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Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

> The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold progress only for a few hundred years.

The Catholic church is more vibrant than ever, and still holds substantial sway over many many people. Most modern organizations are unable to hold as much sway over members as the Catholic church does. If anything, the church is a case study in how to make an organization relevant over the course of millennia.

Your point on scientific progress is especially obtuse, given that the entire reason for the study of science in the West was at the behest of Christianity. I can't think of any time the church sought limiting scientific progress as an end unto itself.

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> The Catholic church is more vibrant than ever, and still holds substantial sway over many many people. Most modern organizations are unable to hold as much sway over members as the Catholic church does. If anything, the church is a case study in how to make an organization relevant over the course of millennia.

This is very true. The Catholic church is not going anywhere soon. Worldwide membership is 1.2 billion people (self reported numbers). The Catholic church is one of the largest land owners in the world, with 177 million acres worldwide. The catholic church has one the largest art and antique collections in the world. The Catholic church has a large impact on worldwide culture and politics. It's never had a larger worldwide footprint than today and it has so many assets and members that it would take centuries of decline to go away.

Sure, christianity as a whole has declined in Europe. That's just one continent. Let's not ignore the fact that 16% of the world population is Catholic.

It's true that the Church supported science but there are plenty of examples where it didn't like the results and tried to bury them.

From my understanding, it's more that the personalities of certain powerful individuals in the Church didn't rub well with the personalities of certain influential citizen-scientists (@Galileo, principally), and the former individuals abused their power to torment the latter. The actual results were much less important to the people involved than the prestige of "being right".

For context, these inquisitions happened at a time when the printing press was democratizing ownership of authoritative information (i.e. the Church) – not too dissimilar to today, where the web's information is upending traditional news sources. The inquisitions were a reaction to a perceived loss of power.

From that POV, it was less an ideological, Church vs Science thing (although this conflict is real today, though it seemed to be less real in the past), and more a butting of egos. Many people today experience zero dissonance between their religion and their scientific beliefs, and this observation is an old one (see the writings of any number of religious scientists throughout history). Anyways, just my 2¢! :)

Yes it was a power play. My point is that a 10000 year organization will have a tendency to do so because otherwise progress will quickly make it obsolete. It needs to control progress so it has time to adapt.

The extent to which this is true depends on which "Catholic Church" you mean..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Orthodoxy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicanism

and, many in these would argue that the extent of the roman repression of the renaissance was a direct side effect of the unique theological positions of the roman church..

Also, the same thing could be said to one degree or another for science which is not politically acceptable in the modern context..

In most contexts, including within Anglicanism and the Orthodox Churches, saying the Catholic Church (with a capital C) indicates the Church of Rome. While all those churches consider themselves catholic, in the sense of universal, the phrase 'Catholic Church' in English has a very well understood meaning, and indeed, this was the church I was indicating in my post.

understood, and agree that this is generally the case; however, contextually, it is also presented as the only 2000 year institution of Christianity, and so its behavior can be extrapolated and viewed as representative of a 2000 year religious institution, which clearly is not true.

I see... point taken. Perhaps I should say the diocese of Rome and the various other dioceses of the original Pentarchy, most of which have stayed relevant in some form in their various regions for the last two thousand years.

Like what? My interpretation is that the church, at various points in history, didn't like the person who found the results (usually for unrelated, or only tenuously related, reasons) and enacted various sanctions against them which today are interpreted as direct revenge for the findings, rather than a personal beef.

It took them a long time to accept evolution for example. Eventually they will come around but they need time.

'Not explicitly accepting' is very different from 'rejecting'. For example, the Church has not explicitly accepted the second law of thermodynamics (which is completely at odds with the church's claim that God will recreate the universe, thus decreasing entropy), but you'd be hardpressed to find an instance of the Vatican censuring that. The initial reactions to evolution by natural selection were rather neutral, and mainly focused on the ensoulment of species. The first official vatican encyclical (which is really the first kind of document that can be applied to the whole church on this topic) was Humani Generis, which took a neutral position on the topic. Not accepting every theory is not a sign of rejection. The church does not typically care to interfere in the minute details of every scientific endeavor. As natural selection became more popular and evidence mounted in its favor, the church responded favorably to it.

Can you cite an instance where the church as a whole rejected natural selection and censured the person writing about it? And I mean, an example not in the context of someone arguing that natural selection means there is no God, because that would go back to my original claim that the various censures were due to reasons unrelated to the purely scientific claim.

By the time Darwin published his findings the church didn’t have enough power to suppress him as they could do a few hundred years earlier.

But that's assuming the church would want to suppress him for publishing his work. I don't see any evidence that that would be the case. You are assuming.

I think this is an overly polarized view of history. We can often see the past in the most accurate fashion by looking at the world today; history has a habit of repeating itself. Genetics especially seems to be playing out this scenario, point for point, again. What science says and what many in society would prefer to believe are in sharp contrast. And indeed geneticists who speak too strongly of things such as hereditary traits tend to face censure, or worse.

So will history look back at our time and write of society 'burying' disliked science? I doubt it. I think in reality it's simply that science changes rapidly and society changes glacially. And, perhaps most importantly, how do you even adapt to new information without a moral collapse? Something that was undoubtedly an issue in the past and equally undoubtedly is one in the present.

Galileo is such a great example of this. He had no less than the Pope as an advocate who tried to help guide him forward in a way that could help drive his view and evidence forward with the gentle touch it required for such a sharp and controversial change to the worldview. Galileo instead decided to act with all the grace of a raging bull in a china shop. That he was right, and knew he was right, was an even bigger argument for tact. Had he been able to tame his ego, it's possible that his views could have been adopted many decades prior to when they finally were, perhaps even during his own life. And in any case when you know you are right, giving fair consideration and representation to all views is always the best way forward since you know only one view lay in accordance with all the facts of reality.

It doesn't seem like it is much of a secret how they manage this. You just have to make sure it is part of your institution to force it upon the minds of your newborn children. You now have a possibly infinite self replicating virus.

If that were true how come many famous scientists were catholic and went to catholic school? If the church is impressing upon the minds of the young the urge to not pursue science and rationality how could it produce so many (faithful) scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc

I don't believe I implied those things were mutually exclusive. The only thing that matters is that it perpetuates itself.

You don't need to look very far to see the Church limiting scientific progress. The Catholic Church banned many scientific books. One of these lists of banned books was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum). For 100 years it included books that advocated for heliocentrism. The pope Paul V himself explicitly asked Galileo to abandon the idea of heliocentrism.

Saying 'for 100 years, it advocated books that advocated for heliocentrism' means very little for an organization that is 2000 years old, and for which, for 1500 years of its existence, geocentrism was considered the correct, scientific viewpoint.

Heliocentrism was first advocated for by Copernicus who was a devout Catholic, possibly even a priest. Other scientists before Galileo advocated for it, and it was a popular enough opinion at Galileo's time, held by other scientists as well. Galileo was arrested (completely unfairly, in my opinion) for disobeying the pope. This places the case squarely under my exception of those arrested for unrelated, tenuously related, or personal reasons.

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