AS262: History for Atheists

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Atheistically Speaking, this is episode 262 and I'm your host Thomas Smith. I'm very happy to have you with me today, another great interview for this week, it's a little long again, but hey, no one complained about how long the content was last time, so, free, I appreciate no one looking a gift podcast in the mouth, so there you go. And oh, I just wanted to say, if you like the show, I've got a lot of new listeners on, thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please write an iTunes review, I keep forgetting to mention that, it definitely helps the show, five stars, write what you like about the show, helps Helps it be heard by more people and that helps it grow, and that's good for all of us. So, thanks for doing that, iTunes review if you can.

0:01:14 Thomas: If you don't use iTunes, don't bother telling me that, it's fine, I get it. I understand that some of you don′t use it, that's fine. Those who do, write a review if they can. Alright, let's get to today's interview.

0:01:37 Thomas: Joining me right now is Tim O'Neill. He has the website historyforatheists.blogspot.com and we're going to talk some history because, well, we're atheists, so it's perfect for us. How are you doing, Tim?

0:01:49 Tim: I'm very well, thanks, Thomas,

0:01:51 Thomas: Way this came to happen, this episode, is that Tyler had you on his show, right? Tyler Vela? Stella? The

0:01:57 Tim: Yeah. Yeah, Tyler, Tyler was, was quite excited to have me on his show, yeah.

0:02:01 Thomas: Reason is because you have a number of topics, a number of instances in which atheists or new atheists tend to get history wrong, right? And naturally, so what I think was kind of funny is you were saying, or Tyler, you were say that you can get on Christian shows and talk about that, but you'd had a hard time getting on atheist shows to talk about that. Is that true?

0:02:27 Tim: Yeah, that's absolutely right, I, I made that point, he, and he was, he was quite gleeful about that, because I think he, he kind of felt that that meant that all atheists were, were closed-minded idiots, but, I'm glad you've proved him wrong, Thomas. That's, that great.

0:02:32 Thomas: Yeah, no, That's the theme of my show. I don't know how familiar you are with it, but I do like to talk about places where atheists disagree or things where I think the movement has gone wrong or just maybe little disagreements between people in the movement. But this is a perfect topic for my show, so why don't we make sure we establish your atheist credentials? Credentials. So you're not going to say you're, you're a devout atheist and you are, what do they always say? And the Christians always say in the debate, well, I used to be a evolutionist and then I stopped.

0:02:48 Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they all used to be atheists. I love the number of Christians who used to be Satanists as well. I had no idea there were so many Satanists out there. Yeah, am I a real atheist? Now, this is something that comes up quite a bit because, well, because a lot of atheists don't like the fact that I'm criticizing atheists for getting history wrong. And so they think I must be somehow a closet Christian. And I've actually had one reliably inform the the blog Butterflies and Wheels, that I am, in fact, a paid operative of the Vatican, to which I've said many times in the past, if that's true, then all I can say is the Pope owes me a hell of a lot of back pay because I've been doing this for 35 years and I haven't seen a cent from that bastard.

0:03:14 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah,

0:04:01 Tim: So, yeah, I'm an atheist. Yeah, absolutely. Been an atheist since I was about probably 20. Was raised a Christian. I got over it. Largely by reading about history, studied the origins of Christianity when I was still a Christian, thinking that I would discover that it was all perfectly reliable and true in my naivety, and because I was, even back then, was passionate about ancient medieval history, and so I kind of applied that interest to my faith, and let's just say my faith didn't last very long after that. Um, and and so I've been an atheist all of my adult life, so for the last about the last 35 years, was a state um president of the Australian Skeptics and a member of the Australian Skeptics, and I'm a paid up, actually think I'm not a paid-up member of The Australian Atheist

0:04:10 Thomas: Make

0:04:58 Tim: Foundation, I think I owe them my due, so I think I'll have to pay that, pay that this week or I might be exposed as a fake atheist.

0:05:04 Thomas: A note. Yeah I was gonna say, well it's just like a Vatican an operative to, you know, become a state president of whatever atheist club. Yeah, that's exactly what you would do.

0:05:15 Tim: But I actually have had people tell me that this is all a ruse. So everything I just said is all the smokescreen, it's all a facade. So what I like to do is point them to some postings of mine on alt-atheism back in the dim, dark ages, back in The Days of Usenet in about 1992 or 93, where I was clearly posting as an atheist. So if it is a pretense, it's a very elaborate one.

0:05:24 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, I was going to say, and at that point, I think you've earned it. Like you can go ahead and if you, if you're that dedicated, I don't even care if you know what, but it doesn't really matter because the arguments in the history is what matters. You know, even if you were a Christian, I would still have you on the show to talk about what, uh, what atheists are getting wrong. Now I do, I am a little skeptical sometimes of certain Christian history, but as you're no doubt going to show us, we should also be skeptical of motivated reasoning in atheist history.

0:05:55 Tim: That's right.

0:06:14 Tim: Yeah.

0:06:14 Thomas: So, yeah.

0:06:14 Tim: Well, I am actually asked quite often, why do you do this? Why are you so vehement about atheist bad history? And my answer is twofold. First of all, one, I'm not just vehement about atheist Bad History. I'm vehement About Bad History, So whether it's motivated by political ideology, such as people who are trying to rewrite the history of the Balkans wars and through the lens of Serbian nationalism, you know, I kick their bums. Whether it's Christianity, and I regularly get stuck into fundamentalist Christians who try and reconcile things like reconcile the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew and try and play around with the dates of the death of Herod the Great or with the census of Quirinus to try and make the Bible not contradict itself. I'm pretty merciless on them as well. Or whether it's atheists getting it wrong. I just don't like people warping history.

0:06:32 Thomas: Right.

0:07:15 Thomas: Yeah. Understood. It's now where I need to make a confession. Of all the people I have on this show, you know, there are lots of people where I can kind of, I can get into it. I can grasp what they're talking about. I Can do some research with whether it's physics or whatever it is. History has got to be one of my worst subjects. So I am terrible at history. I'm confessing this now. And I also don't think, I don't make a lot of historical claims though. Like I don'T.

0:07:40 Tim: It's probably wise. Look, if you don't know the stuff, because the second thing I say in response to why do you do this is that no one else is doing it. Plenty of other people are picking up Christians on their bad history. Plenty other people have been picking up Holocaust deniers, and I hate Holocaust denier, on their history, history, but but for some reason no one is actually bothering to do this with with with the atheist movement

0:07:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Hey, well, I've got an idea. Maybe just to make sure that, you know, the medicine goes down. Okay. How about we do the topics we're going to do on bad atheist history. And then maybe at the the end, you give us one bad Christian history topic a little bit, just to, you know, just a spoonful of sugar makes the history go down. What do you think?

0:08:16 Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I think that'll make it nice. Okay, no problem.

0:08:23 Thomas: All right, so let's talk about it. Now, I'll say that the topics I saw on your website, on your main post, where you've kind of listed some of the bad atheist history, I was very interested by Giordano Bruno and like the Inquisition and that kind of thing, because Bruno was depicted in Cosmos. And I actually do remember at the time seeing a few posts saying like, uh, this is not quite accurate. And I read a little bit into it, but I don't think I knew enough to make like a, you know, a great conclusion on that, that I was too terribly certain of. So I would love to hear about that and the quote unquote dark ages in general of the church setting back history, you known science a thousand years. Years. So let's talk about it.

0:08:43 Tim: Yeah. Okay.

0:09:09 Tim: Well, let's maybe, maybe let's start with Giordano Bruno, because I think a lot of people would have, um, seen Neil deGrasse Tyson's revamp of Cosmos, which which I thought was a great show, um, and I was actually, because I'm a huge fan of the original Cosmos. You know, when I was growing up, Carl Sagan was a great hero of mine. I read the book about 15 times and I loved that show. And it gave me my interest in science and particularly my interest in the history of science and how things develop. Now, since then, I've found that Carl Sagen actually wasn't very good at history either.

0:09:43 Thomas: Sure.

0:09:43 Tim: And I found that he's kind of got things wrong, but that doesn't matter too much. But the new one I did like, but I was quite unhappy about the way it started because it began with this cartoon by Seth MacFarlane, a Family Guy of fame, about the story of Giordano Bruno or kind of a version of it. And what it was doing was making a kind of plea for freedom of thought and was making – also making a plea for thinking bigger, bigger, and and getting out of the constraints of of of fundamentalism, and really it was a parable that was aimed at its, at Cosmos's American audience.

0:10:29 Tim: And it was very much a parabel about creationism and intelligent design, if you read between the lines on it, that was really what it was doing. It was basically those, the the punch line was where Geodano Bruno says, "Your god is too small," which is actually something that he he did say in one of his books. And and really that's what it was about. So it was in the context of current American culture wars politics.

But in doing that, in trying to present that parable, what they did was they took some real history and played around with it. And they played around quite a bit. And this is the problem that I kind of have with a lot of new atheist bad history. It's made up largely of fairy stories which are nice, neat little parables which which tell a great story, which have a real punch, but which are actually aren't historically accurate. And I'm a bit of a stickler for historical accuracy.

So if we have a look at the the story of Giordano Bruno that they told, they said there was this guy in the in the, uh, in the late, late 16th century and he he was a, uh, he was some kind of friar or monk, but he but he had radical thoughts and he had to hide, like, banned books under the floorboards of his friary.

And they showed him hiding a book, um, by, by the Critias, on the nature of things, the Natura Rerum, um, and but but then he got kicked out of his his friary because he had these banned books. So, you know, the Inquisition turned up in all their robes and kick him out.

0:12:03 Tim: And so he wanders around and he comes up with this idea that the cosmos is much bigger than the medieval view of the world and that there were multiple stars and all stars were suns and they all had planets and they could be inhabited and so on. You know, amazing stuff. But he got ridiculed and then eventually he got burnt at the stake. And so it was, you know, the nasty church won. But and the story is is kind of kind of roughly right, I mean Giordano Bruno did have those ideas, he was burnt at the stake, um, but it gets kind of most of it wrong. So for example, the book in question, uh, dererum Naturum by by the Cretius, was not banned. So no one was handing, it hiding, writing it under floorboards.

0:12:53 Tim: In fact, a few years before Giordano Bruno first pops up in history, a major edition of it had just been bought out. It was never banned. It was considered for banning because it was kind of a weird book. I mean, it said that there was no God, that the universe was made up of atoms and that the university was much bigger than everyone said. But they kind of looked at it and said, well, it's a weird book, but yeah, maybe, no, we won't ban it. They actually decided not to. This is a Catholic church. Yes, he was kicked out of his friary. No, he wasn't really kicked out of his friary. He ran away. He ran way from his friary. So he wasn'T actually kicked out for reading naughty books. He was ridiculed because he did believe in Copernicanism. So he did not believe in heliocentrism, which was quite a new idea at that stage.

0:13:40 Tim: He was not ridiculed for that because it was against the Bible. He was ridiculous for that because it was considered a stupid idea. And it was actually against all of the physics and most of the astronomy of the time. Now, we now know that ultimately it was proven to be true, a version of heliocentrism was proven to be truth. So we kind of think that they must have all been dumb to actually accept that it wasn't true. But at the time, especially before the invention of the telescope, it wasn't obvious at all. In fact, it took another, after Bruno's time, probably about another century before Therefore, Kepler came along with his laws of planetary motion, and then Newton came along with his entirely new basis for physics, that most of the objections to heliocentrism finally fell away and the scientific consensus changed.

0:14:34 Tim: So in Bruno's time, that was still a long, long way off. And yes, he was burned at the stake, but he was not burned at a stake because he said that that there were multiple planets and suns, because he didn't actually get that from Lucretius. He got that from a guy he calls the divine Cusanus, and that's a guy called Nicholas of Cusa, who was writing roughly a century before Bruno's time and who was a cardinal of the Catholic Church. In fact, he was a papal nuncio, which means effectively he was sort of second in command, second only to the pope, and was a renowned and revered scholar and theologian and who wasn't burnt at the stake for saying these things.

0:15:17 Tim: So this idea that the Catholic Church was sort of, you know, hated science and so on, they were playing around with a whole lot of ideas themselves. So why did Bruno get burnt at stake? Well, it was for other stuff. He got burnt at state because he said that Jesus was a foolish magician. He said that the Virgin Mary wasn't a virgin. He said there was no trinity. And he said that transubstantiation in the Catholic mass with a bread and wine sent into the body and blood of Jesus was nonsense. Now, fair enough. I agree with him on probably on all those things.

0:15:16 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say you said foolish things. Those sound pretty reasonable to me.

0:15:54 Tim: But, yeah, but the point is in the late 15th century, 16th century all that will get you burnt at the stake. What he wasn't burnt at a stake for was saying that the earth went around the sun. And a lot of people try to say, well, he said the earth went around the sun, he got burned at the stake. Later on, Galileo, you know, 16 years later, Galilei got into trouble and the whole heliocentrism thing and got in trouble with the Inquisition, the same Inquisitor, in fact, Cardinal Bellarmine. So let's put two and two together and get seven.

0:16:28 Tim: Let's assume that he was burned at the stake because he said the earth went around the sun, amongst these other things. That actually doesn't work because he was sentenced and executed by the Roman Inquisition, which was presided over by Cardinal Bellarmine.

And the Roman Inquisition worked according to some very uh hard and fast rules and they worked on case law and precedent, which meant that if someone had ruled on a particular thing after having, you know, examined it and said this is heretical, um, that meant that later on if someone else came up with the same idea and was and was accused before the Inquisiton of the same idea, the Inquistion didn't have to examine it again, they simply pointed back to the precedent, just as we do in our common law today. And that didn't happen in the case of Galileo. When it came, when Galileo came up before this same Inquisition, the same Inquisitor, about 16 years after Bruno's execution, they examined the entire heliocentrism idea from a religious perspective for the first time. They wouldn't have done that if there was a precedent from just 16 years before. And And it's not like Bellarmine would have forgotten, right? He was a pretty smart guy. I mean, I've read his books. He would have remembered.

So the whole idea that Bruno was executed for heliocentrism is simply nonsense. He was executed by the other stuff. Now, was it good that he was executed? I don't think so. The point is, obviously, I don't think so, I d' n't think burning people of the state because they say the Trinity was wrong is good.

0:17:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:04 Tim: Would, but you can't judge the past by the standards of the present. And people in the, in the late 16th, early 17th century, unfortunately, did think it was okay to do this. Now, you know, that that doesn't sit well with me. And if the Catholic Church started burning people today for not believing in the, in the Trinity, well, I'd probably be, you know, in danger of being burned. But even if I wasn't, um, I'd be objecting to that strenuously. But what a historian has to do is, is not judge the past, particularly not judge the past by the standards of the present, but try and examine the past.

0:18:36 Thomas: Well, OK, but let me let's let's talk about kind of the overall reason that this was presented. First off, I want to say 100 percent. I don't like perpetuating, you know, bad history, either bad science, anything that's being used to kind of make a point where you're adjusting the facts accordingly. Like, I get it. I take that absolutely, 100% take that on board. I think that showing the, depicting it correctly is important.

0:18:58 Tim: Yep. Yep.

0:19:05 Thomas: But when you let off, you talked about, I mean, a lot of the theme of this is the church holding back science. And it sounds like you're starting to make the point like, well, they weren't necessarily holding back science. It was for these, you know, like denying that Jesus was, or whatever, saying Jesus was just a magician or whatever he said. Don't you think that that still, all told, that still shows the church was holding back progress and was using violence and horrible execution in order to keep people from questioning it? And it's not as though that's much better.

0:19:23 Tim: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, glad you said that. And the key word in what you just said there was the word progress.

0:19:49 Tim: Yes, of course, what Bruno is a case study in is an example of a suppression of freedom of thought. And and to us in the post-Enlightenment world that is absolutely, you know, vile and and terrible and and, as a post-Enlightenment person, I find it offensive to me, okay? And And so, but but here's the thing, you said holding back progress, and one of the dangers when you're studying history is is to to fall into one of the big historiographical fallacies, and that's that history is a progression, that we start at one point where we're primitive, and we move onward and upward into goodness and wonderfulness. This is what's called the Whig fallacy, and it's also called the presenter's fallacy. So what it means is that we are the good and the wise, and anyone in the past who is like us is a hero, and anyone of the past, who wasn't like us or who suppressed the heroes, were the villains.

0:19:58 Thomas: Yeah, I

0:20:55 Tim: So it kind of turns history into this onward and upward progression. Ultimately, yeah, we do see a increase in sophistication, say, in technology, obviously. I mean, people in the 16th century weren't sitting and talking over Skype across the entire planet. But the idea that everything that is now is good and true and wonderful, and everything that was back then is clearly primitive and therefore bad, is the Whig fallacy. So when you say they were holding back progress, that unfortunately, even though I'm inclined to agree with you because I'm sitting in the same part of history as you, that's actually an example of the presentist fallacy.

0:21:39 Thomas: Don't know. Okay, Okay, let's debate about that. That's interesting. Okay, so I take your point that as a historian, you don't look at things like that and you think it's a fallacy, and I get it. But when we talk about how can we talk about progress? Is there a sense of progress that makes sense or is saying the word progress in any way a fallancy? I'm wondering, I just want to clarify what you mean by that.

0:22:07 Tim: Historians try and avoid value judgments and try and avoid sort of, it's difficult as well. And this is why objectivity is so hard to achieve. And this is where a hell of a lot of new atheist history, a hell lot of atheist bad history is based based on the weak fallacy. It's based on your idea that back then it was bad, now it's good.

0:22:09 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It's annoying. Yeah.

0:22:25 Thomas: Sure. Well, but I think you could still, well, okay. But I, okay, I get that as a historian, you reserve judgment and all that. But if we're trying to evaluate as an institution, is something like a church as it was set up at that time, and as it continued to be set up and to a great, you know, way lesser extent set up now. But still, as an institution, does that hinder the progress of science or the progress of human exploration? It's not a fallacy. It's really not.

0:22:55 Tim: See, there's that word. There's that Word. There's That Word. There's The Word. Progress again. See, the reason I'm objecting to progress is that that word is loaded with value. Let's put it

0:23:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yes, science now is better than science from 1600. We make scientific progress. I'm not sure why that's a problem. Okay, increase in understanding. So is a institution Like that, good? Was it good or was it bad in regards to being able to increase our understanding? I would say that punishing people for thought crime and For restricting free thought.

0:23:12 Tim: To one, let's put progress to one side and talk about an increase in sophistication and an increase and understanding. So, yeah. So, we, yeah, Yeah. Yes.

0:23:38 Thomas: Would be a good way to restrict and to hinder our understanding of things. You know, if you've set certain rules, that's what I mean to say.

0:23:46 Tim: Okay. Okay. Okay. Good, good. I just need to get away from The from the from the value load of words, and I agree with you that that in an institution like that had great potential to to restrict understanding and to therefore restrict and that increase in in in sophistication, but go back to what I was saying before when when I was saying that the reason that the Cosmos cartoon rankled with historians of science and people like me was because what it was showing wasn't correct. Remember I said that he didn't get, hang on, remember I said, though, he didn'T get that idea of multiple Cosmoses and inhabited planets and so on from Lucretius. He got it from a cardinal of the Catholic Church.

0:23:51 Thomas: Sure. Sure, no, I absolutely accept that.

0:24:32 Thomas: Right.

0:24:33 Tim: Now, that cardinal, the Catholic church, no one battled an eyelid. No one cared. In fact, they thought, wow, that's an interesting idea. Wow, the universe might be much bigger than we thought it was. And straight after him, there was another guy called William of Orlong who then took that a little bit further and started to think about inhabited planets elsewhere. So here's a guy in the 15th century, this is 100 years before Bruno, talking about aliens and saying, well, did they have their own Christ? Christ and so was there, were there a whole lot of Christ going out to various planets, were there alien Christ getting crucified? You know, six odd alien Christ being crucified on very different shaped crosses. He was actually speculating about this stuff. Again, it's what I'm, the reason why I'm saying, yes, you're absolutely right, the church, an institution like that, that did, that did have the potential to to stifle science. I'm agreeing with you. What I am saying is historically it didn't do that, right?

0:24:41 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, no. Okay. So, I didn't say science. When it comes to understanding, I think we can include theology and philosophy and moral philosophy and that sort of thing. We can include that in a broader understanding. I'm trying not to use progress. Again, Again, when we have a morality that is based off of those principles in which if you question the Trinity, you're burned at the stake, etc., I believe that, okay, again, I'm going to use the right words, a broader and more beneficial moral philosophy for humans doesn't involve that stuff. So I think I'm taking your point that I should emphasize. I think you're making a great point that atheists have overstated maybe the ways in which the church hindered science. So I think I take that on point granted, but I think it's funny that I don't know that it's all that much better to say, but if they question certain aspects of their theology, I mean, it's still why Bruno was killed. So it's like hindering one

0:25:36 Tim: Yeah. Yeah.

0:26:03 Tim: I Absolutely.

0:26:40 Thomas: Thing versus another.

0:26:41 Tim: I absolutely get it. But but when you look at what they hindered, it was largely to do with theology, so it was actually largely squabbles about invisible dudes who didn't exist and concepts that aren't real. When you look at at what they hindered, as far as uh things like your philosophy, that was actually, there wasn't much there. I mean, they kind of said, they said, well, you can't imagine that the universe is infinite in time. Okay, that didn't really restrict things much. And when you look at what they hindered as far as science is concerned, it was very little because as far as they were concerned, this is the point I wanted to get to.

0:26:42 Thomas: Okay. Mm hmm. OK,

0:27:16 Tim: The myth is that for a thousand years, you know, Greeks and Romans were being rational and wise and scientific, and they were probably on the brink of a scientific revolution. They'd invented mechanical computers and steam engines, and we were on our way to the stars. And then along came Christianity, and they hated science and destroyed the ancient knowledge of the Greeks and Romans and burned down the Great Library of Alexandria, one of the big myths, and plunged the whole of the Western world into a dark age for a thousand years and burnt scientists at the stake, until the glorious dawning of the Renaissance where luckily everyone became intelligent again and we threw off the shackles of religious superstition and marched onward and upward to the sunlit uplands of wonderfulness that we live on now.

0:27:17 Thomas: Right.

0:28:06 Tim: Wonderful story, complete crap. It didn't happen. So I agree with you entirely, and I do not like, let me stress this, I do nicht like the idea of people being killed for their ideas, full stop, even ideas I disagree with. I do not like that. And yes, institutions that restrict free speech are definitely something that is going to potentially, obviously constrain the growth in the sophistication and breadth of our knowledge. But what I'm saying is that the caricature of history that is regularly presented as true and which was part of the cartoon at the beginning of Cosmos is that what this meant was there was a genuine, like an extreme restriction in things such as science, in things such as the breadth of philosophy and in other ideas where really what they restricted mainly was theology. And frankly, I find it difficult to get too upset about that.

0:29:11 Tim: But getting back to what I was just saying about the – because you did bring up the Dark Ages before and you were talking about – asked me about the Inquisition and so on. So maybe we could discuss that.

0:29:20 Thomas: Mm hmm, yeah. And I'd love to hear the real story of the Library of Alexandria as well.

0:29:26 Tim: That's A great one. That's actually going to be the subject of my next post or maybe a couple of posts on history for atheists because I refer to that as the Ur myth. That's sort of the ultimate new atheist myth, myth. And it actually brings us back to Carl Sagan and the original Cosmos, because he ended, just as the new Cosmos began with the myth of Giordano Bruno, the old Cosmos ended with the myth of the Great Library of Alexandria. And, and it's, it's a beautiful story that he tells. He tells the story of, you know, the great, wise and wonderful Greeks and how they built this, this amazing library that had millions of books in it. And it was the sum total of all human and knowledge and it was all gathered together in one place, but then the uh the the barbarians came and they they murdered Hypatia, the last librarian of of the great library, and

0:29:32 Thomas: Oh, great.

0:30:20 Tim: Tore it to pieces and then they they tore down the great liberty and they burnt it and and all that knowledge was lost. And if that hadn't have happened, then we'd all be living on colonies on the moons of Jupiter or something, right? You heard, I imagine you probably heard that story.

0:30:34 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, and well, I have something else I want to say about it, but I'll let you continue.

0:30:34 Tim: Okay. So great story didn't happen. So here's what actually happened. What actually happened was, yeah, there was a magnificent library in Alexandria. It was founded by the Ptolemaic kings who were sort of post-Alexandrian kings of Egypt, Greeks, and they established the museum, which was a center of study and associated with that was this magnificent library. And it was clearly the biggest and most extensive library in the ancient world. Did it have a whole lot of books in it on science and technology? Science, probably, such as it was in the Hellenic world.

0:31:24 Tim: Technology, probably not. Probably not much, because the ancient Greek philosophers regarded that as sort of kind of a grubby, dirty thing that lower class people do because they tended to be upper class and they were much more interested in pure thought and abstract ideas. So there certainly would have been a lot of philosophy in the Great Library. There would have been quite a bit on physics and so on, but not a lot on making stuff. So the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was, you know, we're busily designing star systems or something, you have star drives to take us to Mars or something. No. No, but what was mainly in the Great Library was other stuff.

It works on rhetoric, works on how to speak in public, works of history. And as a historian, I'd love for some of that to have survived, just a fragment of that to have revived. So the Great library was certainly a magnificent center of learning and probably the greatest center of running in the ancient world, but it wasn't unique. And this is why I find it very strange that a lot of atheists get very, very agitated about the decline or the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria as though somehow it was the only library in the whole of the ancient world, which is weird and obviously stupid.

I mean, it couldn't have been. And we know that there were other similar and rival libraries. There was the Great library of Celsus at Ephesus, and there was the rival, the big rival of the great library of Alexandria, the Great Libary of Pergamon, which was almost as big. The legend goes that the Great Laboratory of Alexandria Andrea decided to try and strangle its rival by refusing to export papyrus to

0:32:15 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah?

0:33:05 Tim: Pergamon so that they couldn't write books, and Pergamone responded by inventing parchment and so made it out of animal skins in retaliation. It's probably a myth. It's a nice story, though, and it certainly shows that there was an enormous rivalry between these big centres of learning. But these were the big libraries. There were many others. There was the Imperial Library of Constantinople later on, and there were libraries in most major public institutions. Many temples had libraries and many of the Roman baths, such as the baths of Caracalla in Rome, had extensive libraries as well. So there were libraries everywhere. The idea that the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria was somehow on its own a single catastrophic thing that plunged the whole world into a dark age is obviously nonsense. So that part of the story clearly isn't true.

0:33:51 Tim: But the bit that the new atheist bad history myth gets completely wrong is the idea that somehow it was destroyed by a mob of evil Christians. Even though that's a wonderful picture, the evil slavering Christians in their black robes burning down the beautiful library, it didn't happen. Recently, there was a movie called Agora about Hypatia, which was riddled with bad history as well, but it began with the Christian mob burning down the Great Library of Alexandria, or kind of. What actually happened is that the Great Library, like any ancient library, declined over a long period. The thing about these libraries, they tended to be founded by a royal patron because they were incredibly expensive to maintain.

0:34:42 Tim: Ancient books wore out very quickly, particularly books written on papyrus, and they were also very prone to fire, and when you've got the only form of lighting is lamps, fires in libraries happen to hell of a lot. So the the thing about these libraries is that they really needed someone to be pumping money into them in order to be maintained. While the kings, the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, were maintaining the Great Library, it survived quite well for quite a few centuries. But it did decline. And one of the major losses of books was when Julius Caesar laid siege to Alexandria in the late first century or mid first century BC. And his soldiers set fire to some warehouses on the docks, which happened to be holding a large chunk of the collection of the Great Library and burnt them down.

0:35:36 Tim: And this was maintained throughout the whole of ancient ancient history as one of the great tragedies of the ancient world, and Julius Caesar's soldiers were condemned for it. That wasn't the end of the Great Library, but it certainly would have put an enormous dent, it seems to have put a big dent in its status, and a lot of ancient writers referred to the Great Library in the past tense from that point onwards, so it seems to have gone into quite a decline, but it continued and we've got references to librarians and so on and into about the 3rd century. In the 3nd century, in about the 260s AD, the Roman Empire very nearly fell apart and it broke into three parts. One part, the part including Alexandria, was kind of a rebel kingdom held by the rulers of Palmyra, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra.

0:36:24 Tim: The Emperor Aurelian came over and took that part of the empire back. In the process, he laid siege to Alexandria and he burned down the royal quarter of the city, which included the museum and the Great Library. So that was the end of the Great Library of Alexandria. That was in the 270s and that was before Christianity was more than a minor persecuted cult. It wasn't destroyed by Christians. So where did the so where did the the legend of Christians destroying the great liberty come from? Okay, the Great Library had a number of daughter libraries outside of the royal quarter, so, and one of of those was in a museum, sorry, in a temple of Serapis, the Serapium.

0:37:11 Tim: And that was one of the major daughter libraries, contained quite a few thousand books. That was outside the royal quarter. So when the royal quarter was destroyed and the great library was burned down by a Roman army, not by Christians, he emphasised, the serapium survived. So that was kind of became became the centre of learning, much reduced in size and importance. But that was the remaining centre of Learning in Alexandria. And it was the Serapium that was destroyed, torn down, not burned, by the way, but was destroyed by a Christian mob in the late 4th century. But what's interesting is that the people who tell the story of the destruction of the Seripium, and even if they do understand that it wasn't really the Great Library, it was kind of like an offshoot, minor offshoot of it, they still say, well, yeah, but they destroyed the last remnant of the Great library.

0:38:08 Tim: Well, here's where things get a little bit complicated. The Serapium was destroyed after Christianity had come to power. So in the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, didn't ban paganism per se, say, but things started to go quite seriously downhill for paganism. So temples such as the Serapium were getting increasingly starved of funds, and therefore it was harder and harder to maintain things such as expensive things, such as libraries, because their rich donors were all converting to Christianity. But in Alexandria, there was this real conflict that went on right through the fourth century between Christians and pagans, and some pagans got quite radical.

0:38:54 Tim: And a group of pagan terrorists decided to use the Serapion as a kind of a base and would venture out from it, drag Christians into the temple and kill them. Not surprisingly, the Christians weren't that happy about that. So they surrounded the temple, and there was a standoff. Roman troops were brought in, and because the emperor was Christian, it was pretty obvious which way it was going to end. But there was a negotiation and the pagans were allowed to leave and the Christians were outraged that this negotiation had happened. And so when the empress said, OK, well, you can tear down the temple. And so the soldiers start to demolish the temple, the mob joined in and they raised the thing to the ground. So this is where the story of the destruction of Serapion comes from.

0:39:42 Tim: Was there a library there? It doesn't seem there was. First of all, we've got five accounts of the destruction of the Serapion. None of them mention a library. Two of those accounts are hostile. So one of them is by Eunapius of Sardis, who was a pagan and hated Christians. And he spends most of the story of the distraction of the serapion talking about what idiots they were, how they were unlearned, how their dad had no grasp of philosophy. So, if anyone was going to mention, by the way, when they ripped this temple down, they also destroyed the last remnant of the Great Library of Alexandria, it would be Eunapius, but he doesn't. Now, if we go back a few decades and have a look at one of the last references to the library in the Serapion, we find that in a Roman writer, pagan writer, called Ammianus Marcellinus, who seems to have visited Alexandria just a few years before.

0:40:36 Tim: And he talks about what a magnificent temple the Serapion was, and he said it has had great libraries in its colonnades, using the past tense. He was writing about 20, 30 years before the temple was torn down. So this is why, just compare that to the story I told earlier on, the mythic story. And when we dig down into the details, what happens is that all the elements of the mythics story kind of disappear. You know, that the Great Library wasn't burnt down by anyone, one who was Christian. It was burnt down actually by a couple of Roman emperors, um, the Great Library itself was gone before Christianity arose, and the Serapion was torn down, and there's the bit about the terrorists that usually you never hear about, and uh and there was no library there, as far as we can make out. It seems what probably happened is that what what books were in the Seraphim had kind of been plundered in earlier uprisings in the in uh in the city of Alexandria, or it just just been kind of sold off or stolen.

0:40:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yes.

0:41:34 Tim: That and that seems it seems to be what happens.

0:41:35 Thomas: Selling them for terrorism funds, huh? Yeah.

0:41:39 Tim: Yeah, so it's a very different story, but what, then it plays into this bigger myth about how Christianity caused the Dark Ages. Well, actually, that's not true either. First of all

0:41:41 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:50 Thomas: Well, before you get to that, can I ask you about, what is it? Hypatia? Who was it that was supposed to be torn in pieces?

0:41:51 Tim: Yeah Patient. Yeah. Well, she's going to be a a subject of a few of my future posts as well, um,

0:41:58 Thomas: Yeah. So how did that, was that during the Sarah Palin? Oh, that's how I have to remember it.

0:42:07 Tim: Seraphim or Seraphium. It depends on how you pronounce it.

0:42:10 Thomas: Yeah, okay. Yeah? Was it during that, or was this a myth? Okay.

0:42:12 Tim: No, no, it was after it. It was after. So, again, Carl Sagan got it wrong. He talks about her being assassinated and then the library being destroyed. Well, it's actually backwards. He got it backwards. So, Serapion was destroyed in the late 4th century. Hypatia was assassinated in, I think it was 415, so the early 5th century, so, yeah, she's Okay, well, she's another great new atheist myth because she's like Bruno. She's another Great Martyr to the wicked Christians and their hatred of science. So her patron of Alexandria, remarkable woman, a Neo-Platonic philosopher and an astronomer and a mathematician. It was unusual for a woman to be a scientist or a natural philosopher in the ancient world, but not unknown, particularly if they were aristocrats and they had an aristocratic and therefore learned father. So it was unusual, but it was certainly unusual for someone to be as renowned and respected as Hypatia.

0:42:16 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:42:37 Thomas: So what did she do?

0:42:46 Thomas: Oh,

0:43:24 Tim: It's important to remember, though, that she was a Neoplatonic philosopher first and foremost, and this other stuff, mathematics and astronomy and so on, was part of that. So the Neoplatonics believed in really a god. They believed they were almost monotheists. They believed in the one who was the source of all that was good. And then all of their other beliefs kind of came out from that. And they believed in a mathematical unity to the universe. And that's why she was interested in mathematics and astronomy. Astronomy was a branch of mathematics in the ancient world, whereas these days it seemed more as kind of a branch of physics. What you did with astronomy in the ancient world was you calculated where things were going to be in the sky. You didn't really think that much about whether that would actually represent something happening physically in the Sky, which is weird for us.

0:44:12 Tim: But when you look at, say, Ptolemaic astronomy, there's all this weird sort of mathematical fiddles and fudges to try and explain how things could be moving in circular orbits. And at the same time, you've still got things like retrograde motion. We look at that and just think that's really messy. In fact, a medieval king, Alfonso of Castile, said, if I was God, I think I'd come up with something a little bit neater.

0:44:20 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:44:34 Tim: But to them, it all made sense because it was mathematical. So Hypatia, very, very interesting lady, very intelligent, greatly renowned. She did get assassinated, stoned to death, probably using Riftile's biomob of Christians. So people, again, put two and two together and get seven and say, well, she was a great scientist. She was killed by Christians, therefore she was killed because she was a great scientist. But then if we look at the evidence, and here's what we annoying historians do, we actually go back and don't look at them. If we don't look at it, we look back at the facts. So we go back to the evidence, and what we find is that a couple of contemporary accounts that we've got of the assassination of Hypatia tell us that it was about politics and make absolutely no mention of science or learning.

In fact, Socrates Scholasticus, who's the most detailed contemporary account of Hypatia's death, talks about how renowned and respected she was and how learned she was and how everyone respected her for her learning, and then says, yet even she fell victim to the political jealousies that raged at the time. Alexandria was known for its politics. It was known for violent street politics. Basically, you sorted things out with mobs in the street in Alexandria. That's

0:45:09 Thomas: What kind

0:45:56 Tim: How politics

0:45:56 Thomas: Of political disagreements were they having?

0:45:56 Tim: Um. It was over dominance. So the the city was traditionally ruled by a prefect, and who was who was subordinate to the the uh the Roman legatus, or governor of of of Egypt. And the prefect at the time was a guy called Orestes, um, but what had happened in in the sort of the century or so uh before this for high pages death was, you know, the conversion of Christianity. So suddenly what happened was the empire had this sort of this second layer of bureaucracy, this church layer, and every city had its own little ruler of the church, which was the bishop. And so there was this tension in a lot of cities across the Roman Empire about where exactly does the bishop fit in in the hierarchy?

0:46:47 Tim: Is the bishop separate? Is he subordinate to the secular authority, or is he superior? Um, so there was this real tension, and this this was what broke out in in uh in Alexandria. The bishop at the time was a guy called Cyril, uh, he was a very ambitious, very political guy, and he challenged Orestes uh for his or for for dominance in the city. He started giving orders, uh, he tried to expel the Jews after the Jew's caused a riot, and Orestis didn't like like this, obviously. So there was this real sort of tension about who's top dog in the city. And what happened was at one point, Orestes, the prefect, was going through the street with his bodyguard, and one of Cyril's supporters threw a rock at him and hit him in the head.

0:47:38 Tim: That tends to annoy people. So Oresties had this guy arrested and had him tortured, and the guy died under torture. So Cyril's supporters then got really angry, and they went out and tried to find a supporter, a political supporter of Orestes, and they found Hypatia. Hypatria was known as a political support of Oarestes, and they decided to kill her in revenge. So it was a tit-for-tat killing. Killing, there's nothing in the in the uh in the the sources that indicate that the fact that she was a philosopher, the fact dasshe was a scientist, any of that stuff had anything to do with it.

It was purely that she was a member of of his faction. Their their guy had been killed, it was time for revenge, and that's how politics happened in uh in ancient Alexandria. A lot of people say that her death brought about, you know, again, the dark ages descended, her death bore about the end of the great philosophy centre of Alexandria. That's wrong. We've got a whole lot of references in the century that followed to philosophers, pagan philosophers, even a pagan female philosopher who about 20 years after Hypatia, Aedicia, was a famous philosopher in Alexandria, not killed by any mobs, not stoned to death or torn to

0:49:02 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:02 Tim: Death by any Christians. Why? Probably because she stayed out of politics. I think that's probably the best reason. But again, what we get is you dig down into the detail and all of the elements of the story, the myth, disappear. What we actually get usually is a much more interesting story, but it's much harder work to get down into the detail, and to do it objectively in such a way that you think, well, actually, even though I quite like that story, it's not true.

0:49:32 Thomas: So we've got about 10 minutes left. I would say, what about Galileo? Because isn't that the big example? I'm trying to think. Stephen Hawking, I think, was going to be honored honored by the Catholic church or something. And then he, he didn't want, he refused unless they let him, uh, investigate into the Galileo trial and all that. Right. Is that something like that? So tell us about that.

0:49:43 Tim: Yeah.

0:49:55 Tim: Okay, it's going to be hard to do that one in 10 minutes. To do it, to do it. That's okay. I'll give you a quick one. Okay, so again, let's start with the fairy story. The fairy story version is Galileo was smart and wise and rational and scientific, and he proved that the Earth went round the sun.

But the Catholic Church was evil and stupid and hated science, and so they refused to look through his telescope and see the proof that the the earth went around the sun and they told him that he had to interpret the Bible literally because the Bible always had to be interpreted literally and there were bits in the Bible that said that the earth didn't go around the son and the earth stayed fixed.

And so they threatened to burn him at the stake and they tortured him or they threatened to torture him and they threw him into prison and they were horrible to him and so he had admit, recant and admit that he was wrong even though he muttered under his breath but it still moves at the end of the trial and they put threw him in jail or put him under house arrest,

0:49:57 Thomas: Uh, okay. Well, we can, we'll see.

0:50:51 Tim: And he died. But they were wrong, and He was right, and so science is good and religion is bad, and we all live happily ever after.

0:50:58 Thomas: Well let's end it there. We're out of time. Okay. No, I'm just kidding. Just cut you off on the fix.

0:51:02 Tim: Right, so that's the fairy story. Now, the reason I said it would be difficult to do it justice in 10 minutes is that the reality is, yet again, much more complicated. But let's start with the first thing I said. Galileo proved that the Earth went around the sun. He didn't. But Galileo made some arguments that indicated that the Earth went around the sun, some of which were very good and actually were accepted by the church and by other scientists at the time, such as the phases of Venus. That definitely shows that the old Ptolemaic model was wrong, but some of them were very bad and were actually wrong and were recognized at the same time. He said that the tides were caused by the rotation of the Earth, and that that's just wrong, and was known to be wrong, and he actually got several basic things wrong. But Galileo was, let's say, not renowned for admitting his mistakes, and so he dogmatically stuck to his erroneous argument.

0:51:10 Thomas: Sure.

0:51:57 Tim: So he didn't prove that the Earth went around the sun. In 1616, when the Galileo trial or Galileo case began, there were seven competing astronomical models or cosmological models, of which the one that he was championing, which was Copernicus' heliocentric model, was just one. So the idea that there was the Ptolemaic model and the church stuck to that dogmatically because Bible, and the heliocentric model, the Copernican model, which Galileo championed and proved, is complete nonsense. The church was actually quite open to a whole range of these, which is why they hadn't actually, you might remember, not burnt Copernicus at the stake when he first came up with this idea a century earlier, which is something that a lot of people don't sort of think about too much.

0:52:46 Tim: So what the church was doing was sort of saying, well, look, yeah, any one of these might be right. But what they were saying to Galileo was most philosophers or most astronomers, most scientists, we call them, disagree with you. And this is the key point that everyone forgets, or most people don't even bother to realize. The church had the science of the day on its side, firmly on its site. The overwhelming majority of scientists in 1616 thought Galileo was completely bonkers. There were probably, a guy called Jim Westman actually did a survey of thought on this question at that time and found out of the thousands of astronomers across the whole of Europe, just 10 agreed with Galileo.

0:53:32 Tim: So the idea that the church was sort of against science, was a science versus religion thing is completely wrong. One of the reasons the church was so dogmatic and arrogant about this stuff is that they thought they had the science of the day firmly on their side, and at the time they did. It was another century or so, about 90 years, before that consensus started to change, thanks, as I said before, to Kepler and Newton. But that was way off in the future.

So not only did Galileo not prove that the Earth went around the sun, he made some arguments which were inconclusive, but the church wasn't dogmatically anti-science. The church was actually pro-science, and what they said in their condemnation was this: idea the idea of heliocentrism is absurd in philosophy, that means scientifically wrong, and formally heretical, and that key, and there's a comma, there's actually a semicolon between the two, so it was, there were two reasons why they condemned him. One, it's scientifically wrong. Two, it's contrary to the Bible. So that actually puts a different spin on the whole thing. Now, again, it would take me a lot of time to go into why the story that we generally get about the Galileo affair is largely wrong.

But I think those two key points, one, Galileo didn't prove anything, and two, the church really, really was scientifically literate and was open to the science. The Galileo affair is actually an unusual one, caused by a number of, it's almost like a perfect storm of things going wrong. First one thing that went wrong was Galileo was really good at annoying

0:55:06 Tim: People, um, and and and second thing that when wrong was he kind of insulted the Pope as well, uh, which is usually a bad idea, and and the third thing that went wrong is that the church was under a lot of pressure. The 30 Years' War was raging, the Pope was being questioned about his authority within the Catholic church, and he had to make a a stand on, yes, I am against Protestantism. And they saw Galileo's use of the Bible as a kind of a proto, a form of Protestantism, and so there were a whole lot of things that made that particular case unusual. But the funny thing is, whenever I challenge people about church holding back science and say, give me an example, what's the one example I always get?

0:55:48 Tim: Galileo. But it was very much the exception to the rule. That 1,000 years, the so-called Dark Ages, where the church was supposedly suppressing science, I always say, give me an example of anyone, anyone being burnt, imprisoned, spoken to nastily or looked at in a bad way by the church in that 1000 year period over anything to do with science. And what I get in response is crickets chirping, because there aren't any. And then they say, well, why wasn't there any science? And then I rattle off a list of medieval scientists. I rattle of a list people who did things like like discover how rainbows worked and came up with the mean speed theorem and all sorts of stuff that was happening in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries in this.

0:56:30 Thomas: And people didn't care that the rainbow theory went against the Noah story?

0:56:35 Tim: Well, they didn't see it as going against the novel story. And this is the other thing.

0:56:37 Thomas: Oh, well, it definitely does. I mean, well, I'm just, I was actually trying to make your point as well. I means, it definitely goes against the Old Testament Noah story that says rainbows are there because of a sign of the, uh, interesting.

0:56:43 Tim: Yeah. No, no, no. Because it's signed From God, yeah. But people have got this idea that the Catholic Church then and now actually believes that the Bible is always literally true. The medieval Catholic Church didn't believe that, that. And Cardinal Bellarmine said in a letter at around about the time of Galileo's trial, he said in the letter to someone who did agree with Galileo, if you were to be able to prove this stuff, then we would definitely have to reinterpret certain scriptures. He said, but we're not going to do that until you show us proof, which actually isn't an unreasonable position. But the point is, they were quite prepared to look at those texts allegorically, because they believed that there were four levels of interpretation in the Bible, of which the literal was only one, and probably the least important and the one that could be abandoned. So, yeah, interesting.

0:57:35 Tim: A lot of people got this idea that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages thought the Bible was always literally true. There was a guy in the 12th century called William of Conches who looked at Genesis and said, how could God have made people out of dirt? And then he started to talk about, well, maybe what happened was that that life kind of arose out of dirt through the action of heat, and then it kind of developed in form and eventually sort of grew. And he was talking about a form of evolution in the 12th century, right? This guy's a Catholic monk writing in the12th century. Guess how burnt at the stake he got? Not at all, right.

0:58:02 Thomas: Yeah, right.

0:58:14 Tim: So not even – the only stake he went near was one that was medium rare at dinner. So, again, this is one of the things, you can tell I'm quite passionate about this stuff, but this is one of things that annoys me about the fairy tale version, is that not only are they wrong, they're also kind of dumb and boring, whereas the reality is actually much more interesting. It's much more interesting to have a dark ages, in inverted commas, that the real dark ages now, the real medieval period, we don't use the word dark ages anymore. The real medieval period where you have Things like Elmer of Malmesbury, who looked at the flight of birds and thought, I wonder if we could do that, and then built a glider and carried it

0:58:13 Thomas: It wasn't even singed at the stake. Not even, No. Was he sunburned at the stake? Yeah, sure.

0:58:55 Thomas: Burned

0:58:55 Tim: Up to the top of his church, flew off the top of his Church, flew the distance of about two football fields, and then crashed into an oak tree and broke both his legs.

0:58:56 Thomas: At the stake.

0:59:05 Thomas: Wow.

0:59:06 Tim: Now, was he burned at the stake? No. This was just before the Battle of Hastings. This was in about the 1050s, right? Not burned at the stake. His abbot did say he couldn't throw himself off the roof of the church anymore, but mainly because he didn't think his monks should be endangering their lives, not because he was trying to suppress science.

0:59:13 Thomas: Huh. Sure. Okay.

0:59:24 Tim: So the real history is much more interesting, I suppose, is my point.

0:59:28 Thomas: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, quick question. So you said, so no one uses the term Dark Ages anymore, or at least historians don't look at anything as a Dark Age anymore. Is that what the point you're make.

0:59:39 Tim: Let me put a bit of a caveat on that. The term does get used a little bit, but it gets used in a quite technical sense. It usually gets used about the period between the fall of Rome or the withdrawal of Rome from Britain to really somewhere around about like the 8th or 9th century. And that's often referred to as Dark Age as Britain. And it's called a Dark Age because we don't have any sources. And that's the reason why it's called a Dark Ages.

0:59:41 Thomas: Okay. Okay, okay.

1:00:03 Thomas: So, there wasn't really a regression, and again, this sort of you use as loaded terms, but at least in terms of like scientific discovery.

1:00:13 Tim: Decline in sophistication.

1:00:14 Thomas: Yeah, there wasn't.

1:00:15 Tim: Yeah, there was. But It began in the late 2nd century, century. So again, before Christianity, so it had nothing to do with Christianity. It began due to an economic decline in the Roman Empire. I remember I talked before about how the Roman Empire nearly fell apart in the third century. That's where we see this huge decline, particularly in the Western Roman Empire, massive decline in education, and it never really recovered. And so that's when we start to get this decline in learning. And that's because a lot of the technical works were written in Greek. And what we saw was a decline in Greek literacy. People, people still learn Latin, but it became harder and harder to find people who were able to read Greek. And so a lot of those technical works like Archimedes and a lot about Aristotle and so on stopped getting copied because no one could read them anymore.

1:00:15 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, okay,

1:01:04 Tim: Then you had the Roman Empire collapse. And once the Roman Empire collapsed, we get a massive decline in everything, and that's a, you know, if you're going to talk about like a dark age, it's from the fifth century, probably through to around about the, again, about the eighth, ninth century, when things start to pick up again, but there was a huge loss of knowledge in technical stuff. People, people lost, lost the art of learning, learning how to use, uh, concrete, which the Romans used, that got forgotten. So a whole lot of that stuff happened, and a lot of knowledge was lost. But what happened was there was a revival in that knowledge in the 12th century, what's called the 12th century Renaissance. So in the middle of the Middle Ages, and that knowledge came back into Europe via the Arabs. So it came back largely via Spain, which was Muslim, and via Sicily.

1:01:51 Tim: And that sparked this actual huge revolution in medieval learning and the rise of the universities and the beginnings of, again, for the first time of science. So there was actually a scientific revival in the Middle ages. It wasn't later on in the Renaissance, and that medieval revival laid the foundations for the true scientific revolution of Galileo's time, which again is completely contrary to the story we all get told.

1:02:18 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

1:02:19 Tim: So it wasn't the Dark Age. It was a period actually of great growth and a real expansion of knowledge.

1:02:27 Thomas: Interesting. So we're just about out of time. I got one more short question for you. I'm curious why you talk about new atheist bad history, because it seems like the stem of all this is Carl Sagan. Is he considered a new atheist? I wouldn't really think of him as such.

1:02:31 Tim: Sure.

1:02:44 Tim: No, I wouldn't say that. I suppose the reason I characterize it as new atheist bad history is that it tends to get propagated these days largely by people who you could say are part of the loosely termed new atheist movement. And the reason why I started really getting into this stuff is with the books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith and God Is Not Great, uh I saw this real sort of upsurge in in discussion about um atheism on online in particular and as a you know as an old atheist I I thought this is great but then I started to see this real sort of dogmatism I started to see this sort of evangelical zeal I started to see this this you know this this quite aggressive but but quite often dumb uh argument and and when I saw it about these historical arguments, that's when I really thought, hmm, this is actually a little bit disturbing and someone needs to push back.

1:03:43 Tim: And I think the thing that triggered it for me was when I had a three-week debate with this guy about whether or not the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages taught that the earth was flat, which it didn't, another myth. But this guy refused to believe it. And I just kept hitting him with quote after quote, passage after passage from medieval scientists, from books of folklore, saying the earth is round, the earth is round. And he just kept saying, Catholic Church destroyed knowledge. Catholic Church suppressed science. He just wouldn't listen. It was like, I mean, I've come across creationists that were less dumbheaded, boneheaded, and ignorant than this guy. And that really made me think there's something very strange going on here. So this is why I characterize it as new atheist bad history, not because people who aren't new atheists and people who weren't before that movement, such as Sagan, don't also believe these things. These are common myths.

1:03:52 Thomas: Huh.

1:04:38 Tim: You know, the Dark Age myth, the Hypotia myth, the Great Library of Myths, these are common ideas. But when I see them getting rammed down people's throats aggressively by people who are being quite sort of evangelical, it reminds me of something.

1:04:54 Thomas: Yeah. Well, absolutely. Okay. Well we're short on time. I think that's a great point. I mean, not that I'm in any position to argue with you because again, I'm historically historically completely ignorant, but you make very good arguments, and I appreciate that you're working to clarify things that, you know, even though you are an atheist, you want to correct the record, and I like that. I really appreciate it. I also realized that we didn't get time to go over a religious example. Could I ask you a favor? Would you mind hanging on for like a little mini bonus content to talk about that?

1:05:05 Tim: Yeah.

1:05:28 Thomas: Excellent. So let's sign off here. So Tim O'Neill, once again, the website is historyforatheists.blogspot.com. Boy, an absolute pleasure. I could listen to you talk about this stuff all day. I really could. I didn't even, there are few episodes where I think I've talked less and it's because I was really fascinated by what you're saying.

1:05:21 Tim: We did. Yeah, sure. Yeah, let's do that.

1:05:47 Tim: I didn't give you much of a chance, but Thomas, thank you for the opportunity. This is the first time an atheist has actually got me on one of their shows or invited me onto one of theirs blogs, first time, which again is weird

1:06:00 Thomas: Wow. I am blown away by that because I would love to have you back for multiple things. We wanted to talk about Jesus mythicism and people will go nuts at that topic. So yeah, let's do it. OK, so thanks. We'll sign off from here and then patrons can join us for a short bonus content example of, you know, Christians getting history wrong. All right. Thanks so much, Tim O'Neill.

1:06:10 Tim: Well let's do another one ok ok thanks Thomas, bye bye

1:06:37 Thomas: Alright, another great week here at Atheistically Speaking. Lots more coming next week, including a guest I'm very excited to speak to. I never want to talk about the guest before my eggs hatch or whatever, but I'm pretty excited. Should be really good. I got some new patrons! Thank you so much for pledging! Kam Tudor, David Pratt, alongblackcock, Elizabeth Karen, Benjamin Badger, and Joel. One of the privileges of pledging is whatever name you pledge under, I will read because that's how it works. Hey, you pledged. What can I do? My hands are tied. So thank you guys so much. Patreon.com slash atheist. I hope you enjoyed the bonus episode about Trump. I enjoyed recording that.

1:07:24 Thomas: And if you want to hear that bonus episode of history with Tim, you're going to have to pledge at patreon.com slash atheist. I'd like to thank my top patrons: Sammie, Hunter Ash, Along Black Never Gets Old, Inciting Incident Podcast, Kaylee Riser, Zimu Zinu Jr, Adrian Borsch, Chuff, Jonathan Moyer, J Alden, Walt Franco, Via Real, Steve Sigmund, Peter Skelton, Brian Gear, Fort Dale, Matt Garrett, Ian Rosano, Samantha. Thank you, thank you for being my top top patrons, I love you all. You You make the show go round. All right. It was a great week. It'll be another great week next week. And guess what? After that, I think it'll be another great way. Lots of good guests coming. I'm excited to bring them to you. And thank you so much for listening and supporting. See you next time.