Progress in Manners and morals: No Parallel in History.
I am tried to reassure her (or him, or it or them, who knows?) that the junk science of the Right is no more harmful than the junk science of the Left (I have a list of hoaxes and eco-scares as long as your arm).
She (he?) is not reassured. It seems all of Western civilization stands or falls by Darwin’s theory. If we believe it, we can survive: if not, the deluge! She goes on to tell me that Christianity is a roadblock to progress.
We have had enough time to breed new strains of animals, to find one transitional species, either living or in the fossil record. If not by now, when?
One would have to think the Demiurge is salting visible creation with false clues to believe in a literal six-day creation taking place in 4004 B.C. (Of course, who am I to mock anyone who believes that? I believe a Jew was born from a virgin, died, rose from the dead, and is now and always has been running the universe. Like the Red Queen, I make it my business to believe five impossible things before breakfast. Nonetheless, our poor creationist has no strong evidence on his side: he is in even worse shape than partisans of Steady State or the Phlogeston theory. It is not good science.)
But, be all that as it may, until we produce a new species by natural selection, Darwinism is not empirical; it is not confirmed. It will come as a shock, but it is not impossible that some variation of Lamarck will turn out to be correct. It depends on what the data say. That’s the way science works.
“I see Christianity as another in a long line of religions that retard knowledge and progress. Seems to me Christianity was around for over a thousand years before the enlightenment.”
Christians invented the modern university system, for God’s sake. We even still print diplomas in Latin.
In terms of the progress of manners and morals, there is no parallel in history. The Christians abolished the games, polygamy, temple prostitution, infanticide, and other grotesqueries of an otherwise admirable pagan culture of Imperial Rome. This was long before the Enlightenment and was a necessary first step. This was long before the thousand years you set as the threshold. The King of the Wood is no longer staying awake at night in the grove at Nemi — if this is not progress, nothing is.
Christianity abolished slavery throughout the Oecumene, and eventually the World. Indeed, the impositions on the spread of knowledge I am aware of seem to be clustered around the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Putting Galileo on trial was a bad thing, surely, but that may have been prompted by his insulting the Pope, not on his heliocentric theory. It was no worse than what secular powers in charge of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did to scientists who did not toe their party lines.
“When I started writing Eifelheim, I had the real stereotyped version of what the Middle Ages was like. But the more I read about it, the more it became evident that it was not like that at all. I began to wonder if people who put gargoyles on their cathedrals would be all that frightened of aliens. …“To this day, people take the term “medieval” to mean backward and ignorant, but it wasn’t that way. That came about because of snooty people, first in the Renaissance but mostly during the Enlightenment, actively and deliberately denigrating the era that came before them—because, having rediscovered ancient Greece and ancient Rome’s literature, they had to pretend that nothing had happened between ancient Rome and ancient Greece and themselves. And so the Middle Ages became a time of darkness.“The Middle Ages was an age of reason … and yet we’ve been taught to think of it as an age of superstition. It probably glorified reason far more than the Age of Reason. The medievals invented the university, with a standard curriculum, courses of study, degrees and, of course, funny hats.“The curriculum that was taught consisted almost entirely of reason, logic and natural philosophy—or, as we’d say, science. They didn’t teach humanities, they didn’t teach the arts, they taught essentially logical reasoning and natural philosophy. If you wanted to be a doctor of theology, a churchman, you had to first go through a course in science and thinking.”“This was an era where the most celebrated theologian of all time was Thomas Aquinas, who dared to apply logic and reason to the study of theology. In fact, theology is the application of logic and reason to religious questions. They must have elevated reason to a pretty high pedestal if they were willing to subject their own religion to it.“In the Middle Ages, they first learned how to apply mathematics to scientific questions. After the time of the story, Nicholas Oresme, who was mentioned briefly in passing, was able to prove the mean speed theorem in physics using principles of Euclidean geometry, which marks the first time a theory had been proven by using mathematics, as opposed to us[ing] mathematics to describe the angle of refraction or to do surveying.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
