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
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
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