Because they didn’t know that no one knew. As a matter of fact, it is still not known how the world was created. Moreover, we don’t know anything based on science. We don’t know that the Big Bang happened. If it weren’t for reason, we wouldn’t know anything at all. Knowledge is in the brain, not in a test tube. It is an analytic thing.
You are the only one saying that anyone believes that people before science were anti-scientific.
But consider the rainbow. Do you think that no one looked up at the sky and wondered why the rainbow was there? Our Bible gives the why. It doesn’t give the how, but who needs a how when God can magic it into existence. Do OECs who believe God created the universe worry about the how? Nope, God made it in whatever state he wished, and no other explanation is needed. If YECs weren’t trying to sound scientific to infiltrate the schools, they’d say the flood got magicked into existence also. It would be far more self-consistent than vapor canopies and the other physically impossible “scientific” explanations.
There are plenty of people around today with exactly the same attitudes the ancients must have had. I’m not getting why you refuse to try to understand them.
Of course they thought they knew. God created the world, just like it said in the Bible. Who were we to question how God did it? An omnipotent god could just do it. They certainly didn’t think he was constrained to be a cosmic Bob the Builder, making the earth piece by piece.
Give those guys some credit. They may have been wrong, but they were consistent.
I have made the claim (I don’t really want to give what I wrote that much credence to call it a claim) that if there is a God that wants to burn non-believers in Hell forever and ever, and interacts on the physical plane on a daily basis, then I would expect there to be empirical evidence of its existence. With the untyped implication that otherwise that god would just be an evil bastard.
The claim got some responses but I was descending into the (literally) fevered (103 deg) pitch of the pneumonia and never went back to that thread. I am blaming the fever for my actually making a “claim” as audacious as I did 
It was a pretty stupid thing to do on the Dope but I never claim to be the brightest bulb anywhere.
Your next statement indicates that you are. (You also repeat point that you have specifically been shown to be in error in previous occasions: I have quoted in our previous exchanges the comments of Augustine of Hippo in de Genesis that explicitly warn Christians to refrain from making claims “about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth” that are in conflict with natural knowledge based on a poor reading of Scripture.)
Here you are imposing a modern intention on mythology that it never had. There was no reason to issue your declaration at a time when no one treated the material in the manner that you (and recent biblical literalists) insist on reading it, because the whole of culture did not use the myths as a description of the physical unfolding of events. The story of a six day creation ending in a day of rest made a theological point to support the notion of a six day work week followed by a day of rest. Since everyone knew that the point was theological, adding an official disclaimer that the matters were theological, not physical, would have been superfluous and irrelevant.
Were there occasional persons who took the scriptures literally even then? Sure. Just as there are persons who wish to take it as a literal description of the earth, now. As long as they did not corrupt the theological message, they were permitted to maintain their personal beliefs without harm.
When you insist that the church (or any other pre-scientific culture) should have put in disclaimers that the stories were stories and not facts, you are not addressing the world in which they lived and are simply imposing your own view of the world (shaped by science and a physicalistic philosophy) on societies who never saw the world in the way that you insist it must be viewed.
I have not said anyone was “anti-scientific.” That is pseudotriton ruber ruber’s odd “paraphrase” of my statements.
On the other hand, it is your interpretation that they believed that a “how” was unnecessary if the “why” was known. I do not say that. I say only that the religious beliefs (as recorded in scripture) tended to address the whys without even considering the hows. It was outside the purview of religion just as the why is outside the purview of physics. The lack of the “how” (in Christian Europe) had far more to do with the tradition of Aristotle who set the practice of examining a phenomena and then trying to reason from observations based on laws of logic than they had to do with religion insisting that the questions were invalid. (In fact, the notion of actually performing experiments to validate the conclusions to which logic had brought one seems to have originated with Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, to be carried on, later, by the friar Roger Bacon.)
You’re quite right. My apologies.
You’re not following my reasoning. The lack of interest in how is unrelated to the “why”, but rather related to their understanding that if God did it, they could not hope to comprehend how God did it. That was considered explanation enough, and, like I said, we see plenty of this today. The desire for other explanations arose when the Greeks stopped actually believing that the gods did everything. The Roman Lucretius starts off with any anti-religion screed that would be right in place here. He then examines the structure of the universe. Experimentation does not occur to him, but he is definitely concerned with the “how.”
It’s not so much that religion insists the questions are invalid, more that if you truly believe then there is no reason to ask the questions. (One of the arguments against god of the gaps.) Once the questions started. they might get shot down if they conflicted with the pillars of faith, or might be absorbed into the faith as providing more detail on the wonder of God’s universe. There’s a difference between a cosmoloigy that describes the planets, and one that explains their orbits beyond saying God put them there. (I believe there was some guessing about God’s reasons for the ordering he chose.) Plenty of religionists today, who aren’t whack jobs, say they like science for its demonstration of God’s wonders, right? That’s way different from looking at the universe and seeing naturalistic causes which eliminate the necessity of God (which is different from proving God doesn’t exist.) All the attitudes which I claim existed 2500 years ago exist today, among much of the general public.
Most of those who push the dichotomy don’t believe in that kind of hell anyway. Plus, you’re assuming that God isn’t a total shmuck, which is unevidenced by much of the Bible.
But that’s still true. God still might have just done it. Who can say?
That same consistency would go a long way today. You are one of the few I’ve seen 'round these parts who represents science in a responsible way, and who understands the difference between the faith of religion and the confidence of science. Fact is, I clicked on this thread again just because I saw your name as the last poster. I didn’t expect that Pseudotriton Ruber Ruber would respond to me.
Tomndebb, I agree that religion is more about purpose than it is about physics and astronomy (and perhaps even more about how we should behave), but it (at least Judiasm/Christianity) does make a lot of factual historical claims. Examples would be that Eve was tempted by a talking snake, that God dictated the ten commandments verbatim to Moses, and that Jesus physically rose from the dead. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but it seems like you’re suggesting that historically many or most religious people regarded claims such as these as myths.
It has always been my impression that to openly question things like these was likely to earn you a grisley death. While people no doubt have always considered other people’s religions to be constructed from myths, I have always assumed they felt their own to be absolutely accurate, at least until recently when science has shown certain things couldn’t be literally true and it was better to assume stories were allegorical than simply false.
Thank you. You are quite right that maybe God just did it anyway. We know he didn’t just do it the way it’s described in the Bible, unless he lies. My point is that since there are plenty of people around who think he just did it, despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t see why it is hard to think that of people in the past who had no such evidence. But you get that, I’m sure.
Yep. And we, too, will be reviewed under similar lenses in the distant future. And I don’t mean just scientific ones. It is the nature of man that he is defined by his experience. I differentiate between the man who says (rightly) that science is the proper tool for examining the earth but denies the evidence, and the man who says (wrongly) that faith is the proper tool for examining the earth and so denies the evidence of science. The first man is dishonest; the second is simply mistaken.
You seem to be presuming that it was religious belief that suppressed (even if without malignance) the question “how.” I would tend to see it as more of a human condition. As you note, we see plenty of that today. How many people actually have made an attempt to understand the transistor, solid state circuits, the basic 0s and 1s of the computers upon which even the most technophobic people rely, today? How many people really understand immunology? Radio transmissions? Air conditioning or refrigeration? (And note that I am speaking of practical things that everyone encounters, not nuclear physics or even evolution.) There have probably always been a few people who asked “how” and were brushed off as asking silly questions until the Greeks created a sufficiently large liesure class that those questioners could begin to communicate with each other and leave their questions in writing for their progeny. Was there really a religious (even inadvertant) suppression of “How?”? Or was the question simply not relevant in the larger society?
It was not religion that stifled Western science in the fourth century, B.C.E. It was the overwhelming weight of Aristotelian logic, based on pefect forms, (whether Platonic ideal forms or an Aristotelian perception of essence), combined with an ingrained submission to authority. Once Aristotle had delivered his verdict, whether on the metamorphosis of insects or the revolution of planets, his implacable logic carried too much weight (in that society) to be challenged.
Islam did not suppress scientific discovery, but encouraged it until the society that had promoted such inquiry stagnated and dissolved feuding factions. When Western science arose, again, it arose in a very religious society and those efforts to suppress it occurred pretty much as a byproduct of internal disorder threatening the society, itself, not as a direct effort on religious grounds. (It would be interesting to see the religious and societal conditions in India and China when science made its most advances in those locations. Do they parallel the histories of the Middle East and Europe? Or do they follow some completely unrelated track?
However, I do not believe that the attitudes you describe are founded in religious belief. They are simply the attitudes of most people in most times in most places.
I see. You’re confusing me with someone who is hung up on religion suppressing things. While it would be hard to conduct a historical experiment, since societies without god explanations for natural phenomena are few and far between, I think the very presence of a god explanation. and the lack of any reason to doubt this explanation, was sufficient to explain what we see. I wouldn’t call that suppression, unless you think that computer scientists are somehow suppressing Joe PC user from finding out how his computer works. Now the Biblical explanation of God did it is pretty simple to understand. Maybe Joe thinks that Bill Gates wrote all of Windows, and it works, and that’s good enough for him. I bet most people have an internal model of how things work, it would be interesting to see how wrong these are.
I was not aware that there was suppression of exploration of “science” after Aristotle - until the church decided that this was writ, of course.
All I’m saying is that the ancients did have an explanation for how - God, and that this explanation, lacking any evidence to the contrary, was good enough for them and inherently reduced the desire to find alternate explanations. No suppression required. At a certain point the how became dogma, but that was much later. Those who abandoned the god explanation had to explore alternate possibilities. When evidence came in contradicting the god explanation - Christian version - people were inspired to look at others, but this was much, much later.
I’m not seeing how this is very radical or controversial.
Sorry. I had not intended “suppression” to be equated to overt actions by authorities to suppress so much as in the sense of “suppressing the desire” in the way that an overload of sugar suppresses appetite.
As a matter of fact, following Aristotle, most scientific inquiries slowed to a crawl and halted. In the 250 years prior to the time of Aristotle, there were successive events that continuosly expanded knowledge at an increasing rate: Pythagoras explored the relationships of numbers and the relationships of numbers to musical notes, Almaeon speculated that the center of perception was the brain, based on dissections of optic nerves, Xenophanes raised questions about life, based on fossils he examined, Anaxagoras demonstrated that the moon reflected sunlight and associated eclipses with the passage of the moon and sun in relation to the Earth, Hippocrates of Chios squared the lune, (a crescent formed off a circle), thus advancing geometry to prepare for Euclid), Leucippus speculated about the realtionship of matter he called atoms and the spaces between them, Hippocrates explored regular attempts at medicine, Eudoxus further expanded the knowledge of the connection between math and apparent motions of the sun and moon, and Heraclides of Pontus proposed that Venus and Mercury circled the sun. In the generation that followed Aristotle, (before his works could become normative), Euclid wrote his mathematical treatises, Herophilus contributed a number of observations to anatomy, Aristarchus of Samos used trigonometry to identify the size and distance of the moon from Earth, Archimedes (among other things) identified the characteristics of buoyancy, Erasistratus of Alexandria identified the cerebrum and cerebellum of the brain, and Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth. Then things tapered off. Aristotle had asserted that since observations were necessarily flawed, only facts deduced from logic could be considered true. After a pause of about a century, in the second century B.C.E., Ptolemy collected an astounding number of celestial observations from the Babylonian observatories and plotted out the motions of the planets and stars. Unfortuantely, hampered by Aristotle’s assertions that the heavens HAD to be spherical, he introduced a number of errors while placing the Earth at the center of his model. Guided by the principle of authority that had become prevalent, no one challenged his model for another 1700 years. In the second century C.E., Galen made a number of astute observations about the human body, but, again, following the principle of authority, no one challenged his claims (which included several significant errors) for another 1300 years. Aside from those (flawed) advancements, there was almost no scientific advancement in Europe aside from refinements to the solar calendar. (Note that this all happened without any religious interference.)
It was Aristotle’s assertions that objects had an immutable essence that got in the way of recognizing either the irregular paths of planets (which should have been fixed in their perfect Aristotelian spheres, by nature) or the possibility of changes in species (which each contained an immutable essence that was impervious to change).
It was an adherence to Aristotle’s authority that was the primary argument laid out against Galileo, for example, (although a few churchmen were certainly willing to jump on the bandwagon and take it for a further ride).
I suspect that the “how became dogma” is more of the leftover fallout of current mythology in the history of science from Washington Irving who created a number of tales of “modern” (often Protestant) thinkers overthrowing older (Catholic) beliefs (e.g., Columbus discovering that the world was not flat). Rather little that is presumed to have been dogma was ever actually held as unalterably and physically True by Christian Europe. When the question of “how” first began to be asked, again, by various proto-scientists, once the hurdle of Aristotelian authority was overcome, the church tended to accept the discoveries of science. (On those occasions where the church dug in its heels, it tended to be in cases where the questions were all tangled up in conflicts over power and civil authority, not challenges to theology.)