Jagella wrote:
The Discovery Institute is a Christian apologetics think tank that targets what it calls "scientific materialism." On its website, the Discovery Institute has this to say in
its mission statement:
...the Judeo-Christian culture has established the rule of law, codified respect for human rights and conceived constitutional democracy. It has engendered development of science and technology, as well as economic creativity and innovation.
What might seem to be surprising to many of us is that Christianity has fostered any of these cultural developments. So...
Question for Debate: Does Christianity justifiably get credit for the rule of law, democracy, human rights and science?
Doing a little bit of research, I've found that
the answer is not really. The
rule of law, and
democracy, as examples, predate Christianity and were first developed by Greek philosophers like Plato. The ideal of
human rights postdates Christianity by many centuries and emerged in the philosophy of John Locke. [snip]
Um, a lot to say here, so I'm not going to go into detail until asked.
Your debate question changes the Discovery Institute's phrase "Judeo-Christian culture" to "Christianity." That would seem to be a red flag, twisting someone else's argument and thereby setting up a straw man to knock down. For example, Judeo-Christian culture emphatically INCLUDES the natural law tradition, rooted in the "stoic" (not really) Roman philosopher Cicero, who emphasized piety and benevolence, not unlike the two basic commandments of Jesus Christ. Another point: in a later post Jagella says that Old-Testament injunctions cannot be credited to Christianity, but of course they ARE part of Judeo-Christian culture, and of course Christianity includes the Old Testament as well.
In Judeo-Christian culture, unlike Islamic culture (for example), philosophy (rooted in the ancient Greeks) became part of the conceptual framework of theological discussion. Thomas Aquinas, for example, "baptized" Aristotle, while the early Church fathers saw Cicero behind Romans 2:14-15 ("those who by nature do the things of the law").
And of course philosophy begat natural philosophy (science), and Pope Urban VIII was a personal friend of Galileo until things went bad. The Catholic Church (as my very Catholic father informed me) presents itself as friendly toward honest science, which brings us to the "scientific materialism" reference in Jagella's original post. I'll come back to that later.
John Locke was not by any means the originator of human rights. This would seem to be Cicero once again, who rooted the preeminent virtue of justice in our "natural inclination to love our fellow men." In the natural law tradition (as epitomized by Hutcheson and Burlamaqui in the 18th Century, directly informing the U.S. Declaration of Independence), rights are derived from duties, with piety and benevolence (per Hutcheson) being not only the fundamental duties (and therefore the source of "unalienable rights" as in the Declaration of Independence) but also the source of HAPPINESS (as in the Declaration of Independence).
John Locke, that apologist for slavery,
divorced rights from duties and directly challenged Cicero's development of Aristotle's concept of the "perfection" of human nature being completed virtue, with benevolence (once again) at the root of the preeminent virtue of justice.
A word on democracy: In Christian thinking, rooted in the words of Jesus Christ (I suspect that most people around here won't have to ask for quotes) we are all equal before God, for whom distinctions of wealth and social status are unimportant. I think it is fair to say that in Puritan Massachusetts, a covenanted congregation was the nucleus of local self-government, an essential element of representative democracy as it developed in the USA.
Back to "scientific materialism": I don't know anything about the "Discovery Institute" (mentioned in Jagella's first post), but think that science has been perverted by two closely-related things:
(1) Empiricism (limiting study to that which can be observed and measured in physical space-time) has been falsely elevated from a methodology to a reigning ideology, rendering any discussion of the "spiritual" realm outside the bounds of science and unworthy of serious inquiry.
(2) Reductionist materialism as the reigning answer to the mind-body problem of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the arbitrary assertion that thoughts are simply a manifestation of material processes in the human brain. In my opinion, western culture has been effectively lobotomized, with universities the location where enforcement of the ruling pseudo-religious paradigm of "scientific materialism" gets inflicted on students, especially indebted graduate students who must embrace their masters' ideology to have any chance of getting a position as a professor (and after that, any "heretical" spiritual tendencies serve to endanger the hope of getting tenure).
