Oct 10 2006
Monothestic Religion and Science
Normally I don’t like to talk much about religion, but I came across an idea last night that was so interesting I thought I had to write it down. Simply put, the idea is that science is an unintentional side effect of a religious system that believes in a single god.
The argument goes something like this. Think of a society that believes in lots of gods, one that believes each rock, tree, animal, river etc has its own spirit to diety controlling it. You could easially think of two rivers, one flowing upstream, and the other flowing downstream, because that’s how each god wanted to run their river. If you accept that as a part of the belief system, you will never try and look for common behaviour in all rivers, because it just wouldn’t make sense. Every river has its own god, and every river has its own behaviour, based on that god.
Then by contrast, think about a society such as Christianity, which believes in (one) God. God decides how all the rivers work, and because of this, all rivers work the same. Once you have the concept that all things sharing some property also share behaviour, you start trying to explain that behaviour, to understand it, to predict it. As soon as you start trying to do that, science as we know it soon follows.
The familiar process then often follows, whereby we look at something, create some ideas as to how it works, that seems to successfully predict it, and then we think “hey, this explanation doesn’t need a God to make senseâ€Â. Before long there are all sorts of tensions between the scientists and the religious believes, but that’s another story…
Humbug!
‘Science’ or a very high standard of knowledge was present amongst the Mayas, the Aztecs, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Celts, the Greeks, The Harrapans, the builders of Stonehenge - and most probably stone age shamans - none of which were monesthiestic as far as we can tell! ‘Primitive’ (multiple diety) human society was quite advanced actually (Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Thoth - to name a few were all multiple deity worshippers - and these are the people who founded the basis our modern scientific thinking in the first place!)
All that monestheistic idealogy has given us is war, division, cults and bloodshed. In fact, monestiestic relgion is most commonly found at the root of antiscientific agitation and has been known to burn scientists, kill progressive thinkers and refuse to allow scientific thought and burn books etc, and it is still at it even now. Ahkenaton, the first monesthiest Egyptian Pharaoh invented this belief in the first place to grab absolute power for himself alone, the only function of the one god squad and the one they still use today. They have no interest in science, only in power!
It is a mistake to believe that ‘primitive’ humans were stupid and didn’t know how to observe nature and the life around them. They had no choice if they were to survive, so they had to get it right. They had no margins for failure and we are the descendants of ’survivors’ - go figure!
I think you are mistaking science for advanced though. At no point have I suggested that science and advanced thought are the same, nor that a culture that doesn’t have science in the very limited way that we define science today was in any means less (or more) advanced. When I talk about science I mean a very specific way of thinking. That of creating a conceptual model based on reproducible(?) logical semantics and asserting that that model exhibits isomorphisms to the real world. This is only one way of thinking about the world, and the idea I was repeating (without I must point out, evangelising) was that this way of thinking about things may have been a (unintended - if intention is meaningful concept here) side effect on monotheistic thinking.
I do not know if there is any evidence to either support or refute this idea. Pythagoras et. al. did indeed build the basis of modern day “logic” and even “science”, but whether or not the way they though was then defined well enough to count as modern day science is something I do not know….
My post was in now way intended to consider the repercussions, either benefical or devastating of monotheistic thinking, as I don’t know anywhere near enough to make any claims on that subject that I am willing to stand behind.
Check out Julian Janes “The origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” which theorises that indivisual thinking evolved out of a group or even hive mind in the early bronze age - very interesting - uses Homer to illustrate the argument…
I think you will find that the ancients had a very good idea about rivers and how they functioned, and that just because all rivers had different god/desses does not mean that they had different attributes - they didn’t. Check of the Vedas for a description of how rivers and waters of all minds work - ?dated to possibly 11,000 BCE? and the time of the last ice age melt…
The fact is that we cannot say how the ancients thought. We cannot assume they thought like us, and equally we cannot assume they did not. Do we think like that last generation? Same mind, same attributes, different root menu…?