timeimmortal

For those who labour under the delusion that science and religion are in some way opposed and/or irreconcilable, it might do well to take a look at history:

History shows that the natural sciences grew out of Christian culture. As the sociologist Rodney Stark has so convincingly shown (See especially For the Glory of God: How monotheism Led to Reformations, science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery), science was “still-born” in the great civilizations of the ancient world, except in Christian civilization.

Why is it that empirical science and the scientific method did not develop in China (with its sophisticated society), in India (with its philosophical schools), in Arabia (with its advanced mathematics), in Japan (with its dedicated craftsmen and technologies), or even in ancient Greece or Rome?

The answer is fairly straightforward. Science flourished in societies where a Christian mindset understood nature to be ordered, the work of an intelligent Creator. Science grew where people assumed that the natural world is intelligible and bears the handwriting of its author.

Far from being an obstacle to science, Christian soil was the necessary humus where science took root.

Christianity’s unapologetic support of science is borne out by the immense direct contribution of the Church to science itself. To take but one area — that of astronomy — J. L. Heilbron of the University of California-Berkeley has written:

“The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid 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.”

…

Just as the Christian church patronized the arts, so it vigorously supported scientific research. The caricature of an obscurantist, ignorance-promoting church simply doesn’t correspond to historical truth.

Some of history’s greatest scientists — Newton, Pasteur, Galilei, Lavoisier, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, Maxwell, Bernard and Heisenberg — were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Some important scientists, such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were actually Catholic priests!

Christianity is not against science, but against an absolutist reading of science. The empirical sciences cannot do everything, and hold no monopoly on knowledge and truth. Many important questions — the most important, really — fall outside the purview of science.

What is the meaning of life? How should people treat one another? What happens to us when we die?

No matter how long a white-coated scientist toils and sweats in his laboratory, his instruments will never reveal the answers to these questions. Science is the wrong tool for the job.

The saddest part, I think, is that this sort of thing was, at one time, obvious.

David Warren is back from his annual vacation, and is in fine form. I’ve been meaning to comment on the recent discovery of memristors (the “fourth” fundamental circuit element, after resistors, inductors, and capacitors) for a while now, but I rather prefer Mr. Warren’s approach to it:

…the empirical outlook of science needs balancing against the philosophical outlook, which demands context, and seeks breadth. It is incidentally also why the greater advances in scientific understanding are often made by rank amateurs — people like Einstein working in places like Swiss patent offices, who can see the forest in spite of all the trees.

It is also why such a disproportionate number of the greatest theoretical advances have been made by religious “nutjobs” (in the current parlance) — from the evangelical Newton, to the Catholic fundamentalist Galileo, to monks such as Copernicus, Mendel, and Lemaître — people chilled out by disposition, with a grand view of nature and her infinitely distant, but transubstantially present, God. Without such vision, we all tend to become easily panicked data crunchers.

I was struck this week by another science story, also in Nature magazine. The techies at Hewlett-Packard have successfully fabricated “memristors,” a fourth building block for electronic circuits (after capacitors, resistors, and inductors). The achievement promises significant advances in computer memory and processing.

The possibility of memristors was first established by Leon Chua, a professor at Berkeley, in 1971. He said this week, “I’m thrilled because it’s almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it’s fundamental.”

I love the implicit faith and humility in that statement. The man is thrilled because he didn’t really invent anything after all, merely discovered (”dis-covered”) something already there, in nature or “the mind of God.”

And THAT is where authority comes from. Not from “scientists.”

The thought of scientific discovery is thrilling, but so often it seems the frame of mind that is put in to the necessary research is…lacking in a certain internal humility. Leon Chua knew, from mathematical circuit models, that something more was yet to be discovered; resistors, inductors, and capacitors, though important, did not tell the whole story. But he didn’t create memristors — he understood from looking at the math that the fundamental laws that governed the Universe required that something like memristance exist, even if no technology corporation had yet constructed a memristor.

And indeed, all congratulations to both Leon Chua and the researchers at HP — this discovery is a significant advance in computing technology.

But even in saying that sentence, what is the most important reflection one can make? David Warren points to it — the term “discovery.” For indeed, this is not something new that has emerged suddenly, but instead is something very old which has now been found.

God is rather wont to array things in just such a way that this sort of thing transpires from time to time.

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results — very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further — though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her — 42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped — a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The chance that the victims would not consider this event “serious enough to report,” or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences — supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.

By now, it ought to come as no surprise whatsoever that hardcore leftists and professional feminists are willing to lie their faces off in pursuit of an ideological goal. It’s a pity that the rest of us have to fork over our dollars because of their lies, but I suppose that in the final summation all of that dishonesty and extortion will be sorted out.

I’d always thought that the claim that one in four women at my university had experienced a sexual assault was a dubious claim, especially since I became friends with quite a few women (more than just four) during that time, and only one ever reported having been raped — and in that singular instance, the assault was in no way connected with the university or another student thereof, and had happened several years before her enrollment at said institution. Even allowing for the fact that on campus, men and women perhaps do live and work in closer proximity to each other than in the “real” world (an assumption which itself is fairly dubious to begin with), the idea that the rate of sexual assaults on campus would be twenty to twenty five times higher than in normal society seems absurd.

At any rate, the article goes on to explore the strange world of casual sex and promiscuity that is modern college/university student life, and if anything I think reading the whole thing has convinced me of two important things: 1) my daughters will learn how to beat the living snot out of an attacker, and 2) my daughters and sons will not be allowed to join sororities or fraternities (respectively), or (at least) will be actively discouraged from doing so).