> My claim was that only in the Christian West did science become a self-sustaining enterprise
More than a *thousand* years after Christianity gained power. For all that time, science was frowned upon by Christianity. It wasn't until the church began to *lose* its grip on the west that science really took off.
> It's no accident that Newton's advances in physics followed shortly after the Church's dogmatic definition of "creation from nothing."
So you're saying the birth of Newton had something to do with Church dogma? Or that Church dogma helped spur his lifelong alchemists quest for the Philosophers Stone?
Well, one thing I'll grant you: Newton got his real start on developing calculus when the plague was ravaging London, and some of the blame for the plague can be laid at the doorstep of the church and those who banned cats as familiars, allowing rats to run wild and spread the disease further. So, in a way, yes, the Church helped bring on some of Newton's advances... but not in a way that would normally be considered positive.
You're funny. What "science" was "frowned on" by the Church, since modern science did not yet exist? Who funded Copernicus' astronomical studies?
It's no accident that Newton's advances in physics followed shortly after the Church's dogmatic definition of "creation from nothing."
So you're saying the birth of Newton had something to do with Church dogma?
Can't slip anything past you. You can find the relevant portions in the bolded passages above, and also below.
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? 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. 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.Or that Church dogma helped spur his lifelong alchemists quest for the Philosophers Stone?These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. 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. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.
You're slaying me. Is this the "science" the Church "frowned on"?
Well, one thing I'll grant you: Newton got his real start on developing calculus when the plague was ravaging London, and some of the blame for the plague can be laid at the doorstep of the church and those who banned cats as familiars, allowing rats to run wild and spread the disease further. So, in a way, yes, the Church helped bring on some of Newton's advances... but not in a way that would normally be considered positive.
Did you also know that there are tunnels between the convents and rectories, and that the babies born to the nuns are killed and buried in the basement?