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Originally posted by Stetson:
lilbuddha wrote:

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Seriously? God created everything in six days: boom. That? That you think is intellectually stimulating for science? Or were you meaning other monotheistic religions than Christianity, Judaism and Islam?

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I don't think the point was that everything about monotheism automatically leads to rigorous application of the scientific method. Rather, it's that monotheism contains within itself the ideas that eventually give rise to the scientific method.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I don't think you can refute the argument simply by pointing out instances of monotheists, even in their sacred texts, making unscientific claims.

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Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
AFAIUI Islam owes a certain amount to Christianity and Judaism. Muhammad is believed to have had considerable contact with both Christians and Jews, and Jesus is revered as a prophet.

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Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:

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Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
I understand that Buddhism has a much more civilised approach to schisms than does Christianity.

PS. I don't think that (one type of) Christianity is the only inspired religion, but I can't change my spiritual heritage.

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Yet people move on from their spiritual heritage all the time. New religions and religious movements wouldn't exist if that weren't the case. Christians are particularly prone to this, ISTM.

In what sense does Buddhism have a more civilised approach to schism than Christianity?

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Originally posted by Ohher:
I keep thinking that, with no Christianity, the governance and history of medieval Europe would have been so different, without a Church -- and celibacy -- to send all those best and brightest minds into . . .

Would there have been a lingua franca like Latin for scholars from different countries to confab in? That would have been a serious drag on scientific advancement . . .

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Originally posted by Galloping Granny:

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Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
AFAIUI Islam owes a certain amount to Christianity and Judaism. Muhammad is believed to have had considerable contact with both Christians and Jews, and Jesus is revered as a prophet.

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Ishmael was Abraham's first son, by Hagar, his wife's serving woman, and Sarah threw her and Ishmael out after Isaac was born, Muslims claim him as their forefather, the *eldest* son of Abraham and therefore senior to Isaac and his descendants.
I have an idea that they tell the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but with Ishmael as the son concerned.

GG

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

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I don't think it is now (although intellectual environments that don't share a couple of deep features with monotheism may not be conducive to it).(*)
(*) The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified.

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Seriously? God created everything in six days: boom. That? That you think is intellectually stimulating for science?

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Do I think monotheism was important to the birth and early development of the sixteenth/seventeenth century scientific revolution. The jury is out.

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No jury necessary. Those who think this is a factor are confusing stability and natural progress with influence from religion.

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The first scientist who can reasonably be called experimental, Alhazen, was a monotheist.

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Ibn al-Haytham. But anyway, he is the father of the scientific method, not science.

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China, despite an impressive tradition of natural philosophy, never had a scientific revolution. China was philosophically more advanced than Europe at almost every point up to the fifteenth century; by the end of the seventeenth century Jesuits earned a place in the Qing Emperors court by explaining Western astronomy.

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When China was in decline. But no, it must have been the Christians.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

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And you think you're able to generalise about people who disagree with you because?

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It seems to me that if we're talking about science in any kind of privileged sense that distinguishes it from other branches of human knowledge then we're talking about the use of the scientific method.

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I do not see any reason to suppose that China was any more in decline during the early years of the Qing than during the early years of the Ming or Song or Tang.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
What am I missing in my dotage?

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

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The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.

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The ‘laws of nature’, by those who first used the term in this sense, were viewed as commands imposed by the Deity upon matter

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And you think you're able to generalise about people who disagree with you because?

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Because there is no proof. Nothing to test, therefore it must not be right.

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It seems to me that if we're talking about science in any kind of privileged sense that distinguishes it from other branches of human knowledge then we're talking about the use of the scientific method.

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Science evolved from other branches of thought. There is no clean dividing line, even today.

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I do not see any reason to suppose that China was any more in decline during the early years of the Qing than during the early years of the Ming or Song or Tang.

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It would take a secondary tangent on the history and stability of China at various points to work this out. And I think this tangent is way to big anyway.
Stability, freedom and time are the necessary ingredients to feed curiosity and progress. This leads to science becoming more rigorous, not God.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

You want to believe it is a more logical following of the text (which text?

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have you been taking stylistic tips from Aijalon's posts?).

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Your post is entirely made up of statements for which there is no proof and cannot be tested.

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Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed to feed curiosity and progress. It wasn't obviously more stable or free than any other period of European history.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
What am I missing in my dotage?

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The Renaissance.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
All I see is temporal coincidence.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
All I see is temporal coincidence.

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Do you have any evidence for that?

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
All I see is temporal coincidence.

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Do you have any evidence for that?

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sigh
Science progresses with time. As our understanding builds it moves forward. The coincidence is the rise of powers that happen to be monotheistic occurred relatively recently, after huge amounts of the basic building blocks of science were laid.
Proof? There can be no proof. I am going with the more logical, less exceptional interpretation.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

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The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.

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Some monotheists have thought that way. That's irrelevant to whether other monotheists thought another way. Monotheists have been known to disagree among themselves.

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In the pre-modern world, a firestorm of accusations of atheism and wickedness awaited anyone who raised a powerful and persuasive alternate answer to some question whose traditional answer depended on God. This firestorm fell even if the author in question never made any atheist arguments, which, generally, they didn’t. It happened often, and fiercely.

Thomas Hobbes awoke one such firestorm when his Leviathan suggested that savage man, living in a state of terror and war in his caves and trees, might through reason and self-interest alone come together and develop society and government. Until that time, Europe had no explanation for how government came to be other than that God instituted it; no explanation for kings other than that God raised them to glory; no explanation for what glue should hold men together, loyal to the law, other than fear of divine punishment. Hobbes’ alternative does not say “There is no God,” but it says, “Government and society arose without God’s participation,” a political theory which an atheist and a theist might equally use. It gives the atheist an answer, and thereby so terrified England that she passed law after law against “atheism” specifically and personally targeting Hobbes and banning him from publishing in genre after genre, until he spent his final years producing bad translations of Homer and filling them with not-so-subtle Hobbesian political notions one can spot between the lines.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Allow me to humbly point out that heliocentrism, for all the RCC defended it, was not a Christian invention. We inherited it from the Greeks, specifically Ptolemy I believe. It is not a "goddidit" explanation.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Allow me to humbly point out that heliocentrism, for all the RCC defended it, was not a Christian invention. We inherited it from the Greeks, specifically Ptolemy I believe. It is not a "goddidit" explanation.

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I think you mean "geocentrism".

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
The main objection to heliocentrism from the point of view of a seventeenth century Christian is that it contradicts several Biblical passages stating that the Earth is fixed and does not move. The idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe, while troubling, was considered a second order problem to the idea that the Earth was actually in motion.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
The main objection to heliocentrism from the point of view of a seventeenth century Christian is that it contradicts several Biblical passages stating that the Earth is fixed and does not move. The idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe, while troubling, was considered a second order problem to the idea that the Earth was actually in motion.

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It also plainly contradicts the evidence of the eyes. Anybody, scientist or moron, can see that the sun moves across the sky. To accept heliocentrism is to give up what is obvious for a theoretical construct which is invisible. It's the ultimate in trusting the math over the evidence.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

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The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.

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Some monotheists have thought that way. That's irrelevant to whether other monotheists thought another way. Monotheists have been known to disagree among themselves.

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First off, it should be noted that a polytheist like Archimedes was able to derive "laws governing nature" like the principles of buoyancy or leverage, so the concept obviously isn't completely alien to non-monotheists. In fact, I've heard it argued that because Greek religion was such a non-explanatory hodge-podge it actually encouraged the search for answers or patterns in non-religious ways. I'm not sure I buy that particular argument, but it's at least as plausible as saying that non-monotheists are incapable of recognizing and analyzing patterns in nature.

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At any rate, from an historical perspective Goddidit seems to be the predominant answer monotheists come up with when faced with unanswered questions and get quite upset when alternative explanations are proposed.

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Opposition to heliocentrism is an a well-known and obvious example, but it extends even to fields we'd consider non-scientific, such as political science.

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Until that time, Europe had no explanation for how government came to be other than that God instituted it; no explanation for kings other than that God raised them to glory; no explanation for what glue should hold men together, loyal to the law, other than fear of divine punishment.

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But forasmuch as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things needful for such a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man; therefore to supply those defects and imperfections which are in us living single and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others. This was the cause of men’s uniting themselves at the first in politic Societies, which societies could not be without Government, nor Government without a distinct kind of Law from that which hath been already declared.

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To take away all such mutual grievances, injuries, and wrongs, there was no way but only by growing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves subject thereunto; that unto whom they granted authority to rule and govern, by them the peace, tranquillity, and happy estate of the rest might be procured. Men always knew that when force and injury was offered they might be defenders of themselves; they knew that howsoever men may seek their own commodity, yet if this were done with injury unto others it was not to be suffered, but by all men and by all good means to be withstood; finally they knew that no man might in reason take upon him to determine his own right, and according to his own determination proceed in maintenance thereof, inasmuch as every man is towards himself and them whom he greatly affecteth partial; and therefore that strifes and troubles would be endless, except they gave their common consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon: without which consent there were no reason that one man should take upon him to be lord or judge over another; because, although there be according to the opinion of some very great and judicious men a kind of natural right in the noble, wise, and virtuous, to govern them which are of servile disposition1; nevertheless for manifestation of this their right, and men’s more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them who are to be governed seemeth necessary.

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Originally posted by Ohher:
Since Judaism doesn’t actively proselytize, it’s likely that religious group would have remained relatively small. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the 9th of Av in the Hebrew year 3830, the Diaspora would have further diminished this group’s influence. The Roman pantheon, with the current Caesar as high priest / god, would have become the dominant religion up until ancient Rome fell. A kind of amalgam of assorted Northern pagan traditions and Roman beliefs/practices including both animal and human sacrifice would have held sway until Islam, founded in the early (CE) 600s, began to spread westward.

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Originally posted by Ohher:
If there were no Christianity, there would now be no dividing line between the era we used to call Before Christ (or now, Before the Common Era) and the era we’re in now: Anno Domini, or (now) C.E.

What is now the Common Era 2017 might instead be dated from the dissolution of the Roman Empire in 1453, so it would now be the year 564. Or possibly it would now be 1541, since we could be dating the current era from the collapse of ancient Rome in 476.

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Originally posted by Ohher:
Since Judaism doesn’t actively proselytize, it’s likely that religious group would have remained relatively small. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the 9th of Av in the Hebrew year 3830, the Diaspora would have further diminished this group’s influence.

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Originally posted by Ohher:
A kind of amalgam of assorted Northern pagan traditions and Roman beliefs/practices including both animal and human sacrifice would have held sway until Islam, founded in the early (CE) 600s, began to spread westward.

As the Middle Eastern Islamic peoples, with better-organized societies and more advanced technologies, worked their way into southern and central Europe, they easily defeated the pagan tribes and converted these.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Archimedes called his principles postulates, as Euclid calls the theorems in his book. He didn't call them laws. He doesn't use a metaphor of anything governing anything. So Archimedes is conceptually grouping the theory of floating bodies with Pythagoras' theorem and he is not likening his theories to laws. I think that in order for someone to have the same concept as we do it has to cover roughly the same sort of conceptual space. A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.

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Originally posted by Nick Tamen:
But with a vastly diminished Judaism and no Christianity, would there have been an Islam, at least in a form anything like the Islam that actually developed?

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.

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Interestingly this puts special and general relativity outside the category of "laws of nature". They were rather famously derived from postulates rather than empirical observation.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.

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Interestingly this puts special and general relativity outside the category of "laws of nature". They were rather famously derived from postulates rather than empirical observation.

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As I understand it the postulate in question was an interpretation of the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment (namely that light travels at a constant speed relative to an observer regardless of the observer's motion). I wouldn't really call that an axiom.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
It seems to be an artificial distinction to claim that Einstein's use of observations by Michelson & Morley doesn't count as an axiom but that Archimedes claim that "a solid lighter* than a fluid will, if immersed in it, not be completely submerged, but part of it will project above the surface" does. Both seem equally amenable to observation, though different levels of technical sophistication may be required.

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Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon.

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People don't just arbitrarily assume that the universe is "intellectually comprehensible, consistent, and unified", they notice that it is so, which would seem to be as much of an observation of physical reality as the Michaelson-Morley experiment.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
What if Archimedes had never existed?

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Some aspects of the universe appear comprehensible, consistent and unified and some do not. The weather for example appears neither comprehensible, consistent, nor unified. Diseases do not appear comprehensible, consistent or unified. Inductive reasoning works sometimes and fails to work other times.
There are appearances of consistency too. But you don't just notice that the appearances of consistency are guides to the underlying nature of the world, and that the appearances of inconsistency are misleading.
In order to notice that the world is consistent, comprehensible and unified you have to use inductive reasoning. But inductive reasoning is notoriously not rationally founded; in order to consider it reliable you have to have a prior assumption that the world is consistent and unified enough for inductive reasoning to work.

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Originally posted by rolyn:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
What if Archimedes had never existed?

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We would not have had the old schoolyard joke about you-reeker

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
It seems to be an artificial distinction to claim that Einstein's use of observations by Michelson & Morley doesn't count as an axiom but that Archimedes claim that "a solid lighter* than a fluid will, if immersed in it, not be completely submerged, but part of it will project above the surface" does. Both seem equally amenable to observation, though different levels of technical sophistication may be required.

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Archimedes Proposition 4 is not an axiom because Archimedes deduces it from earlier propositions and from his postulate 1 (which is an axiom).
On your account Archimedes decided to deduce the thing that was amenable to observation, whereas postulate 1 'Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character etc.' which appears rather less amenable to observation is just supposed.

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Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character that, its parts lying evenly and being continuous, that part which is thrust the less is driven along by that which is thrust the more; and that each of its parts is thrust by the fluid which is above it in a perpendicular direction if the fluid be sunk in anything and compressed by anything else.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon.

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Oddly my 'original' assertion connected that idea to non-monotheistic systems as well. But you don't mention that.

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The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified. This is obviously shared by the leading forms of scientific materialism, and AIUI by e.g. Chinese philosophy; but not by, say, Lovecraftian materialism.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Archimedes Proposition 4 is not an axiom because Archimedes deduces it from earlier propositions and from his postulate 1 (which is an axiom).
On your account Archimedes decided to deduce the thing that was amenable to observation, whereas postulate 1 'Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character etc.' which appears rather less amenable to observation is just supposed.

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In whole, Archimedes' Postulate 1 from On Floating Bodies is translated into English as something like:

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Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character that, its parts lying evenly and being continuous, that part which is thrust the less is driven along by that which is thrust the more; and that each of its parts is thrust by the fluid which is above it in a perpendicular direction if the fluid be sunk in anything and compressed by anything else.

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The Greeks regarded postulates slightly differently than we do. We treat them as "things which are assumed but cannot be directly proven". They considered them more along the lines of "things which are so inherently obvious that proof is unnecessary."

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At any rate, Archimedes' Postulate 1 seems more a definition of what is meant by "fluid" than anything else. It consists of two properties which, in less rigidly technical language would seem to boil down to "if you push on a fluid it will get out of your way and redistribute itself to places where you're not pushing on it" (the bit before the semi-colon) and "the lower bits of a body of fluid are pressed down by the bits of fluid above it".

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It also seems like something which not only can be observed, the first half of Postulate 1 is the subject of the second-most famous (though likely apocryphal*) observation of physical phenomena in history. People who know nothing else about Archimedes of Syracuse are familiar with Vitruvius' account of his bath. So our options here are either that the events happened as Vitruvius described and Archimedes observed Postulate 1 in action, or Vitruvius made it up to add a bit of color to Archimedes' own rather dry and technical style, which shows that an observable demonstration of Postulate 1 in action was immediately obvious to Vitruvius, who was much less technically proficient than Archimedes.
Either way, Postulate 1 seems very amenable to observation.

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Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Oddly my 'original' assertion connected that idea to non-monotheistic systems as well. But you don't mention that.

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Your assertion was "I don't think it is now", in response to the question of whether monotheism is important to scientific discovery. You then went on to speculate that monotheism was critical to scientific discovery in the past, because monotheism supposedly has certain inherent properties, such as:

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The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified. This is obviously shared by the leading forms of scientific materialism, and AIUI by e.g. Chinese philosophy; but not by, say, Lovecraftian materialism.

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The obvious test here is whether someone operating not just in a non-monotheist milieu but a pre-monotheist one would or could treat "the universe [as] intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes would seem to qualify. Arguably others would as well.

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To go a bit further the concept of an ordered universe doesn't seem like a necessary characteristic of monotheism. It's just as easy to imagine that a universe which only operates by the whim of a single omnipotent being might be chaotic and unpredictable.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
The Greeks regarded postulates slightly differently than we do. We treat them as "things which are assumed but cannot be directly proven". They considered them more along the lines of "things which are so inherently obvious that proof is unnecessary."

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I think the idea that floating bodies less dense than water stick out of the water might qualify under that definition. Yet Archimedes decides to prove that in Proposition 4.

The change in the view of axioms that you describe is I believe attributable to the consideration of Euclid's Fifth Postulate. Euclid's Fifth Postulate (wikipedia calls it the Parallel Postulate) was for a long time thought not quite so inherently obvious that proof was unnecessary. And finally it was realised that it is something assumed but which cannot be directly proven (since in non-Euclidean geometries it isn't necessarily true).
So it would seem that Euclid was rather closer to the modern definition than to ours.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Your restatement of postulate one seems to be amenable to observation. However, as I noted it's not Archimedes' statement. I don't think one could easily observe that the fluid is pushing on itself internally. One could probably deduce it, but Archimedes doesn't. Again, one could probably deduce from observations that the lower parts of the fluid are pushed sideways but Archimedes doesn't.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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To go a bit further the concept of an ordered universe doesn't seem like a necessary characteristic of monotheism. It's just as easy to imagine that a universe which only operates by the whim of a single omnipotent being might be chaotic and unpredictable.

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Actual historically existing monotheists have usually claimed that God does not operate on whim.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
As I think I said before the argument is not that monotheism is sufficient for the scientific revolution, but that it was necessary. (Or to be less stringent certain aspects of monotheism were causally contributory.)

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I think a more interesting question is not whether monotheism is necessary for the scientific revolution (i.e. history unfolding as it did), but rather whether it's necessary for any scientific revolution (i.e. any reasonably possible history). This is, by necessity, a lot more speculative, but the fact that the putative contributions made by monotheism to the scientific revolution (comprehensible universe, etc.) were 'on offer' elsewhere would seem to answer the question in the negative.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
You can't go around calling something 'ineffable' and then claim you can eff it.

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