Reviews for History of the University of East Anglia, Norwich

The average rating for History of the University of East Anglia, Norwich based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-21 00:00:00 Michael Berry صار من المتفق عليه بين المؤرخين أن العهد القديم قد كُتب بعد وفاة موسى عليه السلام بـ 200 عام ، كتبه عزرا وآخرون من مؤرخي بني إسرائيل .. واستمدوا من الاساطير المصرية والاساطير الكلدانية القديمة في كتابة أساطير التوراة .. لم يكن لديهم إختيار آخر على كل حال ، ولم يكن من الممكن أن تبقى ( كلمة الله ) عاجزة عن تفسير أصل الإنسان والأرض والسماوات . لم يعرف الانسان المنهج العلمي في بحث الظواهر وفي التفكير -كان الإغريق استثناءً في فترة قصيرة من عمر التاريخ- لذلك فقد كانت الاساطير هي الملاذ لمن يريد أن يعرف ويفهم ، لكن التوراة منحت الأساطير القديمة حصانة في نفوس المؤمنين .. وهكذا حلت الاساطير التوراتية محل الاساطير القديمة لدى بني إسرائيل ، وق تبنت المسيحية العهد القديم فيما بعد في تفسير حقائق الكون والإنسان . كانت النتيجة أن أعاقت الاساطير الدينية كل نظر عقلي فيما حسمته من قضايا .. ولقرون طويلة ظل الاعتقاد بأن "السماء عبارة عن قبة صلبة القوام ركبت فوق الأرض ، ويعلوها الماء ، وأن الشمس والأجرام السماوية معلقة فيها" وكمثال على سيطرة الأساطير الدينية على العقل القديم ، فقد أعلن رؤوس الكنيسة " أن القول بجبال القمر ووديانه وبأنه يستمد نوره من إنعكاس ضوء الشمس ، مناقضة صريحة لما جاء في سفر التكوين من أن القمر عبارة عن ضوء عظيم " .. كذلك كان القول بـ كروية الأرض ودورانها حول الشمس مثير للسخط لدى رجال الدين المسيحي كونه يخالف ما جاء بالعهد القديم إعتقد رجال الكنيسة أن الله خلق الكائنات كلها قبل اليوم السادس من أيام الخلق السبعة ،وقد سماها آدم جميعاً؛ وذلك قبل 4004 عام قبل ميلاد المسيح ، وأن الرب جالس فوق الجلد السماوي يحرك الأجرام السماوية بيديه . وأعتقدوا أن الطين والجيف والماء القذر تخرج منها الديدان واليرقات بطريقة طبيعية حتى لا يقولوا بأن الله خلق هذه المخلوقات الحقيرة ، وأن نوحاً قد حمل كل المخلوقات على الفلك أزواجا أو سبعة من كل نوع . وأن الحيوانات والنباتات قبل الخطيئة الأولى كانت وديعة غير مضرة لكنها أصبحت بخطيئة آدم مفترسة أو مسممة . وأن كلمة الله ( أي رسالة المسيح ) قد بلغت كل أقطار الدنيا ، وبالتالي لا يمكن أن يتم إكتشاف أرض جديدة عليها ناس لم يعرفوا المسيح أو حيوانات لم تركب الفلك مع نوح . ما سبق كان أمثلة قليلة حول تفسير الأساطير التوراتية لطبيعة الكون والمخلوقات ، ولك أن تتخيل كيف أعاقت هذه الأساطير تطور العلم ، وكيف إصدمت مع أي رؤية مغايرة لها بحجة أنها تخالف الكتاب المقدس .. وكم كان على العلماء أن يخوضوا صراعاً مريراً مع رجال الدين في محاولاتهم للخروج من قيدها . هذا الكتاب يلقي الضوء على بزوغ فجر العلم وإندثار سلطة الأساطير على تفسير العالم ، وكيف تشبث رجال الدين بالخرافة مقابل الرؤية العلمية ، وكيف قاسى العلماء في العصور الوسطى من أجل قضايا تبدو لنا اليوم بديهية .. كتاب جيد بترجمة متواضعة ، وكان سيكون أفضل لو كان أكثر تنظيما في الفصول بدلا من السرد التاريخي الجامد .

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-21 00:00:00 John E.D. Malin This is, by far, one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. Published in 1894, Andrew Dickson White was in the excellent position to overlook the scientific and technological developments of the game-changing nineteenth century, and to draw implications for theology and religious belief. The book is, basically, a statement on the failure of theology to account for the worldly facts and the strategies theologians took to undermine scientific progress. Although the title might mislead people into thinking White is hostile to religion, this actually is a bit more nuanced. White is a critical thinker, first and foremost; someone who values the scientific method as the road to knowledge. It is, then, not so much that this is an anti-religious tractate by a secular intellectual, it is just that theology has fought scientific progress for millennia and that this has had terrible consequences for mankind. White simply states the obvious: when Christianity took over large parts of the world, scientific progress – which started in Greece – was stifled. Not out of persecution – that only came later – but out of sheer dogma. People thought they could explain the world without having recourse to observation and experiment – reading Scripture would provide all the answers. And if Scripture wasn’t clear on matters, all one needed to was to interpret it, using the deductive method developed by Aristotle. The Church fathers all looked down on science, just like Plato did (it’s not for nothing that many of them were Neoplatonists or were inspired by Platonic ideas), and this led to the establishment of a dogmatic view on the world. This view was handed down to posterity, while technology and science basically disappeared in Europe during the harsh and barren period following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, this then was strengthened by Thomas Aquinas’s attempt to marry Christian theology with Aristotelean philosophy. But during the same time, old manuscripts, saved from destruction and translated by the Arabs, started to find their way back to Europe. So we see the breaking away of established dogma’s by certain bright minds – it is during this time that the Church clamped down on divergent opinion, which it labelled ‘heresy’, and that scientific progress was actually made impossible. Then, in the Renaissance, divergence of opinion and worldview seemed to win (even Popes were reading old Greek philosophers!), a German rebellious, rigid-thinking monk started the Reformation. The Old Church had to establish itself as a religious authority, while the new Reformed Churches all wanted to go back to adhering to literal readings of Scripture – this, then, was the time when divergent opinion was not only deemed fallacious but, more importantly, dangerous. Here we see the official persecution of scientists and philosophers start: Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, even a devout Christian like Newton. But it was too late. During the seventeenth century, when René Descartes showed one could build a system of knowledge without having recourse to theology, scientific thinking broke loose. Following Francis Bacon’s empirical method and using Descartes’ analytic geometry, Newton synthesized Copernicus’ heliocentric model, Galileo’s discoveries and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. This resulted in a new mechanics, which in the following centuries was developed into a comprehensive, coherent world system. About the same time, investigations into man’s origins and the history of our planet started. It took a longer time for these studies to be fruitful – it was only in the nineteenth century with Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species that geology and anthropology were put on the level of Newton’s mechanics. But already during the early phases of development of geology and anthropology you see the Church taking a violent stand against anybody who dares to deviate from Scripture. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake (1600) for claiming that there were human beings living on the other planets in our solar system, and that possibly the whole universe was peopled. According to the Church, this was impossible. Why? Because then there had to be multiple reincarnations of Christ. This arcane way of reasoning seems to us to be silly beyond belief, but it was used in full force by theologians and non-theologians alike. The early Church had deemed it impossible for there to be other peoples on this planet (the doctrine of the ‘Antipodes’), but when Columbus, De Gama and Magellan started exploring the world, this doctrine became problematic. Still, the observations of these daring men were deemed false. Why? Because Scripture doesn’t mention other people. Another example is when scientists started pondering the age of the Earth, this was labelled as heresy. Why? Because the Old Testament clearly states the genealogical tree of Biblical figures – calculating the ages of these early Earthly inhabitants, led to the date of the creation of the Earth: on the 23rd of October, 4004. B.C. the Earth was created by God, about 9:00 in the morning. So when scientists like Hutton, Buffon, De Maillet, etc. in the eighteenth century started claiming the Earth was much older than that – among other things to be able to account for fossils of extinct species, geological events like old volcanos, etc. – this was simply heresy. According to theology, it was impossible that the Earth was older than 4004 B.C. – because Scripture tells us it is. White makes clear that this way of thinking – a priori beliefs determine the facts, not the other way around – was the main bulwark against scientific progress. For centuries, this rigid way of reasoning about the world led to people ascribing bodily and mental disease to demoniacal possession or to the sins of minorities (which were then heavily persecuted); weather and climatic phenomena either to God or to demons; Hebrew as the original language that God (literally) gave mankind and the existence of different languages and peoples to man’s vanity; etc. It is hard to believe that people actually believed such silly notions, but White clearly shows that this was so. The Church fathers took over many pagan beliefs about the world, as explanations for worldly phenomena. Everything that happened was either due to the wrath of a good Being or to the malice of Satan and his demons. And for everything that couldn’t be explained this way, there was another Scriptural explanation. Then, when people tried to come up with natural causes for the same phenomena, allowing us to better our lives, they were handled with accordingly. White claims in this book that the thousands of people who died from torture for being a witch or a heretic; the millions of people who died from diseases and epidemics; the millions of sick people, especially mentally sick, were taken care of in a horrible way and sometimes even persecuted; etc. all died because of theology. While this is a bold claim, what he basically says is: if it wasn’t for theology, we would have hit much sooner on the successful scientific method and would have prevented much human suffering while also preventing the killing of masses of innocent people. This claim can be defended very easily, once one considers the natural explanations that some bright minds tried to offer, already in the Middle Ages, and the scientific progress in the Islamic world. White backs up this claim by showing how theology applied one and the same strategy in all different fields of knowledge, whether that be epidemiology, mental illness, geology, astronomy, or linguistic development. First, the propagator(s) of a new idea are ignored and if not possible, ridiculed. If that doesn’t work (it usually doesn’t), then theology proceeds to threaten and attack these ‘heretics. During this stage, works are banned (or burned), people are excommunicated, people lose their jobs and income, and if that doesn’t work, they’re tortured, put in prison or simple killed off. But once a good idea takes hold of people, especially in an age of books, all these methods cannot prevent the idea from spreading. So, after ignoring and attacking the idea, theology faces the spread of an effective idea that explains the world better than theological doctrines, and what it then does is enter a phase of accommodation. Theologians then start to compromise: the scientific theory explains the data better, but we need theology to give ‘ultimate’ meaning to it. This is a strategy of retreat, since science explains everything better and better, without having any recourse to any God – at all. So theology ends up with nothing but empty hands, while making itself the laughing stock of the whole world. You can ignore and attack Darwin, or even try to compromise – but the fact is, truth doesn’t bend to ideology, and making yourself ridiculous only leads to fewer people thinking your ideas valuable. Now theology has become an enemy of the times; an enemy of human progress. This theological strategy can be seen throughout the ages, in domains as diverse as astronomy, biology, geology, physics, chemistry, medicine, psychology/psychiatry, anthropology, language and economics. The scientific method – deducing new ideas from established ones and then testing these new ideas with observation and experiment – has led to a world that is unrecognizably better, safer and more humane. Theology, unfortunately, has been an enemy of reason, humanity and science for millennia. This is a conclusion that is not very likeable, but it’s the true representation of the facts. It is time theology, especially in Christendom, is held accountable for the death and suffering of millions of innocents and their vehement resistance to and persecution of innocent people who only looked for explaining worldly phenomena in worldly terms. Andrew Dickson White’s book is a classic, in my opinion. He makes bold claims, but he backs them up with mountains of sources. He discusses all scientific domains and is able to illustrate the same theological strategy in all of these. Of course, the book might be outdated – new historical knowledge has surfaced in the meantime and maybe some (or most?) of White’s claims should be more nuanced. But sometimes nuance doesn’t bring us that far – let’s call a spade a spade. And White calls out theology on its faults and flaws, something that most people shy away from – leaving theology unaccountable for its misdeeds. The book is extremely readable, even funny in its criticisms, and is a testament of the success of the scientific method. Definitely recommended!