Agnostic.com

30 11

Religion vs science

Do you think we would have so many irrational religious beliefs in the world if the scientific method were invented 2000 years ago?

Dmoore55 3 Aug 25
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

30 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

12

If 500 years of science hasn’t rid the human race of irrationality I’m not confident another 1500 would have. Science is not natural. Irrationality is. Every baby born today is nearly identical, genetically, to babies born two millennia ago; equally capable of irrationality. Science must be learned, and not everyone will want to become a scientist, or even gain a cursory understanding of the importance of science. And many who do study science only learn their specialty, and are still fully irrational and uninformed in other areas. Science’s enemy isn’t religion; it’s human nature.

skado Level 9 Aug 25, 2019

That's a damn good point!

Early human or pre-human nature — the big and strong eat the small and weak — might have led to religion.
The big and strong did not GIFT the small and weak with religion. Some of the small and weak organized and assassinated their “betters”.

7

No, but I wonder where we'd be if the library at Alexandria wouldn't have been burned to the ground.

I have wondered about that one too.

4

I'm a big fan of the 'Critical Mass' theory of history. Discoveries are made as the knowledge supporting them becomes available.

For example, Einstein would not have discovered 'e=mc^2' without the work of Lorentz and Minkowski et.al. to build on -- Science is cumulative. And I figure the discoveries would have happened and will happen regardless (to the limits of our cognitive ability of course).

But that said... There's no denying the huge detriment Religion has been to our progress.
Here is this week's 'Jesus and Mo' comic. Lol.

Edit -- Additional. I think we'd still be pretty much irrational.
Ask any gambler, climate change denier or flat earth believer. People are lazy and they'd rather go with the quick answer rather than take the time to check and validate alternatives.

3

The scientific method has been around since humans had sophisticated brains which goes back much further than 2000 years.

Don't underestimate the effect of superstition and irrational religious belief among the people's of Earth. We have a long way to go before rational thinking is the order of the day.

The use of two nuclear weapons ended WW2 in the Pacific and forced weapons makers and politicians to take a big step toward rational thinking. They do, after all, want to live.

the method is recent, we can say it was developed and has its modern shape for 300 or stretching maximum 500 years.

Research and development before it was very different, and the method itself is being improved and pushing biases, prejudices and pre-conceptions out as times goes by.

If you look at greek philosophy it was highly metaphysics and guess work, there was not many experiments, it was based on "makes sense" and wordplay.

The development of algebra calculus, statistics allowed the method to be really effective.

Before it was trial and error, and without some tools of the method is really difficult to know if a result is good or not.

For example, in medieval ages people think that cold air was better for the fire in the metallurgic ovens.As the ovens produced better in winter...
The mistake is that in Europe in winter was cold BUT... It was also DRY.
And that is the mistake, DRY air is better and it compensates the small variation of temperature (you have to warm up the air some extra degrees, but you avoid warming up water some hundreds of degrees).

So you can see that before the method his kind of errors were common and masked real knowledge.
With the method we stopped discussing how correct we were, and start discussing how wrong we were, it looks like a marginal shift of thinking, but looking for mistakes instead of justifying why we are correct makes knowledge advance A LOT faster.

Let's go back to ancient Greece, Eratosthenes used the scientific method. It is older than 500 years though it may not have been widespread in its applications

@yvilletom While policy makers certainly had to adjust their thinking after WWII as a result of nuclear weapons, I take issue with the statement that "nuclear weapons ended WWII." They didn't. WWII was already over when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. Most people don't grasp this as there is a significant amount of propaganda clouding that truth but the fact is that Japan was finished and actively seeking surrender terms at the time of the bombing of Hiroshima. All that remained was to work out the political details. Regarding that - I think Japan's terms were more a result of the Soviet Declaration of War on August 8th than on the Hiroshima bombing. Japan and the Japanese military were well versed in the horrors of war. The Soviet declaration was a much more serious issue in their minds than the bombing of a civilian city.

3

I think the scientific method in the West started within the Church. If that's true, the scientific method had to develop in tandem with Church dogma. It's curious that the Crusades introduced so much thought from Muslim scholarship into European thought but I think that means two religions contributed so much to the development of science.

3

which scientific method? the methods keep refining themselves.

and no. religion did not begin 2000 years ago. in fact the religion we think of as beginning 2000 years ago began a bit later than that. christianity is not the only religion in the world, you know.

g

3

The most effective use of scientific enquiry was by Medieval Islam and their translations of the classics across many disciplines

3

It could be argued that the scientific method was utilised by Aristotle so no, not really.

I read somewhere long ago and since have wondered if it’s true, that Aristotle said women have fewer teeth than men. Did 2000 or so years pass before anyone counted teeth?

@yvilletom I wouldn’t know. If you find the reference please pass it on to me.

2

Science methods of measuring (comparing one thing vs another), quantifying, testing, using statistics, inventing a theoryl and testing it ultimated wind up in the same place as religious thought, i.e. "We don't know."
Ask a physicist: What is an electron made of? He or she most probably will answer: It is a fundamental particle.

weldy Level 4 Aug 26, 2019

And the big difference is, the scientist will add 'and we're still trying to find out'.

2

I’m afraid the most robust scientific methods wouldn’t have prevented people from believing in superpowers because people are by nature irrational creatures. It takes some work to start thinking rationally and not everyone is willing to do the work. It’s easier to ascribe things and phenomena to mystical powers than look for and try to understand scientific explanations. The brain is a lazy organ.

Sonya Level 4 Aug 26, 2019

Most want to be spoonfed something to give their lives meaning while getting on with living their lives. Yes, intellectually lazy

2

Stephen Jay Gould was wrong; religion and science are overlapping magisteria.
The religious method - fear, alpha animals, superstition, etc - came first and people protesting that method’s abuses developed the scientific method. Most if not all of us here agree that the scientific method protects us from the religious method.

2

Honestly yes.Science can't take away some people's desire to congregate with others and invent icons to worship.

2

No. Irrational religious beliefs become more bizzare with the more we know.

We might think and shit, but that doesn't mean all of us are good at it.

1of5 Level 8 Aug 25, 2019
2

I was wondering something along the same lines recently. Back in the day, many religious people were what passed for well educated, used actual logic to defend their beliefs. Logic was actively valued, even before the philosophy of science was a thing.

I found myself wondering if they were actual believers, or just toed the line because that was how you earned your living with your mind back then. If they actually were believers, what would they have done with all the evidence we have that contradicts many of the bits they treated as fact? Would they have just done what religious folks do now, just changing goalposts? Would they have turned away from religion?

Anyway, my ponderings weren't on the scientific method specifically, but they run parallel to your question. Interested to follow along with the responses you get.

If Christians like Augustine who merged the neo-Platonic teachings of Plotinus with his faith and Aquinas who went back to Aristotle to do it are good examples, I think they really did believe what they were preaching. I see it as the development of a symbiotic relationship between psychology and religion that later expanded itself to science and religion.

1

I think that mystical beliefs were created as a way of controlling the weak, the poor, the un-educated.....so....no...if even 2000 years ago. If people had been taught rationality, science, reading, writing, the maths,,,ect..I think religions would have less impact..

1

The simple answer is NO but I would like more to talk about getting everyone to appreciate scientific method NOW , not because they were forced to but because they genuinely thought it personally useful in their own lives. We have to believe this is possible no matter how long it will take. Please see my group on this website "science teachers of any age group" . NB you do not have to BE a science teacher just interested in science education to the whole population

1

The two come from opposite directions and can never agree. In science truth is something to be sought even if it means loosing cherished ideas. In religion truth is that which offers to give us what we want regardless of all else.

1

It was invented longer than 2000 years ago. Achemedes, Pythagoras, etc. Isaac Newton was an alchemist until he died... Staddled the fence re science. Muslim doctors were scientists during Euro Dark Ages. "Birth" of science in West was a rediscovery of it.

Especially Aristotle, may well be seen as the not father but possibly the long lost grandfather of science. Long lost, because for a time he was the darling of religion and was lost in that wilderness.

@Fernapple Aristotle might have been the most brilliant man in history - he had a far greater understanding of the Universe than todays scientists.

@gater Not sure about that, his main points were, that he taught knowledge does not come from authority, to make evidence the prime source of truth, and that no subject is beneath study. For that he may be called the grandfather of science, but he did not discover the experimental method and that led to him making a number of mistakes, such as his belief in spontanious generation and an eternal world without begining.

@Fernapple I know he claimed the Universe was infinite - which it is - logically it has to be. Todays scientists only believe in what they see, and they don't know how to apply logic.

1

If science would have happened 2000 years ago, religion wouldn't be as big as it is. It's funny how theist use to say god did it, the science proved it was all natural.

1

2000 yeas ago there were no conditions for the method to be created, and religion is a shape shifter, it convinces people it was always the way it is now, but if you can find old religious books (talking on more than 100 years or even 1000) you see how it changes and adapts to its environment.

1

I doubt statements such as “People are irrational”.
However, there has always been enough irrational parenting to produce rebellious children and some of those children ask questions.

1

I'm more optimistic than some here. I think if people were taught skepticism and rationality from their childhood, instead of fables and myths, they would be much less susceptible to irrational beliefs.

This was my late partner. She was from Iran and brought up in a moderately Moslem family (and a lifelong atheist). She was the only girl with 4 brothers and her mother encouraged her to ask questions (the stories I have heard). She told me she thought bringing up her kids in a non-religious house hold. When she grew up and came to the US she had a difficult 1st marriage. 2 of her 3 kids became S. Baptists (one is a doctor and one has her masters). She told me she didn't realize kids have to be taught to question.

@Easyduzzit - I have conflicting feelings about your point. It makes sense to me that if kids were taught skepticism and rationality, or if our culture had a much smaller portion of religious people that we would see people being much less susceptable to irrationality. At the same time, Michael Shermer's book "How We Believed" showed that an individual's relationship with their parents effects their religious affiliation. Those who have good relationships with their parents tend to stay with the religion of their parents, while those who don't tend to change religions or give up on religion all together. With this piece of evidence, I would think an individual who has a rocky relationship with their parent may be more likely attracted to religions. Of course, other factors influence an individual's decision to believe or not.

I suppose my feeling is that certain decisions to believe are based on certain needs which might trump skepticism and rationality. Mine isn't a well thought out idea; more of a gut reaction.

1

We see enough cult-like behaviors based on pseudoscience, junk science, and science fiction that I would say we would still have organizations based on irrational beliefs.

Russ, you describe the Big Bang well.
It gets billions of taxpayer dollars and those dollars buy many millions of words.
It has no empirical evidence.

1

Probably.

0

More like 15,000 years back. Christianity has hold over the insanity that religion engenders.

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:393788
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.