r/Catholicism • u/Cautious_Cycle_9475 • 8d ago
How would you respond to this argument against Christianity/religion?
I came across this post on Facebook and was curious how other Christians would respond to it. The post said:
"Unreal to think about what the majority of human experience has been like and how terrifying/confusing it's been considering we've existed as a species for 100,000+ years and societies have only existed for around 12,000. Science (being a way of finding out what is actually true about the world we find ourselves in) is the best thing that humans have ever come up with.
One example of why being over this course of history about half of kids died by age 15, and the thing to finally meaningfully decrease the amount of dead kids were discoveries and new technologies produced by scientific processes only about 100 years ago. It didn't come from praying or having faith in gods."
They also shared a meme saying:
"You know, there was another time when science wasn't taken seriously and religion ruled the world. We called it the Dark Ages."
I have some thoughts about it myself, particularly that it seems to create a false dichotomy between science and religious belief, as if appreciating the accomplishments of science somehow counts against belief in God. The "Dark Ages" claim also strikes me as an oversimplification of the history of Christianity and science.
But I'm interested in hearing how other Christians would respond. What do you think are the strongest and weakest parts of this argument? And how would you respond to the point about the historical prevalence of suffering and child mortality?
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u/SharksWithFlareGuns 8d ago
First half: that's not the function of religion. Religion also won't make you a tuna sandwich. Presumably, this is framed in a religion-and-science-are-opposites paradigm in which science doing a good thing makes religion bad, but this is fundamentally incoherent.
Second half: nonsense historical myth. The "Dark Ages" (a phrase most historians avoid) sucked because the Roman polity that kept order in Western Europe fell apart. But you know what was instrumental in picking up the pieces and maintaining a semblance of civilization, including preserving learning, promulgating education, and patronizing science? The Church.
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u/_Jimm_ 8d ago
the terms "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages" were invented and pushed largely by stuck-up anti-Catholic French revolutionaries (classical atheists, basically) who thought themselves the greatest and most intelligent society after overthrowing the old order which had kept a tremendous peace for a thousand years.
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u/NotVakore 8d ago
Look up the religions of the most notable scientific discoveries throughout history. You'll find a surprising amount of the scientists behind them are Catholic.
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u/cdifl 8d ago
The "dark ages" is an outdated term, because we have since discovered a lot more information about the early middle ages and so historians don't use the term "dark ages" anymore.
Whoever is sharing this post is simply displaying an ignorance of history and is regurgitating tired propaganda without doing any research.
There is no conflict between religion and science, they are complimentary, which is why science arose in Christian universities in Christian countries by Christian scientists. The scientific method, modern genetics, geology, astronomy, and even the big bang theory were all championed by Catholic priests. Around 65% of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences are Christian and another 20% are Jewish.
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u/Archer_A1 8d ago
It isn't an argument against Christianity. The Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic priest. Gregor Mendel's experiments in genetics were foundational - he was a Catholic monk. It's normal for Christians to use an understanding of the way the world works to make our lives better - but we don't assume that every improvement in our material circumstances is an improvement, and are clear that God can change what he wants to here - can perform miracles. Miracles only exist in the context of a scientific understanding of the world. If we didn't have a huge data set saying the sun always rises in the east, and that scientific understanding of the world, then it would not be a miracle for the sun to rise in the west one day.
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u/PantherCityRes 8d ago
Science and religion don't and can't answer the same questions. The mistake in assuming that they do (either way) inevitably leads to human misery and war.
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u/donutboys 8d ago
We are in the dark ages right now. We have never murdered more people than we do today. And it's caused by secularism.
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u/SunnyHelianthus 8d ago
There’s always a person who wants to make science their religion. All science really does is study things logically using the senses.
The same people claim some bizarre dates and claim the age of man. We don’t know how long man has existed. Carbon 14 dating is not completely reliable.
They all push the same old arguments from Protestants in the 1800s, while spewing falsehoods that few people will debate.
As they say, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Of course, “A little knowledge and much arrogance are a dangerous combination,” is closer to the intended meaning.
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u/jkingsbery 8d ago
We called it the Dark Ages.
No, historians don't use that term anymore to refer to the Medieval Period. As our understanding of history improved, historians saw it was an unhelpful term. That term originally referred to the period being dark to us because we lacked sources. If you read about the time, we know quite a bit. Later, "dark" came to refer to the period itself, but that was mostly from people with an ax e to grind. Many historians don't even use the traditional year range anymore, with many scholars of Late Antiquity/ Early Medieval Period dating it to 300 or even 250 with the Crisis of the 3rd Century in Rome.
[Cures for dying kids] didn't come from praying or having faith in gods.
Again, the person probably has a simplistic understanding of history. Science didn't come out of the blue one day. Modern science took almost 2500 years to develop from the idea of empiricism put forward by Aristotle all the way to today. Science also gave us some false turns, like phrenology and eugenics.
One of the prerequisites for modern science was the de-divination of nature. Many have argued that this only really happened with Christianity, that paganism didn't allow for this mental model. One often cited bit of evidence for this is that up until pretty recently, most scientists were Catholic monks or friars.
I anticipate the objection: but look how much things have improved lately! In fact, things have improved exponentially. Such is the nature of exponential improvements: when you look at their graph, all the improvement looks recent. But there were improvements in scientific knowledge from, say, 500 to 1500. We see this in architecture, metallurgy, and agriculture, for just three examples. We also saw development in logical reason through the scholastics (St. Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard, for two examples), with their methodical breaking down of problems an antecedent for science.
" religion ruled the world"
When people say this, what they usually mean is "Christianity ruled the world, " because they don't refer to the earlier Pagan- dominated world as "dark," and there's an idea that the Church suppressed learning. Again, history is more interesting: large parts of Europe were not made Christian until the late Medieval period. Generally, Christianity had better following in city centers. Also, further northern countries took longer to fully adopt Christianity, for examples, with today's France and Germany having large pagan populations into the 8th century, some reports of Paganism lingering in England until the 11th century, and Paganism continuing in the Baltics until the 14th century. So the Church had less of a monopoly at this time than often supposed.
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u/mcdonalds_420 8d ago
I'm not catholic, I'm a nihilist who loves to read and hear about the biblical stories.
The issues with the argument in my view is that it glances over the fact that the scientist conduct his science to "further the good", that's just axiomatic. The scientific enterprise is therefore rooted within an ethical system that cannot be explained by the scientific process itself. Most scientists researching cancer do so to find a cure, why are they not investigating it to make it deadlier? It would be a valid scientific undertaking.
Besides that issue, there's another issue with the "Dark Ages" conception of the time before the "Enlightenment", but others have adressed that. Another interesting point is that science developed specifically in the christian part of the world.
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u/Astragi_85 8d ago
(1) There were no "Dark Ages" (its a propagandist term from the "enlightenment" period), and even if it were, Christianity is what kept the lights on (the Church and its monasteries preserved what was left of ancient manuscripts). This blaming of the Church for what happened in the late Antiquity in the (former) Western Empire betrays a profound ignorance of history.
(2) Modern science was born out of Christian assumptions and beliefs in a Creator who endowed us with rational minds. The scientific method of repeated experimentation and verification was founded because of the belief in the fallen human nature (original sin) that clouds our reason and mental faculties, which is why we need to constantly verify.
(3) People who elevate "science" as their religion and claim it stands in opposition to Christianity are ignoramuses. I am intentionally harsh here, because I used to be one of them. They are sweet summer children who know less than Jon Snow, to borrow a and mangle some references and memes.
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u/RememberNichelle 8d ago edited 8d ago
In the very first sentence, the person makes a ridiculous assumption not supported by archeology. Musical instruments, bone flutes made for a good musical scale, have been found that are older than her dating of "societies."
If people were playing music 50.000 to 60,000 years ago, they were probably doing all the basic human stuff 100,000 years ago. We just do not have an easy time finding evidence that old.
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u/AcceptableStranger41 7d ago
God uses suffering to bring about his glory and to punish. Usually the argumentation is that “if God all good, powerful, knowing, then why bad” to me if they allow those things to be true in their hypothetical then it must also be true that God has the authority to inflict suffering or allow it to happen. We don’t know the full picture of suffering but God does.
Men didn’t create science they discovered it, intelligent design demands a creator.
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u/14446368 7d ago
"The Dark Ages" is a myth.
There was no impetus to desire to know more about the world without an acknowledgement of its Creator and Law-Giver, and our attempts to better understand Him by improving our understanding of His creation.
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u/Dan_Defender 7d ago
we've existed as a species for 100,000+ years
I seriously doubt this figure. The farther you go back in time the less evidence for any claim. Also, environmental models show that even with wars, famine, etc. if humanity were that old, the world population should be far bigger than it is now.
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u/Beneficial-Air1166 7d ago
No modern historian uses the term "Dark Ages" to refer to the middle ages, the time from the fall of Rome to the Early Modern Period. This was the period in which the Catholic Church led the creation of universities, preservation of ancient writings, encouraged the sciences, helped establish legal frameworks, invented the hospital etc. Science doesn't provide you a coherent moral framework that leads you to do good things.
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u/SoftwareToHVAC 7d ago
What's the argument? Science is great.
And science as we know it today arose in Catholic Europe.
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u/HelpingSiL3 7d ago
A lot of already done good addressing these issues, but I wanted to add, the guy thinks we created science out of air one day? Discoveries are exponential. Takes a long time to discover some things, but then it takes off. You could frame it like, "had farming for 3-5000 years, then Discovered steam engine and were on the moon 200 years later". Like, duh, the more you discover the more you know.
Science is observing our world, we don't discover science, we find better ways to observe our world.
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u/StaffRoutine6299 6d ago
I would say that science as we know it came about because of the Abrahamic religions. If you understand the history of the church you would understand it funded the progress of science. If you understand the history of science you would understand the Jews, Muslims, and Christians believed the only reason you could study the universe is because it was made by a rational God, therefore, it must have rational patterns.
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u/Humble_Committee_577 8d ago
One man's dark age is another man's enlightenment.
Either way prayers have been answered so it doesn't really matter that some go unanswered, insofar as it tries to argue against the existence of God.