Philosophy graduate and English teacher (based in Japan) Vincent J Torley is currently a contributor of articles to Barry Arrington’s blog “Uncommon Descent”. Vincent has a tendency to verbosity but his posts sometimes are an enjoyable read as he tends to put a little more effort into their content. His latest post, berating PZ Myers for inaccuracies in a couple of blog posts at “Pharyngula” – that hotbed of anti-religious propaganda and feminist zeal – itself has a few inaccuracies. I’m not defending PZ as he is eminently capable of defending himself (I used to enjoy reading PZ’s evo-devo posts but the tone and emphasis of his blog has changed over time and I hardly ever check it out these days unless something such as Torley’s post suggests a look.) What took my eye was the hypocrisy of Torley’s accusations that Myers was telling “whoppers” when a careful look at what Torley writes in rebuttal appears to reveal a few “whoppers” of his own. I live in the Languedoc – a region of France fought over and practically ruined by the so-called Albigensian crusade – and have taken an interest in the Cathars, a shadowy group of people and a faith zealously, ruthlessly exterminated with the encouragement, complicity and connivance of the Catholic Church. Torley is Catholic by all accounts. Torley writes:
The original rationale for the creation of the medieval Inquisition by Pope Gregory IX in 1231 had to do with a dualistic sect called the Cathars, or Albigenses, whose doctrines were not only heretical but also positively anti-social, leading to sporadic mob lynchings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Other sects with similar views were the Paulicians and the Bogomils. Catholicism could not co-exist with these sects, as their aim was to subvert medieval society…
One of the consequences of the Cathar faith, that flourished in the Compté de Foix tolerated by the local nobility, was a loss of income to the Catholic Church as Cathars refused to pay tithes. The crusade against them was basically a land grab, incited and sanctioned by the Catholic Church and carried out by northern barons and their armies of mercenaries, encouraged by the prospect of land and booty and having been granted absolution in advance of any crimes they might commit in the process. The 10 to 20 thousand inhabitants of the town of Béziers were the first to suffer, being massacred indiscriminately after the papal legate, on being asked if they should spare the Catholic majority in the town, famously said “Kill them all; God will know his own” (Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius) But Torley excuse the excesses of the “crusade” using quotes from The Catholic Encyclopedia and himself claims:
…the Cathars, or Albigenses, whose doctrines were not only heretical but also positively anti-social, leading to sporadic mob lynchings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The claim about anti-social behaviour is utterly unsupported and I challenge Torley to find any evidence that the Cathars were in any way violent or participated in mob lynchings. This is pure Catholic propaganda. So Torley is committing the same sin that he claims Myers commits. I call that hypocrisy. I wonder if there are more inaccuracies in Torley’s piece. I was pleased at least to see that he thought gagging Bruno with an expanding wooden pear-shaped plug jammed in the mouth before burning him alive was not much less barbaric than driving an iron spike through his tongue.
ET correct some typos
PZ Myers has an anti-religion axe to grind. Vincent Torley has a pro-catholic axe to grind. I cannot completely trust either of them.
This does remind me, however, that it is far easier to be objective about science than about history.
I think we can trust PZ with basic biology. I wouldn’t vote for him as my representative in any political venue (not that I think he has any ambitions in that direction). I am very pleased that the Catholic Church has less power and influence than it once did, though that influence in Africa and Catholic South and Central America in respect of sexual health and reproductive autonomy is still causing great harm.
Though the application of science to historical events and artefacts has led to confirmations and disconfirmations of pet theories. That recent archaeological evidence confirmed that Richard III did indeed have a crooked spine, for instance.
Too bad Torley has to mess up on the Cathars, at least, because he certainly has a point about Myers’ black and white thinking about religion (feminism, politics). I haven’t seen the newer Cosmos at all (I don’t think I’d learn much), yet Bruno seems a difficult and complex matter, probably chosen because Galileo’s been done to death, and there aren’t too many stories of actual flames and iron maidens used against science out there, in fact.
Myers wants to say, well, all of this persecution is bad–and everyone agrees, hence no Inquisitors pointing out heretics today–and ignores the narrower point that Christianity hasn’t been all that anti-science in general (continuing the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition meant that Abrahamic religions pushed for something behind facts–like theories and mathematics), and the spaces opened by the Reformation meant that the censoring and persecution that might be tempting to do was muted by possibilities for leaving areas likely to prevent your especial science (Descartes, although no scientist, moved about to receptive regions). Tolerance arose among fairly pious folk, even if at the expense of religion’s power.
What Myers seems never to acknowledge is that “religious persecution” involved much more than religion, that it often had to do with power and politics, and that being on the wrong side of anything hundreds of years ago often ended in torture and death. Blaming it all on religion is simplistic, even if religion deserves its knocks.
Turning to Torley’s piece, though, here’s one of the more scientifically inept bits:
I’m not going to claim that religion can’t encourage scientists to think outside the box, such as Kepler’s mystical notions that led him to consider the geometries of planetary orbits and the numbers involved, but the notion of a “Transcendent Designer” itself seems far more likely to lead thinkers astray than to any sort of scientific revelation (Newton was sidetracked by it, and I can’t think of anything positive that has come from that idea). It’s “outside the box” only in the sense of having little or no constraints for guidance (unless modeled on humans, which proponents of the idea seem never to do except nebulously and with intense confirmation bias), and seems to be used almost exclusively in ways that cannot be tested. It is inside the box in the sense that it takes a common bias–that functionality is typically observed by us to be designed–and runs with it, despite all of the evidence of derivation that would never be effected by a competent human designer.
Most of all, when it is used like IDists use it, as something that explains anything and everything that isn’t currently replicable, it is the box outside of which they cannot or will not think.
Glen Davidson
Regarding persecution, I will only say that it is generally a matter of people trying to gain or maintain power, and has little or nothing to do with ideology.
I cannot fathom why anyone would want to concentrate power in one agency, when the history of such concentrations is unsavory. I don’t think it matters how such concentrations start out. They all slide into authoritarianism.
Should have been:
I thought I could edit it as much as I wanted during the hour after, so that’s how I typically edit my remarks (seems easier to keep track that way). Apparently not. And I shouldn’t have written “isn’t currently replicable,” since little is fully replicable, and much evolutionary observation and mechanism can be replicated in some manner, while, yes, Behe’s ludicrous falsification “test” for ID–trying to re-evolve the bacterial flagellum–is not reasonable in the least.
The observations of the effects of evolutionary processes that left their marks throughout life are eminently replicable, hence the IDist attempt to discuss anything else.
Glen Davidson
That should be the case. If there’s still a problem let me know in the moderation thread. I can edit your comment if you wish. I won’t do it without your specific request..