Overall has religion been a bigger hindrance or help to knowledge? I want to immediately say of course it hindered of the bat, but:
Some argue that the Catholic church helped tremendously by setting up universities and focusing on improving medicine in the medieval era.
At the same time you had people like Bacon and Copernicus who could die for questioning anything that didn't fit with Christianity. Was it much different on other continents?
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I think it's worth pointing out that the caste responsible for keeping track of the calendar in the earliest (Neolithic/bronze age) civilizations was almost always the priests. Come to think of it, I can't think of even one exception to this pattern.
Please do not conflate Catholicism with Christianity.
They're two entirely separate entities.
Over time I've lost the ability to answer these kinds of questions as I've also lost the ability to see how they matter in any way.
oh shit, you've started it now
it's hard to tell, since most if not all societies are religious in nature, the closest you'll come to an entire society living absent from religion is the Soviet Union and the extended bloc, but even then that was only on the books, with most of the people themselves still believers.
Taking the Soviet Union example, sure there were advancements and milestones achieved, space travel, aeronautics, rocketry, etc, but even still, most technology was woefully behind the western world by the 1980's and were probably 20-30 years behind by the time of the collapse.
it's not a shining example but it's probably the closest you'll come to a study of development in a large area with no institutionalized religion.
>Catholic church helped tremendously by setting up universities
This is true, but they also ensured that these universities focused on Aristotelian philosophy (by philosophy i mean basically everything). This lack of questioning massively delayed numerous discoveries.
Also numerous dark ages bibles used paper that had greek/latin texts and scratched off the old text. Old classical works were destroyed forever by this poor attitude towards classical works and so much knowledge
/thread
See pic related for a well-written argument on how it was a help (or at least far less of a hindrance than most would believe)
Neither Bacon nor Copernicus were killed by the Church...
>I want to immediately say of course it hindered
Name one way in which the Catholic Church hindered knowledge.
Churches where the place in Medieval Europe were books and lectured people recided, they gathered information and educated the masses until the burgeois revolution took over this, thanks to the invention of the print mostly, universities became a widespread thing by then also, so the distribution and consumption of knowledge got more polarized, but the Catholic Church played a huge rol in civilizing mankind, this comes from someone who doesn't particularly adhere to a religion before you ask.
It's completely the other way around. It's academics who were attached to Aristotelian dogma, and the Church which intervened to break that dogma and force academia to question Aristotle. See the 1277 Paris Condemnation. And using manuscripts to write prayers over is something that happened in the Byzantine Empire, not in the Catholic West.
Learn before talking.
Overall?
In it's capacity as a secular organization, yes.
In it's capacity as the source of revealed wisdom, no.
That's like asking whether government has had a positive impact on human development. In most cases yes, probably; but there's been instances where both have done really bad things.
I would argue that religion and spirituality are very rarely harmful to humanity by themselves. It's the secular organization that deserves criticism for the particular values it encourages/enforces in its adherents.
Not relevant to the main topic of the thread, just a side note.
I have learnt and evidence suggests that Marcus Aurelius and St Augustine both Christianized Aristotelian philosophy. It was the only 'pagan' philosophy that was compatible with christianity and thats why Aristotelian dominated medieval learning unchallenged.
If Catholicism really wanted to challenge Aristotelianism why did it punish Galileo for providing a rebuttal of Aristotle's physics? (see Galileo's demonstation on the tower of pisa/ heliocentrism)
I'm quoting much of the link between Aristotelianism and Catholicism, and how it impeded science from this: davidhume.org
Written by an Oxford professor in Philosophy. I have learnt just from different sources to you. Don't be a fucking twat.
see , specifically the "Galileo, Inevitably" heading
Obvious bait
OK? So that single part of my argument is wrong. But is it still not true that Catholicism perpetuated Aristotelian knowledge whilst hiding most other classical schools of thought away from academia?
Additionally the argument in that article says that the church didn't persecute Galileo, the scientific orthodoxy did. But I'm saying that the scientific orthodoxy was enforced by the church. Read the introduction I sent you.
Couldn't be more wrong. Maybe you're thinking of Platonism.
The authority of Aristotle in the West was established much later, most notably by Peter Abelard around 1100. He was a logician and argued in favour of Aristotelian logic. He famously used it in order to rationally explain the Christian dogma of transubstantiation, which played a big role in him getting the Church on his side. From then on the Church embraced reason and Aristotelian logic (this is the same logic we still use today), and the scholastic method that was born from it.
After that, logic and reason reigned supreme at the universities, but as a consequence of Aristotle's prestige, his Physics turned into dogma among the academia as well. But the Church, while supporting Aristotle's Logic, was always more ambivalent about his Physics, since it partially contradicted Christian philosophy. The Church even briefly banned the teaching of Aristotle during the 13th century, but this was never really enforced, and generally it left academia relatively independent. But in 1277 the bishop of Paris issued a condemnation stating that while Aristotle's Physics could still be taught at the University, it could no longer be taught as absolute fact.
This forced the University to allow questioning of Aristotle, and in the following decades Western natural philosophers made advances in physics for the first time in 1600 years, most notably Buridan and Oresme (who discovered every physical law and theorem that was later attributed to Galileo, who merely rediscovered their work after it had been swept under the rug by Renaissance Humanism).
1277 can be considered the birth date of modern science. And it's the Church that broke the dogma. Secular academia can be just as conservative and dogmatic as religion.
The 1277 Condemnation wasn't specifically designed to encourage criticism of Aristotelian physics. It just wanted to ban it and make scholars focus on theology. Whilst it had the positive side effect of prompting scholars to question Aristotelian physics and produce the new discoveries, if the Catholics had really had their way, Aristotelianism would've gone the way with the other classical schools and all that would be left was theology. It was the scholars decision to reaquire classical works from Greece and Arabia that led to even more criticism and less dogmatism.
No, it wanted to break the Aristotelian dogma because it contradicted Christian philosophy, like I just said. It certainly didn't want to make natural philosophers become theologians, that doesn't even make sense. And the Church was the biggest supporter of natural philosophy for the reasons I already mentioned. Natural philosophy was considered the "hand-maiden" of theology.
>if the Catholics had really had their way
Who are "the Catholics"? You realise everyone in Western Europe was a Catholic?
>It was the scholars decision to reaquire classical works from Greece and Arabia that led to even more criticism and less dogmatism.
How exactly do you think acquiring works that all Aristotelian dogma would lead to less dogmatism?
In fact what you just said is what the Humanists did during the Renaissance. And as a result, they labelled all medieval scientific works as dark age barbarism and threw them to the trash, and their obsession with ancient Greek works is what caused Aristotelian dogma to make a huge comeback and stifle all progress in physics for the following three centuries, until Galileo rediscovered Buridan's and Oresme's works.
*acquiring works that all support
Although acquiring them isn't even the problem, that's what the Church started doing very early on. Acquiring, preserving, copying. The trouble is when people worship those texts like holy scripture, especially when they contain as much bullshit as Aristotle's Physics does. And it's the Church that prevented this from happening, thanks to its healthy skepticism towards Aristotle, at least prior to the Renaissance.