• TheMadFool
    13.8k
    From a cursory observation we see that most ''great'' scientific discoveries have been made by people who believe in God i.e in the period 16th to the 19th centuries.

    Nothing much has been achieved since then.

    Could it be that our loss of faith is ''causing'' a failure in our ability to discover new truths about our world?

    Your views...
  • Dalai Dahmer
    73
    I think the God club was just bigger back then. I think the penalties for not at least pretending to be in the club were quite severe..
  • Txastopher
    187
    Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    I think the God club was just bigger back then. I think the penalties for not at least pretending to be in the club were quite severe..Dalai Dahmer

    My knowledge on history isn't so good but I doubt that early scientists were ''pretending'' to believe in God.

    If I may say so, their works were considered as deciphering the word of God.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.Txastopher

    Really? It's just a coincidence? Could be...never know. However one can't miss the fact that this generation is missing the luminaries that populated the scientific community a few centuries ago.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    1901 – Annie Jump Cannon: stellar classification
    1905 – Albert Einstein: theory of special relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect
    1906 – Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics
    1907 – Alfred Bertheim: Arsphenamine, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent
    1909 – Fritz Haber: Haber Process for industrial production of ammonia
    1909 – Robert Andrews Millikan: conducts the oil drop experiment and determines the charge on an electron
    1910 – Williamina Fleming: the first white dwarf, 40 Eridani B
    1911 – Ernest Rutherford: Atomic nucleus
    1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Superconductivity
    1912 – Alfred Wegener: Continental drift
    1912 – Max von Laue : x-ray diffraction
    1912 – Vesto Slipher : galactic redshifts
    1912 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Cepheid variable period luminosity relation
    1913 – Henry Moseley: defined atomic number
    1913 – Niels Bohr: Model of the atom
    1915 – Albert Einstein: theory of general relativity – also David Hilbert
    1915 – Karl Schwarzschild: discovery of the Schwarzschild radius leading to the identification of black holes
    1918 – Emmy Noether: Noether's theorem – conditions under which the conservation laws are valid
    1920 – Arthur Eddington: Stellar nucleosynthesis
    1922 – Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, John Macleod: isolation and production of insulin to control diabetes
    1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle
    1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies
    1925 – Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)
    1925 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Discovery of the composition of the Sun and that Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe
    1927 – Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)
    1927 – Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang
    1928 – Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)
    1929 – Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe
    1928 – Alexander Fleming: Penicillin, the first beta-lactam antibiotic
    1929 – Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics
    1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers his eponymous limit of the maximum mass of a white dwarf star
    1932 – James Chadwick: Discovery of the neutron
    1932 – Karl Guthe Jansky discovers the first astronomical radio source, Sagittarius A
    1934 – Clive McCay: Calorie restriction extends the maximum lifespan of another species
    1938 – Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann: Nuclear fission
    1938 – Isidor Rabi: Nuclear magnetic resonance
    1943 – Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome
    1945 - Howard Florey Mass production of penicillin
    1947 – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor
    1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon: 'A mathematical theory of communication' a seminal paper in Information theory.
    1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics
    1951 – George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
    1952 – Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine
    1952 - Frederick Sanger: demonstrated that proteins are sequences of amino acids
    1953 – James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology

    All born in the 1800s.

    The rest of the list is made of people who only ''confirm'' what had been theorized by people who believed in a god.
  • Dalai Dahmer
    73
    My knowledge on history isn't so good but I doubt that early scientists were ''pretending'' to believe in GodTheMadFool

    I can see your history is wanting by the reply you had from Πετροκότσυφας.

    You doubt that I I don't doubt that. Well that's that covered then.
    If I may say so, their works were considered as deciphering the word of God.TheMadFool

    Yeah sure. Their works were considered, therefore by others, as deciphering those same other's already belief-in-god club-minded view. It's to be expected.
  • Hanover
    12.9k
    Could it be that our loss of faith is ''causing'' a failure in our ability to discover new truths about our world?TheMadFool

    Assuming your hypothetical true, that most scientific discoveries were made by religious people, there is no basis to conclude there is any causative link between those two facts, considering as you move back in time most people were religious. I'd assume that as the stove top hat fell into disuse, you saw the same changes occur in scientific discovery, but I doubt one had to do with the other.

    As a somewhat relevant aside, the hypothetical is false as well. Technological advances are occuring at a faster pace now.
    www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2015/06/17/the-quickening-pace-of-medical-progress-and-its-discontents/amp/
  • Rank Amateur
    1.5k
    And since the rise is mass produced ice cream, there have been giant leaps in computer science. Therefore ice cream lovers make better computers.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k


    Let me present this from a psychological perspective....

    Belief in God is, in essence, a culmination of the ''sense of wonder'' - a key ingredient in any form of inquiry.

    Do you agree, ergo, that this ''sense of wonder'' spreads into all quests for knowledge? God, in my view, provides a stronger motivation for us.
  • Dalai Dahmer
    73


    I see what you are mired within now.
  • Wayfarer
    22.6k
    Nothing much has been achieved since then.TheMadFool

  • Hanover
    12.9k
    Your thesis that the religious are more creative than the non-religious isn't a philosophical theory, it's an empirical one that requires a firmer definition of "creative" to be tested. I can't say though that I've noticed that the artistic crowd is particularly religious. Really it seems much the opposite.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    I see what you are mired within now.Dalai Dahmer

    Yes but you're being vague. Can you please be specific.

    Your thesis that the religious are more creative than the non-religious isn't a philosophical theory, it's an empirical one that requires a firmer definition of "creative" to be tested. I can't say though that I've noticed that the artistic crowd is particularly religious. Really it seems much the opposite.Hanover

    Well, we agree on some points. It's just a hunch but it's not that difficult to see that religion is tied somehow to mysticism. Mysticism is the icing on the cake of the mysterious - that is the ultimate prompt for all inquiry.

    Nice video. Thanks.

    Have a read above. I'm not saying religion is true but only ponder on it as a very strong and very positive (morally) impetus for discovery - real groundbreaking discoveries.
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.