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To: bdeaner
Please.....

I would say that Vesalius came along more than a THOUSAND YEARS after Galen had died.

Did you miss the point(s) deliberately?

The real difference between progress in western civilization and other parts of the world was plain and simply competition.

The Schism provoked by Luther just so happened to occur when your Vesalius was just about out of his diapers.

Rome discouraged medical advancements for centuries. It was only after Luther came into prominence that such as Vesalius could accomplish anything.

2,665 posted on 07/17/2009 4:49:06 PM PDT by Radix (Obama represents CHAINS for posterity.)
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To: Radix
I would say that Vesalius came along more than a THOUSAND YEARS after Galen had died.

So what? Vesalius was Catholic, which shoots down your claim that the Catholic Church is to blame for suppressing modern medicine. Not at all. It was our guy who starting it all with his groundbreaking work in anatomy! It's as simple as that.

The real difference between progress in western civilization and other parts of the world was plain and simply competition.

Competition? That might have played some part, but more fundamental than anything was the theological ground of Catholic theology, within which one God is understood to be the sole creator of the universe with a single Logos discoverable by reason via natural law. Every other civilization had competition. But not a single one could claim this unique theology which was the only theology that made modern science possible for human thought.

Christian tradition, from its Old Testament prehistory through the High Middle Ages and beyond, conceives of God--and, by extension, His creation--as rational and orderly. Throughout the Bible, the regularity of natural phenomena is described as a reflection of God's goodness, beauty and order. Fir if the Lord "has imposed an order on the magnificent workds of his wisdom," that is only because "He is from everlasting to everlasting" (Sir. 42:21). The world, as understood within the Judao-Christian tradition, is the handiwork of a supremely reasonable Person, and therefore is endowed with lawfulness and purpose. This lawfulness is evident all around us. This idea of a rational, orderly universe eluded other civilizations, such as the arabs, Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians, Greek, Hinus, Mayan, and others, all of whom as much if not more resources to accomplish modern science, just not the cosmological and theological framework in which it could be conceived.

The major shift did not occur during the reformation, but prior to it, during the Middle Ages, as the Scholastics carried out the depersonalization of nature that was inherited from Aristotle.

The development of the concept of inertial motion goes back to this historical moment in the Middle Ages, given birth through the revelation of God's Word in the Church of the Middle Ages. Jeam Buridan was an especially important figure in this development. He was a 14th c. professor at the Sorbonne, who compelled by his Catholic theology, was led to reject the Aristotelian idea that the universe itself was eternal. His ideas paved the way for Newton's physics hundreds of years later.

Not to mention the 12th century emergence of the Cathedral School of Chartes, where the development of natural philosophy was the groundspring within which modern scientific method would emerge, as a result of a commitment to the idea of nature as something autonomous, operating according to fixed laws discernable by reason.

Luther had nothing to do with the development of modern science. If anything, the Reformers hindered scientific development by falling into various heresies that often conflicted with the natural philosophy of Catholicism that made science fit coherently within the overarching Catholic worldview. The young-earth Creationists of today are a good example of such heretics who undermine the natural philosophy of Catholicism within which science is able to flourish.
2,686 posted on 07/17/2009 11:04:33 PM PDT by bdeaner (The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? (1 Cor. 10:16))
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