and I suppose the movement towards individual rights and freedoms that were the Protestant Revolution had nothing to do it http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscie...much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden. But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.
your post manifests your ignorance of the subject. I have told you for years... our standard model has constants which are tuned to more than 20 decimal places... with the cosmological constant going out to over 120 places. you took years to even comprehend that...as you were still arguing 1950s science. A remember you spents posts and posts arguing the cosmological constant could be zero not realizing that changing the number out at the 120 th decimal place and the universe would cease to exist. its no wonder you ranted against the idea of unnaturalness... I suspect you had no idea it was used in scientific american. you have no core understanding of a area you have been bullshitting about for 7 years... just because it conflicts with your 1950s random cause world view.
try it... its called thought... those are big picture thoughts... of course a snarky troll like you will be able to find an exception. I will help you... if you want to be taken seriously... argue who the entire premise is incorrect not by raising an exception but by explaining how the math of the arabs led to western scientific advancements in one smooth line of intellectual evolution or that the early science of the greeks continued in one continuous line... or something worthy of reading for once. (not from salon.com but from real thinkers)
Every time this thread is bumped, I see, "Hawking: Gold did not create universe". No, Mr. Hawking, but it does keep it going.
douche bag phoenix at his thought apex.... its amazing how you just douche it up on thread after thread. does someone really pay you to ruin this board?
So you're standing by your statements that "the natural sciences grew out of Christian culture" and "it was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications"?