Science and absolute theological truths
Charles Freeman replies to James Hannam’s reply to Freeman’s criticism of Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers.
My most important point, and one that Hannam does not even address in his response, is that, in comparison to the Greeks the natural philosophers operated within the context of a much more authoritarian society. Christianity brought the concept of absolute theological truths, many ring-fenced as “articles of faith” which, as Hannam notes, apparently with approval, were unchallengeable.
That has to have been a considerable stumbling block, surely.
As intellectual life evolved in the Middle Ages, no one quite knew where the boundaries lay, the threat of heresy was used all too widely in personal power struggles between opposing factions and individuals and the ultimate punishment was burning on earth as a preliminary to eternal burning in hell. If Hannam cannot see how this affected free discussion in the Middle Ages, there is little hope for him. Yet, as I show in my critique, he even seems to be sympathetic to the process.
Well that would slow me right down, I can tell you. Burning? Oh well I guess I’ll just stick with making shoes.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Science and absolute theological truths http://dlvr.it/8HlsX […]
It’s what has to be pointed out whenever someone cites how prevalent Christianity is as an argument for its validity. People didn’t have a choice about it; if they said they didn’t believe, they’d be killed.
And, similarly if I lived in an era like that and for whatever reason I secretly didn’t believe and had children, of course I’d raise them to be believers. Godless people who raised their children to be godless probably didn’t live all that long, since it wouldn’t take very long to go from ‘My Mama and Papa say that God isn’t real and Jesus is a lie to console the unsophisticated’ to ‘Burn, witch’.
Then, after a few dozen generations, it – for the most party – became intertwined with cultural identity and means almost nothing in practice. Really, the only functional difference between a huge proportion of Christians and the average atheist is that the former answers ‘yes’ to the question ‘are you a Christian?’
The parallels between the way the Church in late medieval times dealt with people looking for truth and the way communist regimes dealt with them is striking. Both of them knew that “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” to quote one of the patron saints of the Church which seems to have consistently ignored this particular advice. And still does.
Just entered a comment on your previous post of the 6th and then saw this one. Thanks for keeping the debate going. It is an important one, not least when a book like God’s Philosophers is given mainstream academic support. Best wishes, Charles.
Ophelia, you need not worry too much about my missing out on a Templeton prize (see your earlier blog). When my pension plan begins to get too low, I simply have to write a book to say that I saw a rainbow, was convinced by it that God existed and have now converted back to Christianity. Then the Templeton dollars will start to flow in! They can never resist repentant sinners.
There’s also how one was likely able to avoid disagreement by simply talking in terms of God, no matter how heretical one’s viewpoints were from the perspective of Christianity. Some people (at least later in the scientific revolution) seemed to just look the other way when it was plain that Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, etc. were almost to a man heterodox. (Exception is likely Boyle.)
Charles Freeman
The discussion is kind of drawing me into wanting to know more about the period – are there any books you would recommend for the layman?
Dear Bruce, Thanks. It depends on which period you mean. Obviously I have covered a lot on the period 300-600 in my Closing of the Western Mind and AD 381 and I have Holy Bones, Holy Dust, How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe coming out next April with Yale. If you want the Enlightenment period, the big name is Jonathan israel, whom I find absorbing but he weighs in at over 2000 pages so hardly for the layman. Perhaps you can let me know exactly what you are interested in and what period specifically. I may, or may not, be able to help but will do my best.
Charles
300 to 800, with a view on xenophobia and what, if any, effect going from a polytheist to a monotheist religion had on it.
Declaration of interest: I’ve been a Freeman fan ever since I read TCOTWM.
In his reply to Hamann’s reply Charles Freeman provides one very useful tip showing how a non-expert reader can spot a pseud when he mentions “Hamann’s failure to footnote provocative statements.” A book with an ‘exciting’ or ‘original’ interpretation of historical data can come with a massive and intimidating array of references that simply bedazzle the educated public into concluding:”wow if the author’s put that much research into it he must somehow have got it right even if it sounds like a load of hogwash”. Holocaust semi-denier David Irving was a past master in that technique of re-writing history to fit ideologically desired conclusions.
Indeed, one wonders what kind of evidence would Hamann require in order to consider that he might just be mistaken. Isn’t the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (first edition: 1559) enough? It wasn’t ‘dissolved’ until 1966 and, according to ex-Cardinal Ratzinger, it ‘still retains its moral force’.
Dear Bruce, I do try to cover the early part of the period in my two books which I leave other readers on this blog to tell you about. Two books on 500-800 to start on are Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, as cited in my reply to Hannam. Its weighty but this is as good a history of the period as you will get. Also very good is Julia Smith, Europe After Rome. A Cultural History 500-1000 (Oxford UP) . There’s a dated but interesting book by the late Valerie Flint: The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe which I would also recommend if you can find a copy. It’s a difficult period as the sources are so scarce and different parts of Europe reacted so differently. Hannam’s view on ‘progress’ is not borne out and one of the first reasons why I discarded this book as not a serious work of scholarship (when one has such good alternatives as the two books I have just cited) within ten minutes of finding it in a bookshop! Good reading.
Dear Carolus Hibernicus. Yes, what can one do? I was brought up a Catholic so I know that world well and it pervades God’s Philosophers.. My point in my first critique was not that I objected to Hannam being a Catholic but that one could not understand his arguments without being aware that he was and so i felt he ought to have said’ I am a Catholic and this is the way it influences the way i have presented my book’. Most readers simply don’t know what a traditional Catholic education taught you but we old hands recognise it when we see it!
For a non-historian such as myself, this is a richly insightful clash of ideas.
Over the years, I have observed on atheist and science discussion boards the frequenting of Catholic apologists, some who have the audacity to claim to be atheists or skeptics, who do not stop at minimizing the damage caused by the church during the dark ages, but actually go that extraordinary step further by crediting the church with the rise of science and attributing secularism as the actual cause of the dark ages.
It is difficult for a layman in the field to debate these apologists off the cuff as they readily and authoritatively quote scholars and historians, most, when I take the time to research them, come from the Religious Studies departments of Catholic universities. In fact, television programs on The Dark Ages are heavily populated by talking heads from these same universities. Although I’m not one for conspiracy theories, it does makes one wonder if there is an agenda to rehabilitate the Church’s role in the Dark Ages.
In any event, I very much appreciate the research of Dr. Freeman.
Exactly so, and it’s the same thing with the apparent agenda of all these Templeton-funded institutes and centres that are cropping up, and the books that people affiliated with these institutes and centres write. The agenda should be declared.
Charles, have you been keeping track of this at all? I’ve been exploring it here recently, prompted by looking at a new book while browsing at the local university bookstore: the Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. A Cambridge Companion forsooth; what could be more respectable? Yet the editor has Templeton affiliations, and so do at least some of the authors, and the editor says in the intro that the “conflict thesis” of sci and relig will get little attention because it’s considered so dated and wrong within the profession. The whole book just reeks of Templeton agenda to me, yet to the unwary it will doubtless look like the latest in respectable impartial academic treatments of the subject.
I must say that the Jonathan Israel tome looks very interesting for the Enlightenment, in particular the Enlightenment Contested one (although I would probably make a good doorstop too!). Where, Charles, I wonder, would you place Peter Gay’s work on the Enlightenment? I have always found it very attractive, but am not sure where historians today would place it. It’s doubtless a bit dated now, but it has been my main source on the Enlightenment for some time.
I know what you mean by “we old hands recognise it when we see it.” Mind you, I was never a Catholic, but I get the same feeling when I read most history that uses Christianity as a (very often hidden) foundation. Brought up in a church school (in India), mainly CofE in origin, but later influenced by American protestantism, there is a kind of knowingness about things written with the basic presupposition that Christianity somehow underlies and supports the cultural fabric.
I notice this, strangely, in Thomas Dixon’s work in Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction — which I am coming to, Ophelia, by the way, but I was waylaid by something I had to write for a Parliamentary committee on assisted dying — which has taken up a good bit of the last two or three weeks — even though Dixon himself claims to be a nonbeliever. It is almost as if the religious dimension of European culture is being given a kind of honorary priority, so that, at its heart, at a deep level, there can be no conflict between religion and science because the culture itself is, somehow, Christian. At least that’s the way it seems as I wrestle with some of the clear instances of conflict which are being read in an artificially non-conflictual way.
The child rape scandals have demonstrated that many Catholic apologists live in a complete fantasy world, where the benevolence of the Church is axiomatic, and anything contradicting this axiom is by definition false. It’s not surprising that the same people are trying to rewrite history.
However, I don’t think this attitude is a deliberate “agenda”. It’s a mental aberration (installed by years of childhood indoctrination) which is embedded so deeply that no fact can move it.
Templeton’s agenda, on the other hand, has to be deliberate in some sense. Not that the scholars who argue for it don’t believe it, but that they are engaged in an explicitly revisionist project. That’s simply what historians do, of course, but at the same time, it can’t be seen as not deliberate.
I think it ought to trouble people more than it does. I think the fact that Templeton funds not just research, not even broadly conservative or liberal research, but research aimed at particular conclusions, ought to trouble the people who accept the funding more than it seems to.
These responses are really interesting – as seen from a British perspective -in this case a barn in rural Suffolk where my wife’s horses keep kicking from their stables on the back of my bookshelves!
Peter Gay- a great writer- I liked his volumes on the late nineteenth century. Ages since I read him on the Enlightenment but he seems out of fashion now. Israel has an agenda -that there was a radical enlightenment kicked off by Spinoza and the more moderate one of Voltaire ,etc and the radical lost out. He has daunting detail and some chapters are completely obscure but you sort of get drawn into him if you have a couple of free months to spare! Mind you, he has a shorter The Revolution of the Mind which is a good starter.
Yes, Ophelia, this Religion and Science thing is worrying. I went innocently to a conference on this in Cambridge last year – a friend asked me along. There was nothing in the prospectus that suggested there was a Christian bias but it was crammed out by Christians, including clergy, and all the lecturers were falling over themselves to suggest that Christianity had nothing against science and was reconciliable. One gets to know the names like Peter Harrison and John Hedley Brooke. Although he was not there, one of my favourites is John Polkinghorne’s idea that God works through the particles in particle physics. What happens if they blow HIM (and I don’t mean Polkinghorne) up in the Hadron Collider? Surely it is obvious that some Christian beliefs such as the resurrection of our actual flesh at the Last Judgement are simply not scientific. Surely anyone , and what percentage is that of Christians, who actually believes that the earth was created less than ten thousand years ago, is in conflict with science. So, at best, you are only left with some Christians who have scientific beliefs that don’t conflict with accepted science and they have some pretty difficult explaining to do if they want to defend traditional Christian beliefs. Fundamentally, of course, there are no stable foundations for Christian belief anyway so at least they can be shifted about whenever something like evolution comes along.
If all humans are to be reconstituted in their original bodies at the Last Judgment but animals presumably are not at what moment in evolutionary time do humans count as humans?
OB:
At least they’ve given you good advice on the best point of attack. One thing I’ve noticed about many religious apologists, is that they often ramp up the anti-atheist sneering around points where they just know they’re right, but are unable to put together any real argument.
This dismissal of the “conflict thesis” seems to be a case in point. They have no real answer to the fact that a large fraction of religious believers reject much (if not all) of modern science, and so they resort to plan B, which consists of sneering about how dated and unsophisticated the people who point out this fact are. (Another example comes in responses to the “I reject your religion for the same reason as you reject his religion” argument. They know how pathetic the “but my god is real and his god isn’t” reply sounds, and so they wrap it in a protective cocoon of insults and condescension.)
The “conflict thesis” is major sore spot. Keep prodding it.
My hunch:
The Templeton Prize attracts authors who can make an impressive contribution to empirical knowledge and yet (because of ideological bias) misinterpret their own data, thus drawing dubious conclusions from solid facts. That at any rate appears to be the argument made by Eric Kaufmann in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (“brilliant and provocative .. a book every liberal should read” — John Gray) where he discusses in some detail Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age, the Templeton prize-winner of 2007.
In 874 pages Taylor meticulously chronicles the growth of secularisation in Western society– and yet concludes that ‘spirituality’ is on the increase. The Templeton Prize “honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works” according to the Institution’s own mission statement. But perhaps — because spirituality is almost as hard to nail down as a blob of jelly — one can ‘see’ it whether it is there or not. Sorta like the ‘real presence’?
That’s very interesting about the conference, Charles. That’s what they do, often – lure in the unwary by not making it clear what kind of conference/institute/book this is. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve felt a faint suspicion of a conference/website/book/author/organization and googled it to find the suspicions confirmed. They fly under the radar on purpose, which is a big part of what makes them so annoying and so worrying. (“They” is Templeton, mostly, but perhaps also people with Templeton ties and people with undisclosed religious motivations in general.)
The names Peter Harrisson and John Hedley Brooke do indeed become familiar. And Polkinghorne is another example of a Royal Society imprimatur – they allowed him to hold a book launch at the RS because he is a member, but of course that meant it look as if the RS had actually approved the book, which it hadn’t. There was a bit of a stink about it a couple of years ago.
Having just read all of the debate in the links, I was happy to find that it was at least relatively civilized, as well as informative [I myself am no scholar, just a dilettanty reader of history with a smattering of knowledge of most of the historical players mentioned]. My sense was that Hannam missed Freeman’s most important argument – which as it turned out, was precisely captured in the quotes Ophelia provides. So it was neat and satisfying to come back to the blog and find there precisely the paragraphs I’d marked out.
Hannam’s book is getting plenty of exposure. I remember picking it up and leafing through it in a local bookshop a few months ago, and my sceptical antennae were raised immediately. The Catholic Church promoting science – or even the exploration of ideas? It certainly doesn’t do so today, and has never done so except when it is in its interests – which is very rarely.
The real issue is academic credibility. There are thousands of books out there peddling ideas for which there is no academic support. We do have to rely on institutions such as the Royal Society to be able to sort out the credible from the not credible. In Hannam’s case , none of the reviewers seems to have been an historian of medieval Europe or the Renaissance. Hannam has recently posted a review by one Jonathan Birch of the University of Glasgow in what appears to be an academic journal specialising in the Renaissance. Jonathan Birch turns out to be a theologian specialising in the first century AD! How did it come about that he ends up reviewing (favourably, surprise ,surprise) a book about the medieval world?
Anyone who knows anything about the Middle Ages or Renaissance would spot the problems in this book immediately. Anyone who tried to follow his arguments for the survival of the natural philosophers , derided as they were by the humanists, in such a way that we would not have had Galileo without them, would have seen that they had no coherence or evidence to support them. I keep coming back to the same question- why were this book’s deficiencies not spotted earlier?
I was fascinated to see that Hannam is saying that I wrote my review because I had been narked by his review of my Closing of the Western Mind. Does he really think that one review of about 150 on Closing that I have received, here by an unknown with no discernible scholarly background in the fourth and fifth centuries who could not even reproduce its argument accurately was going to worry me? The only effect it had was to alert me to Hannam’s way of operation. His review said that Closing was notorious in academic circles just when I was selected as a the guest speaker for 2008 at the Cambridge (MASS) Roundtable on Faith and Reason ( the year before the speaker had been one John Polkinghorne! ) and Yale University Press had approached me (not me them) with a two book deal. How could his review be taken seriously!! Perhaps some self-delusion of grandeur is going on here. It needs to be punctured.
Great exchange, and thanks to Charles Freeman for fighting the good fight on this. As a (very limited!) amateur history student, this sort of thing is gold dust. It’s a shame that Hannam didn’t respond to the comment on Bruno’s burning.
For anyone whose appetite has been whetted, and who hasn’t seen it, there is more on a similar theme on Richard Carrier’s blog from January (onwards), where it all kicks off in the comments – gets a little heated. Charles makes a couple of comments there too, although I’m not sure how much he agrees with what Carrier writes.
Thanks , Mark. Carrier is too extreme for me- he thinks that Jesus did not even exist.
Hannam’s book is being published in the US by Regnery next April under the title The Genesis of Science. I think that its acceptance by Regnery shows that its line was recognised more quickly in the States than it has been here. Best wishes, Charles.
Exactly so, about academic credibility. That’s one reason I’m so interested in Templeton: it’s so skilled at generating that kind of credibility for its projects, via simple ploys like locating new organizations in close proximity to existing universities or scientific institutions. That ought to be absurdly transparent, but it works.
The reviews of Hannam’s book seem to be a separate example. In the US it’s quite normal to have non-experts review books, but I thought that was much less normal in the UK. But maybe it was seen as a goddy book rather than a history, and assigned accordingly. Must look into this; very interesting.
If you look at the reviews of Hannam’s book, you will,of course, find many, perhaps more than half, come from Christian sources. What has been interesting is that a number of historians of science or science editors have given it good reviews. Many of them describe the book as an eye-opener which suggests they did not know much about the Middle Ages. I wonder how many bothered to check up on Hannam’s academic credentials. His PhD is on the sixteenth century but he tells us that he has now renounced his thesis so the cupboard is a bit bare. He has absolutely no background in the Middle Ages but you get the feeling that reviewers think that he has and are prepared to take what he says on trust. None of this invalidates the fact that this book is a ‘good read’ but it is not a serious work of scholarship. You will know more about Regnery as a publisher than I do but I wonder what having that as a stable will do for its reception among the mainstream non-religious scientists in the US.
Absolute kiss of death. Regnery is bottom of the barrel – tainted, agenda-driven, awful. Apart from anything else it’s seen as far more political than…well than anything else: respectable, much less academic.
Reviewers’ taking Hannam’s credentials on trust is scary. Karen Armstrong’s reputation seems to work much the same way – what you said of Hannam’s assertions sounding authoritative but lacking support reminded me sharply of Armstrong. I checked some of her citations for authoritative-sounding assertions in her latest book, and was shocked – one was to a popular survey where I had been expecting a primary source.
I found the post from last year in which I gave some detail on Armstrong’s way with footnotes –
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2009/checking-references/
To quote myself, commenting on Armstrong’s four paragraphs of erudite-seeming waffle about Hume and Heisenberg:
I should add that I have the Tarnas book, so I was able to check the reference, so I know that she really did just paraphrase several pages of it for her book, without saying so. I consider that exceedingly tacky, at best.
Religion poisons everything including academia and scholarship. The mind boggles at how much misinformation, bias and buried knowledge has accumulated over the last two-thousand years. There is far too much agenda driven corruption going on, and Templeton are a big factor.
Yes, the Karen Armstrong phenomenon is very strange. I don’t think The Case for God made much impact here. She has a lot of sympathy for her autobiographical works but making her a guru has gone way too far.
Even reading the Regnery website is scarey let alone the books the they publish. When I saw that Hannam was going to be published there – long before he got onto the shortlist – it seemed that he had found the right stable even though, despite the deficiencies of his book, it does deserve better than being among such trash. His publisher here, Icon Books, is well respected middle-of the road. So he is never going to get the attention in the US he has got here, other than from the usual suspects.
I find the whole psychology of this fascinating, especially when we are talking about someone who has a PhD from Cambridge- on humanism(!), not exciting but certainly competent enough. Take my point about his section on the early Middle Ages where Hannam states quite categorically that it was an age of progress. Does he or does he not know that the overwhelming amount of evidence is against him – especially when the only quotation he can get in his support is from 1940 (not cited as such, of course, or even in the original form in which it was written (see my response to his response)). Does he think he can somehow get away with saying such things and will not be found out? Or does he believe that somehow, despite his lack of any academic background in this period, he has found something everyone else has missed. Perhaps he just believes that anything touched by the Catholic Church must, by definition, be gold, so one does not have to bother with such mundane things as historical evidence. We come back to the central problem: why do people take him seriously?
Well, I am just a labourer in the vineyard, intrigued in finding out what went on for its own sake and loving knocking my way around the Mediterranean so i can actually see the evidence for myself. I was leading a study group in Turkey last week. In the town of Sagalassos, beautifully situated up in the hills, we came across a second century library. There were reports of tensions between Christians and the pagan elites at the end of the fourth century and sadly the archaeological evidence shows that this library was burned and looted at the same time. But I mustn’t push the evidence too far. . . .
Keep up the great work,Ophelia!
Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is 1,600 on the US Amazon list, 95,000 on the Uk Amazon list today, so you can see that she is marginal here.