The Source of Science
"There is but one source for science: It must come from the Medieval insistence on the rationality of God." -- Alfred North Whitehead
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
I disagree. What was necessary were certain leaps of faith with which atheism and theism were equally consistent. One of them was the conviction that the universe was mathematically ordered, and hence that nature could be mathematized. Another—which is less discussed, probably because it is more embarrassing—was the gratuitous assumption that, other things being equal, more intuitive explanations are more probable explanations.
ReplyDeleteWell, disagree you may PSH, but the historical work on the Scientific Revolution has pretty firmly tied it to its Christian roots; see, for instance, Grant's The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. Or listen to the actual words of any of the luminaries of the Scientific Revolution. You are merely asserting that atheism could have done the job -- of course, it's impossible to prove it couldn't have, but the historical evidence is massively against you.
ReplyDeleteI took the quotation as identifying a logical prerequisite for science. ("It must come from the Medieval insistence on the rationality of God.") Perhaps the author was making a sociological point, but that isn't clear on the face of it.
ReplyDeleteI think he meant it neither logically nor sociologically, but historically. In our, actual world, science actually arose from that Medieval belief.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I accidentally deleted a comment from one Race Cannon. (When I try to moderate comments from my phone, "Publish" and "Delete" wind up about a centimeter apart, and sometimes I aim for "P" and hit "D".)
ReplyDeleteMy answer, Race: Nyame.
Perhaps Race Canon is not a person, nor even a pseudonym, but a set of beliefs, probably nasty.
ReplyDelete