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Atheist and anti-theist\u00a0Bob Seidensticker<\/a>,\u00a0who was\u00a0\u201craised Presbyterian\u201d<\/a>,\u00a0runs the influential\u00a0Cross Examined<\/em><\/a>\u00a0blog. He asked me there,\u00a0on 8-11-18<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I\u2019ve ignored on one or two of those posts?\u201d<\/span>\u00a0He also made a general statement\u00a0on 6-22-17<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cChristians\u2019 arguments are easy to refute . . . I\u2019ve heard the good stuff, and it\u2019s not very good.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>He added\u00a0in the combox<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cIf I\u2019ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I\u2019ve mischaracterized them.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Such confusion would indeed be\u00a0predictable<\/em>, seeing that Bob himself admitted\u00a0(2-13-16<\/a>):\u00a0\u201cMy study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I\u2019m researching at the moment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Bob (for the record) virtually\u00a0begged<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0pleaded<\/em>\u00a0with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by\u00a010-3-18<\/a>,\u00a0following\u00a0massive, childish name-calling attacks<\/a>\u00a0against me,\u00a0 encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his\u00a0banning<\/em>\u00a0me from it), his opinion was as follows:\u00a0\u201cDave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn\u2019t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he\u2019s writing about.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0making the statement, Bob\u00a0wrote in a combox<\/a>\u00a0on his blog:\u00a0\u201cSomeone who\u2019s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat \u2018n sassy and ignorant.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Again,\u00a0Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on\u00a010-27-18<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cYou can\u2019t explain it to us, you can\u2019t defend it, you can\u2019t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It\u2019s clear you have nothing.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And again\u00a0on the same day<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cIf you can\u2019t answer the question, man up and say so.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And on\u00a010-26-18<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cyou refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And\u00a0again<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cYou\u2019re<\/i>\u00a0the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Bob\u2019s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again,\u00a0on 6-30-19<\/a>, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself:\u00a0\u201cSpoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, \u2018Let me retract my previous statement of X\u2019 or something like that.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Yeah,\u00a0Bob<\/em>\u00a0could!\u00a0\u00a0He still hasn\u2019t yet uttered one peep in reply<\/a>\u00a0to \u2014 now \u2014 41 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.<\/p>\n Bible-Basher Bob\u2019s words will be in\u00a0blue<\/span>.\u00a0To find these posts, follow this link:\u00a0\u201cSeidensticker Folly #\u201d<\/a> or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page<\/a>.<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n Bob presents\u00a0a completely warped, cynical, jaded, ignorant, one-sided alt-version of the history of early science in his post,\u00a0\u201cWhen Christianity Was in Charge, This Is What We Got\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(8-10-18).\u00a0<\/span>In this disgraceful, outlandish piece, he wrote:<\/p>\n The so-called \u201cEnlightenment\u201d (the supposedly \u201creasonable\u201d people), by contrast,\u00a0murdered Lavoisier, the father of chemistry<\/a>, and several other prominent French scientists and philosophers (namely,\u00a0Philippe-Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric de Dietrich<\/a>,\u00a0Nicolas de Condorcet<\/a>,\u00a0Jean Baptiste Gaspard Bochart de Saron<\/a>,\u00a0Guillaume-Chr\u00e9tien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes<\/a>, and\u00a0F\u00e9lix Vicq d\u2019Azyr<\/a>). The murderous spree against scientists was later revived by the\u00a0Soviet and Chinese atheist Communists<\/a>.<\/p>\n Galileo, on the other hand (the only example of a \u201cscientific martyr\u201d that we ever seem to hear about) lived his life under house arrest in luxurious palaces of his supporters. by the way, St. Robert Bellarmine showed that he had a\u00a0more accurate understanding of scientific method<\/a>\u00a0than Galileo did. Galileo and other scientists of his general time,\u00a0got many things wrong, too<\/a>\u00a0(just as some in the Church had, in condemning Galileo\u2019s premature overconfidence).<\/p>\n Seidensticker\u00a0directly replied<\/a>\u00a0to the above paragraph: \u201cThat\u2019s weird\u2013you\u2019d think that since the Church wasn\u2019t just another big human bureaucracy but instead was guided by the omniscient Creator of the universe that it would look different somehow.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Exactly! That\u2019s why the Catholic Church produced modern science, including heliocentrism (formulated by the Catholic Copernicus). One (sub-infallible) Catholic tribunal at one point of our history, got science wrong (while a pious Catholic who was wrongly persecuted: Galileo, got some major things right, but also other things wrong, and another Catholic, Bellarmine, had the more modern, accurate understanding of scientific method).<\/p>\n Big wow. We would expect to see this. It\u2019s no disproof whatever of our claims. But such things are clearly beyond your capacity to understand, in the blindness of your bigotry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nicholas Oresme<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(c. 1323-1382; bishop) Oresme conceived the idea of employing what we should now call rectangular co-ordinates . . . and thus forestalls Descartes in the invention of analytical geometry. . . . In opposition to the Aristotelean theory of weight, according to which the natural location of heavy bodies is the centre of the world, and that of light bodies the concavity of the moon\u2019s orb, he proposes the following: The elements tend to dispose themselves in such manner that, from the centre to the periphery their specific weight diminishes by degrees. He thinks that a similar rule may exist in worlds other than this. This is the doctrine later substituted for the Aristotelean by Copernicus and his followers . . . But Oresme had a much stronger claim to be regarded as the precursor of Copernicus when one considers what he says of the diurnal motion of the earth, . . . He begins by establishing that no experiment can decide whether the heavens move form east to west or the earth from west to east; for sensible experience can never establish more than one relative motion. He then shows that the reasons proposed by the physics of Aristotle against the movement of the earth are not valid . . . [source:\u00a0Catholic Encyclopedia<\/em>:\u00a0\u201dNicole Oresme\u201d<\/a>] He wrote influential works on mathematics, physics, and astronomy. In his\u00a0Livre du ciel et du monde<\/em>\u00a0Oresme discussed a range of evidence for and against the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis. From astronomical considerations, he maintained that if the Earth were moving and not the celestial spheres, all the movements that we see in the heavens that are computed by the astronomers would appear exactly the same as if the spheres were rotating around the Earth. He rejected the physical argument that if the Earth were moving the air would be left behind causing a great wind from east to west. In his view the Earth, Water, and Air would all share the same motion. As to the scriptural passage that speaks of the motion of the sun, he concludes that \u201cthis passage conforms to the customary usage of popular speech\u201d and is not to be taken literally. He also noted that it would be more economical for the small Earth to rotate on its axis than the immense sphere of the stars. [source:\u00a0Wikipedia bio<\/a>] His work provided some basis for the development of modern mathematics and science. Oresme brilliantly argues against any proof of the Aristotelian theory of a stationary Earth and a rotating sphere of the fixed stars and showed the possibility of a daily axial rotation of the Earth. He was a determined opponent of astrology, which he attacked on religious and scientific grounds. He states \u2013 more than 300 years before Robert Hooke (1635\u20131703) and Newton \u2013 that atmospheric refraction occurs along a curve and proposes to approximate the curved path of a ray of light in a medium of uniformly varying density, in this case the atmosphere, by an infinite series of line segments each representing a single refraction. [source:\u00a0Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\u00a0<\/em><\/a>bio<\/a>] In the whole of his argument in favor of the Earth\u2019s motion Oresme is both more explicit and much clearer than that given two centuries later by\u00a0Copernicus<\/a>. He was also the first to assume that color and light are of the same nature. He asserted methodological naturalism: \u201cthere is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God as if He would produce these effects directly, more so than those effects whose causes we believe are well known to us.\u201d [source:\u00a0Wikipedia: \u201dScience in the Middle Ages\u201d<\/a>] He also showed how to interpret the difficulties encountered in \u201cthe Sacred Scriptures wherein it is stated that the sun turns, etc. It might be supposed that here Holy Writ adapts itself to the common mode of human speech, as also in several places, for instance, where it is written that God repented Himself, and was angry and calmed Himself and so on, all of which is, however, not to be taken in a strictly literal sense\u201d. Finally, Oresme offered several considerations favourable to the hypothesis of the Earth\u2019s daily motion. In order to refute one of the objections raised by the Peripatetics against this point, Oresme was led to explain how, in spite of this motion, heavy bodies seemed to fall in a vertical line; he admitted their real motion to be composed of a fall in a vertical line and a diurnal rotation identical with that which they would have if bound to the Earth. This is precisely the principle to which Galileo was afterwards to turn. He adopted Buridan\u2019s theory of dynamics in its entirety. [source:\u00a0<\/em>Catholic Encyclopedia<\/em>: \u201dHistory of Physics\u201d<\/a>] \u201cMost of the essential elements in both his [i.e., Copernicus\u2019] criticism of Aristotle and his theory of motion can be found in earlier scholastic writers, particularly in Oresme.\u201d [source: Thomas Kuhn,\u00a0The Copernican Revolution<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Vintage Books \/ Random House, 1959), p. 154] [pp. 64-66 in my book][ . . . ]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nicholas of Cusa<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(1401\u20131464; cardinal) Nicholas anticipated many later ideas in mathematics, cosmology, astronomy, and experimental science while constructing his own original version of systematic Neoplatonism. In Book II of\u00a0On Learned Ignorance<\/em>\u00a0he holds that the natural universe is characterized by change or motion; it is not static in time and space. But finite change and motion, ontologically speaking, are also matters of more and less and have no fixed maximum or minimum. This \u201contological relativity\u201d leads Cusanus to some remarkable conclusions about the earth and the physical universe, based not on empirical observation but on metaphysical grounds. The earth is not fixed in place at some given point because nothing is utterly at rest; nor can it be the exact physical center of the natural universe, even if it seems nearer the center than \u201cthe fixed stars.\u201d Because the universe is in motion without fixed center or boundaries, none of the spheres of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world picture are exactly spherical. None of them has an exact center, and the \u201coutermost sphere\u201d is not a boundary. Cusanus thus shifts the typical medieval picture of the created universe toward later views, but on ontological grounds. The natural universe itself, as a contracted image of God, has a physical center that can be anywhere and a circumference that is nowhere. [source:\u00a0Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\u00a0<\/em><\/a>bio<\/a>] Cusanus said that no perfect circle can exist in the universe (opposing the Aristotelean model, and also Copernicus\u2019 later assumption of circular orbits), thus opening the possibility for Kepler\u2019s model featuring elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun. He made important contributions to the field of mathematics by developing the concepts of the infinitesimal and of relative motion. He was the first to use concave lenses to correct myopia. His writings were essential for Leibniz\u2019s discovery of calculus as well as Cantor\u2019s later work on infinity. [source:\u00a0Wikipedia bio<\/a>] The astronomical views of the cardinal are scattered through his philosophical treatises. The earth is a star like other stars [spherical], is not the centre of the universe, is not at rest, nor are its poles fixed. The celestial bodies are not strictly spherical, nor are their orbits circular. The difference between theory and appearance is explained by relative motion. [source:\u00a0Catholic Encyclopedia<\/em>\u00a0bio<\/a>] \u201cCopernicus . . . had probably at least heard of the very influential treatise in which the fifteenth-century Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, derived the motion of the earth from the plurality of worlds in an unbounded Neoplatonic universe. The earth\u2019s motion had never been a popular concept, but by the sixteenth century it was scarcely unprecedented.\u201d [source: Thomas Kuhn,\u00a0The Copernican Revolution<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Vintage Books \/ Random House, 1959), p. 144] [pp. 66-67 in my book]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n [T]here is something odd in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce. But why is it that we mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? Few modern people know what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be ignorant about its knowledge. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gunpowder and printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which we look for progress, are mediaeval. (Illustrated London News<\/i>, \u201cThe True Middle Ages,\u201d 14 July 1906, when Chesterton was still an Anglican, not yet a Catholic)<\/p>\n It was perhaps the one real age of progress in all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such unity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end of the Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments, the cathedrals and the guilds. (The New Jerusalem<\/i>, 1920, ch. 12)<\/p>\n The medieval world did not talk about Plato and Cicero as fools occupied with futilities; yet that is exactly how a more modern world talked of the philosophy of Aquinas and sometimes even of the purely philosophic parts of Dante. (The Spice of Life and Other Essays<\/i>, \u201cThe Camp and the Cathedral\u201d [1922] )<\/p>\n I have never maintained that mediaeval things were all good; it was the bigots who maintained that mediaeval things were all bad. (Illustrated London News<\/i>, \u201cMediaeval Robber Barons and Other Myths,\u201d 26 May 1923)<\/p>\n They started by saying that mediaeval life was utterly miserable; they find out that it was frequently cheerful; so they make an attempt to represent its cheerfulness as a wild revolt that demonstrates its misery. Every impossibility is possible, except the possibility that the whole assumption about the Middle Ages is wrong. (Illustrated London News<\/i>, \u201cMore Myths, Mediaeval and Victorian,\u201d 2 June 1923)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n ***<\/p>\n Atheist and anti-theist\u00a0Bob Seidensticker,\u00a0who was\u00a0\u201craised Presbyterian\u201d,\u00a0runs the influential\u00a0Cross Examined\u00a0blog. He asked me there,\u00a0on 8-11-18:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I\u2019ve ignored on one or two of those posts?\u201d\u00a0He also made a general statement\u00a0on 6-22-17:\u00a0\u201cChristians\u2019 arguments are easy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2331,"featured_media":50826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,112],"tags":[4126,1199,1205,1332,436,254,1194,6141,6138,1206],"class_list":["post-50820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism-agnosticism","category-philosophy-science","tag-bob-seidensticker","tag-christianity-science","tag-church-fathers-science","tag-copernicus","tag-empiricism","tag-faith-and-reason","tag-heliocentrism","tag-nicholas-of-cusa","tag-nicholas-oresme","tag-roots-of-modern-science"],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n
When Christianity was in charge, the world was populated by mystical creatures, we had little besides superstition to explain the caprices of nature, and natural disasters were signs of God\u2019s anger.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n
\nChristianity\u2019s goal isn\u2019t to create the internet, GPS, airplanes, or antibiotics. It isn\u2019t to improve life with warm clothes or safe water. It isn\u2019t to eliminate diseases like smallpox or polio. It\u2019s to convince people to believe in a story that has no evidence. . . .<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nBut if Christianity is just what you do if there\u2019s no science, why is it still here? . . . Superstition in a world before science was the scaffold that supported the arch of religion. Science has now dismantled the scaffold of superstition, but it\u2019s too late because the arch of religion has already calcified in place.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n
It\u2019s the twenty-first century, and yet the guiding principles for Christians\u2019 lives come from the fourteenth, back when the sun orbited the earth, disease had supernatural causes, and the world was populated by Sciapods, Blemmyes, and bonnacons.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nI have documented\u00a0\u201c33 Empiricist Christian Thinkers Before 1000 AD\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>As one example among many, both\u00a0Augustine<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Aquinas<\/a>\u00a0opposed astrology. On the other hand, many great early scientists (also Christians) were\u00a0obsessed with astrology<\/a>, including Galileo, Kepler, and Tycho Brahe, while Isaac Newton (an Arian) was fascinated with alchemy.<\/div>\n\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nFor examples of \u201cscientific Christians\u201d long before modern science was born, see\u00a0Hermann of Reichenau<\/a>\u00a0(1013\u20131054) and\u00a0Adelard of Bath<\/a>\u00a0(c. 1080-c. 1152). When modern science did get off the ground, of course it was Christianity that was\u00a0overwhelmingly in the forefront<\/a>\u00a0of that. Christians or theists\u00a0founded 115 scientific fields<\/a>. There were\u00a0at least 244 priest-scientists<\/a>. And here are\u00a0152 lay Catholic scientists<\/a>. 35 lunar craters were\u00a0named to honor Jesuit scientists<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\nAs for the sun going around the earth, it need not be pointed out that\u00a0Nicolaus Copernicus<\/a>\u00a0was the key figure who changed that, and he was a Catholic cleric, and his work was enthusiastically supported by the pope of the time and the Church (though later with Galileo there were some silly things said). Even a cursory glance at Wikipedia (\u201cHeliocentrism\u201d<\/a>) reveals that there were forerunners of heliocentrism in earlier Catholics:<\/div>\n\n\n
European scholarship in the later medieval period actively received astronomical models developed in the Islamic world and by the 13th century was well aware of the problems of the Ptolemaic model. In the 14th century, bishop\u00a0Nicole Oresme<\/a>\u00a0[c. 1320-1382] discussed the possibility that the Earth rotated on its axis, while\u00a0Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa<\/a>\u00a0[1401-1464] in his\u00a0Learned Ignorance<\/em>\u00a0asked whether there was any reason to assert that the Sun (or any other point) was the center of the universe. In parallel to a mystical definition of God, Cusa wrote that \u201cThus the fabric of the world (machina mundi<\/em>) will\u00a0quasi<\/em>\u00a0have its center everywhere and circumference nowhere.\u201d . . .<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n
\nThe state of knowledge on planetary theory received by Copernicus [1473-1543] is summarized in\u00a0Georg von Peuerbach<\/a>\u2018s\u00a0Theoricae Novae Planetaru<\/em>\u00a0(printed in 1472 by\u00a0Regiomontanus<\/a>\u00a0[1436-1476] ). By 1470, the accuracy of observations by the Vienna school of astronomy, of which Peuerbach and Regiomontanus were members, was high enough to make the eventual development of heliocentrism inevitable, and indeed it is possible that Regiomontanus did arrive at an explicit theory of heliocentrism before his death in 1476, some 30 years before Copernicus. . . .<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n*<\/div>\nAnother possible source for Copernicus\u2019s knowledge of this mathematical device is the\u00a0Questiones de Spera<\/em>\u00a0of Nicole Oresme, who described how a reciprocating linear motion of a celestial body could be produced by a combination of circular motions similar to those proposed by al-Tusi.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nI wrote about bishop Nicole Oresme and\u00a0Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa at length in my 2010 book,\u00a0Science and Christianity: Close Partners or Mortal Enemies?<\/em><\/a>:<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
\n*<\/div>\n\n\nBob is Exhibit #1 of what C. S. Lewis called \u201cchronological snobbery\u201d and what G. K. Chesterton has written about:<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n(originally posted on 8-11-18)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n*<\/div>\nPhoto credit:<\/strong>\u00a0Armillary sphere, constructed by Antonio Santucci, c.\u00a01582. Wikipedia: \u201cThe armillary sphere was introduced to Western Europe via\u00a0Al-Andalus\u00a0in the late 10th century with the efforts of Gerbert d\u2019Aurillac, the later\u00a0Pope Sylvester II\u00a0(r. 999\u20131003).\u00a0Pope Sylvester II applied the use of sighting tubes with his armillary sphere in order to fix the position of the\u00a0pole star\u00a0and record measurements for the\u00a0tropics\u00a0and\u00a0equator.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0[Wikimedia Commons<\/a>\u00a0\/\u00a0Creative Commons<\/a>\u00a0Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported<\/a>\u00a0license]<\/div>\n*<\/div>\n***<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"