http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

As mentioned by another user below. The story in that link is really a great read. However, I'm unable to tell you how accurate or complete that account is.

Fortunately, Aristotle's work was preserved and commented upon by Islamic scholars. Averroes and Avicenna are two important Islamic scholars who commented on Aristotle. After the Crusades, this was reintroduced to the West.

As Aristotelianism was reintroduced to Europe, there was actually an intellectual crisis of sorts, ultimately resolved by St. Aquinas. See 'Scholasticism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism

Eastern Christendom fleeing the encroachment of Islamic invaders (which is largely what reintroduced Aristotle to the West, not Islam) had grappled with the conflict between Platonic and Aristotelian theological influences for centuries prior to the Crusades. The dispute between Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Seminara is the culmination of that conflict. In fact, there arguably wouldn't have even been Crusades if Islamic armies hadn't been actively assaulting Byzantium for centuries.

I think it's disingenuous to say that Aquinas resolved anything. He played a role in moving the West towards Aristotle, but that was not exactly an advancement. It'd been dealt with before.

The areas that we today identify with this faith had the history of a lot of science work before the invaders came. And the religion was also not that one:

From the five holy "sees" only Rome survived the invaders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_see#Listing_of_the_s...

"Rome, in Italy (Saint Peter and Saint Paul)

Constantinople, now Istanbul in present-day Turkey (Saint Andrew)

Alexandria, in Egypt (Saint Mark the Evangelist)[14][15][16]

Antioch, in present-day Turkey (Saint Peter)[17]

Jerusalem, in the Holy Land (Saint Peter and Saint James)[18]"

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

Richly illustrated. Versus

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

"For many years, Wahhabi clerics opposed the establishment of a television service in Saudi Arabia, as they believed it immoral to produce images of humans.[19] The introduction of television in 1965 offended some Saudis,[20] and one of King Faisal's nephews, Prince Khalid ibn Musa'id ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz,[21] was killed in a police shootout in August 1965 after he led an assault on one of the new television stations.[20]"

At your last paragraph, when you say "It'd been dealt with before" who/what are you referring to?

+ Well since I was a teenager anyway

"Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made: but the more teeth they have the more long-lived are they, as a rule, while those are short-lived in proportion that have teeth fewer in number and thinly set."[0]

He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant.

The Aristotelian method might not have been the scientific method as it's understood today, but there's little doubt that it was [i]a[/i] scientific method. Truthfully, it's difficult to overstate just how significant an impact Aristotle's writings, and other Greek philosophy (particularly metaphysics), had on the later development of empiricism and the scientific tradition. I doubt that there was a single early modern philosopher (those who birthed what we'd consider modern science) who wasn't extremely well-read of Aristotle.

Aristotle must be read within his historical context. Both in terms of what he was responding to (Plato, various pre-Socratric philosophers, and his contemporaries), as well as what came after. His shadow is a long one, felt even to this day. Early modern philosophers, medieval Islamic scientists, and the others who helped lay the groundwork for the scientific method were all influenced by the Greeks, even when they disagreed.

0. Aristotle, History of Animals, Bk. II, Pt. 3. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.2.ii.html

I'm probably just dense - how did he go about getting it wrong?

> He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant.

I understand your point but I don't give him a bye for having a rediculously small n, since he was well schooled in inductive reasoning. I have further discussion in other comments so I won't bother to summarize her.

The biggest point, really, is his outsize impact on early christianity and later Islam, which I personally can't all consider benign.

Still, at the end of the day, we two don't need to come to an agreement :-) -- even more so that any disagreement is in degree. Some days I feel that the only people who've actually read the classics are people I already know!

Really, you're going to fault him for not adhering to the standards of disciplines not invented until thousands of years after his death?

I'm not saying I would particularly like Plato as a person, or that I even agree with him on many things, but I find him a wide ranging thinker with much to offer the present.

I think Aristotle got a lot of credibility by being seized upon by some early christian thinkers. The world would be in a much better shape had they leant on some of Sophocles' lost plays instead :-).

And yes my view of him is formed in its context. Classical Greek society was profoundly weird by contemporary western standards, the closest analogy most people might understand might be 8th century islam. I always get a laugh when I see Greece portrayed in film, or cited by a politician: sure, I can and do draw a line philosophical from Athens to London, but but it is almost incomprehensible today without study. Then again I feel the same way when I see physics or computing in film.

There's another important piece of context Bluestrike2 mentions though you might have missed it: the modern view of science is very recent the result of several profound revolutions / dislocations / breakthroughs. Apart from the lovely lack of specialization, 2-3K years ago, philosophical (AKA scientific) theories were discussed more in essay form, like literary criticism rather than through reasoned debate, somewhat rigorous analysis and euclidean-style proof from postulate and theorem. I have read some Vedic era Sanskrit disputations on the nature of zero and they suffered from the same thing.

And yet, all that being said, I think Aristotle doesn't deserve the level of good press he gets. Though frankly my writing on this thread is more than I have really thought about him in 35 years. He simply doesn't have contemporary impact that many of this predecessors do on my daily life.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17917610

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00784-010-0445-3

Fortunately Aristotle doesn't care what I think.

And the scriptures were made by the people who understood very little about the world, compared to what the current science knows. Therefore the creation is described using the concepts that we today know for sure don't exist. Specifically, in the creation myth:

"And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so." (Genesis 1:7)

The firmament is what people believed separated the water that rains "from above" from what we see as "heaven."

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

The Latin translation, accepted by the Church, made in 4th century AD, uses word that is cognate with English "firm." The firmament was believed to be firm, like metals, and the gods "opened" it when it rained, and then closed it back.

They didn't even know that the rain is really in the clouds.

Their "world model" involved non-moving Earth. Aristotle came later.

It's true that Aristotle wrote what he wrote, but his teachings were never a part of the Bible.

Edit: kindly see my next answer down the tree if you don't want to read the Wikipedia yourself, the highest church thinkers really supported exactly the model with the firmament, the Earth in the middle, because Bible. Also see my top post here regarding the main article.

The reality is that the people who shaped the debates within the Catholic church back then tended to be well educated, and possessing all the attributes of one raising through a hierarchy - above average intelligence, determination, and skill. It is pretty extreme to describe them all as narrow-minded fundamentalists.

Before telescopes, Plato and Aristotle were state of the art knowledge in cosmology (inasmuch as this field even could be said to exist back then). An educated person, including top theologians back then, would have been well acquainted with their views. It is also the case that the Catholic church has been historically more open to scientifically-backed knowledge than most people give it credit for - look at all the Jesuits who had successful careers as scientists, while also remaining men of faith.

Please be aware that observing the (mostly american) present-day religious phenomena does not provide you a good basis for judging religious thinking in the past, especially that related to the non-protestant churches.

No, they were not. They were just popular but not state of the art, as neither from them actually preformed astronomical observations or did the calculations. There are people before and after these two who did much more. Because they actually did some real science.

Aristarchus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar...

"This work calculates the sizes of the Sun and Moon, as well as their distances from the Earth in terms of Earth's radius."

Eratosthenes:

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

"Repeating Eratosthenes' calculation with more accurate data, the result is 40,074 km, which is 66 km different (0.16%) from the currently accepted polar circumference of the Earth."

Aristarchus of Samos:

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

"presented the first known model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it"

Archimedes:

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

"Estimation of the size of the universe

Archimedes then estimated an upper bound for the number of grains of sand required to fill the Universe. To do this, he used the heliocentric model of Aristarchus of Samos."

Everything before that year that that carpenter was born, and before his followers continued to depend on older or plainly less informed texts.

I did not say "astronomy". I said "cosmology". The choice was conscious. The one is the more practical study of celestial phenomena, and you are correct that neither Plato nor Aristotle were astronomers. The other concerns itself with the large-scale structures and phenomena, both in time and space. Astronomy studies what is going on out there. Cosmology tries to figure out how it all works together.

Astronomy was not an immediate concern to theologians. But they obviously were interested in what was then a proto-cosmology, intertwined with philosophy. If you were an educated person back then, and you were interested in an overall synthesis of how the universe works, Aristotle had it, and you were sure to read his books.

Also be aware that back then nobody had proof positive that Aristarchus (who was much closer to the current definition of an astronomer) was right. Just like today, there were many competing ideas. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that he was on to something. But really it took the invention of the telescope, and the scientific revolution after 1600 to definitely tip the balance.

It is good that you fight narrow-mindedness, but be aware that its antidote is having a broad understanding of these issues. Spend some time thinking about that, okay?

And no, this is also not true: "really it took the invention of the telescope"

It's Tycho Brahe who measured enough:

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

"he was the last of the major naked eye astronomers, working without telescopes for his observations."

I don't understand why people who don't know history try to argue here. In fact, I think I know, you don't have to try to explain me.

In fact knowledge is the thing that allows you to choose which constants to calculate at all. It is not intuitive why a light in the sky should have a size. What is the size of a sunset? What is the size of a rainbow? What is the size of an eclipse?

Knowledge is not the mere accumulation of measurement. It is the organizational structure that allows you to separate between what we can and cannot measure, what we have measured before and have not measured yet. It is what tells us whether "the" sun is a singleton or that "a" rainbow today is not the same today as tomorrow.

> who don't know history

I think you would benefit from reading up on the current consensus among historians on the Conflict Thesis before presenting it to those of us who have caught up on our Ferngren, Barker, etc.

Conflict Thesis has nothing to do with the facts I've presented. I haven't invented any. Where have you found any error in these?

Can you point out even one instance in which the Bible is inaccurate about the physical nature of the world? I'm curious

Or perhaps grab any part of the creation myth—the whole of the universe, our galaxy, our arm of the galaxy, our place in that arm, our star, our solar system, our planet, all the plants and animals and us...all made in just a handful of hours each.

Or how about the notion that not one, but two lucky guys met death and were returned from it days later. Or that mud can cure blindness. Or 5,000 people can be fed to satisfaction with tons of leftovers from just a couple fish and loaves of bread. Or that a jug known to be full of water can transmogrify into wine. Or bodies of water momentarily drying up, or having waters recede on command, to permit human passage. Or stars falling from the sky and crashing into earth. Rivers turning to blood. Sudden overnight pestilence that kills only the first-born of an entire nation, unless you painted blood on your doors. A woman turned into a pillar of salt.

Of course, asking such a question as yours implies one ought to take seriously and somewhat bordering on completely literal that which the Bible says that remotely touches on and involves the physical nature of the world. Otherwise the question doesn't make any sense. Because from the creation to the revelation, all of its stories say something about the physical nature of the world.

http://biblebabble.curbjaw.com/errors.htm

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/science/long.html

We talk about the religious view. For the religious view the Bible was actually relevant for the Church:

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

"Augustine wrote that too much learning had been expended on the nature of the firmament.[9] "We may understand this name as given to indicate not it is motionless but that it is solid." he wrote.[9]

Saint Basil argued for a fluid firmament.[9]

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the firmament had a "solid nature" and stood above a "region of fire, wherein all vapor must be consumed."[10]"

1475:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament#/media/File:Scheme_o...

Before the Christians, the Jews also had such interpretations:

"According to The Jewish Encyclopedia:

The Hebrews regarded the earth as a plain or a hill figured like a hemisphere, swimming on water. Over this is arched the solid vault of heaven. To this vault are fastened the lights, the stars. So slight is this elevation that birds may rise to it and fly along its expanse.[8]"

Yes, yes, by Apollo I suffer, I get colic, then the stew sets to rumbling like thunder and finally bursts forth with a terrific noise. At first, it's but a little gurgling pappax, pappax! then it increases, papapappax! and when I take my crap, why, it's thunder indeed, papapappax! pappax!! papapappax!!! just like the clouds.

SOCRATES:

Well then, reflect what a noise is produced by your belly, which is but small. Shall not the air, which is boundless, produce these mighty claps of thunder? STREPSIADES:

And this is why the names are so much alike: crap and clap. But tell me this. Whence comes the lightning, the dazzling flame, which at times consumes the man it strikes, at others hardly singes him. Is it not plain, that Zeus is hurling it at the perjurers?

It's obvious that only Socrates here claims that the rain comes from clouds, or that the thunder is the result of the discharge, and gets mocked for that.

Even today very much alive.

From the other sources we know that Socrates was then accused "corrupting the youth of the city-state and asebeia (impiety) against the pantheon of Athens" and that he was for that crime sentenced to death.

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

That's why Platon decided to only philosophise about the "ideas" and not to discuss or analyze the nature phenomena. He didn't want to end like Socrates.