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And you really need to Google "selection bias." If you weren't devoutly religious, you didn't get the support from society you needed to do science.

Keeping this unfortunate state of affairs from happening again is becoming a very serious problem, even in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, nobody credits Newton's passions for alchemy and astrology for his insights -- only his Christianity.




> If you weren't devoutly religious, you didn't get the support from society you needed to do science.

Where is the data supporting this?


Can't reply to your last comment, so: no disrespect intended, and I'm sorry I took the bait. Enjoy the site. It was one of the last ones not taken over by woo merchants (along with the WSJ), but apparently the management policies and moderation guidelines are moving in a different direction.

If anyone has a suggestion for a site similar to HN's original spirit, but where longtime users are allowed to downvote stories, I'd be interested.


Look who's interested in data all of a sudden.


Please follow the HN guidelines and remain personally respectful.

Also, please abstain from flamewars on this site, especially religious flamewars.


I respect anyone who asks for data, actually. I just respect them more if they ask for data from everybody, not just me.

(Also, it's nice if what they ask for can be answered with unequivocal objective data, which I'm sure you'll agree isn't the case with cscurmudgeon's request.)


Social scientists and historians engage in data collection and processing like the one you described almost all the time.

There is a ton of data out there.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=christianity+and+science...


Go back to my original assertion ("If you weren't devoutly religious, you didn't get the support from society you needed to do science.") You hear stranger stuff from your clergyman every Sunday. Do you hold him to the same standard of proof?


Why do you think I believe in Christianity or what the clergy say? I don't.


Despite what you might think, I am a scientist with a PhD (oh the horror).

As I said elsewhere in this thread, the only quality argument seems to be Gödel's proof of God's existence which has been machine verified by Zalta's group at Stanford.

But on the other side, all I see are ad hominems and complete ignorance of arguments like Gödel's while attacking the easy targets like the 2000-year creationists and anti-vaccine groups.

Whatever :)


Actually, he has a point that many of the earliest scientists came from the perspective that a rational God would make a rational universe that obeyed rules that could be understood by humans.


And I have a point in that early scientists believed a large number of other ridiculous things that never seem to come up. We owe a lot of modern chemistry to alchemy and phlogiston "science," for instance, but only the coincidental religious interests of the scientists in question is credited in these discussions with advancing the state of the art.

Today, our concern should be with ways of thinking that move us forward, not with faith-based approaches that might or might not have been helpful to certain scientists in the past who lived and worked under wildly different circumstances.

As I said in another reply just now, I'm done with this thread, and with HN in general if the admins intend to post WSJ-style flamebait stories and attack people who bite.


> And I have a point in that early scientists believed a large number of other ridiculous things that never seem to come up.

Yes, certainly. The process of discovery is not always direct. Science has taken many false turns along the way and I won't be that surprised if there are more in the future. But I would note that you seem to have added quite a few arguments to my post that I never made. Or perhaps those were directed at someone else. I just don't like the common practice of retelling history to fit people's idea of how it should have been and you can find many people doing that for all different reasons. As you said, many believed wonky things, though I would also note that most of those amounted to nothing. Phlogiston (and ether, for that matter) were discredited, while the idea that the world obeys rules that can be understood by humans has proven correct, though I wonder just how much we know about the 'why' of that.

Finally, I would note that it's quite possible to disagree without being hostile, especially personally so. I'm pretty sure that's all dang is asking of us.


facepalm Well, at least you admit to being an ideologue rather than someone who cares about, like, reality. Kind of what I'm supposed to be afraid of religious people for, if you stop to think about it.




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