I've finished reading James Hannam's book God's Philosophers, which I'll probably start blogging about next month. But in the meantime I'm overdue to comment on a much screwier exchange on the same subject online. I'll do that now, to whet your appetite for my discussion of Hannam's much more careful and informative treatment.
Mike Flynn (in "The Age of Unreason") levels many correct and valid criticisms of Jim Walker's wildly erroneous "The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine (And the Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages)" (and that despite the fact that I'm sympathetic to Walker's point, and even make the same argument, albeit correctly, in the forthcoming anthology The Christian Delusion, about which I'll blog as soon as I've seen the galleys). Walker responded to Flynn's critique ("Mike Flynn Discovers the Dark Ages"), this time getting a lot more right (particularly in his discussion of technology), but he still gets enough wrong (or still makes too many claims with greater certainty than is warranted), that I can't recommend it. That aside, both Flynn and Walker's main essays are shot through with so many mistakes of fact they can only miseducate, and thus have no value (even worse than no value, since reading them will only spread their error further). So I don't recommend reading either. Here I'm going to try and correct the damage by dispelling the myths Flynn repeats.
Last year I recorded a new lengthy interview for the Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour on Rodney Stark's disastrously awful treatment of ancient science. Dan the Demented cut the show into three parts, the third on other topics, but the first two on Stark. Those two episodes are now up and available, on the PRH website and as podcasts. You can listen to them here: [Season 3 Episode 3] [Season 3 Episode 4]. Together this is essentially a two-part lambaste of Rodney Stark's embarrassing forray into ancient history, where I pillory his claim that Christianity made science possible, by educating the listener on the actual historical facts of Greco-Roman science (and technology). We quote his books For the Glory of God and The Victory of Reason and dissect their absurd falsehoods point-by-point. Each show runs 45 minutes.
The nature of an off-the-cuff interview lends itself to occasional slips of wording, so I must correct two of those: (1) obviously I meant to say a catheter goes into the bladder, not the kidney (they had a separate instrument that could enter the kidney to extract kidney stones); and (2) it was Ptolemy's lunar orbit that was (in combined motions) nearly elliptical, not his planetary orbits (the latter were still non-circular, describing curlycues, and were still eccentric, with velocities varying in reference to a focal point anticipating Kepler's Second Law--they would only have been nearly elliptical if anyone translated his system to a heliocenter).
A more concise and thoroughly vetted and referenced version of this show's argument will appear in a forthcoming book being edited by John Loftus.
The San Francisco Exploratorium has launched a new website on "Evidence: How We Know What We Know." I was interviewed some time ago for this new launch, and elements of that interview are now available on their site as a podcast. Go to their new project page (above), click "Enter the Site" and select the Podcasts option down on the right side. I'm the second guest. It's about eleven minutes on "Why do Nutcrackers Work? (and other historical questions of science)," where I talk about the ancient origins of modern scientific values and the meaning of this for today.
There was perhaps an hour of Q&A recorded, but only ten minutes were used. Though I understand the need of that, this did create some problems. The editor stitched together elements of my answers into a continuous lecture. So you don't hear the questions I'm answering, or the entirety of my answers, so it sounds like I'm just rambling from topic to topic. Hearing it back I found it a little confusing at times. For example, in the full discourse I would quicken my pace at points to emphasize certain things before and after, but if you just keep the middle bit it sounds like I'm just arbitrarily talking too fast. And the change of topics can seem odd this way, there being no context or explanation of why suddenly I'm talking about something else. For example, my explanation of who Ptolemy was and when he lived wasn't included, until later on in the podcast, so at first it sounds like I just out of the blue start talking about this Ptolemy guy.
But otherwise there are some gems in there, and in the other podcasts. There are also other cool things on that site that are great, though it's all mainly for kids and teens. Currently the site is about the introductory basics of evolution science, but emphasizing the neat cutting-edge stuff scientists are now doing in the field, and how they learn from it, rather than just giving you a class on evolution. The aim of the Exploratorium is to get people excited about science. So it tries to spy out what's exciting, rather than merely lecturing at you. And the How Do You Know? project is about how we know things, the basic underlying methodology and way of looking at data. Its inaugural test case is evolution (though my podcast isn't about that, just science in general). But cases from other sciences will be added over time.
This year I've read several really excellent books in my field. Three I'd like to share with you. Here in the past I wrote about my recommended Books on Ancient Science. The following are somewhat related to the same topic. All are highly recommended, at least if the subject material interests you in any bit. But I doubly recommend them not only because their scholarship is superb and thoroughly up-to-date (they currently have no peer), but also because they are so well written they read like a dream. Though all bog down occasionally in technicalia, those bumps and boggles are relatively scarce. Most of their content is easy to read, even delightful to read, and full of fascinating stories and facts. These are the kinds of authors I wish I were, and strive to be. All three books are entirely approachable to laymen, yet all are advanced, cutting-edge works, and will be required reading for experts in their respective subjects for decades to come.
Previously on my blog (Experimental History) I joked a bit about Lynn White's historical revisionism, which I noted in later comments appears "in several publications beginning as early as 1945 but most famously in Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962)." My old friend Bede got annoyed and wrote a reply (Stirrups, Horse Harnesses and Richard Carrier). As I often find among my critics, (almost) half of what he says is wrong, and the other half is irrelevant to what I actually said. But all this does afford a cool opportunity to talk about ancient history. So here goes.
A few weeks ago I teamed up with my friend David Fitzgerald once again to talk about historical method for a gaggle of godless kids at Camp Quest West. 
David and I dressed up in silly costumes and did a skit or two. One girl loved my hand-made ivy crown so much I was happy to let her have it after the show, but sadly we were so busy we forgot to get any pictures. Oh well. Anyway, the gist of our presentation was that the scientific method also applies to the field of history, and in fact history is really just another science, with its own peculiarities like every other field.
My picture is always a bit goofy. I look too young for my age, especially when I'm all smiles. See what I mean? Sure, I'm a young and happy guy, but I still get carded in bars even though I'm 36. Sometimes my photo gives people the wrong idea of who I am and what I'm about. So I originally chose a different avatar. I have since chosen another, based on a composite photo I developed for my new website. The following is my original post explaining the thought behind my previous avatar (which I used from 2006 on and retired in 2009):
No one will get it at first, just as no one will get me at first. But once you know what it is, you'll know a lot more about me than my own picture could tell you. 
The image is an x-ray scan of the Antikythera Machine, the first computer ever built by man...in the 1st century B.C. Yes, you read that right. The mechanism was recovered from a Roman shipwreck near Greece, shattered, rusted, and crusted over, but has since been reconstructed using CT scans and clever reverse engineering.
