How is it that science became a self-sustaining enterprise only in the Christian West?
Because the West was controlled by the materialistic Christians? And I mean materialistic in both the economic and scientific sense of the word. Meanwhile, the religions of the East concentrated on spiritual matters.
...as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
Science did not spring from Ionian metaphysics precisely because all non-Christian knowledge had been systematically destroyed by the Christians. It was Christians who were responsible for the closing of all the pagan schools and places of learning including Plato’s Academy which had been open for nigh on 600 years and for the final destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. The Christians did the same in Britain and Ireland, Africa and the Americas.
Many of the seeds of ‘Western’ science came from the Islamic world. It was from the Islamic world that Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Euclid etc were re-introduced into mediaeval Europe. Islamic medicine was light years ahead of that in Christian western Europe.
There is no logic in the second part of the quote. Galileo was not the first or only person ever to have studied Jupiter or dropped objects from towers. Many non-Christians had done so before him.
Incidentally, A, N. Whitehead’s most famous quote is:
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato".
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979];
To put this quote in its wider context:-
"...So far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned. There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of some supreme master of thought - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them...".
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosop ... plato.html
No mention of Augustine or Aquinas there, or even Galileo.
To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken…
Damned right it’s mistaken. Only Christianity professes blind faith. The religions of the East and the so-called pagan religions all profess knowledge.
… The Christian faith contains deeper truths-- truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind's exploration of nature: man's place in God's creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.
There’s the f-word again. Eastern and pagan philosophy “contains deeper truths – truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind's exploration of nature”. They also explain what a ‘god’ is; man’s place in the cosmos; and how and why the cosmos was created. To the Greek mind, faith comes from knowledge; one will never get knowledge from blind faith.
It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world.…
To the ancient mind there was nothing arbitrary about the world. Whether or not the world is eternal depends upon how one defines ‘eternal’. The purist would argue that if the world was created then it cannot be eternal as it has a beginning. I would argue that it is the scientific mind which is trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world.
… It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.
There is nothing radical or new in Christianity other than the concept of blind faith. The Christian O.T. is essentially the Jewish Torah, which is itself a hotch-potch of Egyptian and Babylonian, etc, concepts. Nor is there anything new of note in the N.T. and the teachings of the alleged Jesus.
Jaki’s gibberish.
1."Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."
Does he seriously believe that the Christians are the only ones who conceive of a transcendental god? Is Atman/Brahman not transcendental? One could name many others. This is the basic metaphysical starting point for all the major religions and ancient philosophies.
Though One, Brahman is the cause of the many.
Brahman is the unborn (aja) in whom all existing things abide. The One manifests as the many, the formless putting on forms. (Rig Veda)
Hindu cosmology is non-dualistic. Everything that is is Brahman. Brahman is the eternal Now, and in eternity there is no before or after, for everything is everywhere, always. To use the words of Pascal 'it is a circle the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.' (Sudhakar S.D, 1988)
The people of the Southwest, along with the Southeast had full-time religious leaders with shrines or temple buildings. Most Native Americans believe that in the universe there exists an Almighty, a spiritual force that is the source of all life. The Almighty belief is not pictured as a man in the sky, but is believed to be formless and exist in the universe. The sun is viewed as the power of the Almighty. They are not worshipping the sun, but praying to the Almighty, and the sun is a sign and symbol for that. Native Americans show less interest in an afterlife unlike the Christians. They assume the souls of the dead go to another part of the universe where they have a new existence carrying on everyday activities like they were still alive. They are just in a different world.
http://inkido.indiana.edu/w310work/romac/swrelig.htm
2. "The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
So the Christians put humans on the same level as rocks and slugs whereas the Greeks and the Eastern religions advocate that humanity is divinity in embryo. Moreover, the latter also maintain that there lies within Man the ability to develop and realise this potential. The Greeks boiled this down to two words: ‘Know Thyself’; or, if one prefers the N.T.: ‘The kingdom of God is within’. Or:
“When you go into the space of nothingness, everything becomes known.” The Buddha.
"Then only will you see it, when you cannot speak of it; for the knowledge of it is deep silence and suppression of all the senses." Hermes Trimegistus (Lib. x.6)
His last sentence is ridiculous and merely displays either the author’s ignorance or his prejudice. Try reading Empedocles (ca. 495-435 BCE), specifically his writings about Eris and Aphrodite; Schwaller de Lubicz’s Temple In Man (a study of the temple at Luxor); or the Tao Te Ching.
3. "Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
This opens with a direct contradiction of what he said in point 2 with regard to all material beings being on the same level. The rest of the passage supports my contention and is the starting point for all Greek philosophy, all Eastern religions and all mythologies. And all of the latter pre-date Christianity by centuries if not millennia.
4. "At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard against the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."
It is science which attempts to dictate to Nature what it ought to be.
In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens.
A fine example of the infantile philosophy of Christianity. Again, either through ignorance or design, the author totally misrepresents Greek thought. The author also seems to have his own understanding of the word ‘pantheist’ – perhaps he means polytheist?
Pantheism and Theism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/#Tra
The passage from Haffner is risible from start to finish. Some things which jumped out:
....The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible.
Hopelessness? Where is the hopelessness in the Vedas, Greek philosophy, the Tao Te Ching etc, etc.? Hopelessness is rampant is Judaism and Christianity due to the incompetent, psychopathic god of the bible. As for the lack of belief in a creator-god and an intelligent Universe, the mind boggles at the inanity of this statement. Has this addle pate never read Plato? And what does he think Zeus, Wotan, Brahma et al are?
The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time.
This is progress? A millennium and a half after Plato, who knows how long after the Egyptians and the Indians, who all thought otherwise, Christianity can come up with nothing better than something coming from nothing. See:
Rig Veda Bk X, HYMN CXXIX. Creation.
The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
Tempier was not the first to critique Aristotle. The Muslims had been doing it for centuries and the Greeks and Romans did it before them.
The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities.
Nothing new here. Basic Hinduism to name but one.
The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined.
"When goodness grows weak,
When evil increases,
I make myself a body.
In every age I come back
To deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner,
To establish righteousness."
Bhagavad Gita
(Note that it is the sin which is to be destroyed, NOT the sinner and his offspring for all eternity).
It is a pity that Jaki and Haffner did not apply their great scientific minds to the discovery of evidence of an actual person called Jesus, after all, they both seem to believe that you can get something from nothing.
If we are to be subjected to Christian propaganda, can we at least have some which has some intellectual content?
Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil.
Let us look more closely: what is the man of science? An ignoble species of man for a start, with the virtues of an ignoble, that is to say subservient, unauthorative and un-selfsufficient species of man: he possesses industriousness, patient acknowledgement of his proper place in the rank and file, uniformity and moderation in abilities and requirements, he possesses the instinct for his own kind and for that which his own kind have need of, for example that little bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim to honour and recognition (which first and foremost presupposes recognizability-), that sunshine of good name… (p133)
Perhaps he is troubled by his health or by the pettiness and stuffiness of his wife and friends, or by a lack of companions and company- yes, he forces himself to reflect on his troubles: but in vain! Already his thoughts are roaming, off to a more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little how to help himself as he did yesterday. (p134)
List of authors and works listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_au ... ohibitorum
but the gospels say!"...... 
