So most of the time on these forums when I am trying to explain that religion plays a negative role in human advancement people aren’t understanding, this isn’t just some made up thing to use as an argument, it is true and happening, it has happened and it will never not happen from what I can see.
This is more to do with the creationism and god aspect of religions, it has to do with comforts.
It is about people reaching a ‘religious’ experience at the limits of their knowledge, coincidence? I don’t think so, it is hard embedded in humanity to find the answers and if they cannot find the answers, they will create them for security, comfort, etc.
Now let’s give a few historical examples of how this happened, in turn delaying evolution, science, discovery, etc. People invoking creationisn/god/religion from not knowing.
Ptolemy - AD 150 - A man who had the best explanations in his era for how our solar system worked, the cycles, etc. He was Arabic, well look at that… that isn’t much of a surprise is it?
― Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Almagest
Beautifully poetic, yes.
So here we have Ptolemy projecting an emotional/religious feeling at the limits of his knowledge, and this is a trend that will continue for 2,000+ years to follow this. This quote is invoking intelligent design/god instead of a scientific answer. Aka, creating an answer so one may be comfortable with knowing. All he had was a picture.
Moving on…
Galileo - 1615
Letter to Christina Grand Duchess of Tuscany
A few lines he wrote in his letter to the above.
Pretty self explanatory, he was a religious man by the way.
Isaac Newton - 1687
The Principia
An impeccably brilliant man, possibly the greatest mind to have ever walked the planet.
in his page one of the Principia he discovers the laws of motion, f = ma, laws of gravitation, etc. He did this all before he turned 26. When he talks about motion, there is no reference to god, his two body force that he deduced there is no mention to god. Even though before him the understanding of the motion of the planets was given unto god. No body before him understood well enough to really believe they had a full predictive handle on it, in the way the universal laws of gravitation really apply.
So here we have Isaac Newton abandoning reference to god until he realizes that if all you do is calculate the two body problem, here we have the moon and Earth, he calculated, the Sun and the Earth, etc. So what happened is he ended up reaching his limits after the question became too complex, he realized he couldn’t solve it all using two body calculations, he needed a different system of mathematics, he ends up saying
- Isaac Newton in Principia
In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. What he wants is data, inferr’d from the phænomena. But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton invokes God.
A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton’s dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. Sire, Laplace replied, I have no need of that hypothesis.
Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God—or the gods—wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor, look above for his quote.
Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover’d, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets’ relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion—even though a mere century earlier, before Newton’s achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.
Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that’s where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That’s where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life’s complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:
Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps—which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people’s knowledge.
I have to add in Al ghazali at some point as well, but I don’t feel like it right now.
Also, I want you all to look at the time delay from Isaac Newton to Laplace. How long it takes for Laplace to solve Newtons problem in history.