Every religion provides its adherents with an origin story–an explanation for who the faithful are and how their creed came to be.
Nu-atheism is no exception. Some would argue that atheism isn’t a religion but a lack of belief. Science and logic prove this claim false. Human beings are wired to worship. The only people who have no gods are nutcases who think they are God. Simulation theory is a textbook example. It’s bugmen making creators in their flawed image.
Listen to atheists spawned by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the like, and it soon becomes apparent that they worship their intellects and their egos. Like all faiths, theirs has a creation myth.
An integral part of the atheist creation narrative is belief in the Christian Dark Ages. During this benighted period, the story goes, Europeans lost the advances of Greece and Rome. Stifled by the Church, further technological advancement would have to wait for the Renaissance, which was mainly a warm up for the Enlightenment.
Most religions’ origin stories are set during purposefully vague past epochs. When a time frame is given at all, it’s in nebulous terms like, “a long time ago,” or, “in the primordial chaos before time.”
Nu-atheism is one of the few religions that sets a key part of its origin story during a concrete span of time. The “Dark Ages”, in the original Medieval usage, referred to either the 13th or the 10th and 11th centuries, but Reformation and Enlightenment writers later expanded its duration from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance.
Conveniently, the concrete historical setting of this particular creation myth allows us to conclusively debunk it.
Any historians worth their salt have been disavowing the concept of the Dark Ages for years.
So have honest atheists, for that matter. Here’s Tim O’Neill’s review of Hannam, wherein he demolishes the internet atheist dogma that scientific advancement stalled in the Middle Ages.
It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one – scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.
If there were no Dark Ages, why is belief in the Dark Age myth so widespread? First, people need stories that reinforce their identities. A story that reaffirms who you are over and against someone else is especially powerful. Knowing you’re not them is vital to knowing who you are.
For atheists who get their medieval history from Family Guy, an essential part of who they’re not is the superstitious rubes that razed the ancient libraries and burned free thinkers at the stake. To them, it doesn’t matter that that those rubes never existed.
Second, the black legend of the Dark Ages is another Christian own-goal. It was Protestants who took the ball from Petrarch, ran with it, and passed it down the field to Enlightenment secular humanists. Much like the campfire tales about the Crusades, propaganda spread by the Reformers as part of their own origin story came back to bite them.
This post isn’t to knock all religious origin stories set during a concrete point in history. The existence and ministry of Jesus, for example, is better attested than the lives of Socrates, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar. Successful attempts by academic grifters to ply wignat tree worshipers with 70s style “Jesus is a hoax” claptrap show just how intellectually bankrupt every flavor of atheism is.
The Church is on the rise globally. Catch a preview of a post-fedora future in my brand-new mech anthology:
When you peddle the survival of the best adapted, but you have more mates than offspring:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3UXl0oMYPLs/SXWZGAYJf8I/AAAAAAAAAFo/tiHGbGA9JMY/s1600-h/atheism-nogod.jpg
On the money! As a child I remember being told specifically that “nothing happened of interest” in “the Dark Ages” and that basically humanity lived in superstitious ignorance until The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. “Just ignore all the genocide and slavery that immediately followed, it was an age of reason, trust us!” The original fake news, rewriting history, stopping people from educating themselves. When you actually read history, you find that all the sciences had lots of breakthroughs, that there was cultural interchange between all the world powers (even during constant wars), that most of the “modern” problems have been with us for millennia. Yet the amount of secularists who think history started in the 18th century is stunning. These people have embraced ignorance to feed their Myth of Progress narrative.
One of the most vivid “my teachers lied to me” moments came in college, when I started reading through Aquinas’s Summa on my own. I had actually believed the flat Earth myth, i.e. that everyone thought that the Earth was flat before the enlightenment and that the Church taught this as dogma. After all, this was taken for granted in every history class that I had through high school. Then on the reply to the 2nd objection in the very first question I read:
“Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.”
That is not only Aquinas know that the Earth was round, but he thought this was so well known and uncontroversial that he was willing to use it an example to prove another point.
(I should add that on top of the flat Earth nonsense, this was doubling enlightening since my European History teacher insisted that scholasticism consisted of nothing but reciting scripture and rejecting all other sources of knowledge.)
Gaslighting Western thinkers into turning their backs on Scholasticism might be the first example of wide-scale Liberal NPC programming.
Nobody has yet refuted the Scholastics. Guys like Hume just made a show of attacking strawmen, while guys like Kant sidestepped Aquinas altogether, posited internally inconsistent alternatives, and declared that any other metaphysic had to satisfy their arbitrary standards.
They get away with it because the Church spits on its own history. I met a Franciscan friar at a campus parish who didn’t like Thomas Aquinas. It wasn’t necessarily because of flaws in Aquinas’s logic, but because Aquinas and his beliefs were so ancient.
In fairness to them (and I’ve known many good Franciscans), high theology isn’t as much their ballpark. They’re more about going among the people to spread the Gospel. I bet the Dominicans would have a better reputation of him.
The presentation of scholasticism in my AP European History class was so bad that the teacher and book both claimed that Scholasticism could not survive the Renaissance because it was unable to handle the ideas of Aristotle.
It was also claimed that millions of witches could have died in the “Dark Ages” and that the Church described the intercession of the saints as “white magic.” It was ridiculously bad, but I didn’t know that while I was in the class.
Thomas was a Dominican. He’s the crown jewel of their order.
The Franciscans have a fraternal rivalry with them. The star theologian of the Friars Minor is blessed Duns Scotus.
Although I believe there are some who would give the palm to St. Bonaventure.
Or St. Anthony of Padua
Brian
Jean Gimpel’s book on the medieval industrial revolution will diabuse anyone about the stupid dark ages.
Henri Pirenne provides, in my perspective, a cogent analysis of a possible Dark ages stemming with the Moslem invasions and costal raiding from them and the Vikings the 600s to Charlesmagne’s coronation.
xavier
Thank you for the recommendations.
The Church has a rather long history supporting science, and why wouldn’t it? Science describes how the universe works. The Church tells us who made it that way and why. The more you know about the how, the closer you are to understanding the nature of the who and why.
Chris
John Wright posted a long list of Catholic priests/layman’s contributions to science on his blog.
Again, this will disabuse the ignorant.
Fr Stanley Jaki and one of his interpreters Stacy Trasancos are other resources.
xavier
The Church also invented the University and the Hospital.
What modern intellectuals deride as disinterest in their dubious “accomplishments” is actually a response to their own anticlericalism and atheism.
For future arguments, you can point out that there is actually ONE real scientific martyr, genuinely murdered for his scientific beliefs: Antoine Lavoisier, who was killed at the orders of Paul Marat, one of the atheists of the French Revolution. Marat had once apparently claimed to have discovered the ‘Universal Secret Fire’, and Lavoisier shredded his pretensions in print. Come the Revolution, Marat worked his way up the government until he was signing death warrants. He made sure he got Lavoisier’s name right.