science vs. religion

John C. Wright has an interesting dialogue with a reader about the Christian origins of empirical science. To wit, medieval Christianity, drawing from Greek and Jewish sources, posited that the world was created by a God who laid down orderly and systematic laws for His creation, and these laws could be discovered and understood. This is in contrast to the pre-Christian pagan view, that we are at the mercy of capricious and cruel gods and spirits, or the Muslim view, that Allah is supreme and arbitrary. In other words, medieval and ancient Christians were not nearly as ignorant and superstitious as the modern popular image (or certain films) portrays.

Actually, this touches on a pet peeve of mine, that we 21st-century people are more advanced and enlightened than our ancestors. We’re not. We just have better toys, that’s all.

I’ve been reading about the American Civil War lately, and it strikes me how very little has changed since then. That is, how little the essential character of people has changed, despite technological advancement. People might complain about the partisan vitriol of political bloggers, but they’re not very different from Civil War-era newspaper writers. In the old days, if you wanted to push a political viewpoint, you started a newspaper and called it the Minnesota Democrat Herald or the Minnesota Republican Caller or something (in fact, I believe both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton started newspapers to attack each other, and that was during the very first Presidential term in US history). Nowadays, you start a blog. Technology has made it easier and lowered the entry cost, but the driving impulse and the underlying purpose remains the same.

For as Christianity (and Judaism) says, there is nothing new under the sun.

-JM