Badassbab said:
I was talking about the irrelevance and meaningless of 'religious' faith and seperately how 'religious' faith as in today is harmful to the advancement of human civilisation. I understand during the Middle Ages religious insitutions along with the State did fund science but at the same time religion also hindered it. For a start religion by it's very nature imposes predetermined thoughts which can contradict scientific discoveries. The Galileo example as you've already mentioned is perhaps the most well known though you seem to think that was more to do with calling the Pope a 'Simpleton' than his advocacy of heliocentrism. It's probably both since heliocentrism had many enemies in the Church as it contradicted the Bible. Charles Darwin and his scientific Theory of Evolution also caused major spats with Religion which is still being felt today. I don't know which time your talking about when you say nearly every scientist was affiliated with the Catholic Church. And I don't understand how you came to your conclusion that we'd be lucky to be at WW2 technological levels without religion. If mankind had the freedom to study, learn and disseminate information without the fear of religious inquisitions (funds being removed, imprisonment, torture, grisly executions etc) I'd argue we'd be ahead. Though to be frank, there has been countless inventions and discoveries during the secular age, nearly all state funded through the hi tech (mostly military) industrial complex. |
There were a lot of enemies in heliocentracism in the scientific community as well. Also a lot of supporters in the Catholic Church... as a lot of people in the catholic church believed in the non-literal interpretations of the bible.
Galieo was brought up heresy because of calling the pope an idiot. Before then the Catholic Church was fine at Galieo discussing heliocentracism as a theory until he had more concrete demonstrative proof. Had he not called the pope an idiot, there would of been no real trouble there. Galieo's book where he talks about heliocentracism was approved by the pope and the inquistion and published with their blessing.
At the time there actually was no direct observation that proved the Copernican System correct and the Catholic Church System wrong (Tychonic). This doesn't actually happen until the 19th century. With mathmatical proof not being available till 40 years after his death.
So it's not even like they were protecting a wrong system in the face of proof. They both had idenitcal evidence at the time. Though i'd of went with Galeio's system just because it was simplier. Though it was the newer theory... and actually did have scientific errors in it that galieo ignored because he wanted to be right. So maybe at the time nobody would of taken him seriously. His theory called for one high tide. His proof that the earth moved was pretty much soley based on the tides. He saw the tides as being created by the earths movement... not the moon as we see it today. If there were two high tides, his whole theory had nothing in it that disproved the widely accepted Tychonian model.
There obviously are two a day. He knew this, but he instead tributed the second high tide to a number of other possible factors... he drew a conclusion with no actual proof in this case. As Einstein put it looking back on it.
"It was Galileo's longing for a mechanical proof of the motion of the earth which misled him into formulating a wrong theory of the tides. The fascinating arguments in the last conversation would hardly have been accepted as proof by Galileo, had his temperament not got the better of him."
I mean, I think you would understand why even scientific bodies of today would say "you should only discuss this as a hypothesis" if someone comes up with an alternate theory that doesn't have any more proof then the currently widely accepted model, and in fact the support for it vs said model was actually wrong. Which is all they told Galieo until he called the pope an idiot.
Although wrong in the long run. Scientifically at the time... the Catholic Church was just as correct as Galeio, if not more so since there theory didn't rely on any wrong theories. Galieo was right in the longrun, but not on the basis of anything he actually did... the actual proof didn't come until much later.
As for "nearly every major scientists was affiliated with the catholic Church" I mean during the middle ages... nearly every major scientist was affiliated with the Catholic Church. Galieo's for example wanted to be a priest, and had the backing of many priests. Science itself was pretty much built out of religion.
Religon faciliated most of the sceintifc funding because they had the money and saw the use in science. Government funding of technology really wasn't huge until like the... World War 1-2 era. I wanna say it started with like Hitler.
Without the Catholic Church there would of been no independent group funding research during the middle ages, nor libraries protecting books in the dark ages.
Hell, there wouldn't even be the basis for universities which were based off of churches. In other words... much much less would of been invtened then and the very basis on which these people would of been taught wouldn't of existed.
