Why Catholicism Is True

[Torco]

the claim is not about medieval christians specifically though. i'm saying that "the ancients were not innocent to the idea that faith and reason might conflict".

Not every religious conflict is "faith vs. reason". Socrates was accused of impiety; that's an excellent reason not to put theocrats in power, but it doesn't mean that Athenians were tormented by evidence against their religion.

he was also accused of atheism, at least in the apology, if memory serves... yup, that's correct (man, i hadn't reread the apology in decades). there's a whole thing about meletus accusing socrates of being an atheist, and what precisely does that mean, and about socrates defending himself by going "it's not like my ideas are like those of anaxagoras, THAT guy's an atheist, not me!". the tale of anaxagoras is interesting too! while not as brazenly atheistic as, say, me, anaxagoras dared to posit that the sun might be not a god but instead (gasp! scandalous!) something very hot and very far away. this certainly seems like a society that's used to having -and punishing- people who don't fit in with religious orthodoxy.

of course it's a mistake, when looking at different places and times, to imagine the people living in them as basically the same as us, to imagine they had all of our same biases and preferences and cultural values and whatnot, this is the sin of ethnocentrism. but it is also a mistake to imagine them as something entirely different and to take what their texts say -written, in general, by highly specific subsets of the population for highly specific goals- at face value: those are the sins of exoticization and naivete. if you're studying any culture at any period, and the texts there go "oh, no, we can't even imaaagine there being any conflict between reason and faith, obviously there isn't any" and you know that if someone, at that time and place, would have been killed for saying there was some conflict between the two, then it behooves you to be suspicious.

atheism, agnosticism, and doubts about religion aren't modern ideas, just historically supressed ones. you find them in ancient india, in ancient china, in the ancient mediterranean, in ancient egyptian tombs, and probably elsewhere too i don't remember. point is it's easy to imagine oldtimers as being so spiritual and mystical and deeply religious as to not be able to imagine doubting the whole thing, when in reality they were probably just people... different, sure, in a bunch of ways, but also not so very different from us in others. some people could imagine a world without gods, other couldn't, just like today some people can and some people can't

the oldest song we have written down musical notation for, the song of sekilos, goes something like

while you're alive shine!
don't let anything make you too sad
cuz life is short and time doesn't forgive

might as well be a pop song, if you strum it right.

[zompist]

atheism, agnosticism, and doubts about religion aren't modern ideas, just historically supressed ones. you find them in ancient india, in ancient china, in the ancient mediterranean, in ancient egyptian tombs, and probably elsewhere too i don't remember. point is it's easy to imagine oldtimers as being so spiritual and mystical and deeply religious as to not be able to imagine doubting the whole thing, when in reality they were probably just people... different, sure, in a bunch of ways, but also not so very different from us in others. some people could imagine a world without gods, other couldn't, just like today some people can and some people can't

None of this is at issue. I am not saying atheists didn't exist, nor that ancients were all "spiritual and mystical". Plus, obviously, religions are institutions and institutions can have conflicts between each other and with individuals. All the worse if they're backed by the state.

But we were discussing whether religions can be rationalistic. And this is where modern atheists can project their own intellectual climate into the past. Medieval or ancient or Chinese or Indian or Egyptian people did not have the idea of evolution and modern psychology undermining the idea of creation and the soul, didn't have higher criticism and archeology contradicting origin myths, didn't have science providing excellent explanations of everything from the weather to neural behavior to gravity to crop growth to the first minutes of the cosmos. They weren't aware of the enormous stretches of time and space that we are. They lived in hierarchical societies and expected a hierarchical universe. Most of them knew only their own culture well and thus had more limited models of the world.

All of this puts religion on the defensive today, but it didn't before 1750 or so. You could be an atheist in ancient times, sure, but there was no better proof for atheism then than there was for any other belief system. Atheism was not more scientific or rational; it probably struck the majority as crankish and contrarian.

Also, again, ancient Greece is not typical of the past. It was unusual for religion to drift so far from philosophy; so far as I know, no one really tried to rationalize or systematize Greek mythology or mysticism. Neo-Platonism is not an attempt to dress up Zeus and Aphrodite and the rest in philosophical garb; it completely ignored popular religion.

[rotting bones]

Regarding Medieval scholarship, I believe there was an Islamicate scholar who did advance an idea of the survival of the fittest. Of course, he didn't have all the evidence Darwin did. The Quran's account of creation is so mystical that it doesn't necessarily imply Creationism. Basically, Allah literally controls everything all the time. Allah created you in the sense that His Will commanded your conception in the womb. His absolute power is so extravagant that it loops around to being compatible with a naturalistic account of historical events.

BTW, did you know the biography of Apollonius of Tyana says Nero banned philosophy in Rome? Such things happened in previous eras, though I don't know if this specific case is a legend or not.

[rotting bones]

In Islam, the idea that natural theology doesn't make sense is heresy. The Quran says that seeking knowledge leads to faith in God. There's an early Arabic novel called The Self-Taught Philosopher that tries to show how this is possible. Believers must seek knowledge to get close to Allah. It's not optional. Of course, the reason the Quran can say this is that its idea of "seeking knowledge" is contemplating natural phenomena, using your reason and praying for Allah to illuminate you. There's no conception of experimentation or falsification.

[rotting bones]

For a popular science book on the multiverse in physics, I recommend Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire.

[rotting bones]

My understanding is that in early Christianity, reasoning was often considered to be a prelude to faith. It wasn't the "simple" faith of megachurches at all. They thought human beings reason with the goal of reaching faith in the truth. The world is ordered logically. The logos of that logic is Jesus. This is obvious once you read Jesus into all your history books. Catholics still have a program to educate people about Christianity before admitting them into the church.

[zompist]

BTW, did you know the biography of Apollonius of Tyana says Nero banned philosophy in Rome? Such things happened in previous eras, though I don't know if this specific case is a legend or not.

I was curious about this... I have my doubts about this particular ban, but after doing some research, I think it's beyond what can be easily Googled.

The story of Apollonius dates from a manuscript, a hagiography full of miracles, written no earlier than the 220s-- Nero died in 68. Suetonius, who wrote in the 120s, doesn't mention it, and he would have loved to add to his catalog of Nero's crimes.

Suetonius does however attribute a ban on philosophers to Domitian. On the other hand, the historian Edward Watts writes

The emperor Domitian famously exiled philosophers from Rome and punished men who gave speeches praising Thrasea Paetus.
These actions against senatorial speech may have helped precipitate his fall, but they may also be largely literary creations. The supposed Domitianic
reign of terror against senatorial opponents seems largely to be a later literary fiction crafted by his opponents.

Mary Beard advises skepticism about all the accounts of the tyrant emperors. The Romans were not so good at the "succession" thing: most emperors were deposed, and the best way to prove that a deposal was virtue instead of thuggery was to spread stories about how the previous emperor was a tyrant. (At the same time they generally were horrible by modern standards.)

[Raphael]

Mary Beard advises skepticism about all the accounts of the tyrant emperors. The Romans were not so good at the "succession" thing: most emperors were deposed, and the best way to prove that a deposal was virtue instead of thuggery was to spread stories about how the previous emperor was a tyrant. (At the same time they generally were horrible by modern standards.)

I'm skeptical about skepticism about accounts of horrible human actions. I've got the impression that sometimes, you come across people who "just can't imagine" that other people might do certain things which, in fact, some people are known to have done on various occasions.

[zompist]

Mary Beard advises skepticism about all the accounts of the tyrant emperors. The Romans were not so good at the "succession" thing: most emperors were deposed, and the best way to prove that a deposal was virtue instead of thuggery was to spread stories about how the previous emperor was a tyrant. (At the same time they generally were horrible by modern standards.)

I'm skeptical about skepticism about accounts of horrible human actions. I've got the impression that sometimes, you come across people who "just can't imagine" that other people might do certain things which, in fact, some people are known to have done on various occasions.

Do you believe that Democrats were running a pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor?

That's obvious nonsense, yet many people believed it. So, in recent experience, we have people making up nonsense evil actions and attributing it to their political enemies.

Now, will it be quite so obvious that it's nonsense in 2000 years?

[Raphael]

Do you believe that Democrats were running a pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor?

That's obvious nonsense, yet many people believed it. So, in recent experience, we have people making up nonsense evil actions and attributing it to their political enemies.

Now, will it be quite so obvious that it's nonsense in 2000 years?

Fair enough. Then again, some other powerful people were involved in large-scale child rape.

[rotting bones]

I don't see the reason to obsess about him simply because he could be (not is) a traditionalist Catholic figure, when compared to people like the SSPX people who are traditionalist Catholics with influence.

Seeds that will germinate in the future are more important than things that currently exist.

Of course, someone who has changed his mind once might change it again, etc.