RE: What does Sam Harris mean by saying that religions are failed sciences?
January 23, 2024 at 12:36 pm
(This post was last modified: January 23, 2024 at 12:48 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
What people today tend to be thinking of when they say that religion is a sort of pre science, is superstition. As above, ala astrology.
The idea that the position of the lights in the sky has an effect on our lives represents a belief about how the world does work, and gives us a motivation for what we believe to be practical observation making, but not how it should be. Astrology may be a "pre science" but it's not a religion or a pre religion...and we appear to have known about astronomy and animal behavior looooong before astrology was a twinkle in anyone's eye.
We find a system of tally and dot marks on upper paleolithic euoropean cave art that we believe represents a pre-writing calendar/field guide. This would make that cave art proto writing a "pre science" without the superstition, even. A rudimentary synthesis of zoology and astronomy (and also....the first known grocery list).
Personally, I think that superstitious narratives about facets of the natural world arose from or as mnemonic devices and the more elaborate religious narratives about the same tend to be social power grabs that don't appear to have popped up until the neolithic. We assume these religions predate the neolithic, in oral form - and we immediately return to the mnemonic hypothesis. If I tell you about kings playing chess on fine grain sand the important details of the story have nothing to do with any of it's literal or explicit (in the case of oral transmission) content. My kids grew up with an elaborate mythology about the holidays (some of them novel to our family) that amount to much the same.
The idea that the position of the lights in the sky has an effect on our lives represents a belief about how the world does work, and gives us a motivation for what we believe to be practical observation making, but not how it should be. Astrology may be a "pre science" but it's not a religion or a pre religion...and we appear to have known about astronomy and animal behavior looooong before astrology was a twinkle in anyone's eye.
We find a system of tally and dot marks on upper paleolithic euoropean cave art that we believe represents a pre-writing calendar/field guide. This would make that cave art proto writing a "pre science" without the superstition, even. A rudimentary synthesis of zoology and astronomy (and also....the first known grocery list).
Personally, I think that superstitious narratives about facets of the natural world arose from or as mnemonic devices and the more elaborate religious narratives about the same tend to be social power grabs that don't appear to have popped up until the neolithic. We assume these religions predate the neolithic, in oral form - and we immediately return to the mnemonic hypothesis. If I tell you about kings playing chess on fine grain sand the important details of the story have nothing to do with any of it's literal or explicit (in the case of oral transmission) content. My kids grew up with an elaborate mythology about the holidays (some of them novel to our family) that amount to much the same.
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