I’ve never read a more bombastic, boastful claim than the one you make about Christianity being a prerequisite for being able to perform scientific inquiry. I guess all the works of Ancient Greece, India and other cultures would be bulldozed into landfills by the likes of you.
You’ll rightly be laughed out of the halls of academia of repute if you went public with that claim and got anywhere (you won’t).
Have a wonderful day!
:^)
There is no need for ad hominem attacks, insults and rudeness, my friend.
I understood you perfectly. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about you understanding me.
It’s perfectly obvious that you were not talking about ancient Chinese, but contemporary Chinese atheist scientists. The clue is in the fact that you said so (do you remember “atheist Chinese scientists in 2013”?). Why you chose Chinese rather than atheist scientists of other nationalities I don’t know. It didn’t confuse me, but it obviously confused you.
You said: “If atheist Chinese scientists in 2013 can come up with valid, peer-reviewed scientific papers today, then science isn’t dependent on Christianity.”
We are talking about Christianity being necessary for the birth of science, not for doing science. Don’t you understand the difference?
Because one thing - as I’ve explained, but obviously it needs repeating because it didn’t sink in the first time - is to create the concept of laws of nature in an ordered universe, which is the necessary foundation for scientific work, and another is to use and apply this concept once others have created it.
Your Chinese atheist scientist friends would not have been more capable of developing science *before it was created* than any other non-Christians of the time of Galileo.
Only Christians were capable of inventing this concept, for the reasons explained in my article. I haven’t got time to rewrite everything for you, perhaps you should read it more carefully.
If you really are interested in the subject and not just in polemicize, I also advise you to read some good text of philosophy of science, so that not just one of us knows what she’s talking about. Start with Popper or Kuhn.
That you’re not familiar with the history and philosophy of science you reveal yourself when you say that you’ve never heard a “more bombastic etc”, because what I wrote is just a tenet of mainstream epistemological research.
Your last few sentences about academia bring home even more forcefully your extensive unfamiliarity with the subjects we are treating because, as I said, many academics and scholars hold these views (have you even read my article, I wonder?)
The fire example is totally irrelevant.