Did the Ancient Greeks do religion better?

[Kishkumen]

Connected with the absence of revelation, of scriptures, and of a professionally divinely appointed priesthood is the fact that a central category of Greek religion is unknowability, the belief that human knowledge about the divine and about the right way of behaving towards it is limited and circumscribed. The perception that the articulation of religion through the particular polis systems is a human construct, created by particular historical circumstances and open to change under changed circumstances, is in my view connected with this awareness of the severe limitations of human access to the divine, of the ultimate unknowability of the divine world, and the uncertain nature of human relationships to it. The Greeks did not delude themselves that their religion incarnated the divine will.

This is Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood in her essay, "What is Polis Religion?" It is her opinion, clearly, but I think she is definitely onto something here. Especially when it comes to a shared sense of the divine will, it seems foolish to me to claim to have a clear idea of what that is, particularly for other people. But this is exactly what we hear all the time, what God wants, wills, or demands of his children. And, that is one of the things I have a very difficult time buying into.

[dastardly stem]

Thank you for this, Kish. It is quite a refreshing type of perspective when contrasted with the Christian nationalism or fundamentalism (not that such represents all of Christianity) we see in our day. But no doubt there is a code of dogmatism that has followed Christianity since its early days that presumes to know the unknowable. And admittedly I grow a bit perplexed when people tell me all we have in our lives is due to Christianity, since it dominated as religion for millennia in our western world. But you have to wonder, if Christianity died out in the first century, or its sprouting bud died out, what would be different for us today? Religion still would be. Hopefully scientific, technological and sociological advances would still have occurred. And maybe we'd have a better perspective in connecting the spiritual with the reasonable. Its fun to imagine, but of course, we'd never know.

[Physics Guy]

The Greek myths that I recall seem to represent the chief of the gods as a serial rapist. And didn't the Athenians execute Socrates for religious offences? Did they have anything like the Roman Vestals, who would be buried alive for having sex?

[Physics Guy]

The world went on a long time without developing science, so it might have been inevitable eventually in some other cultural context than Christendom, but it might have taken a long time.

Science is hard, and it's especially hard to get it started, because it only really starts to work well once it has reached a certain critical mass of knowledge. The early successes that we now take to mark the beginning of science are things like Newton's explanations of the motions of planets, and of the twice-daily tides. Those are quite tricky things; Newton needed to invent calculus just to express them. There just aren't very many patterns in nature that are simple enough to express below that mathematical level. And the difference between scientific laws that can be tested precisely, and myths that merely give you a nice mental picture to associate with qualitative phenomena, only appears when you have the understanding, the motivation, and the technology to make real controlled tests*. Only that kind of precise testing can compel you to accept ideas that do not provide nice mental pictures, but instead contradict your intuition—like the bizarre notion that the universe does not circle the Earth, when you can see the sun cross the sky every day, and watch the stars turn all night. Before you actually have a fair bit of science, all the best intentions of being rational and critical and empirical will take you no further than rules of thumb, folk wisdom, and myths.

Developing science in the first place requires pre-scientific scaffolding. A theologically tricky religion about an incarnate God who once walked the Earth was convenient for that. A religion with weird abstract theories about pieces of bread, sips of wine, and scoops of water led people to expect the physical world to run on hidden principles that might be complex and surprising but that could be revealed. I don't think that every religion would have worked as well for that, though there are probably some threads in Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism that might have grown or developed in a direction that worked. I'm more skeptical about Greco-Roman paganism, precisely because of its weak claims to knowledge. I don't see how such low expectations would ever get you to science.

*I learned to appreciate this point by watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A motif in the film, that was not in the original play, is that basic physics experiments keep accidentally happening in the background, and failing. For example there are a bunch of clay jars hanging on strings in a line, just like a Newton's Cradle, but when somebody swings the end jar against the next one, it just breaks. It's a profound truth that the simple, bedrock laws of nature, on which everything runs, are hard to discern just by looking at nature. They only work as advertised under quite artificial circumstances, like hanging up a row, not of clay jars, but of steel balls that will bounce without breaking or sticking. To find out what matter is made of, you need a miles-long tunnel full of superconducting magnets. Science is like money that way. You need to have some to make some.

[Morley]

The world went on a long time without developing science, so it might have been inevitable eventually in some other cultural context than Christendom, but it might have taken a long time.

....

Developing science in the first place requires pre-scientific scaffolding. A theologically tricky religion about an incarnate God who once walked the Earth was convenient for that. A religion with weird abstract theories about pieces of bread, sips of wine, and scoops of water led people to expect the physical world to run on hidden principles that might be complex and surprising but that could be revealed. I don't think that every religion would have worked as well for that, though there are probably some threads in Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism that might have grown or developed in a direction that worked. I'm more skeptical about Greco-Roman paganism, precisely because of its weak claims to knowledge. I don't see how such low expectations would ever get you to science.

The idea that science could never have developed under the pagan Greeks only works if you don't count the contributions of Aristarchus of Samos, Pythagoras, Posidonius, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Hipparchus as science.

Physics Guy, I don't know, but you seem to be working with a variation of what used to be called the Conflict Thesis.

[Physics Guy]

Ancient thinkers contributed to pure mathematics, all right, and also made a few sound observations about the world, such as concluding that it was round. Somehow they hit a ceiling and didn't get any further, though. Perhaps their religious context wasn't the limiting factor and they just ran out of time in an economic window of opportunity, and the post-Renaissance Europeans had to take the next steps.

I think that's underestimating how difficult it is to get to the kind of science that began with Newton and has kept going since. The real laws of nature are all differential equations, and until you get the real thing, nothing else works well enough to justify the effort required. To get the airplane rolling fast enough for takeoff, as it were, you need both high expectations for how precisely a theory can work to describe and predict the real world, and high tolerance for difficulty in discerning that theory. You need to believe that under a big heap of crap there will be a lump of pure gold.

What I see in Ancient Greek knowledge is more either turning away from all the crap of the mundane world, to seek gold in clean, abstract places, or else a contentment with qualitative explanation that wasn't expected to make precise predictions. If we expect the work of Euclid or Archimedes to lead to Newton just by keeping on going, I think we take too much for granted because we live after Newton. The whole idea that anything like natural science should exist was bizarre, before we knew it was true. Who would ever guess that the complex and unpredictable world that we see is exactly determined by laws that are simple in their own way but have nothing to do with human intuition?

Starting modern science is like discovering a levitation spell that happens when you hold a one-hand handstand for a minute while chewing candied ginger. Who would ever think of trying that combination? People in a society that was crazy for ginger and calisthenics would; lifting off from the ground after that minute of upside-down chewing might even be just the kind of thing they were expecting to happen at some point, as they tuned their muscles and digestions to perfection. In hindsight, with the whole world hovering to work and back along the gymnastics tracks chomping ginger, we might all think Duh, you do the handstand and chew the ginger, of course, why didn't they notice that earlier? It was really bizarre and quixotic, however, until it actually worked, and the discovery that it did work owed a lot to the prior cultural coincidence of gymnastics and ginger.

Instead of ginger and handstands, of course, it was a culture in which someone like Kepler could be driven to labor for years to discern unifying principles in the motions of the planets, and yet ultimately accept that the principles might be as odd and unsatisfying as elliptical orbits and a fixed ratio between odd powers of year length and mean orbit radius. "Of course, that makes so much sense, and it resonates with all my best human impulses toward perfection and kindness"—said nobody ever. Kepler's laws offered no payoff at all of the kinds for which people have looked to philosophy.

What they offered instead, and what kept Kepler going, was a completely different kind of payoff: perfect quantitative fit with decades of measurements that were far more precise than anyone practically needed. All those unnecessary digits of precision worked as a checksum for the elliptical laws, confirming that although they were weird, they were right. The kingdom of God has drawn nigh: it's there in the sixth decimal place. Precision is an oracle to reveal the alien laws of reality. Who knew the universe worked like that?

I don't think this view is the Conflict Thesis. It's closer to opposite to it: the view that certain kinds of religious thinking can work as a womb in which science can grow.

[Chap]

Ancient thinkers contributed to pure mathematics, all right, and also made a few sound observations about the world, such as concluding that it was round. Somehow they hit a ceiling and didn't get any further, though. Perhaps their religious context wasn't the limiting factor and they just ran out of time in an economic window of opportunity, and the post-Renaissance Europeans had to take the next steps.

Later in your post you go some way towards qualifying what you say in your first paragraph. But since this is just a discussion board, perhaps I might just hang one short point on what do you say in that paragraph. It's this: it can be confusing and misleading to talk about people in other times and other cultures in ways that suggest, however tacitly, that what those people did should be judged on how far it was "a step towards modern science". If they did make what we judge to be such a step, then we set ourselves the problem of explaining what it was that stopped them getting any further. And so on. Pushed to its logical conclusion this way of thinking risks ending up ignoring what it was that the people in question were actually trying to do, and judging their success or failure by criteria they would have found quite alien.

[Morley]

I don't think this view is the Conflict Thesis. It's closer to opposite to it: the view that certain kinds of religious thinking can work as a womb in which science can grow.

Conflict thesis puts science and religion at odds, with science in a needed fight against religion. Your variety of Conflict Thesis still makes the dynamic irreplaceable, as you use religion (esp. Christianity) as the necessary laboratory for scientific enquiry. It's still the same species.

[Morley]

Later in your post you go some way towards qualifying what you say in your first paragraph. But since this is just a discussion board, perhaps I might just hang one short point on what do you say in that paragraph. It's this: it can be confusing and misleading to talk about people in other times and other cultures in ways that suggest, however tacitly, that what those people did should be judged on how far it was "a step towards modern science". If they did make what we judge to be such a step, then we set ourselves the problem of explaining what it was that stopped them getting any further. And so on. Pushed to its logical conclusion this way of thinking risks ending up ignoring what it was that the people in question were actually trying to do, and judging their success or failure by criteria they would have found quite alien.

Well said.

[Morley]

Ancient thinkers contributed to pure mathematics, all right, and also made a few sound observations about the world, such as concluding that it was round.

Contributed to mathematics. Ha.