At what point did scientists become Atheists?

[Eternal_Freedom]

(Mod note, not sure if this wentin history or here, move as you see fit.)

It occurred to me the other day that nowadays, if you're a scientist you are generally going to be an atheist as well. I know there are exceptions but that seems to be the general case and the public perception.

However I know this was not always the case at all. So my question is, at what point in history/scientific history did atheism become the default for scientists? Either actually or in the public perception?

[General Zod]

Who says it's the default? There's plenty of religious scientists out there; most of them just don't make a big deal out of their beliefs.

[LaCroix]

I think there might be a bit of bias in this theory.

Of course, being involved in "science" means that the person develops a certain mindset - asking questions. You can't do science without it. And usually the willingness to ask questions is inversely proportional to the willingness to believe blindly. A geologist will have his problems with blind faith in some messages of the bible, as will a biologist. Someone involved in math or chemistry, at the other hand, will not have that much problem embracing faith and his area of expertise (e.g. pro-creationism scientists usually come out of these areas.)

Others will simply default to "it's not meant to be read literally" whenever their AOE collides with their faith.

So while it is more common to find an atheist in the ranks of scientists (for any given value of science), there are significant numbers of believers within their ranks. Is there a statistic pointing out a uneven distribution, that shows atheism being a default setting. ( = a huge proportion of the sample group)

[Simon_Jester]

Atheism has been becoming more common in the scientific community much as it became more common in the general community. The turning point was probably 1860 or so, because until Darwin there simply wasn't a coherent theory of the origins of life on offer that didn't involve divine intervention at some point. Since then it's been a very slow shift, not a sudden "wham WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?" moment. Even today, it's still a demographic thing; as others point out, there are tons and tons of scientists who do not avow to anything recognizable as atheism.

[Zed]

The question needs a significant amount of clarification.

Firstly, who do you count as scientists? Do you include mathematicians? Do you include political scientists, social scientists, communication scientists, computer scientists, humanists? Do you include only professional scientists, or do amateur scientists count as well? Do you include only academic scientists, or will scientists working in industry or at think tanks count as well?

Secondly, who do you count as atheists? Do agnostics count, given that they don't believe in God? Or do you want people who actually deny that God exists?

[Axiomatic]

Who says it's the default? There's plenty of religious scientists out there; most of them just don't make a big deal out of their beliefs.

Scientists are statistically some of the least religious people around, particularly those involved in biology.

[Axiomatic]

The question needs a significant amount of clarification.

Firstly, who do you count as scientists? Do you include mathematicians? Do you include political scientists, social scientists, communication scientists, computer scientists, humanists? Do you include only professional scientists, or do amateur scientists count as well? Do you include only academic scientists, or will scientists working in industry or at think tanks count as well?

Secondly, who do you count as atheists? Do agnostics count, given that they don't believe in God? Or do you want people who actually deny that God exists?

What you do is you use separate categories, obviously. You find out more by being able to compare atheism rates in social scientists versus political scientists versus astronomers versus biologists etc.

[Rabid]

I think that, by "scientist" (as a general definition), he means "a person involved in scientific research, and participating in the redaction of peer-reviewed works".

I know a scientist, very close to me, that is a practicing Catholic. Her interpretation of the whole thing is that the writings of the Bible are not to be taken literally, but that only the "essence" of the Teaching of the Christ matter : that love should prevail over fear, that people should helps each other, things like that... She also honestly believe in God.
What she think of "souls", "eternal life", and things like that, I don't know. But I think that she takes it more as a "way of life" than anything else (not like a "get out of fire-and-brimstone-hell" card).

What that mean ? Well... Obviously, that not all scientists are atheists, for one thing. Other than that, that there are various degree of "religiousness", so to speak. I think that we can safely say that if all scientists are not atheists, an overwhelming majority of them seem to be of (very) moderate leaning as far as religion is concerned. This should go hand in hand with with the fact that generally, scientists are of apolitical leaning : only their research matter to them, the rest is only a distraction. (but I may be wrong talking out of my ass, mind you...)

[Spoonist]

So my question is, at what point in history/scientific history did atheism become the default for scientists? Either actually or in the public perception?

The answer to both albeit in a limited way is the Enlightenment. This is where the ability to reason is held in the highest regard. It was also a time of questioning the old because the results given from the new was so much better.
It's the first widespread point in european history that dogma is no longer sacred. The times of inquisitions and such was mostly passed.
If someone had printed stuff like Hobbes social contract as opposed to the divine right to rule before that they would have been inprisoned etc.

This is where the meme of the anti-religiousness of science starts. Not because the natural philosophers of the time was atheists, but because of their questioning of unfunded dogma. So it started with deism, ie, a belief in the divine but questioning the untestable claims by clergy and scriptures.
In the public eye this was not a good thing but as long as the new brought wealth it was accepted with some throwbacks of piousness like witchtrials etc.

Then after deism it took a century before the first self proclaimed atheists. These were of course natural philosophers or others in the inner circle of reasoning. What is worth noting is that in earlier centuries such a view could have got you tortured or killed. But in the end of the enlightenment it started to be OK or even cool in some circles.

[Lagmonster]

There is a matter of perspective to consider here; there was a point in ancient Greece where mathematicians, scientists, etc. started describing their universe without mentioning the gods. I can't recall much of the details, but it would seem to me that at some point, someone realized that they could produce a model for how something worked without resorting to filling in the gaps with magic. Even when their pet theories were dead wrong (and medicine did this every other week) the lack of the supernatural seperated science from "pulling stuff out of your ass".

Scientists, as people, have been religious up to the present day. Science, however, has been a separate entity for thousands of years, which leads to point two: There is no 'default scientist atheist'. Shitloads of scientists are religious, some so much so that they almost seem to lead double lives. But almost no scientist is *so* religious that they include the supernatural in their models for describing physical phenomena. The percieved atheism of scientists as a whole is probably more of a reflection that their collective shade of grey is lighter than the bulk of the population (both by virtue of accepting fewer supernatural claims and by having a higher population of skeptics) but it doesn't mean they've gone all the way to white.

[Simon_Jester]

There is a matter of perspective to consider here; there was a point in ancient Greece where mathematicians, scientists, etc. started describing their universe without mentioning the gods. I can't recall much of the details, but it would seem to me that at some point, someone realized that they could produce a model for how something worked without resorting to filling in the gaps with magic. Even when their pet theories were dead wrong (and medicine did this every other week) the lack of the supernatural seperated science from "pulling stuff out of your ass".

At the time, these descriptions often did not distinguish between 'concrete' and supernatural forces.

When Empedocles said that the world was made up of four elements (air, earth, fire, and water) and that the relations of these elements were governed by two principles (love and strife), he routinely referred to these elements and principles by the names of gods, treated the elements and principles as in some philosophical sense equivalent to (vast, not-at-all-like-big-sky-man) gods, and attributed to them properties like intelligence and desire.

Of course, Empedocles was rather early in the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. But that kept going throughout the classical period. Basically, classical civilization believed in a far more pantheistic sort of religion than the Christian and Islamic societies that succeeded it, and was therefore far more inclined to attribute a mystical significance to forces of nature. Which means that many of their mystical arguments translate into English as scientific ones: when we think of the Greek elements, we think of "elements" in the same sense that we today think of carbon and oxygen as elements... and that's not how the Greeks thought of it.

When the polytheistic religions of classical civilization, with their plethora of nature spirits and pantheistic notions of the universe, were replaced by the "stern creator-god" monotheism of Christianity and Islam, it had a major effect on philosophy. In the Islamic world, and for a long time in the Christian world, the effect was to insert the idea of God forcefully into all philosophical discussion, to the point where you couldn't talk about anything without talking about God, and thus attracting the attention of theologians.

In the last few centuries as the medieval "Christendom" evolved into what we now call "the West," that trend got turned round. And only then did you start seeing pure-physical explanations for things in nature that did not invoke forms of mysticism or divine intervention. It really wasn't a major part of the Greco-Roman tradition at all, I'd say.

[Zed]

So my question is, at what point in history/scientific history did atheism become the default for scientists? Either actually or in the public perception?

The answer to both albeit in a limited way is the Enlightenment. This is where the ability to reason is held in the highest regard. It was also a time of questioning the old because the results given from the new was so much better.

That's not an answer to the question at all - the Enlightenment was certainly the "age of reason", but it was not at all an age of rampant atheism, as was asked.

Then after deism it took a century before the first self proclaimed atheists. These were of course natural philosophers or others in the inner circle of reasoning. What is worth noting is that in earlier centuries such a view could have got you tortured or killed. But in the end of the enlightenment it started to be OK or even cool in some circles.

Really, now? De La Mettrie died in 1751. That's hardly a century after the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, with its ideals of progress and reason, was hardly uniform - it wasn't some movement from religion over deism to atheism. It contained atheists from the start, as well as convinced, rational deists such as Immanuel Kant.

Overall, though, your post contains a great deal of caricature of both the Enlightenment and the times that preceded it. The Catholic Church wasn't as intellectually oppressive as is often touted. Copernicus was a Catholic cleric (whether or not he was a priest is uncertain), who developed his heliocentric theory while working on a religious problem. Galileo, while discussing his heliocentrism hypothetically, was admired by the Pope until he published the Dialogue. Catholic philosophers disagreed continuously, and while they were suppressed by proclamations from time to time, that didn't stop rampant waves of Averroism and Thomism, the latter of which eventually became orthodoxy despite numerous attempts to suppress it. It also didn't stop the Jesuits from allowing ancestor worship in China, causing a theological dispute that lasted over two centuries. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance weren't as horrible as you make them sound.

[Gil Hamilton]

The Catholic Church not only enforced heresy laws but also made it something that could be a capital offense depending on circumstance. Treating "Heresy" as a crime is the very definition of being intellectually oppressive. For example, one of the things that Joan of Arc was known for (besides being insane and turning the Hundred Years War into a religious conflict) was threatening to lead a Crusade against the Hussites in eastern Europe on the charge they were committing heresies during the very formative years of Protestantism and the Catholic Church sainted her.

[Simon_Jester]

Ahem. Minor point, not a direct refutation of anything anyone said specifically:

The vast majority of the time, the heresies in question were over religious issues (and the implicit social and political implications thereof), not scientific matters. You could talk about animals or plants or the motion of planets or a wave theory of light (this was first invented by an Italian friar, but he lacked the mathematical toolkit to develop it and it wound up getting overwhelmed by Newton's false corpuscular theory). That was quite safe.

What wasn't safe, and could get you killed, was taking up positions on things like the Trinity, the nature of Christ, claiming to practice sorcery, and so on. That could get you charged with heresy and executed.

Personally insulting high-ranking clergymen was risky too; that was Galileo's mistake.

So yes, it was a very oppressive institution by modern standards. But it's important to understand how and why it was oppressive: it didn't just reflexively squash every new thing it saw or heard of. The Catholic Church was far more likely to come gunning for you if you started making claims that intruded on their 'intellectual property' (religion) than if you started talking about the nature of the physical world.

[Spoonist]

@Simon the problem was when they were tangentially linked. As in heliocentricm or certain medical advances. I'd rather skip the discussion whether religious persecution by itself stifles progressive thinking because I find it redundant.

So my question is, at what point in history/scientific history did atheism become the default for scientists? Either actually or in the public perception?

The answer to both albeit in a limited way is the Enlightenment.

That's not an answer to the question at all - the Enlightenment was certainly the "age of reason", but it was not at all an age of rampant atheism, as was asked.

As was asked? You have telepathic communication with Eternal Freedom? He mentioned the "public perception" I started with the caveat "albeit in a limited way" to explain where "the meme of the anti-religiousness of science starts", OK? Please read it again and I hope you'll see my angle.

De La Mettrie died in 1751. That's hardly a century after the Enlightenment.

You might have been tought differently where you come from but over here we were tought that the european enlightenment started with Descartes. Some let it start with Francis Bacon. Some say its the turn of the century. So I know that it's start is not set in stone, but I thought that I could skip such minutea in a short post on a related topic.

The Enlightenment, with its ideals of progress and reason, was hardly uniform - it wasn't some movement from religion over deism to atheism.

The word trend comes to mind.

Overall, though, your post contains a great deal of caricature of both the Enlightenment and the times that preceded it.

Probably, it wasn't an essay but a short tidbit on where the meme started.

The Catholic Church wasn't as intellectually oppressive as is often touted.

Bullshit. For that statement to be true you need a very strange definition of "as is often touted". There is a reason why calvinism/protestantism got such a strong foothold in such a short while. There is also a reason why the age of reason was seen as anti-clergy. Look at the american constitution for a sentiment of this.

Copernicus was a Catholic cleric (whether or not he was a priest is uncertain), who developed his heliocentric theory while working on a religious problem. Galileo, while discussing his heliocentrism hypothetically, was admired by the Pope until he published the Dialogue.

So? Your point should not be why employed them, your point should be how accepted their new information was, or how leniently their deviation from dogma was received. Why would the vatican have a dedicated torture chamber to "bring back the sheep into the flock"?

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance weren't as horrible as you make them sound.

As I make them sound? Things like slavery and the crusades comes to mind as starters. But on topic maybe you have heard of the persecution of jews, muslim, cathars, vaudois, knight templars, beghards, calvinists, hugenots, etc, etc, etc. Heck IIRC the last heretic executed by the catholic church was in 1826.

Listen to yourself. You mentioned De la Mettrie of machine fame, he was thrown out of his homeland because of his book, and that was during the age of 'reason'. Should we mention what the inquisitions would have done with him?

[Zed]

The Enlightenment, with its ideals of progress and reason, was hardly uniform - it wasn't some movement from religion over deism to atheism.

The word trend comes to mind.

At the end of the Enlightenment, how influential was atheism?

The Catholic Church wasn't as intellectually oppressive as is often touted.

Bullshit. For that statement to be true you need a very strange definition of "as is often touted". There is a reason why calvinism/protestantism got such a strong foothold in such a short while. There is also a reason why the age of reason was seen as anti-clergy. Look at the american constitution for a sentiment of this.

There're plenty of instances in which the Church was oppressive, but those instances are heavily exaggerated by the traditional notion of "dark ages" during which it is claimed there was little to no intellectual development. As Simon Jester said, the Church was more oppressive towards theological disputes than they were towards natural philosophical disputes. Galileo was indeed mostly in trouble for not only personally insulting the Pope, but doing it while the Pope was under significant pressure to take action against unorthodoxy (the Pope had not taken significant action against the Reformation, and his lack of enforcement of orthodoxy diminished his authority). Similarly, Giordano Bruno wasn't in trouble for his natural philosophical views, but for his theological heresies.

Copernicus was a Catholic cleric (whether or not he was a priest is uncertain), who developed his heliocentric theory while working on a religious problem. Galileo, while discussing his heliocentrism hypothetically, was admired by the Pope until he published the Dialogue.

So? Your point should not be why employed them, your point should be how accepted their new information was, or how leniently their deviation from dogma was received. Why would the vatican have a dedicated torture chamber to "bring back the sheep into the flock"?

Can you point to any natural philosophers who were tortured for their natural philosophical views (rather than for, e.g., denying the Trinity)?

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance weren't as horrible as you make them sound.

As I make them sound? Things like slavery and the crusades comes to mind as starters. But on topic maybe you have heard of the persecution of jews, muslim, cathars, vaudois, knight templars, beghards, calvinists, hugenots, etc, etc, etc. Heck IIRC the last heretic executed by the catholic church was in 1826.

Listen to yourself. You mentioned De la Mettrie of machine fame, he was thrown out of his homeland because of his book, and that was during the age of 'reason'. Should we mention what the inquisitions would have done with him?

I'd like to point out that the Age of Enlightenment, "where the ability to reason is held in the highest regard", is also the period of American slavery - America, that nation which was established on the principles of the Enlightenment. It was also the period in which antisemitism greatly increased, as it was altered from a religious issue to a racial issue. It was also an age in which it became common to believe that society and humans are malleable, opening up the world to utopian social projects such as eugenics.

Yes, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance weren't perfect. Theological disputes such as De La Mettrie's would have been dealt with swiftly. The point isn't so much that there was no oppression at all, the point is that their intellectual oppression isn't as significant as is often claimed (consider, for instance, Buridan's work on impetus theory, or Abelard's work on logic), and that the primary difference with the Enlightenment was, indeed, a willingness to doubt the authority of the Church on theological matters - not, as you would claim, a decreasing religious element in scientific work. This was a time in which natural theology was at its greatest. Religion and science had never been so intertwined.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Who says it's the default? There's plenty of religious scientists out there; most of them just don't make a big deal out of their beliefs.

Go into any university biology department and start cracking jokes about Jesus. You might find one person who takes offense. The default for anyone with a PhD or working on one is Atheism, or at least Agnosticism. The rest are Hindus(or Buddhists) and Jews with a tiny tiny christian minority and an even smaller one for "other"

For example, my current department has... maybe two to fouir christians, a jew, a gaggle of hindus and buddhists, the rest are atheists. Every. Last. One. Where I did my undergrad, pretty much the same spread but with more jews than hindus.

Atheism has been becoming more common in the scientific community much as it became more common in the general community. The turning point was probably 1860 or so, because until Darwin there simply wasn't a coherent theory of the origins of life on offer that didn't involve divine intervention at some point. Since then it's been a very slow shift, not a sudden "wham WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?" moment. Even today, it's still a demographic thing; as others point out, there are tons and tons of scientists who do not avow to anything recognizable as atheism.

It depends on what field too. In biology, theism is pretty damn uncommon, and when there is theism, it tends to be one of the eastern religions or "God is a cosmic douche" jews. It may have something to do with the particular field. Being a biologist, working with such messy obviously jury rigged systems where nature itself actually seems...insane. Well even when we feel the same warm fuzzy feelings you physicists do when you stare up at the cosmos, we think to ourselves "This is awesome, but only because the whole thing is like something out of the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft. If there is a god, he is insane and probably not really worth worshiping because I cannot distinguish him from what I would expect from an unguided system". At most, we tend to flirt with pantheism

You physicists though... You have your elegant equations and many of you basically become Platonists and mystics. You might as well try to with-hold the mysteries of the dodecahedron from the populace

I think that we can safely say that if all scientists are not atheists, an overwhelming majority of them seem to be of (very) moderate leaning as far as religion is concerned. This should go hand in hand with with the fact that generally, scientists are of apolitical leaning : only their research matter to them, the rest is only a distraction.

Yes. You are talking out of your ass. I am hard pressed to find scientists in any field who believe in a person god. There is no "moderate" about it. Bashing the concept of god is the biologist's international past time, with only a few exceptions scattered around and just common enough that we can say "there is no inherent conflict between religion and science" without laughing our collective asses off.

And no, we are no apolitical either. We just arrive at our politics through the use of data, instead of the other way around.

The percieved atheism of scientists as a whole is probably more of a reflection that their collective shade of grey is lighter than the bulk of the population (both by virtue of accepting fewer supernatural claims and by having a higher population of skeptics) but it doesn't mean they've gone all the way to white.

Yeah, depending on where you are, the numbers get interesting. National Academy of Sciences for example. 93% atheist/agnostic. The rest are, for the most part, jews. Why jews? No idea.

[Slacker]

Jews in general have had a social and cultural tradition of valuing knowledge for hundreds of years, as knowledge couldn't be taken away from you if you were forced to flee your residence because a pogrom was coming. Obviously there's a bit of a normalizing trend going on now that there's both a Jewish homeland and a lack of pogroms in the West, but it's one of those cultural biases that's actually positive so it has quite a bit of momentum. It's the same reason there's lots of Jewish lawyers and doctors (in America).

Ghetto Edit: This is how it's been explained to me by any number of Jews, anyway, including my in-laws.

[General Zod]

Who says it's the default? There's plenty of religious scientists out there; most of them just don't make a big deal out of their beliefs.

Go into any university biology department and start cracking jokes about Jesus. You might find one person who takes offense. The default for anyone with a PhD or working on one is Atheism, or at least Agnosticism. The rest are Hindus(or Buddhists) and Jews with a tiny tiny christian minority and an even smaller one for "other"

For example, my current department has... maybe two to fouir christians, a jew, a gaggle of hindus and buddhists, the rest are atheists. Every. Last. One. Where I did my undergrad, pretty much the same spread but with more jews than hindus.

Yeah, but that's biologists. I'd expect you'd have a higher number in the other branches.

[Gil Hamilton]

To Simon Jester:
Be that as it may, the very notion of "heresy", that is that a given idea can not only be wrong, but a sin and a criminal act that should be punished, it explicitly intellectually opressive and against the very core of the scientific method. That the Church had a notion of heresy at all demonstrates this. This isn't an abstract or a distant past thing either, the Catholic Church explicitly rejects medical science in the area of contraception and sexually transmitted disease TODAY, including outright lying about it, with disasterous effects in places like Africa and South America, at this point because it takes damn forever for the Church to admit that it's wrong on an issue (upwards to centuries, in some cases). Even then when it has to concede an issue, it's a mealy mouth statement that they aren't really really wrong (see the Catholic stance on evolution, where it was "sure, evolution... as long as it doesn't violate Catholic dogma and is fundamentally supernatural in origin"... a stance that took them 100 years to come up with).

EDIT: Something further: it was during that time period (which ended in the 1960s) that the Catholic Church maintained an Index of Forbidden Books, which contained many scientific works. Isaac Newton laid the foundation of his work on Universial Gravitation (which I think we can agree was a big deal) on the works of Johannes Kepler... specifically a work that was on that banned list of books. The only reason Newton had access to it was that the Catholic Church had trouble enforcing its ban in northern countries and cosmopolitan areas.

[Anguirus]

^ Because according to polls, most (US) ethnic Jews are atheists anyway? (See Jerry Coyne.)

I also think that there are existing correlations between level of education, likelihood of becoming a scientist, and likelihood of re-evaluating one's own beliefs (which considering how most people are raised is connected to atheism) that would be very difficult to tease apart.

I also think that in some ways this hobbles scientists' ability to deal with certain aspects of the public. People don't like the idea that scientists sit around cracking jokes about those dumb ignorant Christians. And it's not as if it's a big secret.

There are also BIG differences between fields. Biologists are far more likely to be atheists (but don't ever assume it's 100%).

Go into any university biology department and start cracking jokes about Jesus. You might find one person who takes offense. The default for anyone with a PhD or working on one is Atheism, or at least Agnosticism. The rest are Hindus(or Buddhists) and Jews with a tiny tiny christian minority and an even smaller one for "other"

Unfortunately, this is a problem for us, because most smart people with a lot of potential in the US, statistically speaking, are Christians, and this (true to a degree as you state) perception drives them away like the fucking plague. It doesn't make us any (ANY) political friends either.

My experience is slightly different than yours, in that I'm the only outspoken radical atheist I know (I was in a ten-person discussion where I was the only one who had ever heard the word "theodicy"). I got an unhappy look from someone when I criticized the Catholic Church (if she only knew what I really thought of it). Slamming creationists and fundamentalists, though, is par for the course if it happens to come up.

Oh, and there's at least one Republican (religious affiliation unknown to me) who does indeed have a chip on his shoulder. While I disagree with him, it's hard to blame him when eminent visiting professors drop a liberal non sequitur into the first two minutes of their talk, and we will tend to forget he's there before saying something like "Fuck the GOP" when we are all at the bar.

[Crown]

There is a matter of perspective to consider here; there was a point in ancient Greece where mathematicians, scientists, etc. started describing their universe without mentioning the gods. I can't recall much of the details, but it would seem to me that at some point, someone realized that they could produce a model for how something worked without resorting to filling in the gaps with magic. Even when their pet theories were dead wrong (and medicine did this every other week) the lack of the supernatural seperated science from "pulling stuff out of your ass".

At the time, these descriptions often did not distinguish between 'concrete' and supernatural forces.

When Empedocles said that the world was made up of four elements (air, earth, fire, and water) and that the relations of these elements were governed by two principles (love and strife), he routinely referred to these elements and principles by the names of gods, treated the elements and principles as in some philosophical sense equivalent to (vast, not-at-all-like-big-sky-man) gods, and attributed to them properties like intelligence and desire.

Aristotle's biology however went so far as to reject the premise that 'Gods did it' entirely, going so far as to say that it offers no explanation at all. Although we do have the 'eels spontaneously manifest from mud' theory because he couldn't find any explanation as to how they reproduced (how was he supposed to know they migrate to and from Scandinavia?) which trumped him. Regardless this is just shoring up Lagmonster original point, the Ancient Greeks were quite ready to throw creation myth under the bus when explaining the natural world if they could devise another theory.

[Spoonist]

@Zed
Sorry for the late reply, didn't see your reply for the other posts.

First why did you ignore my angle? Just quoting out of context gives a quite different impression.

There're plenty of instances in which the Church was oppressive, but those instances are heavily exaggerated by the traditional notion of "dark ages" during which it is claimed there was little to no intellectual development. As Simon Jester said, the Church was more oppressive towards theological disputes than they were towards natural philosophical disputes. Galileo was indeed mostly in trouble for not only personally insulting the Pope, but doing it while the Pope was under significant pressure to take action against unorthodoxy (the Pope had not taken significant action against the Reformation, and his lack of enforcement of orthodoxy diminished his authority). Similarly, Giordano Bruno wasn't in trouble for his natural philosophical views, but for his theological heresies.

This is pure apologism. That stuff happened in spite of church oppression isn't a mitigating circumstance.

Copernicus was a Catholic cleric (whether or not he was a priest is uncertain), who developed his heliocentric theory while working on a religious problem. Galileo, while discussing his heliocentrism hypothetically, was admired by the Pope until he published the Dialogue.

So? Your point should not be why employed them, your point should be how accepted their new information was, or how leniently their deviation from dogma was received. Why would the vatican have a dedicated torture chamber to "bring back the sheep into the flock"?

Can you point to any natural philosophers who were tortured for their natural philosophical views (rather than for, e.g., denying the Trinity)?

What the fuck? I say your point is moot and that they tortured priests and clerics who deviated from dogma. In defense of that you ask for the torture of natural philosophers, something which didn't exist until centuries later. Are you even on the same page here? Do you know what natural philosopher means or when it started?

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance weren't as horrible as you make them sound.

As I make them sound? Things like slavery and the crusades comes to mind as starters. But on topic maybe you have heard of the persecution of jews, muslim, cathars, vaudois, knight templars, beghards, calvinists, hugenots, etc, etc, etc. Heck IIRC the last heretic executed by the catholic church was in 1826.

Listen to yourself. You mentioned De la Mettrie of machine fame, he was thrown out of his homeland because of his book, and that was during the age of 'reason'. Should we mention what the inquisitions would have done with him?

I'd like to point out that the Age of Enlightenment, "where the ability to reason is held in the highest regard", is also the period of American slavery - America, that nation which was established on the principles of the Enlightenment. It was also the period in which antisemitism greatly increased, as it was altered from a religious issue to a racial issue. It was also an age in which it became common to believe that society and humans are malleable, opening up the world to utopian social projects such as eugenics.

Are you completely ignorant of history. Why do you think I mentioned slavery in reference to the catholic church? It wasn't americans who came up with the idea. Before the pope changed his mind slavery was virtually non-existant vs the past within christendom. Afterwards it became not only a commodity but also a christian imperitive in the fight against the infidels. Do you even know about the debate whether africans were animals or whether they had souls or not? Instead its during the enlightenment that anti-slavery advocates based on logical and philosophical arguments starts to turn things around. Another point against your argument.
What are you blabbering about anti-semitism increasing? Do I need to recount the whole history of the mediterranean to get through to you? During the enlightenment and thereafter more and more countries allowed jews to settle and trade. During the middle ages they were not even allowed residence and were slaughetered wholesale. Educate yourself.

Yes, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance weren't perfect. Theological disputes such as De La Mettrie's would have been dealt with swiftly. The point isn't so much that there was no oppression at all, the point is that their intellectual oppression isn't as significant as is often claimed (consider, for instance, Buridan's work on impetus theory, or Abelard's work on logic), and that the primary difference with the Enlightenment was, indeed, a willingness to doubt the authority of the Church on theological matters - not, as you would claim, a decreasing religious element in scientific work. This was a time in which natural theology was at its greatest. Religion and science had never been so intertwined.

Define exactly who, when and what you mean by "not as bad as claimed". Because in every schoolbook on history I've seen it has been downplayed rather than the opposite. Because of religious apologists like you.
Then your religion and science bit, hell no. First the major reason was because people outside of the clergy was simply and harshly discouraged from such work. Secondly, science didn't exist as such back then precisely because deus ex was dogma. The real advances comes when you can simply remove god from all theories. Thirdly because of the book burnings of catholics much of what had been known was lost, it wasn't until we regained it from the muslims that we could again "stand on the shoulders of giants". Just look on math. Lots of math books from the orient was burned because it was deemed heretic. Math?

Then I think that you again misunderstood the "start of the meme" thing. I did not claim that a decreasing religious element etc. I claimed that that was the start of the meme, regardless of how strong their influence was or how religious they were. It was you who started this apology bullshit.

That's the short reply. G2G2B

[Zed]

I don't think you've actually provided sufficient evidence for the public perception of a connection between atheism and science starting to appear during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a time during which rationality was paramount - the ideal was for a rational science as well as a rational religion, and these two were deeply intertwined during this period. If you want further information as to how strongly they are connected, I recommend reading Stephen Gaukroger's "The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity". The argument needs to be sketched in greater detail than a forum post will allow.

I've really no interest in a discussion on Catholics oppressing other faiths - it's done to death, and it isn't relevant to the initial post. This is a discussion about science, and because the concept of science had a different meaning in medieval and early modern times, it's also a question about natural philosophy (wherever you got the idea that the inquisition predates natural philosophy by several centuries, I don't know - but it's very, very wrong.) I pointed out the fact that the Enlightenment wasn't really a better time to live in, because you seemed adamant about describing medieval and early modern times as excessively horrible.

I'd also point out that scientific advances didn't always happen in spite of Church oppression. Copernicus' heliocentrical theory was a side-product of his research into calendar reform - calendar reform which was necessary in order to establish the correct date of Easter every year. Galileo had cardinals for patrons. Jesuit colleges were, for a long time, among the most advanced mathematicians in Europe, seeking to excel in science in order to ensure greater prestige for their faith - up to the point of public experiments. The Jesuits translated hundreds of scientific and mathematical works into Chinese alone. Should these elements be overlooked? It is popular to present science and religion as opposed forces; the truth is far more nuanced.

As a final note concerning antisemitism: you should read up on the distinction between (medieval) anti-Judaism and (modern) anti-semitism. While the two are certainly linked, they differ significantly. Antisemitism grew far more influential during the Enlightenment, focusing increasingly on the physical and psychological characteristics of Jews. Whereas anti-Judaism was largely founded in religious grounds (e.g. "they killed Christ", "they defiled the sacrament"), antisemitism is secular (e.g. "they are greedy parasites"). Antisemitism per se had existed before the Enlightenment (most notably Ferdinand and Isabella's banishment of the conversos), but it was less influential.

[Zinegata]

I'd just like to add something:

A non-atheist is not synonymous with a religious nutjob.

Strictly speaking, the vast majority of people in the world believe in some form of higher power. But only a tiny portion of these "religious" people believe in stuff like blowing up people in the name of God, killing gays for going against some Holy Book, or setup their own personal death cult.

Scientists are generally drawn from the "normal" section of the populace, not the "religious nutjob minority", because the said nutjob minority doesn't believe in science in the first place.