Religion
In reply to the discussion: The Problem with Religious Moderates [View all]struggle4progress
(118,268 posts)of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach."
Here Mr Harris has forgotten the very most important facts about history: the ancients were in some respects, of course, children compared to us, but our comparative "adulthood" is a product of their considerable labors; our wisdom has been produced by the hard experience of those who came before us; and, in the end, one of our advantages is that we know what latter happened to them, whereas they lived their time, looking ahead into an uncertain future. In exactly the same way, we might expect that shallow future minds will sneer at us, for our ignorance compared to the future, and the only thing we could possibly say in their direction is: We made such advances as we were able, in our own time, and tried to leave for you whatever advantages and insights we could
Here is a fourteenth century clock from Salisbury cathedral
http://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/towns/salisbury.shtml
Mr Harris may sneer, if he like, but it is a nontrivial assemblage of work by many people: miners and smelters and ironworkers and a clockmaker. To produce it, ore was dug by hand, trees were cut for charcoal, crude iron was recovered from the ore and then purified by adding experimentally-discovered fluxes, and somebody designed that clock, before smiths produced the works and hammered it together. It is not a crude or careless matter
Here are some of the ceilings
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/salisbury-cathedral
Perhaps it is not brilliant engineering by modern standards, but it must be judged according to what was available when the work was planned and done. Then, it was cutting edge architecture. All work was done with human and animal labor, and enormous ingenuity was involved.
The windows are filled with stained glass. There is quite a lot of it:
Being of an older style, the art may not be to the taste of Mr Harris. But Mr Harris seems entirely oblivious to the technological progress such glass represented, and to the extensive work involved in producing these windows. One needed a good recipe for glass making; one needed skilled workers to produce the colored glass sheets; and one needed excellent artists to do the actual craft work. But Mr Harris sneers at them who came before
An ancient proverb tells us, that the student must finally exceed the teacher, when the student be a good student and the teacher a good teacher. Student became teacher to new student, again and again in every century, century after century, from then until now, and so bit by bit everything that we know now was gained and handed down. That Mr Harris might sneer, at past accomplishments, mostly suggests that he suffers from a certain superiority complex which mainly reveals that his gaping ignorance
Sadly, Mr Harris does not even bother to get historical facts right:
De sphaera mundi ... is a medieval introduction to the basic elements of astronomy written ... c. 1230 ... De sphaera contains a clear description of the Earth as a sphere which agrees with widespread opinion in Europe during the higher Middle Ages ...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_sphaera_mundi