"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 22 Apr 2021 01:21:50 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 17 Apr 2021 22:13:14 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 08:19:55 +0100, #Paul
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
You have to wonder how far we would be today if religion
had not impeded science.

You've pre-loaded the statement; since it is reasonable to believe
that at least in some cases religion has impeded science, is is only
natural to make the follow-on assumption that science would have been
further advanced. Well, unless the impediment was somehow such that
it
slowed science so as to avoid some sort of science based global
catastrophe; perhaps a nuclear war at a time when people were less
averse to mass slaughter and less aware of the global consequences.

A more neutral question might be somthing along the lines of:

"You have to wonder whether religion has, overall, been a help
or hindrance to scientific advance."

A bit of both, in my opinion, and which is more dominant depends
a lot on how widely - or how far back - you cast your viewpoint.

Why are you concentrating on disasters?

He isnt.

I just mean that advances like satnav might have happened 20 years
earlier,

Don't buy that. Satellites had nothing to do with religion, it was
WW2 and the V2 and von Braun that produced that eventually.

and by now we could have been on mars.

Again, nothing to do with religion, that
was actually driven by the cold war.

Surely you must agree that people refusing to believe the earth goes
round
the sun for 100 years slowed down advances in physics?

No it didn't. The most it did was waste a lot of time trying
to explain what we saw with the movement of the planets.

Shutting up or even killing those who make discoveries simply has to slow
down science.

Only that bit of science they were shut up or killed about and it didn't
really do that
either with that question of whether the sun revolves around the earth or
the reverse.

And like we keep telling you, the professionally religious with lots
of spare time on their hands because they were parasites on society
were in fact responsible for lots of the really useful advances in real
science too. Most obviously with Mendel and Darwin.