[Frummy]

His theological writings had profound effects on the church, the historically dominant power structure in the west and their behaviour for hundreds of years. Yeah defining what's good is difficult, even using information theoretical arguments like preserving or creating order gets messy. But regardless of metaphysical truth there is tons of other stuff to analyse like tracing historical cause and effects of how stuff looks like in the world today back to, theological writers.

[cmdli]

A large part of the development of Europe, especially after the Renaissance, was resistance to the church and its historical teachings. The Reformation, Renaissance, rise of deism, scientific revolution, etc were all in response to and in many cases disagreeing with historical understanding. Saying "our current civilization is based on the teachings of the church" ignores the many aspects of our civilization that came about in spite of said church.

[lmpdev]

> Reformation

I’d argue the Catholic Jesuits probably had a more profound impact on science than any counter-catholic Christian denomination - purely from their intellectual output

They were formed around the same time as the reformation, but obviously had vastly more money and power (not that this should discount their contributions)

Examples:

- Christopher Clavius (created our modern Gregorian calendar)

- Anathasius Kircher (somewhat helped pull geology and medicine from vague Natural Philosophy into actual disciplines)

- Rodger Boscovich (atomic theory and a lot of basic everyday lab work was first used by him)

- A lot of contributions to astronomy and mathematics by many priests

- Probably their biggest contribution was the communication to the west and preservation of Chinese and Indian cultural artefacts/traditions. Without their work later anthropologists would have lost entire fields of study

Protestants had, what? Max Weber? That’s more cultural than intellectual or scientific

I agree with you though the later scientific revolution and age of enlightenment were in spite of the Catholic church, but I’d also probably broaden that as in spite of Christian belief altogether

[bigstrat2003]

But the author didn't say that. He said "a large part of our civilization rests [on Aquinas]". That can be perfectly true even if there were other, equally significant, influences.

[Frummy]

Yeah there's many influences. Pagan gods, greek philosophy, trade with asia, egypt, middle eastern religious inspiration and so on. And cultural geniuses maybe put their trust mostly in their lived experience and craft and so on like the sheer product and infrastructure of civilisation is mostly made by nonbelievers just doing their thing