Thread by @TimONeill007

@RationalityRule The problem with just quoting nineteenth century freethinkers like Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens is they were terrible at history. Here Clemens is just parroting the notoriously bad pseudo history of Andrew Dickson White in his *History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and ...

@RationalityRule ... Christendom* (1896). The quote from Clemens comes from a November 3 1909 notebook entry by his biographer A. B. Paine, who also noted that in June 1909 “Clemens was re-reading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White's *Science and Theology*, which he called a ...

@RationalityRule ... lovely book” (Paine, Vol. 3, CCLXXXII). What Paine records Clemens saying in the quote above (Paine, Vol. 3, CCLXXXI) reflects White’s book perfectly. Of course, Clemens has the excuse of saying this in 1909, when White’s book was generally regarded as fairly reasonable ...

@RationalityRule ... history. In the century since then, however, it’s been thoroughly debunked and its whole thesis – the co-called “Draper-White Thesis” or “Conflict Thesis” of an eternal conflict between science and religion – has been completely rejected by historians of science. See ...

@RationalityRule ... here for a summary of the scholarship on this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_…
So Clemens is basing this assessment on a book that modern historians of science regard as biased and outdated junk. Modern historians do not accept that “the Church has opposed every innovation and ...

@RationalityRule ... discovery … down to our time”. They note there have been *some* examples of opposition – the opposition to evolutionary biology being the obvious and prominent example. But there are plenty of other innovations where not only have churchmen been at the forefront of ...

@RationalityRule ... inquiry but have been so *because* they have been inspired by their religious belief in a rationally ordered cosmos.
Clemens, like White, holds up the Galileo Affair as a straight-forward case of religion opposing science. This ignores the fact that the Church had the ...

@RationalityRule ...science very much on its side at the time and based its ruling on that firm consensus. That consensus only changed long after Galileo died. To present the Galileo case as “religion opposing science” is simplistic nonsense.
Likewise, the claim that “anesthetic in childbirth ...

@RationalityRule ... was regarded as a sin” comes directly from White’s book. And, like his version of the Galileo Affair, it’s nonsense. You can find a neat debunking of that myth here: bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/12/deep-s…
And the claim that “the Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and architecture” ...

@RationalityRule ... is typical nineteenth century idolisation of the ancient Greeks, complete with the quaint aesthetic idea that only realist art is “good” art that was being overturned by the post-impressionists and their successors even as Clemens was saying those words.
Again, Clemens ...

@RationalityRule ... had the excuse of being an old man speaking in 1909 when these ideas were at least reasonably respectable. No-one has that excuse now. So why does @RationalityRule keep peddling this dusty, outdated junk? Why can’t he do his homework on history for once in his life?