timeimmortal

Over on the Edmonton Atheists forum, someone else isn’t happy with me:

I get a kick out of his assertion that science didn’t flourish in non-Christian areas. Does he know nothing of history?
Egypt, Babylon, and Greece really got hings going, and Muslim countries in the middle ages were far ahead of the Christian Europe.
When missionaries got to China, they found that the Chinese already had their own science doing well (think gunpowder).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science #Science_in_Medieval_Europe

I’m not unaware of the fact that earlier in history, other societies — China, Egypt and various Arabic (it is especially important, regarding this issue, to distinguish between Arabs and Muslims) nations are excellent examples — had made considerable scientific advancement. I’m aware that, for a time, scientific development in non-Christian areas of the world outpaced scientific development in Christian areas of the world.

But that’s much earlier in history, isn’t it? Looking at those same nations a little later on, what do we see? It was the West, starting in the 12th or 13th century, that began to rise to scientific prominence, while in other parts of the world the early promise of science proved to be stillborn: it’s no accident that when one views, for examples, lists of Arabic scientific innovation, such lists tend to stop abruptly after about the 12th century.

That was my point. I don’t deny that other cultures gave scientific study a good start; I simply note that it also floundered in those places later on, and that it was out of Christendom that modern science emerged.

Wikipedia is not the most reliable of sources, but since it was cited in the argument against me, let’s note what the ol’ wiki has to say about scientific development in Christian Europe, shall we?

An intellectual revitalization of Europe started with the birth of medieval universities in the 12th century. The contact with the Islamic world in Spain and Sicily, and during the Reconquista and the Crusades, allowed Europeans access to scientific Greek and Arabic texts, including the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Geber, al-Khwarizmi, Alhazen, Avicenna, and Averroes. European scholars like Michael Scotus would learn Arabic in order to study these texts. The European universities aided materially in the translation and propagation of these texts and started a new infrastructure which was needed for scientific communities. As well as this, Europeans began to venture further and further east (most notably, perhaps, Marco Polo) as a result of the Pax Mongolica. This led to the increased influence of Indian and even Chinese science on the European tradition. Technological advances were also made, such as the early flight of Eilmer of Malmesbury (who had studied Mathematics in 11th century England), and the metallurgical achievements of the Cistercian blast furnace at Laskill.

I should pause here and note one important detail: the Church was heavily involved in the development and growth of universities in Europe during the Middle Ages.

But let’s continue:

At the beginning of the 13th century there were reasonably accurate Latin translations of the main works of almost all the intellectually crucial ancient authors, allowing a sound transfer of scientific ideas via both the universities and the monasteries. By then, the natural philosophy contained in these texts began to be extended by notable scholastics such as Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus. Precursors of the modern scientific method, influenced by earlier contributions of the Islamic world, can be seen already in Grosseteste’s emphasis on mathematics as a way to understand nature, and in the empirical approach admired by Bacon, particularly in his Opus Majus. According to Pierre Duhem, the Condemnation of 1277 led to the birth of modern science, because it forced thinkers to break from relying so much on Aristotle, and to think about the world in new ways.

The Condemnation of 1277 was issued by Bishop Tempier in Paris, and was a comprehensive response to teachings deemed heretical by the Bishop after due investigation. Its effects were far-reaching, but basically signaled a rejection of Aristotelean Peripatetic physics.

This paved the way for new ways of looking at the natural world. As Duhem went on to note, “if we must assign a date for the birth of modern science, we would, without doubt, choose the year 1277 when the bishop of Paris solemnly proclaimed that several worlds could exist, and that the whole of heavens could, without contradiction, be moved with a rectilinear motion.” And indeed, several principles of reasoning which are still applied today — being, perhaps, the most familiar one — can trace their origins to the philosophical ramifications of the 1277 condemnation.

The Church, then, allied herself with reason even at this early stage. And while at later times, the Church certainly made its share of mistakes with regard to science (the case of Galileo being the most famous example thereof), she also laid the foundations for science to transform itself into its modern form, and to progress with the breakneck pace that has characterized it ever since.

My atheistic detractor is here hoist, somewhat, on his (?) own petard; he notes, among his list of “counter”-examples to my point, that the ancient Greeks made an early start at science. He is correct in this observation…but modern science emerged in part from a rejection of the scientific tenets one of the major philosophical schools of the ancient Greeks.

Wikipedia continues:

The first half of the 14th century saw much important scientific work being done, largely within the framework of scholastic commentaries on Aristotle’s scientific writings. William of Ockham introduced the principle of parsimony: natural philosophers should not postulate unnecessary entities, so that motion is not a distinct thing but is only the moving object and an intermediary “sensible species” is not needed to transmit an image of an object to the eye. Scholars such as Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme started to reinterpret elements of Aristotle’s mechanics. In particular, Buridan developed the theory that impetus was the cause of the motion of projectiles, which was a first step towards the modern concept of inertia. The Oxford Calculators began to mathematically analyze the kinematics of motion, making this analysis without considering the causes of motion.

In 1348, the Black Death and other disasters sealed a sudden end to the previous period of massive philosophic and scientific development. Yet, the rediscovery of ancient texts was improved after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West. Meanwhile, the introduction of printing was to have great effect on European society. The facilitated dissemination of the printed word democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas. New ideas also helped to influence the development of European science at this point: not least the introduction of Algebra. These developments paved the way for the Scientific Revolution, which may also be understood as a resumption of the process of scientific change, halted at the start of the Black Death.

And the foundation for that revolution? It is a comprehensive thing, which many different scholars contributed to, to be sure. But the Church was certainly one such element, and then a rather pivotal one. And at the core of the modern scientific method, there remains a rather Christian sensibility in the belief that the Universe itself is, to a certain extent, rationally ordered, such that scientific inquiry will in due season be rewarded with evidence or information of some kind. The scientific method, it seems, is built on the expectation that we will find when we seek.

Just as Christ promised.

Ezra Levant has been doing some research, and has noted that there seem to be quite a lot of parallels between modern Canadian human rights commissions and their medieval counterparts. Not surprisingly, the most striking parallels concern the original Star Chamber from around 1632.

For example:

I was fascinated to learn that, among its other victims, entire juries were tried in the Star Chamber if they didn’t render the politically appropriate verdict.

But the most striking analogy was a Star Chamber order of 1632, which is a template for the show trial of Maclean’s magazine of 2008.

According to Wikipedia, 1632 is when the Star Chamber:

…banned all “news books” because of complaints from Spanish and Austrian diplomats that coverage of the Thirty Years’ War in England was unfair. As a result, newsbooks pertaining to this matter were often printed in Amsterdam and then smuggled into the country, until the ban was lifted six years later.

So foreign trouble-makers who objected to free speech and who insisted on politically correct versions of current events managed to censor the news. Plus ca change.

But wait, it gets better:

I have found a legal precedent that the BCHRT can use to convict [comedian Guy Earle] even if his jokes were funny. Especially if his jokes were funny!

I spent some time today reading a book I found on Google Books. (It’s an amazing resources; not only has Google scanned countless books, included old and rare books, but they’ve made those books text-searchable.) I was reading a book called The Star Chamber, published in 1880, that contained hundreds of decisions of that court. It also has a very interesting preface, that describes that court’s descent from a well-intentioned idea — a court big and tough enough to take on law-breaking bishops and sherriffs who would be impervious to justice of regular courts — into a corrupt political tool used to destroy the kings enemies, and confiscate their wealth.

The book has a readable summary of hundreds of cases. In it, I read a footnote about someone fined “severlie”, not for telling an offensive joke — but for laughing at it.

I couldn’t find the case of the illegal laugher, but I found a reference to it in a defamation judgment in another old book of Star Chamber cases. It starts on page 149, and the reference to the laugher is on page 152…

It’s nice to know that Canadian justice has caught up with the rest of the world and adopted 17th century standards of jurisprudence.

It was bound to happen, you know? A bunch of people with nothing better to do have complained that the Wikipedia entry about Muhammad contains *gasp* images of the (false) prophet of Islam, which (as I think we all should know by now) are prohibited under Sharia law.

Or…something like that. To be honest, I’ve stopped caring.

Wikipedia has refused to censor the images (good for them!).

Please note that discussion on this talk page has determined that pictures of Muhammad will not be removed from this article and any removal of the pictures without discussion here first will be reverted on sight. If you wish to discuss the inclusion of pictures in the article, please read over previous discussions here, here, and here and the Muhammad article FAQ at this page.

Look, Muhammad was just a man, not the Son of God, and only a few kooks and radicals have any sort of problem with displaying the image of the Son of God in as many artistic mediums as possible. It is, quite frankly, insulting to suggest that a lesser man than Christ is too holy and sacred to be depicted, even for the purposes of historical record-keeping.

Not that one expects all that much: the legal code that prohibits images of the (false) prophet of Islam from being displayed is also the legal code that stipulates that uncovered hair is in the same “category” of nudity as bared breasts.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: My Pet Jawa)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!