For Fun, how would medieval world been if science rather than religion ruled?

rjh01 said:
I want to respond to this. Two issues.
1. The dark ages ended no later than 1000AD not in 1450 or so as per your reference. I note the achievements listed all date to after this date. Ref: https://www.britannica.com/event/Dark-Ages.
2. Americans (both north and south) had no hope of becoming technologically advanced. The reason is that they did not have enough varieties of domestic animals, not to mention wheat, in order to get wealthy enough to develop the necessary technology.
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The use of the terms dark ages is grossly outdated.
 
In the end, the real answer is that it's nigh impossible to give a meaningful answer. Religion and its effects were far, far too pervasive and mixed to be able to meaningfully separate them from the happenings of the time and, if one is going to try to replace it wholesale, it'll tend to be a rather arbitrary and bias-confirming method of substitution, given how people work. One positive thing that can be said about the "dark ages," at last check, was that that was a time period when morality broadly shifted focus and developed in the region to something notably more recognizable to us today. It can also be said that this was a shift that would be dramatically less likely with the various kinds of pressures that the prevailing religion(s) added to the mix. Just think of what things would be like if exceedingly nationalistic conquerors who had no problem at all with even using nukes on their enemies had arisen hundreds of years earlier?
 
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Here is an interesting article about Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, "cultist" mathematician during the "dark ages" who made invaluable contributions to the development of algebra and trigonometry. His work was translated by Robert of Chester who worked under his patron Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi

Jeepers, I hope I am using "cultist" and "dark ages" correctly!
 
The Christian Dark Age and Other Hysterical Myths

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person's grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.
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The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews “God’s Philosophers”

Link

Fortunately on this critical thinking site for skeptics, no one seriously advocates on behalf of such myths.

Off to rake the leaves with fellow members of my cult.
 
It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that science advances civilization. They advance each other. After the fall of Rome, there was no civilization that could continue to advance science significantly--the resources that Rome had access to were so far ahead of everybody else for almost 1000 years.
 
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People always find justification for treating others like crap. Society doesn't operate on either religion or science alone. Social dynamics, cultural preferences and whatnot play a huge role.
If after the fall of the Roman Empire, instead of Christianity, a belief in science had become the dominant ideology, we might have ended up with a prosperous utopia, or an industrialized totalitarian hellhole.

And since I doubt that emperors, kings and warlords would have given up their power if only they had had steam engines, effective healthcare or chemical weapons at their disposal, I'm not very optimistic :P
 
The Big Dog said:
Yes, I understood that the question was what would happen in the absence of Christianity/organized religion, and answered on that basis.

Again, my analysis is that the most rational way of looking at the hypothetical you posed is to look at the least organized religion society at the same time, and apply that to human civilization as a whole.

I think the pre-Columbian natives of North America stand in very nicely, don't you?
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Or perhaps pre-Columbian South America? ;)

However, I would rather look at China, which has had a continuous non-theistic (albeit not non-religious) culture for about 3,500 years.

What we see is a roughly parallel development.

China starts technology, both bronze, iron, and ceramic technology earlier than Europe.

In the early centuries AD, China is ahead on textiles and chemistry (think silk, gunpowder), shipping, and cosmology.

Medieval times (~1,000 - 1,500) AD, they're very much even, China builds great palaces and the Great Wall, Europe builds castles and cathedrals.

After that, China is bugged down in political senility and conservatism and misses the real leap of science.

Late 20th century China takes the bloody, but effective route over socialism, to shed the old shackles of feudalism (and eventually exchanges it with the equally suppressing, but far less bloody and even more effective meritocracy).

Now, China is busy catching up, and making quite good headway. Another half century or so, assuming continued relative world peace, and they will be well ahead on nearly all accounts.

Hans
 
Porpoise of Life said:
People always find justification for treating others like crap. Society doesn't operate on either religion or science alone. Social dynamics, cultural preferences and whatnot play a huge role.
If after the fall of the Roman Empire, instead of Christianity, a belief in science had become the dominant ideology, we might have ended up with a prosperous utopia, or an industrialized totalitarian hellhole.

And since I doubt that emperors, kings and warlords would have given up their power if only they had had steam engines, effective healthcare or chemical weapons at their disposal, I'm not very optimistic :P
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I'm not sure science could have progressed much faster than it did. In some cases, it was hampered by religious authorities, but other science was indeed made in religious circles, if only because they were the ones commanding the resources.

Science is a succession of interdependent steps. You can't build a steam engine till you can make steel components. You can't build cannons or aircraft unless you have certain skills. Look at Da Vinci: Plenty of ideas, but very limited practical implementation.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
.........China...... exchanges it with the equally suppressing, but far less bloody and even more effective meritocracy.......
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Sorry, I'm not following. Are you claiming that China is a meritocracy?
 
The Big Dog said:
I proposed that in the absence of religion, society would not have developed beyond hunter gatherer societies prevalent in pre-Colombian America that were not "burdened" by organized religion. Any thought on that?
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Yes. It is possible. Unless they were "burdened" with some other kind of organisation. Like the Chinese. Like the Egyptians.


Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
I'm not sure science could have progressed much faster than it did. In some cases, it was hampered by religious authorities, but other science was indeed made in religious circles, if only because they were the ones commanding the resources.

Science is a succession of interdependent steps. You can't build a steam engine till you can make steel components. You can't build cannons or aircraft unless you have certain skills. Look at Da Vinci: Plenty of ideas, but very limited practical implementation.

Hans
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Good points. But perhaps if the intellectual and financial resources at the time were directed towards scientific advancement rather than religion?
Not sure the level of motivation would be the same or not, but supposing, just for fun it was? What if all the monks were scientists instead? :)
 
MikeG said:
Sorry, I'm not following. Are you claiming that China is a meritocracy?
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No. Wrong word, sorry. Officially it's an oligarchy, but I was trying to express something else: One where you let those with success lead the way.

Hans
 
Without religion, the techniques for building might not have reached the heights they did, I'm also wondering if religion had a part to play in advancements in metallurgy and or mining at the time.
 
alexi_drago said:
Without religion, the techniques for building might not have reached the heights they did, I'm also wondering if religion had a part to play in advancements in metallurgy and or mining at the time.
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"the techniques for building might not have reached the heights they did."

Ha! Nice one.
 
The Sparrow said:
Admittedly this is not an original concept. We see it in the rock band Rush's early period, and lord knows star wars is full of medieval parallels.

What might it have been like in medieval times were there no christianity, no theism or religion in general.

Rather, naturalism and scientific study and discovery ruled the day.
I'm not suggesting they would have more advanced technology than they had, just that their ultimate 'authority' for knowledge would be different. What do ya think? How would that look?
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The Renaissance would have happened several hundred years earlier.
 
CORed said:
The Renaissance would have happened several hundred years earlier.
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Considering that the several Renaissance periods were primarily cultural and were immensely benefited by the revival of the Classics through Monasteries, it is questionable whether they would have happened at all.
 
alexi_drago said:
Without religion, the techniques for building might not have reached the heights they did,
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Or war. Fortifications come before churches.

I'm also wondering if religion had a part to play in advancements in metallurgy and or mining at the time.
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War was definitely one of the prime motivators behind metallurgy advances. Better weapons got you the wealth to build churches, or helped you keep the wealth you had.
 
MRC_Hans said:
I'm not sure science could have progressed much faster than it did. In some cases, it was hampered by religious authorities, but other science was indeed made in religious circles, if only because they were the ones commanding the resources.

Science is a succession of interdependent steps. You can't build a steam engine till you can make steel components. You can't build cannons or aircraft unless you have certain skills. Look at Da Vinci: Plenty of ideas, but very limited practical implementation.

Hans
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It's not the Middle Ages, but I remember reading a short story in which a scientist built a time machine. Feeling that there wasn't enough appreciation for science in the modern day, he went back to ancient Greece to introduce the great thinkers of the era to things like the modern scientific method, expecting to jumpstart his own era. He made two mistakes:
He tried to inspire them by citing all of the great scientific accomplishments his people had achieved in "a distant land". This led them to conclude that there was no point in studying these things, since someone else had already done them.
He emphasized the amount of hard work needed for true scientific advancement, but they felt that "hard work" was something that the lower classes did.
This had the effect of stalling the study that had originally happened in that period. The time traveler returned home to find an agrarian society centuries behind what had existed when he left, with no ability to maintain or recharge his time machine to try to fix it.

EDIT: "Aristotle and the Gun", by L. Sprague de Camp. The tedious accumulation of experimental knowledge is beneath the dignity of a civilized person.
 
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Armitage72 said:
It's not the Middle Ages, but I remember reading a short story in which a scientist built a time machine. Feeling that there wasn't enough appreciation for science in the modern day, he went back to ancient Greece to introduce the great thinkers of the era to things like the modern scientific method, expecting to jumpstart his own era. He made two mistakes:
He tried to inspire them by citing all of the great scientific accomplishments his people had achieved in "a distant land". This led them to conclude that there was no point in studying these things, since someone else had already done them.
He emphasized the amount of hard work needed for true scientific advancement, but they felt that "hard work" was something that the lower classes did.
This had the effect of stalling the study that had originally happened in that period. The time traveler returned home to find an agrarian society centuries behind what had existed when he left, with no ability to maintain or recharge his time machine to try to fix it.

EDIT: "Aristotle and the Gun", by L. Sprague de Camp. The tedious accumulation of experimental knowledge is beneath the dignity of a civilized person.
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Well, yes. Highlights the problem that you can't just take one chunk out of a culture and replace it with some other and ask how it would work. There is simply no "all else alike" that works here.

Hans
 
Armitage72 said:
It's not the Middle Ages, but I remember reading a short story in which a scientist built a time machine. Feeling that there wasn't enough appreciation for science in the modern day, he went back to ancient Greece to introduce the great thinkers of the era to things like the modern scientific method, expecting to jumpstart his own era. He made two mistakes:
He tried to inspire them by citing all of the great scientific accomplishments his people had achieved in "a distant land". This led them to conclude that there was no point in studying these things, since someone else had already done them.
He emphasized the amount of hard work needed for true scientific advancement, but they felt that "hard work" was something that the lower classes did.
This had the effect of stalling the study that had originally happened in that period. The time traveler returned home to find an agrarian society centuries behind what had existed when he left, with no ability to maintain or recharge his time machine to try to fix it.

EDIT: "Aristotle and the Gun", by L. Sprague de Camp. The tedious accumulation of experimental knowledge is beneath the dignity of a civilized person.
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Thanks for the cite, I'll look it up. (I read his Dinosaur and the Gun many years ago)
 
The Big Dog said:
The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews “God’s Philosophers”

Link

Fortunately on this critical thinking site for skeptics, no one seriously advocates on behalf of such myths.

Off to rake the leaves with fellow members of my cult.
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Thanks for pointing that out; reading the Hannam book now and finding it quite engrossing. He mentions the excavations at Sutton Hoo; looking at some of those artifacts it is pretty obvious that civilization was far more advanced than I would have expected for 600-700 AD.
 
Fact is that Scienctific Progress and Ethical Progress don't seem to be connected, Germany was one of the most scientifically advanced nations on Earth in 1932,and look what happened...
Though I admire HG Wells as a writer,his belief that scientific progress alone would assure Utopia...and his belief that the way to progress was to give total political and ecomomic power to a small group of scientifically trained experts (most obviously shown in "Shape of Things To Come")...is both wrong and dangerous
 
dudalb said:
Fact is that Scienctific Progress and Ethical Progress don't seem to be connected, Germany was one of the most scientifically advanced nations on Earth in 1932,and look what happened...
Though I admire HG Wells as a writer,his belief that scientific progress alone would assure Utopia...and his belief that the way to progress was to give total political and ecomomic power to a small group of scientifically trained experts (most obviously shown in "Shape of Things To Come")...is both wrong and dangerous
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I agree that scientific progress is not a solution to all problems. It will not, on its own defeat discrimination against groups. To get progress you need freedom to think and to think in ways that is different from other people. Then people discover that certain assumptions, that everyone has been making, are wrong. These new ideas can then be accepted only in certain societies such as democracies.
Even discrimination will hurt society and slow down scientific progress. For example if a country rejects Albert Einstein then his ideas would not benefit that country.
If a country has a major grievance against another country (real or imagined) then that country will react. It does not matter who the two countries are. For example the UK and Iceland had a major disagreement about the right of British ships to fish in areas claimed by Iceland. And yes, the UK navy was involved. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars
 
dudalb said:
Fact is that Scienctific Progress and Ethical Progress don't seem to be connected, Germany was one of the most scientifically advanced nations on Earth in 1932,and look what happened...
Though I admire HG Wells as a writer,his belief that scientific progress alone would assure Utopia...and his belief that the way to progress was to give total political and ecomomic power to a small group of scientifically trained experts (most obviously shown in "Shape of Things To Come")...is both wrong and dangerous
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Amen. As a kid I loved the idea that the Science Council ruled Krypton in the Superman comics. But scientists are unlikely to be great leaders.
 
Brainster said:
Amen. As a kid I loved the idea that the Science Council ruled Krypton in the Superman comics. But scientists are unlikely to be great leaders.
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Back around the time of the 2008 election, Michael Savage (insanity warning!) was playing a clip from Bill Maher on his radio show in which Maher was complaining about the lack of basic scientific knowledge among politicians and how it affects their policy decisions.
Savage's response was "You want scientists running the country? Hitler was a scientist. Is that the kind of person you want running things?"
Leaving aside the Godwin, I don't know where he got the idea that Hitler was a scientist. But, it was Michael Savage. Reality is irrelevant.
 
Damien Evans said:
Have to back you up on this point. The Dark Ages never happened. It's true that some areas of Europe underwent significant problems after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Dark Ages as conceived of in the popular imagination are fiction. Historians call the period the Early Middle Ages.
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There was, in the West of Europe especially, a substantial collapse of urban centres. There was also a decline in literacy. This may not be the result of Christianity as such, as the Christian East continued to sustain huge urban centres and centralised imperial government. But in the East, religion was subservient to the state; in the West, the opposite.

However, it is less obvious that Christianity as such was required to sustain civilisation through the "Early Middle Ages". The phenomena that have led people to use the term "Dark Ages" were prominent in W Europe, but were less in evidence, not only in the Byzantine Empire, but in the Muslim Caliphate, and in China, where no monotheist religion held a monopoly of influence.
 
The Sparrow said:
Admittedly this is not an original concept. We see it in the rock band Rush's early period, and lord knows star wars is full of medieval parallels.

What might it have been like in medieval times were there no christianity, no theism or religion in general.

Rather, naturalism and scientific study and discovery ruled the day.
I'm not suggesting they would have more advanced technology than they had, just that their ultimate 'authority' for knowledge would be different. What do ya think? How would that look?
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I don't think there's an answer to your question. Christianity wasn't responsible for the middle ages, and as much as it held some things back it helped others. It's just too complex, and too intertwined with the middle ages, so be separated from it.
 
The Big Dog said:
The use of the terms dark ages is grossly outdated.
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And a bit misleading. Though it's true that the fall of Rome had consequences on commerce, literacy and quality of life, it's not true that Europe fell into ignorance and filth to the level that some would have us believe. Nor was the middle ages as clean and civilised as golden age Hollywood wanted us to think.
 
theprestige said:
What are some things Christianity held back?
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Oh, it did in fact try rather hard to suppress a lot of science that was perceived to threaten Christian doctrine, or was otherwise incompatible with it.

Medical advance was held back through forbidding dissection of human bodies.
Cosmology was held back due to forbidding the publication of new models, such as the heliocentric model, just to mention some examples.

Actually, this was probably less a question of basic religious doctrine than a matter of maintaining the power of the Church over the general populace; any authority not explicitly supporting the Church was seen as a threat.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Cosmology was held back due to forbidding the publication of new models, such as the heliocentric model, just to mention some examples.

Actually, this was probably less a question of basic religious doctrine than a matter of maintaining the power of the Church over the general populace; any authority not explicitly supporting the Church was seen as a threat.

Hans
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That is of course not true. Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published in 1543, well into the Renaissance and long after the Medieval period was ended.

Hell even Galileo was permitted to publish his work, and ended up mucking it up by mocking his patrons as Simplicio in the work.
 
The Big Dog said:
That is of course not true. Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published in 1543, well into the Renaissance and long after the Medieval period was ended.

Hell even Galileo was permitted to publish his work, and ended up mucking it up by mocking his patrons as Simplicio in the work.
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Both of which were attempts to avoid what exactly?
 
MRC_Hans said:
Oh, it did in fact try rather hard to suppress a lot of science that was perceived to threaten Christian doctrine, or was otherwise incompatible with it.

Medical advance was held back through forbidding dissection of human bodies.
Cosmology was held back due to forbidding the publication of new models, such as the heliocentric model, just to mention some examples.

Actually, this was probably less a question of basic religious doctrine than a matter of maintaining the power of the Church over the general populace; any authority not explicitly supporting the Church was seen as a threat.

Hans
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Further investigation into the the first subject suggests that prohibition of dissection of human predated the birth of Christ and actually revived during the late Middle Ages.

See e.g. https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevie...issection-of-the-human-body-in-the-YM03BUSes0
 
abaddon said:
Who was it exactly that attempted to suppress that publication?
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Which publication?

Copernicus's work was in fact published with the patronage of a Catholic Bishop Lutheran Church and Galileo's Dialogue was expressly permitted by the Pope (until Galileo's hubris caused him to mock the Pope and other supporters in the work)
 
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