[jallanite]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

For one thing, the one posting may not be aware that his or her words are insulting, having a worldview quite at odds to our own.

Very true. And it is difficult to respond to a poster when the post appears to me to contain assumptions that don’t altogether fit with the subject of the post. The same is of course true of Tumuhald2 in reverse.

Also, much of what I say has been said by Tolkien, better, in his Letters.

Yes. Tumhalad2 nowhere indicates what Tolkien he has read. Has he read the Letters? Recently, in light of his concerns?

Tolkien and Lewis, for example, did actually prefer a medieval worldview to the modern, one that was quite at home to the Roman Catholic church.

Dubious. They very much understood the medieval viewpoint. But I doubt either really wanted to see the Holy Inquisition return, for example. And neither has much favourable to say about the French chansons de geste which are obsessed with the fighting of Christians and Muslims but continue to stress that Muslims are pagans who worship idols, and to be opposed for that reason. Particularly four gods named Mohammed, Apollyon, Termagant, and Kahu appear, only one of which is even known to Muslim tradition and that one, Muḥammad, was and is not considered to be a god. Medieval Christianity with its images of saints and veneration of individual saints was far more like paganism than was Islam. But lies about the gods of the Muslims persisted and persisted.

Jallanite refers to Galileo and Darwin. These two scientists could not have said and did what they did, if not for a virtual Continental Shift in philosophical point of view that occurred in the late middle ages, from a Platonic worldview to an Aristotelian.

Mostly agreed. Suddenly people were actually looking at the universe to see what they could find rather than mainly codifying received wisdom. But was it a change in philosophical view that caused the new viewpoint or was it the widespread discovery of new ideas not found in received wisdom that caused the philosophical shift to something more Aristotelian?

Discoveries about the nature of the universe were made by the early philosphers. The world was a sphere. Its size was measured. But then interest in investigation and discovery mostly ceased, until the Renaissance. Sir Isaac Newton, possibly the greatest scientist who has every lived, wrote mainly on the Christian Bible, attempting to date the Earth from its records.

Honestly, it would take a book to properly address Tumhalad's thoughts, and some have been written. Suffice it to say that Tolkien's Christianity was most certainly an influence upon his work, at least in terms of worldview, evil, and morality. But there are other influences as well, such as (1) his view of language and how language changes, (2) his love for things Nordic and Finnish, & (3) his love for Oxfordshire before it was 'ruined' by the encroachments of technology, just to name three.

Agreed. If Tumhalad2 finds it difficult that Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, then what must he think of a Roman Catholic science-fiction writer like Gene Wolfe or a Mormon science-fiction writer like Orson Scott Card? Neither of them are creationists and the writings of both are extremely popular, because they are good writers whose writings don’t appeal only to their co-religionists.

And there are many other religious people who write scence-fiction.