Western philosophy teachers offer a standard explanation for the birth of scientific inquiry. Isolated cultures clung to myths and religion to explain the existence of the world and natural phenomena. The Ionian Greeks, however, positioned in the middle of various trade routes, heard religion and creation stories from all of their trading partners. These religions and stories were all mutually inconsistent. The Ionians concluded from this that all were likely false and looked for new ways to explain the world. Science was born. (wikipedia)
Let’s look for a parallel in the modern world. Many societies are dominated by a single religion and/or culture. Italy, for example, is at least 90 percent Roman Catholic. Very seldom does an Italian encounter a passionate adherent of some other religion. Yet Italian Roman Catholics are not necessarily themselves passionate or strictly observant. The U.S., by contrast, has at least as much cultural and religious diversity as the Ioanian city states. An American, simply by strolling around his neighborhood, may learn about many religions and creation stories. If the philosophy teachers are right, Americans should be among the world’s least religious people. A Southern Baptist learning about other Christian sects, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus should say “I’m not going to believe any of these stories; I’ll look for explanations in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.” Yet this is not what we observe. There are millions of Americans who believe very passionately in their particular religions, despite being fully aware that others in the U.S. and around the world hold contradictory beliefs.
How can we account for this apparent discrepancy? Are the historians of philosophy simply wrong about the pre-Socratics? Are modern religions much more compelling and convincing than those promulgated in Miletus circa 600 B.C.? Or what?
You would have to find out if the Southern Baptist really is learning about other religions. I find those who travel and do trade(as the Ionian Greeks) have the curiosity to learn about those they are engaging with.
The lack of curiosity of people who are simply living in their hometown, which may be very diverse, is probably the reason that the U.S. is still very religious.
At least the Jehova’s witnesses are doing their part to expose people to the absurdity with their “the only true religion” pamphlets.
A few thoughts:
America as a whole is diverse, but a lot of Americans lead fairly insular lives.
Was the Ionian Greek peasant an adherent of science? Or are you talking about the aristocratic class? I’d argue that among the highly educated in America, there are fewer fervent religious believers.
Richard Dawkins theories of “memes” (natural selection applied to religion) may have a good explanation.
When only a few people traveled slowly, a successful mythology didn’t need to explain nonbelievers to get passed on from one generation to the next, because religious discussions with outsiders were very rare.
But today all surviving major religions have some way of explaining and dealing with outsiders, from sending missionaries to blowing them up. Even Italian Roman Catholics, and their children, have easy access to Mormon literature. Also, they believe in the same religion that must defend itself in other countries.
I’d argue that the strongest religious communities in the United States are still in areas where interacting with those who disagree with you are still rare. It’s still not uncommon for someone growing up in many areas of the United States to not ever have a personal relationship with someone who would disagree with them on religious grounds.
We do see that religion is strongest in ‘middle’ america and weakest on the coasts. Especially in those cities that have diverse immigrant populations.
I of course don’t have any data to backup any of those claims. Just anecdotal evidence.
Jared Diamond of “Guns, Germs and Steel” fame would tell you that people nowadays are more stupid (and thus more gullible) than they used to be in primitive societies, because less intense darwinian pressure for survival is no longer culling the dumb.
Religions have also had ample time to develop countermeasures for rationalist skepticism.
For one, if the only criteria needed to disregard a religion is mutual inconsistency with another philosophy, then we should reject all philsophies, including scientific-based ones. Why go with Chemistry if it’s just another theory incompatible with Catholicism? So, the Greeks just may have had something going on besides luckily rejecting all religion on false logical grounds. Perhaps they were just smart.
Freed from that canard, the explanation for why religion persists, even in America, is pretty obvious. It works. And by works I mean the people who adhere to it are, for whatever reason, induced to (a) have lots of kids and (b) raise them in the tradition. It’s no coincidence that reproduction is a major focus of all world religions. The Catholics were no dummies when they banned contraception and opened the gates on guilt.
Atheists and secular humanists, on the other hand, seem destined to go down on the ship named “Being Right,” as our philosophies seem to give us everything we need except the desire to reproduce.
If one were a results oriented kind of person, one might be tempted to suggest the Catholics are smarter, at some level.
One more comment. To address your question of whether or not ancient religions were less compelling: I don’t know if they were around as early as 600 BC, but if there were anything close to the cult of Bacchus back then, I ‘d think that would have to have been hard to beat in terms of compelling. If the Greeks rejected drunken cult orgies for geometry, I think we just have to give them credit where credit is due.
the Diamond/Fazal/Jonathan outcome seems quite likely. It’s the Occam’s razor solution to be sure. But I think there are a number of counter examples worth mentioning. These are based on my observations of various fundamentalists families. Firstly, in quite a few of them, at least half and perhaps all of the children completely revolt again their parents nonsensical beliefs. And some of them still go one to have non-fundie families. This is in spite of an upbringing of heavy indoctrination. Secondly, I’ve encountered a number of US fundamentalists whose lack of adventurousness is so wholly encompassing they tend to marry a woman who looks like their sister or cousin. Even if she isn’t, its probably a sign of shared alleles; over time this would lead to a mild kind of inbreeding suppression, and sure enough these people, if they don’t have difficulty having kids, end up having ones that are a little wacky looking. (as Ja’mie King would say, “I’m sorry, it’s true.”) These are the promising counter examples…because they suggest secularism will have a hard time “dying out.”
But there’s a scary counter example, specifically to the assumption people will get dumber. Obviously most of them will, but it seems there will be an “ecological niche”, so to speak, for people smart enough to get scholarly or technological work done, yet be willing to accept religious myth. Of course, the alleles to propagate such a worldview probably always existed, but there wasn’t any selection for them because before the 19th century everyone in polite company essentially had to be “religious”. The smart could advance their genes and religion had nothing to do with it from a evolutionary perspective. It didn’t influence selection one way or the other, because being a single for life secularist wasn’t an option. (in fact, this seems to be the thesis to “A Farewell to Alms” which I believe I read about here first.) An example of people showing these alleles was a mini-scandale in the past few years at a prestigious Ivy League graduate program. An “orthodox christian” student left before finishing because she had a vision that God’s plan for her was to be a stay-at-home mother. Suffice it to say she had the intelligence to get into an ultra-competitive Ivy League graduate school, but a genetic susceptibility to believing 2000 year-old fairy tales should guide her life. Reading, for example, example, about what seems to be a slew of high achieving Mormon classical musicians or musical students – a metier which obviously takes a certain kind of intelligence – also makes me worry about the propagation of these alleles.
I suspect that we’ll eventually find that a predisposition towards religiosity is at least partially genetic. America is disproportionately peopled with the descendants of religious dissenters. (and other adventure-seeking immigrants; almost everything is overdone here)
Let’s also not forget about the practical advantages of at least feigning religious devotion. If you’re a politician, being on record as a Christian gives you the potential “I’ve sinned but repented get-out-of-jail-free” card. If you took all of the United States Congressmen and forced them to take a lie detector test, how many do you think will test positive for religion? Probably a whole lot less than campaign as members of various churches, synagogues, etc. If you’re in a union, it’s to your advantage to appear religious, otherwise you’ll have a harder time using your “religious” personal days. If you’re a huckster, the Bible is a great ally in securing donations to your cause, especially if you can make it on cable television. My selfish question, “is chiropractic treatment religious or scientific?”
Peter Turchin has written about this.
Essentially social groups become cohesive where there is a boundary of conflict. Where a boundary of conflict doesn’t exist new ones are created to create cohesive subgroups.
The boundaries of conflict in Italian society are not religious boundaries, so people don’t think about it and identify in different ways. In the US it is part of people’s identity (my speculation: an outcome of the cold war where the Soviets were “atheists” and so being religious was an identification with the “correct” side of the boundary of conflict.) In the past the boundaries in the US have been along race boundaries, and that cultural overhang still exists.
Turchin’s book “War and Peace and War” looks specifically at the Italian and the US cases (along with various others) and the basis on which various parts of those societies become cohesive (along with a bunch of other interesting stuff.) Relevant to these comments, it specifically has counterarguments to some of Jared Diamond’s points.
It also looks at why expanding empires are cohesive on the frontiers but collapse at the centre. In some ways it looks like that is what is happening in the US: far-away wars and remote nation building attempts, but at the core of the empire infighting dominates and arbitrary boundaries of conflict are created.
An interesting example is the NYT column “Where did ‘we’ go?” I read it the same day as I read a column on newsmax.com essentially calling for a US military coup. The US seems to me to be an empire that has expanded a bit too far. There are social impacts (external boundaries too far away to maintain cohesion) and financial impacts (the money will run out.)
The vast majority of people are religious. Science is a religion. Religions can be better or worse. Religions differ by focus. The ultimate way to judge a religion is by outcomes. Science is a good religion. So is Christianity, in a different way. So is Judaism, in an entirely different way. So was Islam in a way very similar to Christianity (something became broken in Islam after the defeat in Spain and I am not sure what). So was the Egyptian cult of Amon-Ra, etc. On the other hand, the Semitic cults of Ba`al and Ishtar as well as the Greek and Roman religions were not so good. Pagan cults of place spirits and such were quite lousy.
While religions can be good or bad, religious fanatics are almost always harmful. The traits of religious fanatics are (i) fixation on their religion and (ii) claims that all other religions are false. Richard Dawkins, for example, is a religious fanatic of atheism. (Atheism is distinct from science [science has nothing to say on supernatural beings, but atheism does], also a religion, and a rather useless one, about the level of the cult of Ishtar.)
To answer your original question: the tendentious history of science that you refer to is what the New Testament is to the history of Christianity. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s not where you’d look for an unbiased examination.
Practice science by all means, but not religious fanaticism of science. I’m afraid it may be the latter that informs the sentiment of this post.
What may have been different about the Greeks is an unusual extent of religious tolerance they had. Their basic view was diametrically opposed to religious fundamentalism—instead of treating other religions as false by default, they treated them as true. To reconcile, they mapped every religion to their own with much flexibility. (Most affected religions were enlightened by this attitude of tolerance. But, for example, the exclusionary Judaism, inherently fundamentalist [look at the first commandment again] was less ready to embrace the Greek mapping.)
(Because I also don’t believe in unbiased analysis, for the context: Personally, I consider myself an agnostic. This includes my attitude towards science. Or perhaps I’m a math cultist. I’m also culturally Jewish.)
One other element of the puzzle: the afterlife. I’m not sure how many of the pre-Christian religions had an “OURS is the *only* way to heaven” mentality, but that aspect has a built-in fear element that makes it hard to shake, even among people who might otherwise determine that such a claim is logically preposterous. “Just in case” seems mighty attractive when faced with adversity aging and pain.
The ancient pagans were “unitarian” – they identified the gods of other pantheons as different faces or aspects of their own. Believing that your religion is the one true religion is a monotheistic thing. The details of, say, the flood story, were somewhat different from religion to religion, but then again the details of the four gospels are somewhat different from each other, and the details of Chronicles and Kings (covering the same events) are somewhat different from each other.
>I suspect that we’ll eventually find that a predisposition towards religiosity is at least partially genetic. America is disproportionately peopled with the descendants of religious dissenters.
The problem with this theory is that the descendants of the dissenters who settled New England are now the least religious people in the country, whereas the descendants of the not particularly fanatical Cavaliers and Scotch-Irish are the big churchgoers.
Stanislav, science is not “a religion”. I hope humanities departments aren’t teaching such mumbo jumbo – science departments certainly aren’t – but perhaps they are, under some clumsy rubric of “they are all just belief systems”. (there is an impression that most readers of this blog have at least received an undergraduate degree from an accredited institute of higher learning) This is rather like saying “TNT and sodium chloride are both solids, therefore similar, and in fact TNT is a type of sodium chloride”. A very superficial and inconsequential connection in terms of the practical aspects of handling either material. In fact modern science is totally antithetical to religion. One is a belief system based on rationalism, and one on irrationality and hearsay. At best they are different leaves in a taxonomy of human knowledge. Furthermore religions are specialized belief systems dealing, to some degree, with the erstwhile unknowable and unseen. So any arguments from that point forth are a house of cards waiting to collapse.
That being said, I agree in principle that defining religions by the outcomes is a sound approach. And that some are good, at least at some point in time, and some are bad…although I can’t just give an easy pass to Christianity and Judaism as you do. But I disagree with the broad assumption that all religious fanatics are harmful. Most of them, sure. But take the Amish. They are fanatics in a most pure sense. To me, though, the only people they seem to be harming are themselves – and maybe only in a very limited way. And when a nut with a gun downed 5 of their kids…what was their first priority? Forgiveness. The is completely the opposite of what would be expected from the stereotype of a “fanatic”. So, from this false assumption that fanaticism is always dangerous, you somehow create a specter of “religious fanaticism of science.” Could you explain in greater detail what you mean by that? Did some members of the National Academy of Sciences hold a protest outside of McLean Bible Church near DC, chanting “science is making us lose in Iraq, because science don’t right approve of bendin’ over for God!” I don’t recall hearing about that if it did happen.
“In fact modern science is totally antithetical to religion.”
What a bizarre thing to say. Perhaps you meant to say “pretty indifferent”. Otherwise I regret to inform you that you are sadly uninformed about religion (or perhaps about science; or both).
Meanwhile, the hypothesis that people are dumber nowadays sounds like a joke. If anything like that were the case, it would certainly work the other way around: absent-minded professors are not known for their skill in feeding themselves, fighting off enemies, or escaping from hungry bears, so relaxed survival requirements would surely favor more academics and “intellectuals”.
I wouldn’t say the historians are wrong, but surely there are many other factors involved. However, it’s also clear that modern religions *are* more compelling, at least philosophically. The ancient religions didn’t have much theology, and when the Greeks started doing theology, it didn’t work out much like anything in Homer. Judeo-Christian religion, on the other hand, was able to develop a remarkably sophisticated theology. (Some folks have even suggested that Plato must have popped over for a visit to the ancient Hebrews, but that seems rather unlikely. Besides, Plato was smart enough to figure it out for himself.)
Of course, the average Southern Baptist on the street may not be philosophically trained, but then neither was the average presocratic Greek. A modern educated Christian, in either the US or Italy, has at least heard of Augustine or Aquinas or C.S. Lewis and has an idea where to go to look for theological details. It’s also worth noting that science in the modern sense was developed in highly Christian Europe during the Renaissance (or from Medieval Muslims, and also Christians, depending on how you count). Again, of course, there are many other factors that come into play (such as whether your society has time for academic pursuits outside of feeding and defending itself).
I have no regret in informing you that the first point hardly merits a response, because it’s an ad hominen argument (attack) that doesn’t say anything. “You are wrong because you do not understand science and religion.” The second, about absent-minded professors and hungry bears, is nonsensical. Because people in the western world are not even semi-routinely attacked by bears (are you?), bear attacks have nothing to do with which alleles enjoy a greater frequency in the population of the western world. (I’ve been able to clarify that because I have a BS in biology from one of the top 10 US public universities. Oh but wait, I don’t understand science.)
I’d agree with you that “modern religions” are more “appealing.” In fact it’s getting quite ridiculous. From the stoic simplicity of Jewish monotheism, we moved to Christianity: God sent a man to Earth to be just like you (except the part about sin) – for a while at least…to Islam: a regular Joe like you became an exalted prophet because God talked to him…to Mormonism: get those ancestors converted, and you too can be become the God of another universe. (clear coat optional)
BTW the final point is wrong too. This is an associative fallacy. Science developed as an alternate way of explaining the universe that just so happened to take place in a Christian Europe – that science and technology was also developing elsewhere in the world, such as China, should serve as an obvious counter-example to some notion that Christianity specially fostered it. Yes, it’s true that the first books Gutenberg printed were Bibles, and that printed word later helped the spread of science. But that doesn’t mean that religion helped science! Not to mention the fact that religion tried and continues to try to suppress science whenever it doesn’t suit its sociopolitical aims – be it Galileo or stem cell research. Science “in the modern sense” has its ancient roots in Greece (non-Christian) and its modern roots in the German Research University model…which developed in the 19th century at the time when religion as an element of the scholastic life started to vanish.
> How can we account for this apparent discrepancy? Are the historians of philosophy simply wrong about the pre-Socratics? Are modern religions much more compelling and convincing than those promulgated in Miletus circa 600 B.C.? Or what?
I buy this one. Name a single missionary-centric religion from 600 BC.
Confucianism & Taoism don’t exist; Buddhism is due in another hundred years, as roughly is Jainism. Hinduism & Judaism aren’t evangelical, and I’m not sure they even accepted converts at this point. Obviously any form of Christianity or Islam is right out. The native Greek cults are slowly being absorbed into the mainline Olympian system, but are propagated by Greek growth only; the Egyptians keep to themselves. Mithraism doesn’t yet exist, like most of the Mid-Eastern mystery cults, or Manichaeism.
So that leaves us basically with… Zoroastrianism, which seems to have historically not sought converts. Whoops.
On the other hand, modern religions have the benefit of all the philosophy & techniques worked out by the Milesians and co.; they have mutated in all sorts of ways and worked out all sorts of innovations; and so on. Note that a free market in religions encourages virulency – just look at countries with government-supported monopolies on religion, such as the Scandinavian countries, and how much less religious they are than the USA.