Re: "Dog-whistle Catholicism"

On Jun 30, 8:47 pm, John Schilling <schil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:50:15 GMT, "David Formosa (aka ? the Platypus)"

<dform...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:42:19 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 27, 6:34 pm, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:21:24 GMT, thro...@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop)
wrote:
OK.  What are the Top Ten Things About Christianity That
Illuminate The History Of Western Thought, History, and Philosophy?
1.  The world was created by a single benign deity as a cohesive
whole, and everything in it has a purpose.
This certainly helped Western thought take the natural sciences
seriously.
Did it?  While I will not deny that individual scientists had a
theistic motive for doing science, I'm not convined that it was a
universal or even commen view.  It was the weakening of the church as
a result of the reformation that allowed science to gain a foothold.

The reformation didn't exactly weaken the church.  It created a new,
competing church, but the new one was about as powerful in its sphere
of influence as the old one had been, and no more friendly to science.

But LWE is right; Christianity has generally been pretty good for
science, both pragmatically and philosophically.  

Philosophically, because in Christianity, miracles are the exception,
not the rule.  Which by now is one of the Western world's "Duh, everyone
believes that!" things, but it wasn't always so.  What's the point of
studying celestial mechanics or discovering gravity when "everyone knows"
it's the Sun God what makes the Sun move across the sky each day?

But if you've got a Sun that *automatically* moves across the sky, and
a God that maybe once or twice miraculously stopped it for a while, now
there's a whole potentially useful and theologically non-threatening
area open to scientific study.

Pragmatically, because as St. Augustine pointed out, your missionaries
look pretty stupid if they keep saying stuff that their audience can
verify is false.  So keep some scientists on staff and have them make
sure you get the verifiable stuff right.

...unless it includes heresies such as heliocentrism....

Them's torturing words!

Peter Trei
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OxBoink, anybody?
    ... History and Philosophy of Science was a Special ... The Examination Statutes of 1961 say, of the Honour School of Natural ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: "Dog-whistle Catholicism"
    ... Illuminate The History Of Western Thought, History, and Philosophy? ... a result of the reformation that allowed science to gain a foothold. ... it's the Sun God what makes the Sun move across the sky each day? ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)
  • Re: "Expelled": How dumb are creationists?
    ... is proper in philosophy, but not in science, though ... (the most empirically successful theory in history of Earth, ... I do believe that quite a few scientists DO accept quite a few things ...
    (rec.arts.movies.current-films)
  • Re: vatican observatory
    ... John S. Wilkins, Philosophy, University of Sydneyhttp://evolvingthoughts.net ... relation between religion and science, some of it on biology during ... Proceedings of the International Congress on the History of Sciences ... Her earlier work is also often on earlier history of biology, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Thomas Kuhn--> The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    ... Example of A Paradigm Shift in the History of Science is the Colvis ... Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ... Lyle Zenda's Lectures on the Philosophy of Science. ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)