Trouble rears its
James Hannam reiterates that religion and science have always been quite matey despite what Some People say to the contrary.
…today, science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet. Both are capable of doing enormous good, but their chances of doing so are much greater if they can work together. The award of the Templeton Prize to Lord Rees is a small step in the right direction.
Well religion is one of the most powerful intellectual forces on the planet if by “intellectual force” you mean “force that interferes with humans’ best intellectual skills,” but I suspect that’s not what Hannam wants us to take away from his happy thought.
He has some critics on that post, too. Like the one by James Hrynshyn:
…it seems the facts as laid out by Prof. Hannan’s review suggest the precise opposite of the idea that science and religion can work well together. He notes that the two are compatible when science does not challenge anything consequential. So long as science sticks to abstract notions, everyone gets along. But as soon as science challenges anything the churches care about, trouble rears its ugly head.
It’s the usual thing – yes they can “get along” if religion stays in its compartment; no they can’t “get along” in any substantive sense.
“Getting along” can mean a lot of different things. For example, I can “get along” just fine with my mother-in-law as long I stick to the topics of food, sport, weather or my daughter, because we agree on those things. But disagree on any topic, however nicely and innocently or even inadvertently, and she instantaneously switches to a passive-aggressive paranoid sociopath who thinks I’ve got it in for her.Ditto faith: we can all agree that rainbows are nice, but dare mention that it’s down to refraction instead of shining out of a unicorn’s arse and onto a pot of leprechaun gold and all of sudden we’re intolerant fundamentalist materialists with an axe to grind about poor grandma’s harmless beliefs.
Heh. Quite. I can get along with certain people provided they stay off certain topics. The trouble is…they never do!
:- )
Trouble rears its what?!
The suspense is killing me…
Anyway,
Might get some flak for this but I’m not convinced science is. ‘Leadin intellectual force.’ Mind you I do consider it an indispensible tool and think it should be but it definitely does have the impact religion and idealogies around the world do. It’s just (to most in the West) some wishing font or vague enemy to be compated.
Right on the money, Jimmy!
I noticed in the “Latest News” section on the front page of this blog the tizzy over women serving mass in Cambridge. Without Religion, how would we have ever discovered that it’s Wrong for women to do so? By waiting for Science to weigh in? Hardly.
Clearly we need them both: Science can tell us how the universe works, and Religion can tell us who’s getting all uppity.
I think it is more that science and religion get along as long as science minds its own damned business and doesn’t look into things like consciousness and mind; you know the things that dualists insist are separate from the brain.
“if they can work together.”
Oops. Sorry, they can’t. They don’t.
I can’t wait to read about how much agricultural practice advanced under slavery.
The Independent (London) had a good article on 19th May headed “Church and state clash over sex and condoms in the Philippines.’ It told how, in this 80 per cent Catholic country, population had doubled in the past thirty years to 94 million with many living in acute poverty. There are an estimated 560,000 illegal abortions a year of which some 90,000 develop complications. The state has been trying to encourage condom use. The Archbishop of Manila recently told a rally against this policy that ‘Sex is not a game that should be taught to children, along with the use of condoms, supposedly [don’t you just love that ‘supposedly’] to avoid disease’. The latest call by the Church ( and I do not make this up) is to call for condoms to have warning labels saying that they create a false sense of security and encourage promiscuity. If a papal warning on the packet does not put you off sex for life I don’t know what will.
So science and religion really are cosy here. Again, I don’t know what proportion of Christians believe in creationism and/or ID but it seems very high. If this is not a clash between religion and science I don’t know what is. In fact, it is quite difficult to find Christians who are enthusiastic about the possibilities of science and please will someone tell me what recent developments in religious thought can be called intellectual.
I only got involved with james Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers ( in the States The Genesis of Science) when its strange appearance on the Royal Society’s Science Book of the Year shortlist risked making it appear a serious work of history. So the review that I wrote to be found under ‘Charles Freeman God’s Philosophers’ online. The US seem much more canny- the book was published by a deeply conservative publisher Regnery and is bought alongside other right-wing tracts. Hannam has shown his true colours by being interviewed by Tea party supporters and climate change deniers (see his Facebook entry under James Hannam Genesis of Science). i think he has found a home for himself at last! Of course, the five star reviews on Amazon keep rolling out. I have been asked to write a shorter review shredding the book again but really no one in the Tea party world in which he has now taken up residence is going to listen to me and there is not a shred of evidence that he is taken seriously outside this. There are better things to be getting on with. Charles Freeman
It’s exactly the same as claiming that centuries of art were religiously inspired simply because the Church provided the funding. The Communists were giants in funding science, too, and in medicine we’re even using information collected in experiments the Nazis conducted in concentration camps. Needless to say, none of that exculpates the ideologies involved.
There is something very _special_ about the argument that science was the product of Christianity, ignoring as it does ancient, medieval and modern history. It’s certainly the case that, on and just above the surface of our planet, motion and friction are closely related, and the latter is frequently exploited to achieve the former, but that’s not to say that they generally tend to the same result.
“Exposing the truth about global warming, media bias, liberal bigots and Hollywood Left-Wingers. No subject is too taboo as Mark Gillar interviews some of today’s leading authors and political thinkers. …” (From Gillar’s radioblog.)
James Hannam is one of Mark Gillar’s ‘leading authors’ interviewed by him recently. It’s actually quite rare to find a Brit tied up in Tea party circles- it really seems a movement beyond the comprehension of anyone with a working mind, but one must take folks as one finds them…. It certainly puts him beyond the pale as a serious scholar so he is digging his own hole here.
[…] Are Not the Same, Dr. Hannam! by TempleoftheFuture under Current Affairs Ophelia Benson, over at Butterflies and Wheels, put me onto an interesting post by James Hannam. Hannam “has a PhD in the History and […]
Thanks for pointing this out. It’s a poor argument. Faith Vs. Reason =/= Religion Vs. Science. False equivalence. Not good. I weep for Cambridge.
[…] And now we come to James Hannam’s review of The God Delusion. This is timely, since Ophelia has something up about James Hannam over at Butterflies and Wheels this morning. Some critics call Dawkins smug, but for smugness […]
Charles;
Thanks much for the review. I found God’s Philosophers a good read, informative and not argumentative, so I was a bit surprised by this statement from Hannam. I find it more abhorrent to denigrate and take sides under the guise of being conciliatory than just coming out and stating your case. I’m glad to be alive in a period that is reassessing the Enlightment but doing that poorly doesn’t really help. A better understanding of the roots of Christian fundamentalism as well as the bad scholarship of Huxley, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White will help settle the science vs religion problem. Hannam’s work might help to popularize that, but might also lead to further misunderstandings.
Must find that Indy article that Charles mentioned…
Two issues: 1) Cause and effect – is there something special or different about Christianity that directly led to the development of science? or was it that money, power and education were centered in the church and where else would you expect intellectual innovation to arise?
2) The present is not the past. Even if Christianity directly led to science 300, 400, 500 years ago, does it have anything to offer to science today?
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Jwolforth.
Give me a break, it’s just Christian apologetics write large. What is the intellectual part of religion and especially Christianity. The flat earth held aloft on four pillars which is the centre of the solar system (the universe doesn’t seem to exist in the Bible.) The sky is a firmament which has windows to let the body of water orbiting the earth make rain. Insects have four legs (is god blind), demons cause disease and don’t even get me started on the cure for leprosy. Bats are birds WTF, cooking with human excrement (trust me it’s there.) Not to mention the slavery, genocide, misogyny and parental care which would give a social worker a heart attack. Ho! But some people where allow to explore their surrounding as long as they didn’t question this book of lunacy. Do you really think the obscene penalties (burning at the stake) did not give free thinkers pause for thought. James Hannam can take is ‘history is so mean to Christianity’ meme and shove it where the sun don’t shine hopefully followed by a blunt rusty double bladed knife.
It doesn’t surprise me that Tim O’Neill and Humphrey Clarke are defending James, but this comment that O’Neill posted in response to a claim the Church suppressed science does surprise me:
No, my argument is that no scientists at all were suppressed, as that long list of esteemed Medieval scientists who practised their analysis of the physical world unmolested shows. For the whole 20+ years I have been studying this stuff I have been asking people to give me an example of the Medieval Church suppressing any scientist at all. So far no-one has come up with a single one.
In an organization as political as the Church is and was, this strikes me as very odd and frankly unbelievable. The Catholic is suppressing science today – just look at their view on HIV and condoms.
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I’m sorry but James Hannam and his Christian apologetics really pisses me off. Does he really think that the innovation of the Anglo-Saxons and the adventurous nature of the Vikings wouldn’t have led us to modern science. The Greeks where very good at introspective thinking but the nature of the Anglo-Saxons/Viking nature in wanting to conquer the world as they saw it would have easily led to modern science and we would not have had to wait so long without Christianity retarded thinking. We could be inhabiting the solar system by now as well as exploring the galaxy while having a cure for cancer and other ailments. Ho! The Christian church was so full of learning centres but so long as you kept a sharp eye on the Bible while you where exploring your surrounding. I’m sure all those burnings at the stake never give any free thinkers pause for thought. Ho! But the rest of the world didn’t have Christianity and they never invented modern science? Well they wouldn’t would they HELLO Anglo-Saxon/Viking nature. Dark ages/medieval ages is just another word for the Christian repression of free thought.
Well it’s like soft tissue, and fabric, and fruit – it doesn’t leave a record. A lot of church suppression will have happened without leaving any record at all (and a lot of records will have disappeared over time). It’s a bit ridiculous to assume that “no record”=”nothing happened”.
In 1559, pope Paul IV issued the first major Index of Prohibited Books. There were 904 items on it, some of them simply the name of an author all of whose books were banned. On March 18th of that year the energetic cardinal Michele Ghilsieri, later pope Pius V, claimed that he had burned between 10,000 and 12,000 books in Rome on that day alone. The Index was doubled in size in 1596. Of course, to maintain Hannam and O’Neill’s thesis, someone went through all the books before they were thrown on the flames, took out the ones that dealt with science (even though this was not defined as such in that period- but the Church always knows best) and preserved them. The point is that the Counter-Reformation saw a widespread programme of repression which is well detailed in Christopher Black’s The Italian Inquisition. To suggest somehow that the Church supported science among all this is hilarious.
The more I read Hannam’s book and checked on his references or complete lack of them as ,for instance, in his extraordinary portrayal of the the humanists as ‘incorrigible reactionaries’, the more his arguments fell apart. The point I made in my review (Charles Freeman God’s Philosophers) was that when the book was so obviously weak as a work of history , more people have not rumbled it. When I asked around a limited circle of contacts in Britain, it seemed in fact that it had not come the way of historians. If any scholar of humanism had read it they would have laughed it out of court.
This is especially true in cases where the suppression was passive as opposed to active. There would be no need to document it if the very environment discouraged scientists from expressing their views because they ran counter to church teachings. An example of this would be, IIRC, Kepler who was hesitant to make public his thoughts on eliptical orbits of the planets after seeing what happened to others that had broadcast their opinions and theories.
It’s kind of like saying football and paraplegia are compatible. Can you think of any particular instances of paraplegics being thrown off football teams?
I can’t think of any explicit examples of “scientists” being persecuted by the church because the church controlled access to most of the scholarship and materials that would be required by anyone hoping to do science. It gets even worse with folks like Hannam insisting that there was a rigorous way to determine which aspects of Bruno’s teaching were natural philosophy and which merely heresy.
There wasn’t, but it hardly matters. To the church at the time, science was the “handmaiden of theology”; the results of scientific investigation weren’t subject to adversarial peer review, the church alone determined the validity of any particular empirical finding, and did so through the lens of whether or not it was consistent with doctrinal orthodoxy. Those wishing to perform falsificatory testing — the gold standard of 20th century scientific method — of accepted scientific principles would be very unlikely to be granted access to the necessary materials by a church that had given itself final and absolute authority on questions of truth.
In short, there’s no question that the church would support scientists/natural philosophers who were making arguments consistent with or orthogonal to the church’s doctrine, but that’s not really “science.” Good science is skeptical and adversarial, and these principles are not consistent with an organization that both determines what does and does not constitute knowledge and then controls access to that knowledge. Hannam and others arguing against the conflict thesis need to explain a very simple principle: how can an institution that considers heresy as a crime legitimately claim to be pro-science? Very simply, it can’t. An institution that places arbitrary limits on the questions researchers can ask and reserves the right to veto results it doesn’t like is quite simply anti-scientific.
Preventing the conflict deniers from conflating science as a body of knowledge as opposed to a methodology is important here. There’s no denying that churchmen like Linnaeus compiled a great deal of the data that ended up being the impetus for modern scientific theories. But gathering data is only one part of science, and as much as the church may have supported such activities (as long as they served to glorify God and His Creation), it also constrained the development of scientific theories by asserting things to be true or false by fiat rather than by any systematic method.
Keep reminding people that it’s scientific methodology, not scientific facts, that the church suppressed — not necessarily intentionally or explicitly, but because of the philosophical premises implicit in its own claims to epistemological and moral authority.
Oh dear…how similar that sounds to Richard Evans’s experience with David Irving. Not to compare the two; just to say that popular histories can get away with that if no one checks, and usually, no one checks. Checking Irving’s was enormously labor-intensive.
I had better write this quickly before all the networks and a lot else besides closes down at 6 pm this evening. Somehow I don’t think many of the contributors to this site can be sure they will be taken up in ‘the rapture’.
The way the Christian apologists work is very interesting but you do have to know your stuff to confront them. For instance, they have an obsession with whether Christians burned down the library in Alexandria or not, challenging all and sundry to prove that they did. Last Year I intervened in a blog discussion on this to make the point that there was an awful lot of evidence that Christians at this period were burning books even if the Alexandria case might not be proved. The abuse that followed!
The evidence comes from all over- the triumphalist account of the destruction of the temples of Gaza by bishop Porphyry which tells how sacred texts were destroyed, the archaeological evidence- the library at Sagalassos seems to have been looted just at the same time as there was reported tension between Christians and others in the 390s – and the laws passed against ‘heretics’. One of these ,of 409, reads ‘If perchance any person should be convicted of having hidden any of these books under any pretext or fraud whatsoever and of having failed to deliver them [for burning]. he shall know that he himself shall suffer capital punishment, a a retainer of noxious books and writings’. Scriptural backing was provided by Acts 19:19 ‘ And a good many of those who formerly practised magic collected their books and burnt them publicly” ( This was when Paul was preaching in Ephesus.) This text was used to justify the extensive book-burning that went on in the second half of the sixteenth century which also justified the practice by quoting an alleged burning of library in Rome by pope Gregory the Great.
The evidence is all there if you want to study this subject seriously.I get angry with the holier than thou comments that anyone who criticises ‘the Christianity loves science and freedom of speech’ thesis does not know what the historians are saying. There is a host of well-argued books by acknowledged authorities that spell out the ways in which the church suppressed freedom of thought. (Christopher Black on The Italian Inquisition is an excellent measured account based on the new material released from the Vatican archives which details ,among other things, the case where torture was ordered.) Hannam likes to pretend he represents contemporary scholarship but until he can show a single recent study that supports his views on humanism no one should take him seriously.
Follow-up. For those who have not read Hannam’s book, his argument is that the medievalists were all great, founding science ( the Greeks are discarded!), etc. etc. Then came along the wicked humanists who were ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ who spent all their times studying Greek and Roman texts to no avail and denigrating the medieval thinkers. Then along comes Galileo who does have his misunderstandings with an essentially benign church ( no mention of book-burnings in Hannam!) but somehow triumphs. As I pointed out according to the historian of science Edward Grant it was in fact Galileo who was foremost in denigrating the medievalists so Hannam’s argument that Galileo drew on medieval science to found modern science (something for which the foremost biographer of Galileo, John Heilbron, can find no evidence) simply collapses.
Hannam’s ignorance of humanism is unforgivable. He wrote his PhD praising the movement as reforming Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth century , then in his response to my critique of his book (online as part of Charles Freeman God’s Philosophers discussion), he says he changed his mind and saw the humanists as reactionaries. However, in his book he provides not a single source to support his new stance. As i am working on this subject at the moment, I have a pile of recent works on the relationship of humanism with new movements of thought- I particularly like Brian Ogilvie on The Science of Describing (Chicago, 2006) because it shows why the medievalists were incapable of serious study of the natural world and how humanism led to the rebirth of natural history in the sixteenth century. This is typical of the work being done and blows Hannam’s thesis, and the idea that he is relying on recent research, out of the water. In fact , an interesting introductory essay by Anthony Grafton and Nancy Sirasi in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (MIT 1999) dates Hannam’s thesis to long discarded works by Thorndike and Crombie, etc,in the 1940s, early 1950s and goes on: ‘Few would now maintain the strong form of the the thesis of continuity between scholastic science and a clearly delimited Scientific Revolution’. Then one David Lindberg is quoted ‘ The more extreme claims made on behalf of medieval science and its anticipation of early modern developments are not merely exaggerated,but false’. And Lindberg is claimed to be a supporter of Hannam’s thesis! You can see why Hannam’s book simply dissolves into dust when it is examined critically.
Well if ‘Christian logic’ is right, this might be my last posting- good luck to all in the coming firestorm!
yes we know hannam. Read this : http://newhumanist.org.uk/2444/science-gods-philosophers-and-the-dark-ages where charles freeman debunks hannam’s book about that lovely religion where all science came from.
David Leech;
I reread my post to try to figure what bothers you and other than “it was a good read” I can’t figure it out. I’m not a scholar, so I appreciate the help of Mr. Freeman in finding alternate sources. I did notice that footnotes disappear at some very critical generalizations made by Hannam. Unfortunately I have found few good books on Medieval times. The common story is, there was Aristotle, then Rome fell and something happened in Baghdad, then Spain was conquered and Greek texts were “rediscovered” and then we got science. Not very good history especially for its Eurocentric bent.
Maybe you misunderstood my comments about fundamentalism. I understand the fundamentalists I actually meet now that I know about the pamphlets distributed in 1910 by Lyman and Stewart. That movement has popularized the idea that certain core beliefs have always existed and are the core of Christianity. I put Hannam in the same category of attempting to rewrite history, although for very different reasons.
Not sure why you felt it necessary to discuss firmaments and bats.
“Hannam has shown his true colours by being interviewed by Tea party supporters and climate change deniers”
What a fallicious thing to say. By your same logic (or at least what counts for logic), Prof. Dawkins is a raving creationist just because he was interviewed by the Answers in Genesis guy a few years back. Whilst I cannot speak on his behalf, Dr Hannam’s interview does not seem to portray him as an ‘average’ tea party supporter, in fact at several points in the interview he takes the time to point out that he does not share the same views as the interviewer. Attempting to downplay the credibility of his work based on an ad hominem attack does not really reflect well on yourself.
Chris. So why did he choose to be published by Regnery- a press which makes no secret that it is a mouthpiece for US conservatism. You do need to put evidence together and spot the consistencies. I have made my own critique of Hannam’s scholarship at ‘Charles Freeman God’s Philosophers’.
As I’ve said before, I am not familiar with Dr Hannan to know the reasons as to why he went with that particular publisher. Perhaps they had a link with his current UK publisher, perhaps Dr Hannan felt that it would be the best publisher for reaching a wide audience, or perhaps more simply, it was the only offer on the table from America and he took the offer in the belief that if he waited any longer the chances of getting the book published on that side of the Atlantic would be slim indeed. But I doubt the fact that the publisher is conservative is a reason why he went with them, much less the only reason.
How like Fahrenheit 451 that sounds.
That’s interesting. Medieval painters certainly seemed to be incapable of seeing it (at least in the sense of noticing the discrepancy between what they saw and what they painted). I wonder if the reasons are the same…
Chris- You only have to look at ‘What other customers have bought’ on Amazon to see that his book fits into a certain niche.
Ophelia. Yes, this is a fascinating area. There is a wealth of new material on fifteenth / sixteenth century humanism. ( It is a growth area in scholarship at the moment as the I Tatti Renaissance Library is publishing modern translations of a lot of key humanist texts.) The humanists knew Greek so they were able to rediscover many original Greek texts and critique them. Someone like Dioscorides, a first century AD natural historian from Cilicia who lists 700 plants , the drugs that could be taken from them and then studies the clinical effects on patients, was a hero to the sixteenth century natural historians. It encouraged acute observation, something that was lacking in the medieval era.Leonardo ,of course, was a pioneer of both acute observations and also the study of processes, such as the development of chicks. One had to wait until later in the sixteenth century for woodcuts to be clear enough for scientific illustrations to be disseminated to the academic community, another development of the sixteenth century- the range of contacts the leading humanists had is extraordinary. Ogilvie is excellent on the competitive spirit as ,following Dioscorides who was known for his extensive travelling in search of new plants, natural historians vied with each other in finding new species (and this means they had to develop means of classification). This is the essence of science which is why the sixteenth century humanists can be seen as crucial.You have to have a lively community free to carry out their own researches and argue with each other over empirical evidence. In my recent relic book, Holy Bones, published in the US today!, I devoted a chapter to Pietro Pomponazzi who was the first ‘modern’ to scrutinise miracles. He introduces ideas such as the placebo effect as in cases where fraudulent relics appear to cause miracles. This was an important development as a miracle based society as medieval Europe was, cannot produce systematic study of natural laws- they can always be subverted by HIm on High! Naturally Pomponazzi’s book on this went on to the notorious 1559 index of Prohibited Books.
When I picked up Hannam’s book in a bookshop and saw that he described the humanists as ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ and then ‘ A fifteenth or sixteenth century humanist was simply someone who was interested in classical Greek and Latin literature’ ( p. 212), I knew that this could not be a serious work of scholarship.
Thank you, Charles, that’s a wonderful aperitif – it makes me hungry for more. Want to know more about Dioscorides – he sounds like another Herodotus. Must read Ogilvie at once.
Congratulations on publication day in US!
Thanks, Ophelia. We will see how it goes-the Los Angeles Times has given it a good start.
Don’t get too excited about the Ogilivie as he is an academic and does not write with passion but he represents the recent close study of the relationship between humanism and progressive thought and I have found it a sane and satisfying book. Just as the Christian apologists get obsessed with the Library at Alexandria and completely miss the wider scholarship on the subject of book destruction in the fourth and fifth centuries, so too they are obsessed about Galileo and again miss the low-level but vitally important developments in science in the sixteenth century that have nothing whatsoever to do with religion, any more than they do now. It was when someone such as Pomponazzi encroached on church teaching ,as had to be done with miracles if scientific thought was to achieve validity in its own right, that the Catholic Church pounced. One reason why I am bored with the Hannam debate is that it has absolutely nothing to do with any serious historian working in this area – or none that i can find when scouring the shelves in history of science in the Cambridge University Library.In fact, he is really stuck in the debates of the 1940s that have long since been superseded. What is truly fascinating is that he and his supporters claim some kind of moral superiority over those of us who are merely jobbing historians trying to keep up with actual historical research! We are apparently biassed, out of touch,etc,etc. Well so be it!
i meant to add that after I had given a lecture on ‘The Greek Achievement’ a couple of months ago, someone came up to tell me how disappointed they were that I had not mentioned Dioscorides – he is a hero to anyone interested in the history of plants.I had to explain that there was rather a lot of ‘Greek Achievement’ but the more I know about him the more I am tempted to bring him in as an excellent example of Greek scientific practice and quite late, first century AD so a good example of how long-lived this tradition was- and it was, of course, by no way finished – Galen,Ptolemy ,etc.
No I prefer academic history – I don’t like “passion.” I supply that myself – I love intellectual history. Guthrie on Greek philosophy for instance.
Quoting P. Z. Myers, prior to his giving a lecture here in London next week:
“I think you can guess from the title what it will be about. I’ll be discussing how science works, what we know, and the folly of trying to find compatibility between science and religion.”