Did the Ancient Greeks do religion better?

[dastardly stem]

This feels like a miss to me. focusing on ancient Greek thought and trying to extrapolate it forward as if it too wouldn't have developed and created an atmosphere for science seems silly. Indeed, as the opening post points out, ancient Greek myths may have actually helped create an atmosphere more amenable than Christianity did. Perhaps no scientist would have been murdered as it developed. Perhaps an attitude of openness would have allowed many more to jump on board and help develop our sciences. We'd never know.

If we took the predecessor of Christian thought--ancient israel (Well let's be more accurate Greek, Roman and many other influences) and attempted to extrapolate forward to today, would we ever really arrive at science as we have today? Theoretically? The same practice put on Greeks would have to apply, you'd think. Science came about not because of Christianity, it seems to me, you know that religion that tried and continues to try to stamp out the practice as if it is a great evil. Why would that be any different if some form of Greek myth prevailed way back when and carried on to today?

PG says:

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?

The God of the Bible was a serial rapist too. He had a body, came around to eat the people's food, steal their women, and tell them to murder and maim, and did some murdering and maiming himself. So many attempted thinkers were murdered in ancient Israel all the way through Christianity. Sex has been a mainstay issue for defaming, torturing and killing women within and because of Christianity. I don't see what in the world any ancient Greek myth has to do with this, particularly if their follies were simply par for the course, particularly when compared to Christianity.

The problem here is we can't go back and replay the world, so we'd never know. But it seems silly for us to pretend to know. We don't know if a Newton would have arrived on the scene hundreds of years before our Newton did, if Christianity died before it started like many other silly mythical stories before and after. Since we don't know, surely it could have gone the other way. Maybe we'd still be stuck with classical mechanics or something, waiting for the ideas and discoveries that moved science forward. It could very well be, if Christianity died, we'd be much further along in our progress today than we are. So I see no problem at all wondering about the virtuous tenants of another, wondering what would be if it had prevailed. Ah well....I'll consider what more gets said, but this seems like a miss to me.

[huckelberry]

Indeed, as the opening post points out, ancient Greek myths may have actually helped create an atmosphere more amenable than Christianity did. Perhaps no scientist would have been murdered as it developed. Perhaps an attitude of openness would have allowed many more to jump on board and help develop our sciences. We'd never know.

,....... Science came about not because of Christianity, it seems to me, you know that religion that tried and continues to try to stamp out the practice as if it is a great evil.

Stem, I think I can imagine with you that science could have developed in a world without Christianity. Speculation is a bit uncertain and a number of influences could be involved.

I am not remembering scientists murdered. It is a big world and a long time so there could be someone I am not remembering. I am unfamiliar with a form of Christianity fighting against science. There are some fundamentalist groups fighting specific ideas and I do not think their efforts contribute to science. They are happy to support science otherwise. There exist enough small groups with extreme ideas that it is possible some group or individual in a basement preaches against science. I am unaware of an example.

[DrStakhanovite]

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.

I too sometimes forgot that Aristotle basically started the field of embryology and that his naked eye descriptions of how chick embryos developed, based on hundreds of detailed dissections he did himself, remained in textbooks until the 1800s when microscopes had advanced far enough to replace him. I mean, he basically *invented* the modern practice of taxonomy and organized animals into hierarchies based on their anatomy and behavior.

Not very scientific.

[DrStakhanovite]

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.

I think this highlights just how distant we are from the Greeks and I don’t mean temporally either; they had a conception and form of life that is frankly alien to us. Is it better? I’m not sure, I’m hesitant to take it that far myself simply because I’ve been born into and immersed in modern forms of religious life that I can’t be sure if I find the differences refreshing because they are so different or because they are better.

I suppose it depends on the metric we have in mind.

[Chap]

Well, it depends what you call a "scientist". Leaving aside the fact that the word was not invented until the 19th century, I suppose you might think of Giordano Bruno as a possible example. However, many historians would argue that he was not condemned for his views about the natural world, but rather for his theological opinions.

[Symmachus]

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.

I have a parallel reaction to claims made of understanding divine will or claims made upon me for my time and money that are couched in terms of divine will, yet I don't think even religious people really think about divine will, and that it is more of a rhetorical relic or sometimes little more than the a fragment of some impotent ritual (like a patriarchal blessing). "God wants you to be happy" or "ask god what you should do" or "god wants you to clean the church on Saturday" are not really how the Greeks understood divine will; it's a question of the human position in the cosmic order. They go to oracles not to ask what they should do but to see whether what they want to do is acceptable to the scheming minds of the gods or not. The assumption is that there is a divine will or wills behind it, and they want to try to see if doing x or y will offend them or not.

I sympathize with the emphasis on the un-knowability of divine will as a counterweight to such claims, but I would not emphasize one over the other here: it's not the un-knowability alone that matters. Greeks felt compelled to search out divine will anyway, or at least to acknowledge it as a substantial fact. It's not just un-knowability that is characteristically Greek; it's the combination of un-knowability tied to an unquestionable assumption that there is a divine will operating in the world.

The first lines of the Iliad, the fount of Greek culture, literally tell us that everything we're about to behold is the unfolding of Zeus's will—and yet none of the characters quite get it until near the end, if at all, a mirror of our own situation. It is gradually apprehended by the most heroic of them. Until then, they're all wondering just what the hell is going on—why this plague? why is Zeus tricking me with deceitful dreams?—but there is no Samides Harristeus or Richardion Dawkinseles to urge anyone to discount or discard divine because of its ultimate un-knowability.

I understand the motivation behind the implicit criticism here of ecclesiastic Christianity, but I myself find little to admire or emulate in an un-knowability that doesn't assume there to be a thing that is actually unknown. It seems hybristic, perhaps incoherent: if there is no divine will, there is nothing that can be "unknown" about it, so let's just think about what we humans can know (e.g. Protagoras), which effectively means we can ignore the rest—quite contrary to Greek thought. The un-knowabilty inherent to Greek religious understanding was not a performative, one-way denial but an extension of the deep conviction that so much of human life was intimately subject to the will of divine forces—Zeus, Tyche, or whoever—though they just happen to be beyond the bounds of full comprehension. That tension is the epistemic situation of tragedy.

The context is inaccessible to me, but I would want to mercilessly probe one thing that I-S writes: "the perception that the 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." Whose perception? And it at least depends on the kind of change we're talking about, and which polis. This reads to me as if there is an assumption lurking here, that liberal pluralism is embryonic in Greek attitudes about religion (set up in the obvious opposition to Christianity/Judaism/Islam here), which many people want to believe. I can't help scratching the itch in my mind: which "open to change' polis does she have in mind here? The endless social strife of the only polis she could be seriously attributing this to (Athens) doesn't present a society open to change on the basis of, well, "ultimately we don't know about the gods." Openness to (social) change is a very anachronistic way to describe any pre-modern society, to put it kindly, let alone a Greek polis.

I too sometimes forgot that Aristotle basically started the field of embryology and that his naked eye descriptions of how chick embryos developed, based on hundreds of detailed dissections he did himself, remained in textbooks until the 1800s when microscopes had advanced far enough to replace him. I mean, he basically *invented* the modern practice of taxonomy and organized animals into hierarchies based on their anatomy and behavior.

Not very scientific.

Yes, of course, but did it develop much after Aristotle until the High Middle Ages? That's the issue Physics Guy is raising, if I understand him, not whether there weren't some great scientists in antiquity. It seems like there was a ceiling. There are huge developments even in the short span between Galileo to Newton, but by comparison we have Aristotle and then not much of an advance until the around the early thirteenth century with Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, a bit earlier in the Islamic world (another monotheistic culture). I wouldn't disagree if the response is that Aristotle was just that brilliant. But it was also probably hard to get research grants for most of that period after Aristotle, though not as hard as today, obviously.

[Kishkumen]

Fantastic posts! Thanks to everyone who picked up this conversation while I was busy with work and family. I did not intend to post and run.

Dear consul, your post was especially rich and thought-provoking—of those I have had time to read this far. It seems to me that I-S must be aware of the fact that she is approaching this topic with the benefit of historical hindsight. Were all ancient Greeks participating in an ideal religious system? None were. Furthermore, the concept of the polis system of religion, while useful, has real problems, imho. That said, I like to imagine a world in which religious doctrinal purity is not even a concept, let alone something one might imagine the state getting involved in. So, is this implicitly a criticism of Christianity? Undoubtedly. That is obviously a key element of the history and continuing practice of scholarship on Greek and Roman religions. It is almost impossible to escape that critical discourse.

So, yes, this is a highly opinionated post drawing on scholarship that, while useful in some ways, is obviously written with Christianity somewhere in the background. That is why I posted it here. I did not post it with the idea that Ancient Greece was a utopia.

ETA: I don't think the unknowability S-I talks about is used in an absolute sense. Surely, S-I is aware that tragedy shows gods knowing things that humans learn too late but might have known earlier. But if we think of the wedding of state authority to absolute confidence in one oracle, be it a text or a person, then, I don't think the Greeks really had that. S-I talks about people, including states, consulting oracles but then consulting other oracles to confirm or get another perspective.

To PG's point about Socrates, he is the one instance I can recall of an Athenian of his time being prosecuted for atheism. The case of Socrates is not a very straightforward example of state enforcement of an authoritative religious point of view. The political motivations for prosecuting him were complicated, and the reference to his atheism in the charges against him is anomalous.

[Res Ipsa]

At my unsophisticated, dumbed down level, it seems to me that the prerequisites for the evolution of modern science includes a belief that (1) the universe operates according to unchanging rules and that (2) those rules can be discovered through experimentation. It seems reasonable to me to view Christianity during the "dark ages" as an environment that could foster those beliefs. During that period, with the exception of miracles, I think the general notion was our universe (such as it was understood) functioned through the operation of God's laws, which were indeed discoverable by people. Indeed, there was seems to have been a notion that studying and uncovering the laws of God (or nature) was in fact a way to almost worship God.

When conflict arose, it is when the discovery of some specific law of God appeared to be in conflict with some religious dogma or other. But those conflicts do not mean, to my understanding, that the Christian view of God's laws did not create an environment that facilitated the development of science.

I have no understanding at all about what it was like to be a Greek thinking about Greek Gods. If the Greeks viewed themselves as being at the mercy of of the whims of capricious Gods to the point that they didn't view the universe as being operated by a set of discoverable laws, I could see Greek religion as being an impediment to developing science. But I don't think that would be consistent with the discoveries that have been discussed so far. They seemed to view mathematics as a set of laws or rules that were unchaining. They used Geometry to show that the earth was round and, if I recall correctly, estimated its size. Given that we can't rerun history without Christianity, I can't see my way clear to reach any firm conclusions.

Still, interesting to try and figure it all out. Or at least maybe a small piece.

[Morley]

I think it more likely that the invention of movable type played a bigger role in bringing about the Scientific Revolution than Christianity.

I guess that I don't see the stable, discoverable, cause-and-effect Christian worldview that some of you do. The Medieval Christian god who preceded the Enlightenment was arbitrary, fickle, and malevolent--a deliverer of unpredictable plague, war, and famine. How this is a substantively different god from the deities presented in Homer?



edit: I'm not sure that the case has been made that any religion was necessary--as either scaffolding or foil--for the development of science.

[Kishkumen]

Yes, I would not try to make the case that any religion is necessary for science. People who participated in religious cultures did much for science. Early Greek philosophers must be indispensable entries on such a list.