Alan Cromer’s “Uncommon Sense”- Why the Greeks invented science – and nobody else did. I HIGHLY recommend this book!
SCIENCE:
The Greeks discovered it, and the modern world developed it into a juggernaut of daily discovery: a species-wide, universal, naturalistic, collective learning machine employed so successfully in the last 200 years or so in explaining how the world really works – in place of the wholly imaginative and very parochial, magico-religious approaches that have dominated human civilization for millennia.
Each culture in the past 5,000 years or so had its own gods and origin stories. Ever notice how everybody’s gods are on the order of thousands of years old? Seems like nowadays we don’t do that so much anymore, i.e. create new spiritual agents and origin stories about just “our people”, making up imaginary stuff about “our gods” that run the world. That seems to be a thing of the past. We believe mostly in very old gods, and don’t make many new ones up.
OK, So Scientology’s Xenu was a more recent invention, but the writer and founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, admitted right up front he was making it all up in order to start a new religion – and in 1955! I guess he got bored with calling the fruits of his imagination just “science fiction”.
The worlds largest religions: the “Big Four” of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (in order of number of adherents), each having hundreds of millions to a billion or so members, all date from about 1,000 BC to 600 AD. Only a few very small, regional, religions, most less than 1% of the size of these four world-wide religions were invented in the last few hundred years: Mormonism, Scientology, Shintoism, Cao Dai, and Sikhism, among others.
So, most of the world’s religions, and the largest ones, date to Classical and Bronze Age times. The earliest Sumerian and Egyptian gods are no longer worshiped, despite the religion of Ancient Egypt hanging on for over 3,000 years. It is forever gone now, despite it lasting over 1,000 years longer than Christianity and twice as long as Islam thus far. Nobody believes in or prays to Osiris and Amun-Ra. And nobody is making up new such creatures to worship that would take their place. We don’t make up grand mythologies to explain how the world works anymore. For most of us on the planet if we believe at all, it is only in really old gods and myths.
Why is that?
Two good reasons, I suspect.
1. Child indoctrination – or rather the lack thereof – kills any and all religions. Without kids being taught that Osiris rose from the dead (sound familiar?) no-one believes in him, or that by being a good person your heart will be light enough after you die, weighed on a scale against the feather of the goddess of truth and order – Maat, so that you will live forever in the afterlife: with all of this dutifully recorded by the scribe-god Thoth. BUT if your heart is heavy with bad deeds, the crocodile god Sobek will devour it and that’s it pal – no eternal life for you! That was once the reigning conception of how the afterlife works, believed by one of the largest populations of people on the earth – for well over 3,000 years!
Sounds silly, eh? You bet. No-one teaches that particular mythology to children anymore to believe in as unquestioned religious truth, and SO – NOBODY believes in it anymore.
But how sillier is it, than the idea that a blood sacrifice through gruesome crucifixion of a son of some god, who was somehow born from a mother who never had sex (yup, the tale of the Jewish zombie and the Virgin Birth), who had to rise from the dead to absolve you of a sin you never committed, by a god who will burn you forever in fiery torment if you don’t believe in him and him only- but who loves you? Without this “gift” of torturing His only Son to death, you would not be saved, and instead fry forever in his hell – no matter if you were a caring, honest, good person – or a scoundrel. Is that some fucked-up mythology or what? But for nearly 2 billion Christians it is unquestioned as how things really are – it is their normal.
Fucked up? Absurd? Primitive and barbaric?
YOU BET IT IS!!
But if you were raised Christian it is easily be as accepted as totally true just as a crocodile god eating up your sinful heart was to an Ancient Egyptian…just sayin’
Hell, I’d rather take my chance against the feather! At least being a good person would have guaranteed me a peaceful afterlife.
So when you AREN’T indoctrinated into any of them as as child – then religions disappear to their rightly place on the mythology shelf as is depicted in the banner at the top of this website. Just like Ancient Egyptian Mythology, Roman and Greek Mythology -the Bible is aptly re-named “Hebrew Mythology,” and the Koran accordingly –“Arabic Mythology”. ‘Nuff said.
2. Science, I believe, is the second good reason (and maybe the best one), that we no longer make up fanciful stories full of miracles and supernatural agents: due to its phenomenal success at actually explaining the world and the utter failures of religions to explain anything. Nobody bothers to try to make up a new god or gods to explain anything anymore. Telling isn’t it?
Collective human knowledge that concentrates on this life and not some supposed afterlife also tends to enable normal human empathy as well in demonstrating that all humans are one species and truly one tribe – without religious division, discrimination, and persecution. Hypothesizing, testing, verifying, and sharing knowledge that works for all of us on the planet actually does explain our daily reality: saying some “god did it” doesn’t.
Nobody’s gods ever showed up, nobody’s mythology ever explained how the wind blows, or the grass grows. It is yet true that a significant majority of the world’s population still believes in gods and religious claims, and due solely to child indoctrination. Most still identify with one religion or another. However, even with the near-ubiquity of child indoctrination into one ancient belief or another, the next largest group after Christianity and Islam is the non-believers or “Nones”- those unaffiliated with any religion. Many ‘Nones” yet believe in some sort of nebulous, higher power, but they have eschewed any and all particular gods, mythologies, and especially repressive rules for human’s behavior (especially for women and gays) that all religions contain to some degree.
Although many students of the past assume religion may go back 10’s of thousands of years, well into the Late Paleolithic and Ice Age Europe of 12,000-40,000 years ago, there is precious little evidence for that assumption. Religion as we do know of it, does go back thousands of years – at least 5,000, back to the Egyptians and Sumerians as noted above.
RELIGION 
VS. 
SCIENCE.
Scientific thinking, science itself is SO NEW by comparison.
Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense makes the case that it is not our default way of thinking. We tend toward agency: imagining person like entities (agents) to be the cause of unexplained things in nature – just as we humans are the causal agents of our own affairs. In addition, we think egocentrically from our own subjective perspective instead of objectively from the perspective of the world outside ourselves, without our selves in it. Objective and naturalistic, eschewing mythological tales full of very human-like agents (gods and spirits) for materialistic, naturalistic explanations: that’s what science does.
Since science is not our normal way of thinking, we had to learn to adopt it over our tendency towards agency and our egocentric perspective. As a Developmental Psychologist, I wholeheartedly agree – agency is our default mode of explanation and it starts around age 5. But I think also that logical, hypothesis-test thinking, operating in the day-to-day natural realm of having to survive, is natural to us as well. We had to learn over the millennia (and are still learning), that one way of thinking doesn’t work so pretty good. In fact, agency and mythologies suck at explaining anything and we are in the midst of slowly jettisoning even more aspects of egocentric agency with every passing decade. We have become incomparably less religious as a species in the last 400 years. And that lessening reliance on magico-religious explanation has only accelerated in the last nearly 200 years – since the mid-1800’s with daily, institutionalized science cranking out its advances, both practical and theoretical.
To me it is very understandable that most folks on the planet are still enamored with religious ideas and explanations, and indoctrinate their children, just as they were, into one religion or another, all the while simultaneously embracing all that science has given them. The absolute explosion of science successfully explaining our world and our place in it IS so damn new in comparison to magico-religious thinking and mythological explanation. Science is now as entrenched in our daily life and culture as religious thought, which hangs solely through child indoctrination.
Consider this: back in late Antiquity when Ancient Egyptian, Hinduism, Roman, and Greek religions were all in full swing and Christianity just beginning, everyone was religious and believed in dozens, even hundreds of gods. That was our normal back then. And the Ancient Four as I’ll call them, were the main religions of the time: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam hadnt been invented yet. Just think about that.
Nowadays with the dominance of Christianity and Islam, and somewhat “godless” Buddhism as one of the Big Four of modern times, only Hinduism and many tribal religions remain polytheistic. Monotheism is what’s for dinner. But, also consider the fact that Secularism (the non-religious “Nones”) is now bigger than Hinduism or Buddhism! Non-belief is smack dab in the middle of the “Big Five” belief systems, if I may call them that: Secularism and the Big Four religions. Scientific thinking which is the primary perspective driving non-belief in religion, while comparatively new as worldwide phenomenon, has certainly had its effect.
Thanks to adopting the scientific approach, we have eradicated most childhood diseases in the last half century, we are feeding nearly 8 billion humans out of the 8.2 billion alive on the planet today, and most of us enjoy A/C, clean water, 24/7 entertainment, advanced medical care, and the worlds knowledge in the palm of our hands. Over 6.5 billion of us are connected in some way to the web. Yes, greater than 2/3 of humans on the planet have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop connected to all the rest of us AND ALL OUR KNOWLEDGE through the Internet.
Religion got us none of this.
Although the Greeks of 600BC – 150AD developed the theoretical inquiry and naturalistic explanation perspective that underlies all science, modern science as practiced by close to 10 million working scientists today, and understood and appreciated by even the most religious of us, didn’t take off until the 1800’s – when science and scientists became institutionalized in governments, universities, and other corporate and public entities dedicated solely to research. We take this worldwide enterprise of systematic, naturalistic dedicated inquiry for granted now in the 2020’s, but compared to ensconced religious thinking and the various faiths that dominate our societies – modern, international science is in its infancy. It took roughly 2,000 years to explode onto the scene the way it has in the last 200 years.
Dr. Cromer lists 4 criteria explaining why it took so long to catch on: that made science take off during and after the 1600’s in Europe, and NOT in India, China, the Muslim empire, Ancient Rome, Egypt, or Babylon, despite significant mathematical, technological, even scientific advances in these cultures previously.
1. Rediscovery of Greek thought in Renaissance Europe.
2. The rise of independent city-states – refuges of independent thought free from religious hegemony and the existence of a large merchant class that valued education and progress
3. Low cost, accessible printing in service to a public market-selling books for the dissemination of information to the general public and education of the common man.
4. Thousands of scientists seeking knowledge independently of a controlling monarchy or church.
Naturalistic, evidence based theorizing practiced by individuals free from religious or government control, coupled with the spread of new scientific ideas and discoveries by printing of books that were not constrained to solely bureaucratic record keeping (as in Dynastic China) exploded throughout post-Renaissance Europe.
Science then, finally took off to reach its modern form in the late 1800’s with the widespread expansion of Universities in the US and Europe, leading to the presence of science laboratories worldwide in educational, commercial, and private institutions.
Today, in the 2020’s we have nearly 10 million scientists working on every problem imaginable – and more research PhD’s granted all over the globe than ever before: over 400,000 new PhD’s awarded annually. From its beginnings in Classical Greece to its expansion during the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, science and scientific thinking have become a hallmark of human achievement and a progression of modern thought
But it is yet so new, compared to the entrenched and self-perpetuating religious way of explaining the world.
Science then, is systematic observation of the natural world, with theory and hypothesis of material entities NOT agents (gods or spirits) proposed and discovered as the causes of things, with testing against reality in this world, not some spiritual realm, and finally, worldwide public sharing and critiquing of the knowledge gained. And it works for everybody – all humans.
Science is not religious mythology full of gods to be worshiped in celestial realms largely within one culture or another.
One man’s mythology is another man’s religion.
Without child indoctrination they’re all just mythologies – there is no religious belief. All religions can be easily seen for what they are from the outside, when you are not brought up in one. They are just the silly and imaginative stories full of fantastical agents and fanciful rituals they appear to be.
But science, the method, and all the scientific knowledge gained by that method, works for every person on the planet.
One person’s science is everyone’s science.
I’m DAMN glad the Greeks found it and the Renaissance merchants and thinkers rediscovered it and the 18th century natural philosophers and industrialists made it a way of life.
Here’s hoping it utterly replaces ridiculous, arrogant, delusional, and repressive religious thought in another 200 years.
end religion now.
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