Science and Religion
The very invention of science itself
was in the face of religious opposition.
Studying the world was considered a waste of time,
or at worst forbidden sorcery.
A succession of Popes issued orders forbidding the study of nature,
and even supporting the killing of those who did.
Ignorant men like
Aquinas
championed a useless mix of armchair philosophy and scripture-quoting theology,
while the experimental method, the only actual source of knowledge, was forbidden for centuries.
The ignorant theologian
Bonaventure
had the heroic pioneer of the modern world
Roger Bacon
forbidden from teaching in 1257.
Bacon, worth a thousand disposable medieval pseudo-scholars like Bonaventure or Aquinas,
was imprisoned for 14 years.
Incidentally, Bonaventure was head of those later murderers, the Franciscans.
By c.500 BC, the Pythagorean school in
ancient Greece had come to believe that the
earth was round.
Around 1513,
Copernicus
(also here
and here
and here)
first wrote down his discovery that the earth goes round the sun.
This discovery, one of the greatest in the history of human thought,
would be violently opposed by ignorant Christian churches
for the next three hundred years.
- Heliocentrism
- Giordano Bruno
(and here
and here)
- The philosopher and dreamer Bruno
was burnt at the stake
by Rome in 1600
for daring to suggest that
the earth goes round the sun.
- See the weasel words
of the Catholic Encyclopedia
on this case.
- Richard W. Pogge
says Bruno was not really a great thinker,
he was just lucky and "bet on the right horse".
- See also
here
and here
and here.
- Galileo
(and here
and here)
- The persecution of Galileo -
This great human thinker was imprisoned,
threatened with torture,
and forced to recant his beliefs
because they disagreed with Christian superstitions.
Ever since, Catholic writers have
told lies
about him, and try to justify what happened.
- The thinker and writer
Campanella
was tortured for subscribing to the
Copernican theory.
- While the Catholic opposition to Copernicus is well known,
less well known is the violent
Protestant opposition to Copernicus' evidence that the earth goes round the sun.
Apparently, though, the Protestant churches now believe that
Luther, Calvin and Wesley may have been wrong,
and the earth may in fact go round the sun.
- The idea that the earth goes round the sun was explicitly
prohibited in the church's Index of banned books
in 1616 under Paul V,
again in 1664 under Alexander VII
and again in 1761 under
Benedict XIV.
Unbelievably, the Copernican theory remained on the Index
until 1835.
Apparently, though, the church now believes that the earth
may in fact go round the sun.
One of Giordano Bruno's supporters ends with the words:
The "Church" will never outlive him.
- Interesting point.
After all,
who now worships Zeus?
Yet we still revere the ancient Greek philosophers.
Humanity's gods are mortal and temporary, and fade over time
as new memes arrive.
Mathematicians and scientists and philosophers
are immortal,
and transcend religions and cultures.
As pioneering scientists in Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries
discovered that
the Flood never happened,
the Earth was not just a few thousand years old,
animals had existed for millions of years before humans,
and the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve never existed,
religious people had to come up with an explanation
as to why such nonsense was in their holy book.
Their first reaction was spluttering denial of science, as in
Pope Pius IX,
who called the descent of humans from non-humans "a tissue of fables".
But soon they had to come up with better replies.
The one they settled on was that these stories aren't meant to be taken "literally",
but rather are myths or allegories.
Only a simple-minded fool would think these stories were meant to be literal history.
- This is all very well, but ignores the fact that every single Christian thinker
before the 18th century appears to be just such a "simple-minded fool",
including Jesus himself:
- All of these people, including Jesus,
would have been very surprised if you pointed out to them
that these are just stories, not meant to be taken "literally".
- In reality, the idea that these stories aren't meant to be taken "literally"
is a modern, 18th-19th-20th century invention,
made to try desperately to save their religion against the onslaught of science.
No one ever thought they weren't meant to be taken literally
before the 18th century.
Or so I think. But I am open to persuasion:
-
THE CHALLENGE:
- Some religious thinkers claim
that taking the Bible literally is in fact a recent invention,
that in the distant past it was always treated as myth and allegory, not as history.
I don't believe this, but I am open to persuasion.
- If you believe this is true,
show me any quote from any Christian thinker before 1700
saying that some Bible stories are just myth or allegory,
and aren't meant to be taken literally.
-
Not an atheist or deist.
And not a heretic who was persecuted/executed.
A mainstream, accepted, Christian thinker
- because you claim it was mainstream to think this way in the past.
Send quotes to me
here.
-
I think I was wrong, to some extent.
Allegorical interpretations of Genesis
collects some interesting quotes.
More here.
-
Origen (3rd cent. AD)
denies the Garden of Eden existed:
"Who could be so silly as to think that God planted a paradise in Eden in the East the way a human gardener does, and that he made in this garden a visible and palpable tree of life ... I do not think anyone can doubt that these things, by means of a story which did not in fact materially occur, are intended to express certain mysteries in a metaphorical way."
He denies the world was made in 6 days:
"we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world".
- Does Origen deny the existence of Adam and Eve?
Send quotes to me
here.
- It should be noted that Origen was declared a heretic by the church in the 6th cent. AD.
- Does anyone apart from Origen state clearly that the literal meaning may be false?
Something like: "The Flood may never have happened"
or "Adam and Eve may never have existed".
It is true that other ancient Christian thinkers considered "6 days" as indeterminate periods of time,
but this is not as dramatic as saying that some event never occurred at all.
Did anyone apart from Origen say that?
Send quotes to me
here.
- I still maintain that:
- Jesus and the New Testament authors did not know these stories (the Flood, Adam and Eve, etc.) were allegories.
- The fact that Jesus did not know they were allegories
is strong evidence he was not a god.
- Views like Origen's were not mainstream.
I would still claim that if you went back before 1700
and told almost any Christian cleric or layperson on earth
that the Flood never happened, they would be very surprised.
-
I would imagine, for example, that every single Pope before 1700 believed the Flood happened.
Is this true?
Send quotes to me
here.
In 1844,
Darwin
(also here)
first wrote down his discovery that humans arose from other animals
by a natural process.
The obvious consequences are
(a) that humans are physical things,
the soul is mythology,
and there is no afterlife,
and (b) therefore
our destiny is to discover how the brain works,
and then to become immortal on earth.
This discovery,
perhaps the greatest ever in the history of humanity,
is still opposed or watered-down
by ignorant churches of every creed
today.
- Evolution
- "Creationism"
- Human Evolution
-
For almost all of the history of Christianity, the church preached that the earth
was less than 10,000 years old.
Apparently, though, the church now believes this is completely wrong.
- Archbishop James Ussher
- In the early 17th century,
Vanini was burnt alive for daring to suggest that man has risen instead of fallen.
- In the 17th century,
La Peyrere was imprisoned, and his book burned,
for claiming that humanity must be older than Genesis implies.
- The humiliation
of the great Buffon
by the Church in the 18th century.
- The anti-science views
of John Wesley,
founder of the
Methodist church.
Even though it was the 18th century, this ignorant man
supported a raft of beliefs that would not be out of place
in the Middle Ages.
He disputed that the earth goes round the sun.
He defended the witch superstition
(admittedly after most of the murder had ceased).
He believed that
disease and insanity are caused by demons.
He held the obscene belief that
earthquakes are God's vengeance for human sin.
-
Mainstream church opposition to Darwin in the 19th century.
See the quote from
the ignorant Pope
Pius IX,
who calls the descent of humans from non-humans
"a tissue of fables".
Guinness ad:
"Evolution".
It gets our actual ancestry all wrong, but is still great.
It is actually quite moving, if you think how far we have come
and how long we have struggled.
The conflict between science and religion continues today.
The major area of conflict today is probably
brain science and artificial intelligence.
Religions are simply in denial about the
consensus in modern science
that the mind is a physical machine
and the soul does not exist.
- That classic fuzzy-headed thinker,
Stephen Jay Gould
- John Polkinghorne
- The idiot, rent-a-quote
Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams
show us his complete lack of understanding of nature
(making a change from showing us his complete lack of understanding of politics).
"God doesn't do waste", he asserts, Jan 2008,
ignoring the unbelievable waste of 3 billion years of slow, painful,
evolutionary selection and extinction.
Lives are wasted by the trillions in nature.
Beautiful species
are snuffed out in pointless mass extinctions.
Billions of intelligent, sensitive humans
have died young and in pain.
Uncountable human potential has been squandered and lost
because of nature's cruelty and indifference.
And Rowan Williams understands none of it.
- It is simply untrue that religion is not in conflict with science.
They always have been in conflict, they are still in conflict today,
and there is no sign of that conflict ever ending:
-
Consider
"Truth Cannot Contradict Truth"
(also
here),
address
by Pope John Paul II, 1996:
"theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them,
consider the [mind]
as emerging from the forces of living matter
or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."
This is a scientific assertion, an assertion about the physical universe.
And it is wrong.
-
"Communion and Stewardship"
(and
search),
issued by the
International Theological Commission
under the future Pope Benedict XVI, 2004,
makes more scientific assertions:
"An unguided evolutionary process
- one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence
- simply cannot exist."
- Intelligent believers now accept that
Homo habilis
and
Homo erectus
existed before
Homo sapiens.
-
But the problem for religious people who claim that "God directed evolution"
is this: Why make Homo habilis and Homo erectus at all?
Why not go straight to Homo sapiens?
- Indeed, why make the dinosaurs at all,
if they were only going to all die?
- Why did it take over 3 billion years to get to Homo sapiens?
- Why make parasites at all?
- Why make predators of humans at all?
- Religious people have no answers to these questions.
The history of life on earth only makes sense if no one was watching.
No one was in charge.
No one intended for humans to come,
and no one made us come.
That's the only theory that can
possibly explain all the wasteful extinctions,
pointless detours, awful parasites, bad design flaws,
and long roundabout way of getting to humans.
- The limited intellectual standards of Christian theology
are illustrated well by the
Catholic Encyclopedia entry on atheism,
which refuses to even take atheism seriously.
The fact that God may not exist at all
is a taboo that is clearly lurking beneath the author's mind,
as he furiously fights all his life
against ever for one moment
entertaining it.
- Medicine itself had to struggle into existence
against the opposition of theologians,
who have spent most of the Christian era
massively prolonging
human suffering with their stupid superstitious theories
of disease, namely that:
-
Disease is caused by sin
(also
here).
-
Insanity is caused by demons
(also
here).
- The struggle for medicine
- Superstition about the new survives today:
- The Catholic church bans
contraception,
essentially because it is new.
- The Christian "Scientists"
still deny the germ theory of disease,
simply because it is new.
- The Jehovah's Witnesses
refuse blood transfusions, even unto death,
because they are new.
- And it is not just ignorant religious groups.
The Green movement
threatens science and medicine today.
At one end are the violent
animal liberation terrorists,
costing human lives by
stopping medical research.
At the other end are politicians of all parties
making laws to artificially restrict medicine
because of their own prejudices.
For example,
the supposedly secular state
has made
human cloning
a crime,
again basically because it is new.
- Library fires
-
The greatest library of the ancient world, the
Library of Alexandria
(also here),
collected works from around 300 BC
for centuries (possibly over 900 years)
until its final destruction.
- The "daughter library" of 40,000 scrolls (founded around 200 BC)
was burnt by the Christian
Archbishop Theophilus
in 391 AD.
See the martyrdom of Hypatia.
-
It has been claimed by many that the final destruction of the library was
by the Muslim conquest of Alexandria in 641 AD,
but
apparently
(see discussion)
the following story is legend:
The story goes that
when asked what to do with the library after the capture of Alexandria,
Caliph Umar
(also here,
advisor to and father-in-law of
The Prophet Muhammad)
replied:
"If the books are in accordance with the
book of Allah,
we may do without them,
for the book of Allah more than suffices.
If they are not in accordance, then there is no need to preserve them."
- The words may be legend,
but did the Muslims carry out the final destruction anyway?
It is apparently not known.
Bernard Lewis:
"There is good evidence that the library itself was destroyed
long before the Arabs arrived in Egypt."
- The Chinese Emperor
Shih Huang-ti
ordered the burning of all books in China in 213 BC
except those dealing with agriculture, medicine and
fortune telling.
-
This evil was to be repeated in Mao's ignorant
"Cultural Revolution"
in the 20th century, when again
much of poor battered China's heritage was lost.
- John Derbyshire
defends the West hoarding the treasures of the rest of the world
- because the West is safe.
In reply to someone saying items in British museums
were looted by foreigners
from China:
"Well, we should be thankful that it was.
If it had
stayed in China, it would have been smashed up by Red Guards
during the Cultural
Revolution"
- The Spaniards in Mexico in 1520
spitefully destroyed every item of
Mayan literature
because it disagreed with their own superstitions.
Leading this great crime by the Catholic Church
against
humanity were the Franciscans.
-
"We found a great number of books ...
and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil we burned them
all."
Their violence and cruelty
seems somewhat at odds with the values of their founder
St. Francis of Assisi,
but maybe not.
The Franciscans were also
strong supporters of
the genocide of the
Catholic Nazi state in Croatia
in the mid-20th century,
and participated in the killing.
- The Germans
burnt the ancient library of the University of Louvain
in 1914.
- The Nazis
burnt the ancient archives of Angevin Naples
in 1943.
- The Serbs burnt many of Bosnia's libraries
and destroyed
much of its heritage
in the 1990s.
See the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project.
- The Italian Mafia
bombed the Uffizi art gallery
in Florence
in 1993.
-
The destruction of archaeological remains
by ignorant Native Americans,
believers in "souls" and "spirits".
Copied here.
-
Mireille Breitwieser
deliberately destroyed a huge collection of
priceless works of art
in 2001.
- Chae Jong-gi
deliberately destroyed the
Medieval gate of Seoul in an arson attack, Feb 2008.
- IRA attacks on libraries
- 9/11
- Afghanistan
- Iraq
-
Muslim Azerbaijan destroys ancient Christian sites.
- Pull down the castles
(or via here),
by Melanie Reid
- A writer in The Herald, 25 Apr 2006,
actually advocates destroying Scotland's heritage,
apparently
because it offends in some way her unexplained
(socialist? green?)
beliefs.
The spirit of Marx, Lenin, Mao
and the other barbarians and destroyers
is still very much alive.
- She wants to destroy 19th century
Taymouth Castle.
- "Think of how liberating it would be if we could flatten such divisive symbols, escape from their faux-ancient yoke, and start to enjoy the freedom to build afresh; to design modern buildings for a technological age. I'm talking about buildings scaled to the lives people must lead in the future, not to the empty reassertion of status and excess. Society has changed. Tomorrow's enemy - the global shortage of energy, the prospect of a world reduced to a husk - is a far more grave one than we realise."
- I suggest that tomorrow's enemy is, as it has always been, people like her.
The monumental 6th century AD
Buddhas of Bamiyan,
Afghanistan
(built before Islam was invented).
Destroyed by the ignorant, illiterate religious maniacs,
the Taliban, in 2001.
Later that year, after they helped attack America, the Taliban regime was destroyed
and thousands of Taliban maniacs killed by the
U.S. military.
Image from here.
The Vatican, always at the cutting edge of human thought, declared in
1992
that
the earth may go round the sun.
Then in
1996
these pioneers of human knowledge declared that
life on earth may have evolved.
Return to
Atheism
page.