>an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found
Hmmm. No suggestion of a period/era, despite that last claim of 'first'...
Meantime, much farther up the Nile at Nabta Playa in the Nubian desert is a stone circle dated to circa 7,500 BP.
https://medium.com/@humanoriginproject/the-ancient-astronomy...
I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world.
Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without having to communicate where we got that information.
For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of how they operated.
Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than something they invented.
Consider the medieval European priesthood... for example. It's basically where all scholarship and literacy resided. Also esoterica, healing magic, astrology, alchemy...
This persists until the scientific age. Mendel was a monk. Newton was highly devout, and mostly devoted to jewish christian protoscience... some of it tracing all the way back to those Egyptians. If you'd asked him, he would have probably described himself as an alchemist.
Recall that the church tried Galileo... because his published results negated Church dogma. That's because the study of celestial motion was a religious function. Always had been.
Ancient Greek philosophers are often seen as "proto-secular." They were mostly seperste from formal priesthood and often treated homeric gods and myth with scepticism.
But... they tended to be highly devoted to "mysteries" and their cults. There's also evidence that Socrates and co taught "secret" esoterica too... about the secret nature of the world... and triangles.
Math, religion, deciphering of celestial patterns.. those have been together for a long time.
Having religion separate from math, physics and natural science is a modern invention.
Though interesting that each of the above scientists all explicitly claimed to be Pythagorean… where are the Pythagoreans of today?
Agreed. Even today, for many people there is no fatal tension between science and religion (often in large part because they serve to answer different questions).
My personal rule of thumb is that if I see an apparent contradiction between religion and science, it just means I have an incorrect/incomplete understanding of some area of religion or science (or both).
https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
is a successor of the Pythagoreans.
Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions, their most famous work opens with an explanation of how the world was created. Was that not the work of somebody interested in how the world works?
I absolutely agree! Although in the context of authorship during exile I'd hazard a guess that there was some motive of community cohesion and development.
> When I hear the word religion I specifically think of people that are curious and critical.
I hear a far more ambiguous term, and the term will have different connotations if you ask a catholic vs a protestant vs jewish person vs a sunni vs a sufi vs an atheist, &c. I have no clue how others perceive the term, but I sense that it's a rough match at best and completely nonsensical at worse.
But broader than that, our (i.e. those of us in the western tradition) entire conceptions about interpreting metaphysical/ontological language have been shaped by western religious conflict and an impossible to enumerate number of people being very, obviously, proudly incoherent, preserved in writing at massive, massive cost. The terms we use—faith, belief, god(s), spirit, afterlife, heaven/hell, sin, evil, guilt, salvation, &c—are difficult to detach from the above conflict and often have zero parallel in the metaphysics of people outside this culture.
This also results in people not realizing how much they've internalized the connotations of what might be basic descriptive words for common internal phenomena outside of the framing of religous rhetoric—for instance, you often see atheists proudly rejecting the concepts of faith and belief entirely, unaware that their own worldviews are formed around confidence about metaphysical concepts formed on less-than-certain grounds. as Hume would point out, and as should not be a surprise to anyone who identifies as an empiricist—we all have faith or belief that the sun will rise tomorrow without any line of reasoning to allow us to find deductive, 100%, absolute certainty in this. After all you never know when a pulsar might just completely obliterate our solar system, or that the laws of physics won't arbitrarily change. This might seem facetious until you realize that language only binds to reality in terms of personal confidence that these words are actually descriptive, regardless to what extent this is actually relevant to reality wrt established inductive reasoning.
Meanwhile, if you go back far enough, or even just speak in another language that hasn't marinated in christianized latin for millennia, "gods" and "spirits" might as well just be code for "unknown force that drives the mechanisms of the world and human relations". Anthropomorphization of these forces is a social process that allows people to reason about these concepts in abstract ways. Atheism in this context wouldn't necessarily mean you're rejecting a "sky wizard who wants you to deny evolution" (for a particularly facetious example); such beliefs might be perceived closer to a person abandoning the sole basis people had for reasoning about the world without providing an alternative other than "skepticism" (particularly in the case of Socrates, whose actual worldview we have very scant knowledge of). It takes a lot of time, resources, and pain for people to create concepts we take for granted today—even things like "truth" and "encoding words and numbers to strings of symbols we can algorithmically reason about" had to be invented. Of course this would have been bootstrapped on whatever reasonable substrate was available, if only for the sole purpose of communicating your reasoning to others.
Naturally this is just my 2¢.
I mean, if you're that guy, you can't just say you don't know!
Some will flat out kill you for disagreeing, in fact.
EDIT: Especially in the context of christianity, the importance of faith/belief cannot be overstated. Even the very act of looking for proof that you're doing the right thing can arguably undermine the entire point of the "religion". cf John 3:16—"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
NB, as awkward as I am to quoting the bible, I am an atheist. I'm just saying this doesn't need to be a barrier to understanding other people.
As for your scripture quote ... the usual misinterpretation I see in that is ignoring the context (particularly, the condemnation in verses 18-19 for those who believe not), but that seems not to be what you're saying. Remember that "faith, believe" is a much broader word in Greek, covering "loyal, trust, commit, persuaded"; I don't see how that's possible if we ignore the evidence we're handed. "Blind faith" is mostly an outside mockery of Christianity rather than a internal doctrine (I can go on about that if you want).
Pair that with Modernism, and you've got a recipe for some slippery definitions of "truth".
But we generally agree to only label it as Gnosticism if it doesn't pass the consistency trial (2 Pet 1, 1 Jn 4), and especially if it outright fails it.
Every major religion in recorded history, and all the ones I’m aware of from prehistory, have some history of violence. Even Buddhism.
This is one of those ‘false ideal past’ things.
You can draw lines of causation back and forth between those two (or three) big things pretty much arbitrarily depending on the specific circumstances.
Eastern worldviews (tao, buddhism—particularly zen buddhism) are inherently contradictory. Regarding these your perspective is simply nonsensical. Most worldviews have contradictory aspects that require inward judgement rather than just looking to a given bureaucracy to determine value; it's very rare for opinion to have any meaning at all outside of the christianity and islam.
Of course, this comes back to what you consider a "religion". If you're looking for something like the catholic church where belief in a specific worldview is necessary for salvation of the soul it's a pretty natural to be dismissive of anything other than what you already believe in as you presume that other people even care what your opinion is (metaphysics, worldview, belief-system, whatever you want to call it) when likely your opinion is entirely beside the point.
Though in both cases, would the unacceptable idea not be ‘there is one objective view of reality’, and anyone holding such a view highly unlikely to be considered an adherent?
Otherwise, pretty much every religion says they aren’t a part of it anymore. Sometimes that has serious consequences for them. Several of the large religions have ‘you can’t leave’ clauses, either de facto or de jure.
And if the core tenets get ‘influenced’ to violence, then that is what also happens.
I have always assumed that it was the King James Bible that established the “modern” of religion and has distorted its emphasis.
The distortion is so intense that it doesn’t usually make sense to even point out the misunderstanding.
This domain of human inquiry is definitely large enough for all ideas and I find the downvotes on this comment anti-social not because they have other ideas but their inability to articulate them.
The only reason we don't use "religious" method is because science has taught us to only believe "data backed evidence". Also at the same time we are moving fast into the era where reproduction of most "papers" being published today is hard and unlikely if not impossible.
That "day-to-day" people neither read science papers in depth nor religious scriptures in depth is a common problem as well.
A lot of science (both back then, but especially now) is less hard and is more optimized towards being accepted. Psychology, Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, many fields of Biology, and many others are all about social proof, since really what else can you use? There are too many lines of judgement that have to be drawn for any of it to make sense in a hard ‘verifiable’ way.
And hard science still requires reproducibility, but a lot of that is getting more niche and harder to verify, rather than more directly verifiable, so it is also falling prey to ‘acceptability’ vs ‘verifiable correctness’.
Going back even further Historically, it was very hard to afford verifiable correctness, so very few people could actually do it. Pretty much either very rich people, or people with rich rich sponsors - which also often required or provided social proof/acceptance.
Religion helps wrap the whole thing up in a way that is marketable, and secrecy protects the ‘trade secrets’ so any sort of professionalism can be supported for further work or development. And because people need to eat.
Which are closely related to secret societies like the Freemasons [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry], and the common pattern of secrecy among Alchemists [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/amb.1992.39.2.63].
I’m not clear about what you mean with ‘tiered system of information based on achievements’ separate from ‘secrecy’. That pattern was, and still is very common in religious and military institutions that I think anyone would call high on ‘secrecy’.
In broad strokes, how is that different from modern day security classification systems, and/or things like information access based on rank?
One very obvious difference between now and then, IMO, is the massive difference in wealth and population between now and then. That allows specialization and optimization to much greater degrees than possible before.
What % of population today can actually understand let alone reproduce the papers being published today. And this is not just about practicality of it. Is there a motivation to even reproduce it ?
I am not saying "science is bad". I am saying science has the same fate as religion.
It is not obvious to me.
You have some other ideal I assume.
I see you as unwilling to defend your ideas.
It is unlikely because there is no incentive to it. In contrast, it would be considered career sabotage if you keep reproducing other studies than creating original research. Because funding agencies and hiring committees will look for that. Not because it is impossible (Of course operative word here is "most")
It's not really clear that "formal" mathematics is actually that useful to an ancient society, even ones like Egypt or Greece that embarked on large engineering projects (you don't really need a proof of most basic geometry, just empirically noting relationships between shapes will get you far enough). So the idea that it started as basically a religious activity amongst mystery cults in Egypt and Greece is appealing
Of course, the fact that the "mystery" part of "mystery religions" means they didn't write anything down, so rather frustratingly we only get vague third hand accounts of this stuff from classical greek philosophers and Roman-era neo-platonists.
I suspect, when you don't understand things like the big bang and genetics, the line between religion and science (or fact and fantasy) is quite blurry.
How would we when we don't know what caused them.
Seriously, though. There are a lot of open questions on dating old and middle kingdom events. The issue is not that there is no good chronology, it's rather that there are multiple reasonable and established chronologies that conflict. Entire careers have been made on basically arguing about dates.
We can date important events after the 8th century BCE pretty well for the entire Levant, thanks to the hard work of Babylonian royal astronomers who around that time started systematically recording all celestial events on clay tablets, on which they also recorded the date and occasionally various major events. We can "run the sky backwards" and compare with their records to get a perfect correspondence between their calendar and ours. This is why we know the exact date of the death of Alexander the Great, among other things.
An old or middle kingdom observatory with dated slabs that describe enough events to get us a few unambiguously fixed dates is one of those finds that archeologists dream of.