Topic: Scientific Discoveries By Religions (Read 946 times)

Humm this thread will be flooded with religious fanatics... ha ha ha ha

Off topic

Days ago I saw something that made me very curious

I traveled to a province very far from the capital of my country and in this province when I went to the market I saw something that made me very curious

I saw many people buying used clothes... I asked myself the following question:

Where do these clothes come from? Will the clothes donated by the people of the more developed countries be diverted and sold?

And the clothes that are donated to the churches? Where will it go?

Isaac Newton was quite religious. Though a bit nutty too

Are there any?

Any at all?

Are there any?

Any at all?

The road from alchemy to chemistry is a road from foolishness to wisdom. Eventually the foolishness died out and the wisdom persisted. If you are interested some of the history of this transition here is an article on the topic.

The Origins of Today's "Central Science"
Many of the earliest chemists, physicians, and philosophers were also alchemists.

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/big-history-project/stars-and-elements/other-material3/a/from-alchemy-to-chemistry

Chemistry rose from the teaching of alchemists ..NO NO NO    Put leaves in water and boil Chemistry ..

Error is self-correcting IF we stick by it honestly, and follow it through to conclusion.

Being wrong is not a spiritual disaster - it is dishonesty which is the disaster: it is living by expedient lies which leads to Hell. Because expedient lies prevent us from recognising error.

This created world has ultimate coherence, since it is the product of one God. Therefore, all error will reveal itself in incoherence.

(Of course, coherence is Not the same as logic; since logic, like mathematics - or which it may be the parent - is a partial model of reality; and logical coherence therefore leaves out most of reality.) 

Some people with a reputation for blunt honesty are nothing of the sort! - they  wriggle and writhe in the face of the conclusions of their assumptions.

A couple of decades ago I used to admire and defend Richard Dawkins - mainly because I considered he was unsually honest; because he was clear and blunt in expression and unafraid of contradicting people to their faces. But I gradually realised that, on the contrary, he was evasive and expedient in his reasoning.

Dawkins is a good example of one who refused to follow his path of excess to the palace of wisdom; because he was not even aiming at wisdom; he refused to persist in his folly, hence he remained a fool rather than becoming wise.

Two examples. The book Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) was an exercise in distraction, a non sequitur in response to the century-plus of observations that If natural selection were indeed regarded the ultimate truth, Then art, poetry, morality, science (including natural selection) and much else are invalidated.

(This is a fact; because all our feelings, indeed all our knowledge is revealed by the assumption as merely the side effects of adaptations to enhance reproductive success. For example, if natural selection is primary; the theory of natural selection destroys its own validity; all scientific theories being merely side-effects of the process of enhancing differential reproductive fitness.)

Somewhat later (but a couple of years before I was a Christian) I met Dawkins at a dinner party, and asked him - as, I intended, a preliminary to a deeper discussion, why the USA was both by far the leading scientific nation in the world and also by far the most Christianly-religious of the developed nations?

Dawkins's reaction made clear that this paradox had not occurred to him - and he did not have an answer ready.

But instead of noting the apparent contradiction and exploring it as possible evidence of an error in his oft asserted assumption that Christianity was intrinsically and necessarily anti-scientific; Dawkins visibly shook-off the potential discussion with the irrelevant comment that it was not the most Christian people who were the actual scientists. Then having dismissed the matter, he turned and walked away to terminate the discussion - leaving me standing and more-or-less gaping! - which had not gone further than a few sentences. After just a few steps Dawkins looked as if he had already forgotten the whole thing.

Dawkins's folly is to believe that natural selection is the primary reality. I know exactly what this feels like, because I have believed this too. Indeed, I have believed this probably considerably more deeply and comprehensively than Dawkins (reaching its peak in the appendix to my 2003 book The Modernization Imperative).

But I persisted in my folly - and kept coming up against paradoxes and contradictions. My excessive devotion to this particular simplification therefore led me towards the palace of wisdom, because I was honest enough that I would not be satisfied with irrelevant pseudo explanations.

If I have any virtue in a higher than usual degree it probably is exactly this - that I persist in my folly, with honesty, until its falsehood becomes evident and unavoidable; and then I abandon it.

I have, indeed, adhered to most of the starkest follies of modernity over my life; and my life has therefore been a process of adopting then exploring folly before abandoning it. This continues - however, the follies are probably less 'excessive' these days; since after becoming a Christian I perceived the starkest insanities and evils of mainstream modern secularism.

But mainstream modern secularism is foolish in the extreme, and yet at the same time avoids learning from its folly; because it is dishonest.

Modern media/ bureacratic culture is systematically and pervasively dishonest - dishonest in public, dishonest in private, dishonest with itself. (This is sufficient evidence of its demonic origin, since such thoroughgoing and peristing dishonesty must be purposive; and only supernatural purpose could span generations.) No folly of modernity is too extreme to escape the correction of even common sense and direct experience (for example, the current official and coercively-imposed belief that being a man or woman is - in actual practice - a reversible state). 

This is why dishonesty dismays me far more than error. An honest fool will sooner or later become wise - indeed in essentials he already is wise, as such things are measured in mortal life.

By contrast; a dishonest man is a fool; no matter how great his knowledge, skill, status, wealth or power - and as such he is self-damned with a certainty that is as sure as his dishonest persists.

There is no cure for the dishonest soul.

Thats a very interesting article, but i have one problem with it, History states that Chemistry rose from the teaching of Alchemist and the article says that the Church burned the Alchemist, if so then dont you think that they hindered the advancement of Science.

Alchemy in the Middle Ages was a field of charlatans and con men, happy to sell you a non-working formula for making gold tell you about a potion of immortality or the nearby philosophers stone. For a price they would also sell you a panacea that could "cure any disease."

Thats a very interesting article, but i have one problem with it, History states that Chemistry rose from the teaching of Alchemist and the article says that the Church burned the Alchemist, if so then dont you think that they hindered the advancement of Science.

The list of inventions created in the Middle Ages would exhaust the patience of an historian. I will mention only in passing a few off the top of my head: the stirrup, the spur, the horse collar, the horse shoe, the wheelbarrow, the chimney, the paper mill, windmills, escapement and clockworks, the pointed arch, the flying buttress, the jib sail, the stern-mounted rudder, the button, the steel crossbow, the quadrant, the almanac, the hour glass, the eyeglass, oil paintings, and most important of all, the university.

While all cultures, even the most primitive have learning, and all civilizations have scholars, only the Christians ever invented the university, an self governing institution solely devoted to the investigation of the trivium and quadrivium. It is not coincidence that to this day the terms used for logical syllogisms and logical fallacies are in Latin; it is no coincidence that the scientific names for everything from beasts to chemicals is in Latin, the language of science.

One of the astonishing things I discovered after my conversion, or at least, it was an astonishment to me, was that nearly everything I knew about history was false. When England and Germany broke away politically, religiously and culturally as much as they could from the rest of the European civilization, they did their level best to rewrite and reinterpret history into a revised form that denigrated all the accomplishments of the universal and ecumenical catholic Christian Church, and offer alternate explanations or alternate origins for her accomplishments.

Under this revised history, or, to be precise, mythology, the Roman Empire fell due to the invasion of virile outer barbarians racially distinct from the Imperial civilization, and everything from free elections to chivalry toward women sprang from the barbaric rather that civilized sources.

Moreover, according to this mythology, the Middle Ages were a time of magic, when men burned witches; whereas the previous Hellenic civilization was a time of enlightened investigation of the natural world, a time of logic and philosophy.

Allow me to quote from my fellow science fiction writer and good friend Mike Flynn:

The philosophers of the “Age of Reason” called the Middle Ages the “Age of Faith,” and claimed that because “God did it!” was the answer to everything, no one searched for natural laws. Some have since imagined a “war” between science and religion, and accused the medievals of suppressing science, forbidding medical autopsies, and burning scientists. Bad times for science and reason!

Or was it? In fact, the Middle Ages were steeped in reason, logic, and natural philosophy. These subjects comprised virtually the entire curriculum of the universities. The first medical autopsies were done in medieval Europe. And no medieval philosopher was ever prosecuted for a conclusion in natural philosophy. In his twelfth-century Dragmaticon, William of Conches wrote, “[They say] ‘We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.’ You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.” Not even the “Age of Reason” could have said it better.

Well, the most famous philosopher of the Hellenic culture, Socrates, was condemned to death for his investigations, while Aristotle fled into exile. The Hellenes were a people soaked in magic and mysticism, to which the clean intellectualism of Christianity was a shocking and refreshing change. Julian the Apostate, eager to reintroduce the Old Religion, in order to foretell the outcome of his war in Persia, had a slave girl disemboweled and her entrails examined by haruspices, official readers of entrails.

The reason why we think of the Greek as logical and philosophical culture is that the monks of the Dark Ages carefully preserved the ancient writings concerning grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

The monks did not preserve the mystery religions, the mysticism, no more than did the Romans after the conversion of the Empire preserve the barbaric customs and traditions of their pagan fathers, such as slavery, gladiatorial combat, exposing unwanted infants, the right of the father to kill disobedient sons, temple prostitution, temple sodomy prostitution, and no fault divorce.

The people the Church persecuted were not scientists. She upheld and supported the sciences—it was not the secular power, after all, that funded and founded the universities, that was all done by the Church. The people the Church persecuted were astrologers and alchemists. By clearing the strangling underbrush of magic away, the Church is the only thing that permitted science to exist at all.

The Church crushed astrology to allow astronomy to flourish. The oldest astronomical observatory still in use anywhere in the world, significantly enough, is the Vatican observatory.
...
Science arose in Christendom because it could arise nowhere else.

Allow me by way of introduction to quote again from the indispensable Mike Flynn

To summarize briefly, the Latins believed that:

The universe was rationally ordered because a single rational God had willed it into being,
This order was knowable by autonomous human reason by ‘measuring, numbering, and weighing’ (and reason could be trusted in this regard),
Matter could act directly on matter in “the common course of nature;” and because God was true to his promises, these actions were dependable and repeatable; and
The discovery of such relations was a worthwhile pursuit for adults.
They also embedded this pursuit in their culture through broad-based cultural institutions:

Creating independent, self-governing corporations in the social space between Church and State.
Accepting with enthusiasm the work of pagan philosophers and Muslim commentators and reconciling them with their religious beliefs.
Teaching logic, reason, and natural philosophy systematically across the whole of Europe in self-governing universities, in consequence of which:
Nearly every medieval theologian was first trained in natural philosophy, which created enthusiasm for rather than resistance to the study of nature.
Encouraged freedom of inquiry and a culture of “poking into things” by means of the Questions genre and the disputatio.

The reason it could arise nowhere else is that, while scientific breakthroughs are made by particular geniuses, and which refinements of technique are possible in any civilization, scientific progress itself is a orderly group effort, and must be sustained by the consensus of the general society. You cannot have a generally literate society, as Europe had in the Late Middle Ages, without a university system that enjoyed academic freedom.

Science or natural philosophy cannot be maintained by the consensus of society unless that same consensus accept the metaphysical and theological axioms on which natural science is based.