I seriously doubt it, since British naval gunfire would most often be used on the ships of rival western-European powers, like France and Spain. But it did help Britain build a big empire in the 17th to 19th cys.

Humor me a little as an intellectual exercise and give me your thoughts on the naval gunfire hypo.

It sounds way too specific. I think we would be closer to the mark on why Western Civilization is more successful, by noting how the Printing Press quickly spread throughout Europe & came to a halt at the borders of Islam.

The printing press was enormously important in helping all further technical advances & its rejection by Islam shows an important underlying difference in attitude.

I'm not entirely sure what the point was, but at this point in the atheist-believer debate, I'm just happy if nobody's foaming at the mouth at the end of a conversation.

If you had read what I had written earlier, I described how progress became an ideal when it started becoming glaringly apparent. Imagine that you are an educated Western European in the 1750's, and you know a lot of history. You are someone like David Hume or Voltaire or Frederick the Great.

You look back to Greek mythology and the Bible and find that their authors know about only a little bit of the world, the eastern Mediterranean. Then you go to classical Greek and Roman writers (an important part of the curriculum back then), and you find that they knew of much more of the world, from Britain to India, including your ancestors. There's not much more until the end of the Middle Ages, when Europeans start exploring, and by your time, Europeans had discovered great landmasses known only from travelers' tales, if they were known of at all. And had even started conquering such places and moving into them.

Technology had clearly improved. Mechanical clocks. The printing press. Lenses and eyeglasses and microscopes and telescopes. Etc.

Mathematics had advanced far beyond Euclid, including having a much nicer number notation, much nicer notation of algebra, new methods, like analytic geometry and calculus, etc.

Physics had progressed far beyond Aristotle's hand-waving to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of gravity. From Newton's laws could be deduced the motions of the planets, and even the motions of those fearsome apparitions: comets. Edmund Halley showed that the comets seen in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were one comet repeatedly returning to the inner Solar System as it orbited the Sun; this comet returned again in 1757.

Cosmology had advanced from the Biblical picture of the Earth being a flat disk with the sky being a bowl overhead to Ptolemy's picture of the Earth being a big ball in the center of some concentric celestial spheres to Aristarchus's and Copernicus's picture of the Earth traveling around the Sun like the other planets, with the stars being VERY far away.

Etc.

Many of these changes were very welcome; if you were very educated, you certainly would have appreciated being able to get a hold of books MUCH easier than in centuries past. And why cringe in fear of a comet when it's something that repeatedly returns like clockwork?

And if all these nice things had happened in recent centuries, one could extrapolate to conclude that more such progress is on the way. And extrapolate correctly, as it turned out.

So you would have to be either very ignorant or else very obtuse to deny that significant progress has happened over humanity's history, especially progress in recent centuries.

And John, as to your anecdote about the Enlightenment guy and the Rabbi, I suggest that you turn that around and apply it to your own beliefs. Do what you demand that we do.

John Deighan, Scotland

Firstly, pagans didn’t get their cyclical conception of history from paganism. Paganism didn’t create the seasons or the various methods of subsistence agricultural living which were influenced by them. Paganism was invented as an attempt to understand and tame the cyclical influences on the lives of its adherents. Therefore, paganism got its conception of history from the cyclical nature of the lives it was designed to serve.

I’m no historian or anthropologist but I’d imagine that the shift of emphasis from the cyclical to the linear would be unproblematic for people in societies where personal interests were necessarily shifting from subsistence agricultural activities to more long-term commercial exploits. To shift from a cyclical to a linear conception of history doesn’t therefore require any significant effort in abstract thinking. One need only broaden one’s view of the cause/effect nature of ones relationship with supernatural agents from the proximate (e.g. sacrifice this goat today to ensure the success of the current crop – just like we did last year) to the ultimate. A change in the way one earns one’s living will facilitate the necessary conceptual shift. Since such a change in lifestyle doesn’t necessarily entail departure from the supernatural, it is fairly natural that one’s spiritual outlook will undergo a similar change to accommodate this view.

With the introduction of eschatology Christianity certainly capitalises on this shift to a linear conception, but Christianity was not necessary for the conceptual shift itself. In this sense, as with paganism, the direction of cause and effect is the other way around. For Christianity’s part, the introduction of a distant eschatology is little more than an act of divination, something very common in paganism. More practically speaking it’s a good strategic move if you want to maintain influence on people whose lives are less dependent on cyclical events. All that is required is a prophet with an eye on the gullibility of his current audience and the antics of his predecessors, et voila! the purpose of one’s votive behaviour is shifted from the proximate to the ultimate – from the cyclical to the linear.

More importantly, whilst this linear conception entails the notion of progress in the sense of one thing following on from another into the future, progress in the sense of things changing in stages over time, preferably for the better - does not necessarily follow. At the time of the Enlightenment there was certainly no need of theological input to recognise the scourge of poverty and disease; the fact that there was no dignity in accepting one’s lot in it; and no need to await ecclesiastical approval before doing something about it.

When Christianity is all pervading and ubiquitous, saying that the Enlightenment, social justice, equality, science, etc.. “sprang from Christianity” doesn’t actually say much at all. Saying that all these things owe their origins to Christianity is saying something else altogether – but still not much more than saying freedom owes its origins to slavery or peace owes its origins to war.

No doubt you can dig up various theological ruminations to support the idea that the church was actually behind the Enlightenment (an architect of its own demise no less) and that we’re kidding ourselves if we think that the great thinkers of the time were doing anything other than continuing the Christian theological tradition. That’s the thing with a linear history - it’s easily revised. No doubt in 100 years from now when we’re celebrating the enormous advances of medical science thanks to therapies based on stem cell technologies the Pope and the Arch Bishop of Canterbury will be giving lectures about the invaluable contribution of early 21st century Christian theologians in facilitating this essential field of scientific enquiry.

I think other commenters have offered quite satisfactory responses to your argument that Christianity inspired the idea of historical progress. However, I'd like to point out that you did the exact thing I anticipated, and which I specifically asked you not to do:

And it's not enough just to show that these ideas are similar; there has to be evidence of an actual causal influence and it has to be in the correct direction.

Even if we accept your conclusion that Christianity contains an idea of historical progress, it doesn't follow that the Enlightenment thinkers got the idea from there. Not least, this is because many of them ferociously attacked the doctrines of Christianity, rather than acknowledging their debt to it. If Christianity was such a progressive faith, why weren't more of the famous Enlightenment thinkers believing Christians, rather than deists or atheists?

But more fundamentally, you still haven't presented any evidence of a causal connection. You've simply argued that idea A is similar to idea B, and therefore the advocates of A must have been inspired by the advocates of B. This just does not follow. I could use the exact same argument to "prove" that the Christians of that era actually got the idea of progress from the nonbelievers!

Unless you intend to present evidence substantially more detailed than what you've already given, evidence that actually establishes a causal connection and doesn't just assume the existence of one, I'll probably close this thread shortly.

How ironic.