Keeping this unfortunate state of affairs from happening again is becoming a very serious problem, even in the twenty-first century.
Meanwhile, nobody credits Newton's passions for alchemy and astrology for his insights -- only his Christianity.
Where is the data supporting this?
Also, please abstain from flamewars on this site, especially religious flamewars.
(Also, it's nice if what they ask for can be answered with unequivocal objective data, which I'm sure you'll agree isn't the case with cscurmudgeon's request.)
There is a ton of data out there.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=christianity+and+science...
As I said elsewhere in this thread, the only quality argument seems to be Gödel's proof of God's existence which has been machine verified by Zalta's group at Stanford.
But on the other side, all I see are ad hominems and complete ignorance of arguments like Gödel's while attacking the easy targets like the 2000-year creationists and anti-vaccine groups.
Whatever :)
If anyone has a suggestion for a site similar to HN's original spirit, but where longtime users are allowed to downvote stories, I'd be interested.
Today, our concern should be with ways of thinking that move us forward, not with faith-based approaches that might or might not have been helpful to certain scientists in the past who lived and worked under wildly different circumstances.
As I said in another reply just now, I'm done with this thread, and with HN in general if the admins intend to post WSJ-style flamebait stories and attack people who bite.
Yes, certainly. The process of discovery is not always direct. Science has taken many false turns along the way and I won't be that surprised if there are more in the future. But I would note that you seem to have added quite a few arguments to my post that I never made. Or perhaps those were directed at someone else. I just don't like the common practice of retelling history to fit people's idea of how it should have been and you can find many people doing that for all different reasons. As you said, many believed wonky things, though I would also note that most of those amounted to nothing. Phlogiston (and ether, for that matter) were discredited, while the idea that the world obeys rules that can be understood by humans has proven correct, though I wonder just how much we know about the 'why' of that.
Finally, I would note that it's quite possible to disagree without being hostile, especially personally so. I'm pretty sure that's all dang is asking of us.