steve wrote:Christianity was an impediment to science whenever science disagreed with dogma.
Doing away with Christians and the nuts that come with it means doing away with the following fellows:
-Sir Isaac Newton, obsessed Bible thumper, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, argued that religion and science were inseperable due to God inventing the laws of nature that scientists were studying.
-John Buridan, priest, laid the groundwork for our understanding of gravity, student of William of Ockham, a monk, known for "Ockham's Razor", a minor detour of scientific philosophy.
-Pierre Gassendi, obsessive Catholic Priest, first observed Mercury's path across the sun, would hardly have cared about the cosmos and contributed to scientifict history were he not a priest.
-Johannes Kepler, completely off his fucking rocker who had to change his scientific theories to fit his conception of
what God wanted.....and gave us the laws of planetary motion which we observe to this day....As this "roadblock to science" stated once: "The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics."
-Nicole Oresme, crackpot bishop who came up with the idea the Earth rotated on some sort of axis.
-Nicholas of Cusa, Cardinal and lawyer for the Catholic Church proposed that the universe was infinite and that perhaps life existed on other planets. Summarily not jailed!
-Bede the Venerable, perhaps the father of modern history in his kooky plan to discriminate sources in writing a history book and citing the sources he actually uses....This idiot blocking the march of human progress was a monk who holed up, immune to the real world where no god obviously exists.
-Francis Bacon, who probably contributed as much to science in a PRACTICAL manner as anyone else, slipped out an idiotic statement such as: "It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
-George Berkeley, a complete unknown in the field of philosophy, sought to create colleges for ministers to convert Native Americans.
-Robert Grosseteste, who arguably provided the intellectual concept of the scientific method, was some sort of jerk off bishop.
-Roger Bacon, who beat Sir Isaac Newton by 400 years on the topic of the visible spectrum, was a Franciscan friar. His inspiration was COMPLETELY SECULAR, JUST LIKE ALL SCIENTISTS OF HIS DAY: "And indeed, since all speculative thought proceeds through arguments which either proceed through a proposition by authority or through other propositions of argument, in accordance with this which I am now investigating, there is a science that is necessary to us, which is called experimental. I wish to explain this, not only as useful to philosophy, but to the knowledge of God and the understanding of the whole world: as in a former book I followed language and science to their end, which is the Divine wisdom by which all things are ordered."
-Oh, that Arab shit? Introduced to the Western World through Pope Silvester II. Where is the Islamic world scientifically today again? I say the strength of Western Civilization (that DEFINATELY includes the Romans) lies not necessarily with original ideas, but with its ability to adapt and its ability to assimilate.
-Peter of Maricourt influenced Roger Bacon and argued that experimentation should be the basis of scientific inquiry. He also was A FUCKING CRUSADER LOOKING FOR THE TRUE CROSS.
-Giovanni Botero came up with this wild idea that kings derived their right to rule from the consent of the governed. Botero was a Jesuit influenced directly by St. Thomas Aquinas.
-Copernicus, some fucking insignificant CATHOLIC PRIEST.....who DID NOTHING.
-Rene Descartes......this roadblock to progress once tried to prove God's existence in perhaps his most famous (infamous?) work.
-Albert Magnus, an early chemist, isolated arsenic. Also claimed to have encountered the Virgin Mary in person.
-Pope John XXI wrote an influential piece on medicine, arguably one of the most read texts in history......oh, and he was a fucking pope.
-Galileo....okay, okay, this is the cherry picker, right? Well, the piece he wrote that got him in trouble was written AT THE REQUEST OF THE POPE. Now the official bullshit line on him getting in trouble claims his theory is wrong and goes against the church, but most historians agree that the real story is that the pope thought one of the characters in the book in question was meant to represent the pope and Galileo made a fool of this character in the book. In other words, the issue was personal between the pope and Galileo. So, we have the Pope REQUESTING this historic book being made.....and what happens 100 years later? The Catholic Church announces it was wrong with how it treated Galileo and FINANCES THE PUBLISHING OF THE BOOK IN QUESTION. Oh, they didn't bother to say any of that shit in World History 101, did they? All of this ignores that Galileo was a faithful Catholic. Whoops!
-Johannes Gutenberg....popularized some insignificant piece of technology and proceeded to work on some other forgotten progect....the Gutenberg Libel, the Gutenberg Child, the Gutenberg Wible.....ah, can't remember, probably not important!
-Marin Marsenne, gave us the Marsenne Primes and contributed to TUNING OF STRINGED INSTRUMENTS AS A SCIENCE.....also a friar who wrote extensively on how atheists are going to hell.
-Blaise Pascal.....what's the point? Really, what is the point?
-Gottfried Liebniz, independent of that religious quack Newton, also "invented" calculus, and anticipated by several hundred years the work of some dude named Einstein in physics. Also wrote extensively on how perfect the God-created world was.
-Theodoric of Freiberg, monk, refracted light, heard of this shit?
-Thomas Bradwardine, Oxford Calculator, also preached at the Battle of Crecy.
-Otto Brunfels....the father of Botany....also religious nut, big on the reformation.
-Bartholomaeus Pitiscus, largely noted for introducing trigonometry to the public and probably invented the decimal point. Also a Calvinist preacher.
-John Napier POPULARIZED the decimal point and gave us the idea of logarithms. This asshole also obsessed over the Book of Revelations and worked hard to figure out when the End Times were.
-Robert Boyle, probably the first modern chemist, argued the point of science was to figure out God's perfection.....a theme common to, well,
all scientists.
-Charles Babbage, arguably the inventor of the modern computer, was convinced that God must exist, because the world was perfectly mathmatical.
-Gregor Mendel, popularized the idea that genetics might be something to think about....oh yeah, he was a fucking Jesus freak abbot.
Yep, yep, we can pretty much conclude that "Christianity was an impediment to science whenever science disagreed with dogma." It's really too bad that Christianity existed to get in the way of progress.
That's not entirely true.