Pseudo-knowledge.

The "rule of thumb" is a myth.

Pseudo-Knowledge Alert.


Did you know that John Paul II warned scientists not to study the "Big Bang" because it was "holy"?

It must be true because Steven Hawking uses that statement as a regular "laugh line" in his talks.

In another observation of modern religion, Hawking noted that in the 1980s, around the time he released a paper discussing the moment the universe was born, Pope John Paul II admonished the scientific establishment against studying the moment of creation, as it was holy.

“I was glad not to be thrown into an inquisition,” Hawking joked.

Har, har, har...Catholics and the Inquistion...that's a knee slapper every time.

The problem is that John Paul II never said it.

Here's one site that links to the putative speech, which contains nothing of the sort.

And - mirabile dictu! - here is an atheist who came up with the same conclusion.

And, then, there is the obvious problem that the person who formulated Big Bang cosmology, aka "the Father of the Big Bang" - Father Georges LeMaitre - was a Catholic priest.

Oh, and the Vatican has an observatory.

But we should expect this story to become iconic.

*sigh*

Augustine did not say "The Church is a whore but also my mother."

For folks who are still upset about the "Donation of Constantine," which was forged by Charlemagne supporters in the 9th Century, they are pretty easy-going about contemporary forgeries.

There is a bit of pseudo-knowledge going about where Augustine gets quoted as saying "The Church is a whore but also my mother." To anyone whose actually read Augustine, that doesn't sound like Augustine. No one can find a source for this putative quote.

Mark Shea called BS on the quote on his blog. Some internet research turned up progressive Evangelical Tony Campolo as the "patient zero" for the quote. One of Shea's intrepid readers actually emailed Campolo:

I did some work on this because it always bothered me too. I’m a protestant who has a MA in Historical Theology, and it never made sense to me that Augustine would use such a word to describe the church. The phrase smacks of modern protestant thought. The first protestant author who cited this in writing was Tony Campolo. I emailed him about it, and he replied that he didn’t have a reference, but that he had heard it from a English preacher who I could never track down. The short of it is that Augustine did NOT say it, nor did a later author quote him as saying it as far as I can tell. However, it is accepted in print for the time being.

And that's how BS pseudo-knowledge gets born.

File under "Too Good not to be True."

Zhou Enlai was referring to 1968, not 1789, in his "too early" to assess the effects of the French Revolution:

When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously said it was “too early” to assess the implications of the French revolution, he was referring to turmoil in France in 1968 and not — as is commonly thought — to the more distant political upheaval of 1789.


So says a retired American diplomat, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr., who was present when Zhou made the comment during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

Freeman, who was Nixon’s interpreter during the historic, weeklong trip, made the disclosure last week during a panel discussion in Washington about On China, the latest book by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The discussion was moderated by Richard McGregor, a journalist and China expert who wrote about Freeman’s comments for the Financial Times of London.

In an interview yesterday, Freeman elaborated on his recollection about Zhou’s comment, the conventional interpretation of which is frequently offered as evidence of China’s sage, patient, and far-sighted ways. Foreign Policy magazine, for example, referred last month to that interpretation, saying the comment was “a cautionary warning of the perils of judgments made in real time.”

The Washington Post’s recent review of Kissinger’s book likewise referred to the conventional understanding of Zhou’s remark.

Freeman described Zhou’s misconstrued comment as “one of those convenient misunderstandings that never gets corrected.”

He said Zhou’s remark probably was made over lunch or dinner, during a discussion about revolutions that had succeeded and failed. They included, Freeman said, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, both of which the Soviet Union crushed.

He said it was clear from the context and content of Zhou’s comment that in saying it was “too early to say” the Chinese leader was speaking about the events in France in May 1968, not the years of upheaval that began in 1789.

Freeman acknowledged that the conventional interpretation makes for a better story but added that it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the discussion that Zhou was speaking about 1968.

Are we really smarter than our ancestors?

Mark Shea points out:

But instead of this gratifying scenario, we do not find an antiquity full of people who are closer to the beast. Antiquity does not reveal homo sapiens unable to conceive nothing higher than eating, drinking and copulating. That required the invention of MTV. Instead, in its childhood, the human race seems to have been born in a white hot explosion of music and dance, cooling into poetry that only after some time hardened into prose. Ancient man is a creature who can scarcely be restrained from music and exultation, not merely for entertainment, but for the gods. Only modern man could invent deconstruction, allowing hundreds of educated people to hold conferences in which they read thousands of pages of closely reasoned words arguing that language has no meaning, then break for lunch and haggle with the waitress about the bill.


Something of the richness of the ancient approach to life is glimpsed in the word “tragedy” for example, which takes us back to the exultant childhood of our race. This supremely human mode of drama—which honors human choice with the high compliment of saying it matters profoundly–comes from a term roughly meaning “goat song” and probably hails back to religious rites of story and song. In short, Greek drama is (as all art was until about a century or so ago) intensely religious. Going further back, the glowing intensity of poetry only gets stronger. You find, not dull records full of bookkeeping written by soulless bores, but the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of Job in which the mysteries of life and death, joy and suffering, earth and heaven are probed with profundity. The earliest impulse of the human heart seems to have been to praise, to groan, to ask the Big Questions, and to do it in song, not to cringe like a whipped cur. There was no embarrassment about this. It was the most natural—one might even say the most human—thing in the world for ancients to do this.

It has taken the labor of centuries to banish poetry from ordinary human discourse and make it no longer normal and human, but elitist, artificial and strange. Why poetry is now seen this way is something I don’t understand. But I think it has something to do with the Fall. And the further we move toward the Parousia, the more, well, boring we seem to become. We progressively wall off from conversation the most interesting aspects of life and leave the public square open to endless triviality about the latest titillation from the latest bimbo.

And the more we do this, the more we incapacitate ourselves from being able to remedy our situation. Case in point: the Beeb’s recent Robin Hood series. It’s a fun post-modern retelling, mostly because the guy who plays Robin is likeable and the guy who plays the Sheriff of Nottingham is having such a won-der-ful time being evil.

But there is still something mournfully shallow about it. Most of the verve come from the sort of jerky, washed-out, fragrmented photography that is now de rigeur for action flicks. It’s well-choreographed violence, punctuated by a bit of saucy banter. But the writers have zero capacity to create characters who are remotely believable as actual medievals. Everybody involved could just as easily be members of the Manchester underworld fighting a corrupt cop while having flashbacks to their service in Gulf War I. Like Kevin Costner’s ridiculous costume drama, what you get are thoroughly contemporary actors in semi-medieval garb who fight, kiss, and stand around and spouting PC pieties about multiculturalism. Friar Tuck? Who he? But naturally one of Robin’s Merry Men is a Saracen girl whom he rescued from slavery and who has a vast knowledge of chemistry and all manner of other civilized science and philosophy. We get the expected sermons on pacifism (Robin is a disillusioned Crusader) and, of course, wealth redistribution. Marian is this buff chick who knows martial arts. Everybody is impossibly clean, fit, and Euro-sexy. The Church basically does not exist except as the land-grabbing entity that is sending good young men like Robin off to fight in Crusades against Indigenous Peoples. (A nun does turn up once, but she turns out to be a fraud). When religion is mentioned it is basically to catechize the audience in the standard religious vision of contemporary UK Chattering Classes: namely, that all religions are equally superior to Christianity.

Mostly, Robin is a good room temperature UK Labor socialist who is clever and always defeats the cunning but ultimately chopfallen Sheriff by robbing from the rich and giving to the poor without any reference whatsoever to the sorts of ideas or pieties that would have animated an actual medieval.

One can, of course, reply that “It’s just a stupid TV show.” True. But that’s the point: most people spend most of their time watching stupid TV shows, going to stupid movies and reading stupid books. It’s what people know. And that means they don’t know anything approaching history. Nothing else accounts for the fact that a staggering percentage of people think The Da Vinci Code gives us profound insights into the origins of Christianity. No wonder they’re filming a sequel. Those who don’t know bogus history are doomed to repeat it—and brag about how much smarter they are than suckers who believe the “official story”.

Aquinas on Women.

Let's put the "Aquinas thought that women were defective men" trope to rest.

There are more people alive today than have ever lived in the history of the Earth...

...well, not exactly.

Or to be more precise, not even close.

This site crunches the numbers on this extremely long-lived and wrong canard:

(Population Today, November/December 2002) The question of how many people have ever lived on Earth is a perennial one among information calls to PRB. One reason the question keeps coming up is that somewhere, at some time back in the 1970s, a now-forgotten writer made the statement that 75 percent of the people who had ever been born were alive at that moment.


This factoid has had a long shelf life, even though a bit of reflection would show how unlikely it is. For this "estimate" to be true would mean either that births in the 20th century far, far outnumbered those in the past or that there were an extraordinary number of extremely old people living in the 1970s.

If this estimate were true, it would indeed make an impressive case for the rapid pace of population growth in this century. But if we judge the idea that three-fourths of people who ever lived are alive today to be a ridiculous statement, have demographers come up with a better estimate? What might be a reasonable estimate of the actual percentage?

The conclusion (showing year, number of persons alive and number of births between "benchmarks"):

50,000 B.C. 2 - -

8000 B.C. 5,000,000 80 1,137,789,769

1 A.D. 300,000,000 80 46,025,332,354

1200 450,000,000 60 26,591,343,000

1650 500,000,000 60 12,782,002,453

1750 795,000,000 50 3,171,931,513

1850 1,265,000,000 40 4,046,240,009

1900 1,656,000,000 40 2,900,237,856

1950 2,516,000,000 31-38 3,390,198,215

1995 5,760,000,000 31 5,427,305,000

2002 6,215,000,000 23 983,987,500



Number who have ever been born 106,456,367,669

World population in mid-2002 6,215,000,000

Percent of those ever born who are living in 2002 5.8

So much for that factoid.




Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates.

Galileo Myths, continued.

 

In an essay on Justice Richard Posner's academic "sloppiness", Professor Bainbridge writes the following:

 

In his essay Overcoming Posner (94 Mich. L. Rev. 1898), my former colleague Gerard Bradley complained of "Posner's recurring caricaturization of the Catholic Church when he should be engaging in counterarguments." Gerry also notes that "Posner squarely invites the reader to choose between religion ... and reality." Finally, Gerry catches Posner in yet another example of sloppiness with facts. Posner wrote that "Cardinal Bellarmine refused to look through Galileo's telescope at the moons of Jupiter, whose existence seemed to refute the orthodox view that the planets were fixed to the surface of crystalline spheres ...." As Gerry points out, however, "Posner is grotesquely wrong on the facts here. Bellarmine, a leading theologian of the day, was on friendly terms with Galileo. Bellarmine accepted Galileo's invitation to look through the telescope in April of 1611, and thanked Galileo for the opportunity." Yes, Galileo eventually got into trouble with the Church, but here again we see Posner evidencing "only a superficial engagement with the facts."

I'd recently heard something about the refusal to look through the telescope - maybe from Christopher Hitchens - so I posting this for when I need to remind myself about the truth of the claim.

 

Speaking of 10 second pseudo-knowledge soundbites, Hitchens, in his recent debate with William Dembski, claimed that when Father Georges Lemaitre, the Jesuit priest who "discovered" the "Big Bang", described his discovery with some pope, the pope offered to make the "Big Bang" a matter of Catholic doctrine, to which offer Lemaitre demurred.

 

It's amazing the effect a confident British accent has.  The story is obviously unsourced, unmitigated bullshit.  Catholic magisterial authority doesn't work that way, and the idea of making a recent scientific doctrine a matter of Catholic doctrine is sheer nonsense.  But Hitchens said it - without citation - and his herd of lemming-like "independent minded" followers will be quoting it as gospel.  On the other hand, I'm reluctant to call bullshit on it without first finding out what Hitchens is basing this claim on because there is bound to be some tenuous relationhip with reality that Hitchens has uncharitably distorted.  And, so, the Hitchens/Dawkins bullshit machine continues to grind out the pseudo-knowledge.

Update:

This may be the seed from which Hitchens has manufactured his story:

It is tempting to think that Lemaître’s deeply-held religious beliefs might have led him to the notion of a beginning of time. After all, the Judeo-Christian tradition had propagated a similar idea for millennia. Yet Lemaître clearly insisted that there was neither a connection nor a conflict between his religion and his science. Rather he kept them entirely separate, treating them as different, parallel interpretations of the world, both of which he believed with personal conviction. Indeed, when Pope Pius XII referred to the new theory of the origin of the universe as a scientific validation of the Catholic faith, Lemaître was rather alarmed. Delicately, for that was his way, he tried to separate the two:

 

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God… It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”

Here is an interesting and useful discussion of Lemaitre's approach to faith and science.  A discussion of the interaction between Pius XII and Lemaitre is offered.

During most of Lemaître's tenure in the academy, Pope Pius XII occupied the Chair of Peter. The Pope delivered his famous speech, "Un'Ora," after he analyzed Lemaître's science with the intent of developing a philosophical argument that one could ultimately use to prove the existence of God. This event immediately stimulated theological and scientific debate on the relationship of science and religion. Pius XII had provided two arguments relying on science to confirm philosophical positions that included God. First, he mentioned the instability of the universe. Pius XII thought it was logical that an immutable being had to have created the mutable physical world. Lemaître was not adamantly opposed to this line of reasoning. However, Pius' second idea was not as well received. The Pope said that the apparent organization that characterizes the entire universe was another indication. It appears that Pius XII's underlying assumption was that the supernatural act of divine creation began with the early stages described by the primeval atom hypothesis:
 

. . . contemporary science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux, which along with the matter there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation . . . Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, modern science has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the creator.10

Statements such as these contradicted Lemaître's own strict distinction between the tools for investigating matters of science and matters of theology. "He realized quite fully the tentative and hypothetical character of scientific theories and for this reason alone, if for no others, opposed the use of such theories to support philosophical, theological or faith statements."11 As a result, Professor Lemaître wanted his scientific theories to be judged exclusively on their physical merit, keeping metaphysical implications completely separate.
 
Not surprisingly, Lemaître was alarmed when he was informed that the Holy Father would be delivering a speech to the Eighth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rome. On a trip to South Africa, Father Lemaître stopped at the Vatican to consult with two men, Father O'Connell, a science advisor to Pius XII, as well as the Cardinal Secretary of State. Lemaître's visit had the intended effect. The Pope's speech primarily praised the advances in astrophysics research in the last fifty years, making only a brief statement on the Big Bang, namely that "the human spirit, upon considering the vast paths traveled by galaxies, becomes in some manner a spectator at the cosmic events that occurred on the very morning of creation."12 Pius XII never mentioned the primeval atom hypothesis again.

 The interesting thing about the statement is that it was undoubtedly intended to protect the scientific theory of the "Big Bang" from rejection at the hands of atheists like Hitchens for being too "religious":

 

Despite his unquestionable scientific credibility, Lemaître's priesthood often led skeptics to question his theories, believing the Big Bang was "presented in a spirit of concordism with the religious concept of creation, and even received its inspiration from that religious concept."14 Concordism is the belief that the Bible contains scientific information not known by people at the time of the writing of the sacred texts. Even Professor Einstein confronted Lemaître on this issue. Not surprisingly, Father Lemaître had an excellent response to such critics:

Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses . . . As a matter of fact neither Saint Paul nor Moses had the slightest idea of relativity.15

Godart and Heller succinctly characterize the relationship of philosophy and science, "There is an intricate feed-back between cosmology and philosophical views. On the one hand, cosmology emerged from philosophical imaginations of the universe as a whole. On the other hand, philosophical speculations often took the inspiration and stimulus from the world-picture presented in the science of a given epoch."16

It is an interesting dynamic.  No one - theologians or scientists - should want a scientific theory to be accepted for non-scientific reasons, i.e., that it fits some ideological agenda.  We've seen the pernicious effect of that dynamic in the "anthropogenic global warming consensus" of recent years.  On the other hand, no one should want a scientific theory to be rejected for ideological reasons either.  Hence, ideally scientific theory  should be judged on scientific grounds, if at all possible, although pace Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"  the ideal may remain only a platonic ideal.
This last bit makes me think that reading Lemaitre may pay some dividends:

Monsignor Lemaître was very successful in achieving the goals of Vatican I and the charter of the Pontifical Academy. His methodological purity allowed him to share scientific discoveries with the Church, protecting her from misinterpreting physical results while at the same time sharing the splendor of her truth with the scientific community in a non-threatening way. Throughout all of this, Lemaître knew that the very nature of his research led man to consider the theological implications.17 Speaking to Catholic scientists, Lemaître said:

The Christian researcher has to master and apply with sagacity the technique appropriate to his problem. His investigative means are the same as those of his non-believer colleague . . . In a sense, the researcher makes an abstraction of his faith in his researches. He does this not because his faith could involve him in difficulties, but because it has directly nothing in common with his scientific activity. After all, a Christian does not act differently from any non-believer as far as walking, or running, or swimming is concerned.18

But Lemaître also felt that Catholic theology guarantees the autonomy of science:

He (the Christian researcher) knows that not one thing in all creation has been done without God, but he knows also that God nowhere takes the place of his creatures. Omnipresent divine activity is everywhere essentially hidden. It never had to be a question of reducing the supreme Being to the rank of a scientific hypothesis.19

Reaching out this time to his fellow churchmen, Lemaître said, "Does the Church need Science? Certainly not. The Cross and the Gospel are enough. However, nothing that is human can be foreign to the Christian. How could the Church not be interested in the most noble of all strictly human occupations, namely the search for truth?"20

Hitchens' 10 second hit and run leaves out all of the wisdom of Lemaitre.  Moreover, Hitchens' inability or reluctance to come to grip with Lemaitre - and his reflex of treating all religion as a caricature to club religion with - leaves him ignorant of the best argument he could make against the Intelligent Design idea championed by William Dembski, namely that God is not a cause in the material universe, rather God is the "cause of causes" and he has granted to created things the "dignity of causation."




 

 

 

 

Fighting Pseudo-Knowledge - Hurricanes and Global Warming.

Failed predictions of imminent apocalypses have a way of slipping our mind once the season passes, which leaves the failed prophets with no net damage to their reputations, e.g, Paul - "Humans will be eating Humans in the Global Famine of 1985" - Ehrlich.  So, it's a good time to reflect on the absence of predicted hurricane activity during the last half decade.

New Age Bullshit Alert.

The Chinese "word" for crisis does not mean "danger" and "opportunity."

Another bit of pseudo-knowledge goes down in flames.

Fighting Pseudo-Knowledge - Right-wing Dan Brown/Mormon Division.

Francis Beckwith points out that Glenn Beck's appraisal of history needs to be taken with a grain of salt, particularly after listening to this:



So, according to Beck, Constantine put together the bible and persecuted dissenting Christians which caused the Essene Jewish community to hide the Dead Sea scrolls in a cave 300 years before Constantine was born.

Eh????

Pseudo-knowledge is dangerous because it caters to our sense of "truthiness," i.e., it confirms things that we already know. Beck is a Mormon - and there's nothing wrong with that - and Mormons are taught that the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm Joseph Smith's story of finding tablets containing the Books of Mormon and that Christianity fell into apostasy with the death of the last apostle and that this apostasy was institutionalized by the Emperor Constantine. 

Mark Shea explains why Glenn Beck's version of early Christian history is embarrassingly wrong.  For example, the Apostle's Creed pre-existed Constantine as did the canon of the New Testament.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were preserved by the First Century Essene community that pre-dated Constantine by nearly 300 years.  Neither Constantine or Nicea instituted a death penalty against dissenting Christians.

Protestant blog Razorkiss offers this:

Now, I listen to Beck for a simple reason. He’s a Mormon, and his worldview “bleeds through” quite frequently – and I find it interesting. Especially when, as is more common lately, he speaks about faith and religion. He frequently refers to himself as “Christian” – when he is nothing of the sort. For instance:


Glenn Beck – Satan vs Jesus

The section I’m most interested in is here:

“The enemy of Jesus is not a government. It is the capping of individuals. It is the stopping of people understand what the power inside of you is. The ability to choose between right and wrong. Jesus never took anybody and waterboarded them and told them ‘accept me, accept me, accept me’. He never did that. Religions, when they became about politics, did that. Jesus said ‘forgive them, for they know not what they do’. Jesus said ‘do you not yet understand all this and more you can do’. It’s individual rights. It’s a war that has been going since before time. I’ll save em. I’ll save em all. Just give me the credit, I’ll save em all. I’ll make the choices for them so no one can fail. No, no, no. Let men fail – and I will send a Savior, and He will redeem them for the price that they cannot pay. But let them fail.”

An observer who isn’t familiar with Mormonism might miss this. Check out Moses 4:1 in the LDS scripture. Sound familiar? Look at their teaching on this subject in “The Pearl of Great Price“.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Note: Lucifer’s plan has often been compared, negatively, to Calvinism – which, ironically, is what a Presbyterian is. Like… the Presbyterian author (and seminary president at WTS) he approvingly endorsed earlier in that same show!

So, we’ve established two things.

While Glenn might consider himself a good historian on the founding fathers, he should stick to things he has actually studied.

Glenn’s Mormon presuppositions slip through, and color his viewing of history as well his statements about faith.

Presuppositions are like that - they quickly form into pseudo-knowledge, particularly when they strike a cultural chord.

Fighting Pseudo-Knowledge - Hollywood Division.

Mark Shea points to this excellent discussion of the history of Hypatia, which includes the following important and sourced bits:

Hypatia, whether by chance or choice, found herself in the middle of this power struggle between two Christian factions. She was well-known to Orestes (and probably to Cyril as well) as a prominent member of the civic life of the city and was perceived by Cyril's faction to not only be a political ally of Orestes but an obstacle to any reconciliation between the two men. The tensions spilled over when a group of monks from the remote monasteries of the desert - men known for their fanatical zeal and not renowned for their political sophistication - came into the city in force to support Cyril and began a riot that resulted in Orestes' entourage being pelted with rocks, with one stone hitting the Prefect in the head. Not one to stand for such insults, Orestes had the monk in question arrested and tortured to death.


Cyril tried to exploit the torture and execution of the monk, making out that it was effectively a martyrdom by Orestes. This time, however, his appeals to the Imperial authorities were rejected. Angered, Cyril's followers (with or without his knowledge) took revenge by seizing Hypatia in the street and torturing her to death in vengeance.

The incident was generally regarded with horror and disgust by Christians, with Socrates Scholasticus making his feelings about it quite clear:

[Hypatia] fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles [oyster shells]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.

(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

What is notable in all this is that nowhere in any of this is her science or learning mentioned, expect as the basis for the respect which she was accorded by pagans and Christians alike. Socrates Scholasticus finishes describing her achievements and the esteem with which she was held and then goes on to say "Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed". In other words, despite her learning and position, she fell victim to politics. There is no evidence at all that her murder had anything to do with her learning. The idea that she was some kind of martyr to science is absurd.

And:

Unfortunately for those who cling to the "conflict thesis" of science and religion perpetually at odds, the history of science actually has very few genuine martyrs at the hands of religious bigots. The fact that a mystic and kook like Giordano Bruno gets dressed up as a free-thinking scientist shows how thin on the ground such martyrs are, though usually those who like to invoke these martyrs can fall back on citing "scientists burned by the Medieval Inquistion", despite the fact this never actually happened. Most people know nothing about the Middle Ages, so this kind of vague hand-waving is usually pretty safe.


Unlike Giordano Bruno, Hypatia was a genuine scientist and, as a woman, was certainly remarkable for her time. But she was no martyr for science and science had absolutely zero to do with her murder. Exactly how much of the genuine, purely political background to her death Amenabar puts in his movie remains to be seen. It's hoped that, unlike Sagan and many others, the whole political background to the murder won't simply be ignored and her killing won't be painted as a purely anti-intellectual act of ignorant rage against her science and scholarship. But what is clear from his interviews and the film's pre-publicity is that he has chosen to frame the story in Gibbonian terms straight from the "conflict thesis" textbook - the destruction of the "Great Library", Hypatia victimised for her learning and her death as a grim harbinger of the beginning of the "Dark Ages".

And, as usual, bigots and anti-theistic zealots will ignore the evidence, the sources and rational analysis and believe Hollywood's appeal to their prejudices. It makes you wonder who the real enemies of reason actually are.

The answer to that last question is, "atheists like P.Z. Myers" and other members who insist on empirical data except when it comes to slandering Christianity. 

Der Ewige Jude opens in New York.

Sherry Weddel is fighting the pseudo-knowledge of "Agora."

Agora shows mobs of hate-filled, ignorant, Christian monks under the command of St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria burning the great Library of Alexandria and killing Hypatia because they saw reason and thought as the enemies of the true faith.


For you who are really busy, here’s the short version of the real history:

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria was 1) probably the result of an accident rather than a plot 2) done by pagans, not Christians and 3) occurred 40 years before Jesus was born and 418 years before Hypatia was born. The part of the Library's collection that survived Julius Caesar was kept in a branch library in a pagan temple in Alexandria but had almost certainly vanished before that building was destroyed in 391 AD, 24 years before Hypatia was killed and 21 years before Cyril became Bishop of Alexandria.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria had nothing to do with Hypatia or Christianity or Cyril of Alexandria. This is an anti-Christian 18th century urban legend.

Hypatia’s death was horrific and unjust but Cyril of Alexandria probably had nothing to do with it. Her death was probably the result of a political dispute between Christians (not between pagans and Christians) and had nothing to do with a Christian hatred of philosophy and learning or the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

(Update: I've just visited the Agora website and see that the film is set conveniently in 391 AD - the year that the pagan temple which had once held a branch library was destroyed. (See the detailed history below). The problem is that Hypatia was her early 20's in 391 and wasn't murdered until a quarter of a century later in 415 AD. Cyril was a teenager of 15 in 391 AD and wouldn't become Bishop of Alexandra for another 21 years. Oh yes, and the temple was, according to ancient witnesses, probably empty of all library scrolls by 391 AD anyway. No witnesses made any reference to it as a "library".

In the film, Hypatia's father and mentor, Theon, is portrayed as the last librarian of the library that hadn't, in fact, existed for many years. Theon was a mathematician and philosopher as was Hypatia. But math and philosophy don't make for strong visuals and if you focus on astronomy, as the film does, you can always present your heroine as a Galileo-like figure, ready to entertain the idea that the earth is not the center of the universe, and we all know how the Catholic Church treated Galileo!

So this film is nothing less than CGI heavy anti-Christian propaganda. The only difference between Agora and the Da Vinci Code is that the assassins in Agora aren't albinos. Yet it was the most popular film of 2009 in traditionally Catholic Spain.

Agora is being released in New York this weekend and in LA a week later. )