To answer the second question first, how are you able to do science if you don't have scientific instrumentation? The ancient world did not even have something as necessary to measuring stuff as clear lead crystal glass (it wasn't invented till the middle ages). Without glass you can't watch the results of your experiments because not only does it have a refractive index close to zero, it is also the least reactive substance that was known then.
You seem to want to reduce science to optical devices. There was medical science, astornomy, Euclidian geometry and some pretty sophisticated calenders like the Mayan which in fact was the most accurate calender in the world until the Atomic clock.
So no test-tubes, retorts, beakers
No but they had gears, levers, winches, screws and the agubus. All thourghly scientific in their conception and application.
You also can't have lens for spectacles, telescopes and microscopes for correcting faulty eyesight, seeing the very large and the very small.
You seem to define science in terms of optical devices, that is a little restricting in my view.
If you can't have accurate measurement, you can't have science. You can have "natural philosophy", which is speculating on the nature of things from what can be observed using the naked eye and using what limited maths you have.
The notion that the Earth is round (spherical) existed well before the Renaissance. When Eratosthenes, a scholar in Egypt during Hellenistic times, learned that a shaft of sunlight penetrated to the bottom of a well in Syrene on the summer solstice, he deduced that he could use the information to measure the circumference of the Earth. Around the same time, another Egyptian scholar, Aristarchus of Samos, was trying to figure out how far the moon and sun are from the Earth. In the process, he deduced that the moon orbits the Earth, and the Earth orbits the sun. His insight came a millennium and a half before Copernicus, however, it was not appreciated at the time or widely published.
http://www.infohistory.com/creative.shtml
The ancient world didn't have a seperate system of numbers (the Arabs, c8th century), algebra (again, the Arabs), and calculus (Newton, among others).
The ancient world had a sophisticated systematic computation methodology for measurement that still works. Calculas measures then more precisly but no more scientifically then pythagerons therom.
Despite lacking the most basic elements necessary to do scientific research, the ancient world achieved astonishing things in the realms of technology and architecture. But that's not the same as science. What science there was is hardly of much use now: who now goes to Galen for medical advice?
I am not getting you working definition for science and experiementation is only a small part of scientific method. Now granted, since Newton's demonstrations at the Royal Society in London in 1672 science as we know it was very different. However, do you conclude that prior to the invention of the refracting telescope there was no such thing as astronomy?
"In December, 1672, Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and at this meeting a paper describing his invention of the refracting telescope was read. A few days later he wrote to the secretary, making some inquiries as to the weekly meetings of the society, and intimating that he had an account of an interesting discovery that he wished to lay before the society. When this communication was made public, it proved to be an explanation of the discovery of the composition of white light."
The vast majority of people in the ancient world could neither read nor write. They were not taught it, and there was no social imperative to teach them. Education on the whole was for the monied elite: most of the letters of St Paul would have been read to the congregation by those few who could read. The same with the Gospels. The same with Genesis, and the OT.
That is not what you said, you said that the writters of the Bible knew nothing of science. To that I would say, what about Luke, he was respectably well educated and his books are regared as historically accurate. Moses was trained in the sciences of Eqypt which would in time give rise to Euclidian math in Greece. The only difference between the ancient Greeks and many of the other brilliant thinkers in the Mediteranian world was that they wrote everything down.
Again, where would Paul have learnt about science? He was a Roman citizen, so he might have read Aristotle, Plato, the Stoic philosphers, alongside the Torah and the Tanakh, but where would he have studied science? Classical education included rhetoric, poetry and philosophy; it didn't include experimental science.
There were no experimental sciences, in fact the ancient Greeks frownd upon experiementation. Only in modern times do we reduce scientific discovery to empirical demonstrations. This is neither a good working definiton of science nor an accurate sounding board for the depth and range of scientific inquiries.
Forgive me for the length of the quote but I really like the passage and couldn't bring myself to shorten it.
“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself
going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It's a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”
“Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
“Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as ‘education.’”
“You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?”
“Sure.”
“That's absurd.”
“You've heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.”
John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”
I counter, “That's the first normal thing I've said in weeks. The rest of the time I'm feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.
“But I'll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.
They are just looking at me so I continue: “The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It's that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too; it's just that that doesn't make it bad. Or ghosts either.
“ Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts.
We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”
http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/PIRSIG, ROBERT.htm
I'm exagerating somewhat, as I suspect that the scientific impulse may have begun with the Greeks (Pythagorus, Archimedes, Galen etc...) But it was hardly started by the time of Jesus; and wasn't terrifically encouraged by the Romans (great builders and copiers of others though they may have been.)
We remember the Roman Legions and Ceasar crossing the Rubicon but sometimes forget that the glory of Rome was their engineering of roads and bridges.
Science proper doesn't really start in Europe till the Renaissance rediscovery of the ancient Greeks, and discovery of what the great Muslim scholars like Averroes were doing.
I'm sorry, but to assume that St Paul, Peter or even Jesus would have anything useful to say about the content of science is to read them as if they were 20th century people with a 20th century education.
Why would I ever want to reduce them to a modern conception of scientific discourse. Education in the modern world in not nessacarily better then in ancient times and the Renaissance was marked by a rebirth of the ancient Grecian arts and sciences as you have allready mentioned. Our sciences are more precise but are they inheritantly superior to the ancient understanding of life and nature. I would submit that if anything the tools of science are making us intellectually lazy, the ancients had to work for their knowledge we simply press a button or pull a lever for ours.
Thought provoking post, thanks for that.
