Do you believe the Draper-White thesis?

Here is White, Andrew Dickson White, on Eusebius:

"Speaking of the innovations in physical science, he said: 'It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things.'"

This is from The Warfare of Science By Andrew Dickson White Second edition Henry S. Kings & Co. London, 1877. Accessed through Google Books.*

In passing, note that an editor in London respected White's American "labor" without correcting it to "labour". Since then, editors have become a bit uselessly punctilious about the received orthography of their own country.

Now, it was on page 11, it gives a footnote 1 which says See Eusebius, Præp. Ev. XV., 61.

Now, I go to Præparatio Evangelica, book 15** and scroll down to chapter LXI:

CHAPTER LXI ---- OF THE EXILING FACULTY.

'PLATO, Democritus: it is in the head as a whole.

'Straton: between the eyebrows.

'Erasistratus: about the membrane of the brain, which he calls the epicranis.

'Herophilus: in the cavity of the brain, which is also its base.

'Parmenides: in the breast as a whole.

'Epicurus, and all the Stoics: in the heart as a whole.

'Diogenes: in the arterial cavity of the heart, which is full of breath.

'Empedocles in the composition of the blood.

'Others in the membrane of the pericardium: and others in the diaphragm. Some of the more recent philosophers say that it reaches through from the head to the diaphragm.

'Pythagoras: the vital power is around the heart; but the rational , and intelligent faculty in the region of the head.'

So far, then, as to their opinions on these matters. Do you not think therefore that with judgement and reason we have justly kept aloof from the unprofitable and erroneous and vain labour of them all, and do not busy ourselves at all about the said subjects (for we do not see the utility of them, nor any tendency to benefit and gain good for mankind), but cling solely to piety towards God the creator of all things, and by a life of temperance, and all godly behaviour according to virtue, strive to live in a manner pleasing to Him who is God over all?

But if even you from malice and envy hesitate to admit our true testimony, you shall be again anticipated by Socrates, the wisest of all Greeks, who has truthfully declared his votes in our favour. Those meteorological babblers, for instance, he used to expose in their folly, and say that they were no better than madmen, expressly convicting them not merely of striving after things unattainable, but also of wasting time about things useless and unprofitable to man's life. And this shall be testified to you by our former witness Xenophon, one of the best-known of the companions of Socrates, who writes as follows in his Memorabilia:

[omitting chapter LXII which is the quote from Memorabilia]

So, the point was not at all about "innovations in physical science" but about diverse fairly unsubstantiated opinions the ancients had on what is now called neurology and neuropsychology.

If you are anything like White, but live now as opposed to having died in 1918, as he did, you will love neuropsychology. However, you will also note that Standardized neuropsychological tests, Brain scans, Global Brain Project, Electrophysiology, Experimental tasks like the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) were, all of these, not available to Plato, Democritus, Straton, Erasistratus, Herophilus, Parmenides, Epicurus, Diogenes, Empedocles, Pythagoras and others.

Eusebius speaks about "vain labour" because of the disagreement and inconclusiveness. If the labour had been fruitful, there would have been a conclusion that was generally accepted. Now, the subject here did not give such a conclusion, and therefore was, in the opinion of Eusebius a vain labour - much like Draper White fans love to brandish the historical as well as present multiplicity of Christian sects and interpretations as a reason to reject Theology as a vain labour.

Introducing the quote, which was verbally correct, by the very misleading relation "Speaking of the innovations in physical science" is simply dishonest.

About as dishonest as an Evangelical speaking on Roman Catholicism (I had a video*** with Dr. John Barnett pretending to debunk Oral Tradition, and it was incredibly misleading and I cannot say other than dishonest, if only intellectually and to himself).

In fact, I think White may have considered that the words referred not only to neuroscience, but to things mentioned before the parts of the soul, but the problem is, cosmology before Magellan was also fairly immature. And non-geoentrism still is:

CHAPTER LV ---- OF THE EARTH.

'THALES and his followers say that the Earth is one.

'Hicetas the Pythagorean says that there are two, this and the antipodal earth.

'The Stoics: the Earth is one, and finite.

'Xenophanes: from the lower part its roots reach into infinity, and it is composed of air and fire.

'Metrodorus: the Earth is the deposit and sediment of the water, and the Sun of the air.'

CHAPTER LVI ---- OF THE FIGURE OF THE EARTH.

'THALES and the Stoics: the Earth is spherical.

'Anaximander: it is like a stone pillar supporting the surfaces.

'Anaximenes: like a table.

'Leucippus: like a kettle-drum.

'Democritus: like a disk in its extension, but hollow in the middle.'

CHAPTER LVII ---- OF THE POSITION OF THE EARTH.

'THE followers of Thales say the Earth is the centre.

'Xenophanes: the Earth first, for its roots reach into infinity.

'Philolaus the Pythagorean: first, fire in the centre; for this is the hearth of the universe: second, the antipodal Earth, and third, the Earth which we inhabit, opposite to the antipodal both in situation and revolution; in consequence of which the inhabitants of the antipodal Earth are not seen by those in this Earth.

'Parmenides was the first to mark off the inhabited parts of the Earth under the two tropical zones.'

CHAPTER LVIII ---- OF THE EARTH'S MOTION.

44 'ALL the others say that the Earth is at rest.

'But Philolaus the Pythagorean says that it revolves round the fire in an oblique circle, in like manner as the Sun and Moon.

'Heracleides of Pontus, and Ecphantus the Pythagorean make the Earth move, not however by change of place, but by rotation, turning like a wheel on an axle, from west to east, about its own centre.

'Democritus: at first the Earth used to change its place, owing to its smallness and lightness; but as in the course of time it grew dense and heavy, it became stationary.'

After the utterance of these different opinions by the noble philosophers concerning the Earth, hear now what they say of the Sea.

One cannot say this was "innovations in physical science" because there was so little to know. It was variations in speculation. Fairly free variations in fairly free speculations. But, yes, if White was referring to this and considering Philolaos, Heracleides and Ecphantus as precursors of Galileo, he was even slightly more honest than Dr. John Barnett. However, at least very ill advised.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Sts. Rufus and Zosimus
18.XII.2018

* The Warfare of Science
Andrew Dickson White
Henry S. King & Company, 1877 - Religion and science - 151 pages
https://books.google.fr/books?id=K0EXAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

** Eusebius of Caesarea: Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel). Tr. E.H. Gifford (1903) -- Book 15
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_pe_15_book15.htm

*** Here is the video:

Catholic Oral Tradition
DTBM OnlineVideoTraining | 5.XII.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJCk_WCZdNw

And here is my debunking of it:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Answering Dr. John Barnett on Catholic Oral Tradition
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2018/12/answering-dr-john-barnett-on-catholic.html

Could a Community Arising a Century Later Invent ...

... not only Jesus (and one far from any real life model) but also the intervening Church History?

Jesus had Apostles, including Peter. Paul was later joined to them, and especially to Peter in Rome. Every place where Apostles went, they had successors, both for sacraments (most of the seven sacraments depend on someone either Apostle or successor administrating them), and for message. This resulted in an early multistranded network where each strand with some independence was repeating the miraculous claims about Jesus, like his doing many miracles (including curing leprosy, which, if identific to Hansen's disease, which is probable, would take 6 months of antibiotics to cure and culminating in Resurrection after dying and in Ascension).

Could this have been invented about a century later? Do communities really forget their real origins and recall fake ones?

I have compared the idea of Church inventing Biblical Jesus, about 100 years later, to US being founded by Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and all the previous history of US being an invention projected back on little to no real back-ground. George Washington not just misdescribed in idealising biographies, but either a myth or dying after faithful service to British Crown. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davies either myths or rival civil servants of the English crown.

That is how absurd I think the idea is ... now, I have put out the challenge if any nation or church or whatever could totally forget its real origin and project a fake one back beyond it ...

Well, it seems that baseball community has invented a myth about origin of the game.

Abner Doubleday invented baseball* before going on to make a military carreer in the Civil War. Except, this was stated in 1908 15 years after he died, meaning he died in 1893 ... and he was born in 1819.** However, baseball has been mentioned in US as early as 1791.*** So - to sum it up - "except he didn't".

Before enemies of the Gospel shout hoorrah for this admission, I will have to give two little distinctions from the problem I had posed to them:

• 1) Invention of Baseball is post-poned after the real one. This involves forgetting history prior to Doubleday in 1839, not inventing a lot of extra material, some of it fairly dry, before the real date in or before 1791.
• 2) Baseball is a game played in the present, it is not a statement on the past.

To elaborate. Actually, if an origin is forgotten, which happens, you are likely to get misattributions of origin. These could either point further back or be more recent, but as more recent is less forgotten, the latter is more probable. However, even in case of a preposed origin, there is not a great likelyhood of there being a lot of intervening history added on to that.

Freemasons and Ruckmanites are alike in solving that problem (Masonry doesn't actually go back to Nimrod or Cain and Baptists aren't the Church where Gospels were written) by coopting a lot of "highlights" of intervening events. You will have Freemasons claim Templars were Freemasons. You will have Ruckmanites claim Paulicians were Baptists. You will even have Freemasons and Baptists hankering back to such supposed "earlier brethren" and adapting Masonry and Baptism to Templarism (Scottish Rite degree of "Chevalier Kadosh" vowing to avange the burning of Jacques Molay on Papacy and on French Monarchy, at least this is reputed - and Victoria Osteen repeating the adoptionist heresy of Paulicians, which is actually even documented°). But you will not have a continuous record belonging to the self pretended continuation for all intervening times, including boring times, at least as far as external action is concerned.

And in the case of Abner Doubleday, it is simply a matter of forgetting baseball games earlier than that in which he was involved, plus Abner Graves misunderstanding what Doubleday did when drawing a baseball diagram - Doubleday was drawing a diagram of a game which already existed. Graves thought he was drawing a diagram of a game which not just Doubleday had played first time in 1839 (when Graves was 5 years old and could not oberve such things accurately) but which in this misunderstanding had been played first time in 1839.

Very little is distorted and some obscure baseball history prior to 1839 is lost.

Information is not gained (something which is also true of mutations, but that is more of a Creationist matter than to this blog's theme).

But the other thing is, Christianity, unlike baseball, is a historic claim. Though Carrier tries hard, it is hard to make it seem there was any transition from another type of claim (un-earthly) to a historical (that is earthly) one. Some of the facts he invokes in support of this are actual facts - Christianity does identify Jesus Christ with "angel of the Lord" in several OT passages. Christ is definitely claimed to have an eternal un-earthly pre-existence before the earthly and historic story starts out. But identifying such factors is very remote from identifying a real process through which one type of claim could be misunderstood for the other type of claim.

As baseball players are required to know the rules, but not the history of their game, they are very much freer to be what they are while ignoring the history until it gets remolded.

I forgot a third possibility. Abner could have invented the first real game of baseball, and the "baseball" from 1791 or "base ball" from New York 1823 could have been a name variant of the earlier game of town ball, so that Abner Doubleday came up with the rules now sticking to baseball, precisely as the myth claims. In that case, through Abner Graves (and perhaps a few earlier recorders forgotten) the Doubleday "myth" would be an example of the general rule of a community recalling its actual origins - even if baseball community is too loose a thing for the rule to apply, it being very different from a nation or a church.

For this example, I must give a h/t to Simon Whistler°° though I haven't more than just started his video. I'll post this, then post a link to it under the video, then resume watching. And perhaps even change my mind about Abner Doubleday. But I rushed from the video to wikipedia, and found an interesting take on Apologetics in it, here you go.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Pope St. Damasus I
11.XII.2018

Romae sancti Damasi Primi, Papae et Confessoris; qui Apollinarem haeresiarcham damnavit, et Petrum, Episcopum Alexandrinum, fugatum restituit; multa etiam sanctorum Martyrum corpora invenit, eorumque memorias versibus exornavit.

PS, responding to info on video : if Doubleday was in West Point, therefore not Cooperstown in 1839, Graves could have misrecalled date, and it could have been another year, when he was on leave or after graduating in 1842. Chronological details are among easy victims of oral tradition. Or, more conspiracy theorising, Doubleday could have been on a secret leave or even a secret mission disguised as a secret leave. But mainly, Graves could have misrecalled the date. Inconsistency in Graves' account of whether he played could have been a doubt on whether the game he played in was the first. And, obviously, Graves could equally have totally misunderstood the situation, thinking a game invented for an occasion where it was just spread. He could have been a freemason, lying for the glory of US to avoid rounders being the origin of baseball - and then disposed of in an insane asylum before he could discredit hisstory, a bit like John Todd might have retracted or discredited his own story on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, had he not been quickly disposed of out of Evangelical tradition, first as relapsing to Spiritism and later in prison and possibly insane asylum (not sure whether he's still alive, I think that would be a valid point for Trump to look into).

Knickerbockers were obviously in priority to any claim of Doubleday when it comes to exact set of rules (1837 founding of club, 1845 Knickerbocker rules, in which Alexander Cartwright was involved, replaced or updated in 1857 by "Laws of Base Ball" by Daniel "Doc" Adams).

PPS, on "final" consideration, I'd say the orthodox story of baseball involves Knickerbockers playing a version of rounders or town ball and Doubleday is about as credible as Constantine inventing Christianity./HGL

PPPS - obviously there are commissions who do want Constantine to have invented Christianity : Freemasons of the Deist type, Jews, Atheists, and even perhaps Neo-Pagans who would like to imagine worshipping Zeus and Hera didn't quite die out ... which it did./HGL

PPPPS - as I was tired, here is an anacoluthon I just spotted: "You will even have Freemasons and Baptists hankering back to such supposed "earlier brethren" and adapting Masonry and Baptism to Templarism (Scottish Rite degree of "Chevalier Kadosh" vowing to avange the burning of Jacques Molay on Papacy and on French Monarchy, at least this is reputed - and Victoria Osteen repeating the adoptionist heresy of Paulicians, which is actually even documented)." - should be "You will even have Freemasons and Baptists hankering back to such supposed "earlier brethren" and adapting Masonry and Baptism to Templarism and Paulicianism (Scottish Rite degree of "Chevalier Kadosh" vowing to avange the burning of Jacques Molay on Papacy and on French Monarchy, at least this is reputed - and Victoria Osteen repeating the adoptionist heresy of Paulicians, which is actually even documented)."/HGL

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubleday_myth
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abner_Doubleday
*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_baseball_in_the_United_States#Early_history
° See video of Justin Peters condemning this as heresy and my post endorsing that but criticising Justin Peters on other grounds.

FALSE TEACHERS EXPOSED: Word of Faith/Prosperity Gospel | Justin Peters/SO4J-TV
SO4J-TV | 28.X.2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptN2KQ7-euQ

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Is Justin Peters Competent to Condemn False Teachers?
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2018/11/is-justin-peters-competent-to-condemn.html

°° See his video:

Why Do People Think Abner Doubleday Invented Baseball?
Today I Found Out | 20.VI.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL28mgEZ2Ts