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Monday, November 02, 2009
Science Fiction
I linked to this on my other blog this morning, and then thought the folks over here would appreciate it as well. Michael Flynn, SF author, discovered a "free association thought" website and proceeded to rip apart one of their essays on Christianity, science, and the Dark Ages. Well done sir.
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16 comments:
Wow. That's what I would call a total annihilation.
wow - just wow
It's all fairly standard. But it was awful (awe-full) to find all of it regurgitated in one place. After a while, I just got in the mood.
Wound up afterward deleting a few items, which is why the paragraph numbers skip. There is such a thing as "piling on."
Has there been a response from NoBeliefs?
I loved the line on getting what you paid for, when engaging freethinking...
I think the good ship NoBeliefs just took a torpedo amidships. Any response to the essay yet?
Flynn, you might want to check under your boot. I think there's still some freethinker stuck to the underside.
I don't expect a response. The intenet is vast and ships pass in the night. I came across the essay only by accident, a link from a link sort of thing. But what can the OP say besides repeating the original claims? Surely, he cannot cite facts! Chances are, any scholarly research not "blogged" by someone sitting at home in his pajamas would be utterly inaccessible to him. Browsing and googling ain't reading.
"I think the good ship NoBeliefs just took a torpedo amidships."
Unfortunately it was full of free sinkers
I loved the chart on the original article (where scientific progress steadily climbs until Christianity where it sharply drops and stays completely flat until the Renaissance), because it's so ridiculous.
Re: the chart. Definitely a ROFL. I should have commented on it, too. For someone who claims to champion SCIENCE!! and the empirical method it would seem strange to plot the graph of a metric that is not even defined.
The graph is a howler.
There seems to me to be a fair amount of exaggeration and misinformation on both sides of this issue. I recently had a discussion at the blog THINKING CHRISTIAN in which the blogger Tom Gilson claimed that science never could have come into being without the influence of Christianity. I've heard this claim made quite a few times by Christian apologists--but have yet to see anything that approaches a reasonable defense of it.
By the way, Mike, I greatly enjoyed your novel EIFELHEIM. You were fair in your depiction of both atheists and theists. I wish that happened more often in novels touching on religion.
Certainly, the medievals gave due credit to the muslim commentators they read. But science never became culturally embedded in Islam and the great faylasuf were marginal in their own culture.
The way I sum up the difference between Islam, China, and the West is "China never had an Aristotle, Islam never had an Aquinas."
And thank you for your kind comments on Eifelheim.
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