's just not true.

If you mean to suggest that you think that a person suffering from such mental symptoms at that time would likely have been diagnosed by a medical practitioner as suffering from demonic attack or possession - I think that's also false.

To cite from the pertinent portion of the post I linked earlier:

According to the DMA, "Insanity may have been characterized by different names and attributed to various causes during the Middle Ages, but it was evidently recognized as a disease." Medieval physicians expressly rejected supernatural etiologies of mental illness, even if sometimes they would assent, as a last resort, to allowing their patients to be treated with "folk/empirical recipes and ... magical rites and incantations. They often justified this by adding [in their therapeutic accounts], 'so that something may be done' when purely human attempts proved futile."

Interestingly, although such desperate measures sometimes involved appeals to religious powers, according to the DMA, "Contrary to modern assumption, these did not consist of exorcisms[.]"

When I began specifically to research the history of medicine earlier this year, I found that certain received ideas I held regarding the role of the supernatural in pre-modern Western medicine were simply false. Those ideas were the product of depictions of the subject in films, TV and popular fiction.

Let's be honest, health care today doesn't consider demons and in the past what could be construed as health care did.

Remember that we departed on this tangent about germ theory because scimystic insinuated that the Church opposed it, because it was inconsistent with what scimystic apparently assumes was a prevalent and supernaturally-based or dogmatic understanding of disease etiology in Christian societies. That's just not the case, which was the main point I was raising to scimystic on that subject.

 

[Jorghnassen]

Whatever happened to miasma and humours anyway?

 

[ceo_esq]

Whatever happened to miasma and humours anyway?

Actually, I think the theoretical basis for humouralism/Galenism began to be chipped away as early as the Middle Ages with the founding of the great medieval medical faculties and their innovation of scientific human dissection (something the ancients never practiced) and other empirical advances. Galenic medicine obviously suffered a great blow due to Harvey's work on the circulatory system in the early 17th century, though long delays in acceptance and corroboration followed. At any rate, despite its lack of empirical support humouralism seems to have had great staying power, continuing to influence medical practice right up through the nineteenth century (possibly for want of sufficiently comprehensive and viable theories to replace it entirely).

 

[Huntster]

I'm not really sure how to respond to your post except to say that today we don't jump to the assumption of demons when someone exhibits such symptoms....

Indeed. In fact, it is roundly denied in an environment like this that demons even exist, let alone are capable of influencing a person's physical well-being.

 

[I less than three logic]

"In the past" is a bit vague. But if you mean to suggest that, say, six or seven hundred years ago medical practitioners "jumped to the assumption of demons" in the presence of "such symptoms" (by which I assume you mean the mental illness symptoms alluded to in the Gospel passage) - it's just not true.

If you mean to suggest that you think that a person suffering from such mental symptoms at that time would likely have been diagnosed by a medical practitioner as suffering from demonic attack or possession - I think that's also false.

To cite from the pertinent portion of the post I linked earlier:



When I began specifically to research the history of medicine earlier this year, I found that certain received ideas I held regarding the role of the supernatural in pre-modern Western medicine were simply false. Those ideas were the product of depictions of the subject in films, TV and popular fiction.




Remember that we departed on this tangent about germ theory because scimystic insinuated that the Church opposed it, because it was inconsistent with what scimystic apparently assumes was a prevalent and supernaturally-based or dogmatic understanding of disease etiology in Christian societies. That's just not the case, which was the main point I was raising to scimystic on that subject.

What do you suppose would have been the diagnosis of someone with a manic-depression or bi-polar disorder, say, six or seven hundred years ago? Insanity is one thing, but there are many mental disorders that are not so easily explained away as insanity.