The title of the article doesn't really match what the article has to say about his trial. It does, however, work nicely as an example of a general rule I have:
I'm always suspicious when hearing tales about scientists who were punished for their discoveries by less enlightened minds. Looking into it, it mostly turns out they were either sentenced for other crimes or, as this article claims was the case here, that it was most likely a political move masquerading as being motivated by theology.
Which itself falls under another similar guideline: if any big societal undertaking (wars unfortunately seem to be the most common example) seems motivated by religion, that's usually not the true reason behind it.
Perhaps my own beliefs are colouring my interpretations, but it just seems like people's actual motivations tend to be pragmatic but they market their actions as being out of belief or morality.
> Looking into it, it mostly turns out they were either sentenced for other crimes or, as this article claims was the case here, that it was most likely a political move masquerading as being motivated by theology.
Despite having been a believer until age ~14 or so (raised that way) I've been having real trouble lately getting into the heads of adults who really, actually believe all the stuff their religions teach. I don't mean the vaguely spiritual Unitarian Universalist sorts or the new-age Buddhists who figure all the weird stuff in Buddhist teachings & writings is purely allegorical, I mean the ones who truly think all the stuff in their books happened and maybe even that the supernatural has a real influence on their lives today.
I have even more trouble modeling the mind of functioning, even intelligent adults who run religious institutions and are true believers, not just pragmatists following along because that's What One Does, doing it all with a bit of a wink and a nod. Like, your average priest: how many actually believe? Is it really most of them? An abbott? Really, they do, for the most part? How about back in, say, the middle ages, the cardinals and such really believed? Nobles and heads of state did? I just can't wrap my head around it.
Or, ancient folks. How real was religion in their lives? To what degree were the gods of Greece a vehicle for conveying (this part clearly real and important, to the Greeks!) common norms and lessons via (essentially) folk tales, and how much did they actually think Zeus—actually Zeus, a supernatural being who for-real did all the batshit crazy stuff in the stories—truly might show up at their door dressed as a beggar? Did most people believe it? Did the elites? It's hard for me to imagine.
All this seems incredibly dumb, I know, but that's where I'm at.
[EDIT] incredibly dumb that I'm struggling so much to comprehend this, I mean.
As a functioning, intelligent adult who believes everything written in my religion’s holy book I empathize with how ridiculous it looks from the outside. But to me I have just as much trouble understanding how someone can go through life and not believe that there’s more to it than the natural world, and probably struggle as much to understand that viewpoint as you do to understand mine.
To me it’s a self evident miracle that any kind of universe exists, not to mention that there’s life in it, and even more amazing that the life can observe the universe, explore it, and enjoy it. To me something had to cause all this, and if so then some religion has to be true. If some religion is true then you can’t pick and choose the parts you like and discard what you don’t.
I agree that many of the most powerful religious leaders don’t actually believe everything they teach though. Religion is a powerful tool to get people to do what you want.
Sorry if I was insulting, I wasn't trying to be. That's why I called out my own difficulty as stupid, since in fact such people sure seem to exist (though, again, my problem is that I can't listen to them without a "no, but really, what are you after?" in the back of my head, so am having deep trouble modeling a fairly common kind of person I'm pretty sure is real).
The "this is all so great (though, I mean, at least as Lovecraftian?) that there must be something behind it" or "Buddhist practices do help you find meaning (and Pure Land and saviors and all the stuff about wild miracles are allegorical or else wrong-but-maybe-useful)" is the sort I can understand, actually.
It's the leap from there to "this specific set of stories is right—as in, actually true, or at least much of it is—and the rest are wrong. I've not picked this one to follow because the moral teachings and practices give me comfort and little offense, but because I think a large part of the specific supernatural episodes the faith considers true are true, in a real, actual sense". Supernatural angels and god(s) themselves really actually do stuff in real life—maybe now, and certainly in the past—that kind of thing.
I think the point the previous poster is making is not just a need or desire for a vague answer (i.e. the universe was created and no one really knows so maybe it was God), but then actually going from that step to believe every word of a holy book, or from a preacher.
There seems to be a big leap from a feeling of wonder at nature (essentially, unitarians as I understand it) and structured organized religion.
More specifically: why can't you pick and choose? Christianity has hundreds of sects, each of which adds or removes beliefs both big and small. Belief the Pope is infallible being the most obvious one that caused a lot of bloodshed.
A few hundred years ago the deist option seemed plausible to a lot of people. (Martin Gardner, a writer I admire a lot, developed a contemporary version of a deist view.)
This view agrees with what you described up until "if so then some religion has to be true": it affirms that we have reason to believe in a creator (and in some accounts, in divine providence of various sorts) but doesn't expect a divine revelation, or doesn't endorse any claims that we've received one.
I remember that Descartes argued that the creator was logically required to be benevolent and that part of that benevolence would then entail getting in touch with humanity and letting us know something about the divine nature. But other thinkers took various other angles on this, including the idea that the divine benevolence is already complete even without revelation, or that revelation occurs in a non-public or even incommunicable way, or still other possibilities.
Atheists and deists have both been very preoccupied with the idea that different revealed religions are all extremely plausible to people who are brought up in or around them (in modern times, even different schisms of revealed religions have this characteristic). In the deist account, this might be a reason to doubt that any of them is uniquely intended by the creator to be a revelation to all humanity, since which one people believe is for almost everyone a matter of luck. (Even if one account of revelation is more compelling than others, most people will never have the social conditions to verify this for themselves.)
There are lots of theological accounts about why God might allow only some people to discover the true revelation, but a deist (and atheist) alternative is that it's also reasonable to think that that wasn't God's plan.
This is a sort of "gambit" that doesn't work because it assumes that all religion is created by humans. But most religions claim they are handed down directly from God, so the point would be moot.
Of course anyone who thought their religion was made up by a human wouldn't really believe it. So this won't convince anyone either way.
I guess I just mean to say that I can still have the abject wonder about the world we see around us and have reason to believe that there was something (as opposed to nothing) responsible for the entirety of existence, without having to fall back on saying that MY religion is the reason for this to be the case.
I agree with your logic. Believing something made the world doesn't necessarily mean one religion reveals that something. In the journey of my life experiences I have found a compelling case in the Bible and Jesus. I understand that it sounds strange (incomprehensible?) to others with different experiences. But the best I can say it in short form, logic opens the door for belief, beauty guides me through that door. By "beauty" I mean that aesthetic sense of rightness. The same feeling that makes me know a painting is good is the same feeling that makes me feel that the story of revelation, fall, redemption presented in the Christian religion is True.
What I can't understand is atheists who balk at the possibility of any kind of god, but happily entertain the notion that we are in a simulation. What exactly would be the difference in a created reality and a simulated reality?
I get it. This is exactly how I ended up self-identifying as an agnostic theist. I firmly believe that by definition it is impossible to obtain evidence of metaphysical questions. And because of that, humans simply cannot confirm nor deny truth value of these questions. So this is heavily integral to my internal definition of the word faith: That I choose to believe, with the understanding that I will never "rationally" know.
> Like, your average priest: how many actually believe? Is it really most of them?
Mother Theresa's personal diaries, anecdotally, complained about her frustration with her own lack of faith.
I personally think that the people who believe active supernatural intervention is a genuine possibility are comparatively rare in the halls of power, and that this has been true for millennia. To copy/paste from wikipedia's article on "god helps those who help themselves",
> The sentiment appears in several ancient Greek tragedies. Sophocles, in his Philoctetes (c. 409 BC), wrote, "No good e'er comes of leisure purposeless; And heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act."
> Euripides , in the Hippolytus (428 BC), mentions that, "Try first thyself, and after call in God; For to the worker God himself lends aid." In his Iphigeneia in Tauris, Orestes says, "I think that Fortune watcheth o'er our lives, surer than we. But well said: he who strives will find his gods strive for him equally."
So even back then, there was the attitude of "whether they exist or not, you'll have to live your day-to-day as if you're on your own."
I can start by stating that beliefs are built on other beliefs up to a point. When you truly believe an all powerful and omni-present Creator designed all things,further beliefs built upon that foundation which you seem to have a hard time with make perfect sense. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to suspend critical thinking to believe in a Creator. And also,yes, to varying extents most peope in history and in the present actually and truly believe the things they profess to believe.
I think this will get downvoted severly but I hope you understand my intentions, understanding how and why someone makes a decision to believe something is better in my opinion than dismissing them as uneducated fools without asking further questions
I'm not especially interested in the "uneducated fools"—prod your average Christian, say, and it quickly becomes clear they barely understand the core tenets of their own sect and the sources of their beliefs, let alone even basic apologetics. "Become more knowledgable about the foundations and core beliefs of [faith] than the average adherent" is usually the work of a few days of casual research. Those folks believe because they just don't ever question it at all, which I find kind of dumbfounding seeing as they also profess their belief that it's all of actual no-BS cosmic importance so you'd think they could at least be bothered to read a book or two, but it's not hard to understand why they believe. Their actions are baffling, but not their belief. Then again folks of all sorts believe tons of stuff they don't act on particularly well, so maybe that's all it is. The above about how it's easy to become more knowledgable than the average faithful is true of most stuff people believe, not just religion—but then again, climate change, to pick an example, doesn't claim to have significance to one's eternal soul, so I'd say the stakes of even that are somewhat lower. But anyway, this part's not that interesting to me.
It's the ones who have wrestled with the stuff that I have trouble getting in the heads of. Do they all believe? Do even most of them? Surely not in the same way as those covered above—surely their faith is qualitatively different from that—but then, how? Or those who claim to be devout but hold serious secular power—are they really? Even most of them? And again, my trouble is with specific sets of stories and dogmas, not general "I like to think there's a higher power" stuff, which I have an easier time "getting", and in fact it's hard for me to understand that any significant portion of thoughtful religious aren't more or less of that variety and do believe they've joined a mostly or entirely correct religion, miracles and supernatural occurrences and all being actually true.
And that's before we throw in cultural and time gaps. What was the faith of the abbot or abbess of a 13th century monastic community like? What was it like in their heads? To what degree did a Pope, considering whether to grant one of these communities recognition, see their duty as political versus carrying out the will and protecting the interests of an almighty deity that became a person (only kind of, sort of, but not really—it's complicated, if you want to avoid heresy) then died, then some fly on the wall might have actually seen the dude's corpse re-animate—imagine the sight!—and some real, actual angels push a stone around, and all that really happened. That's where I get lost, trying to tease out motivations based on faith versus those where the faith's something else—social posturing, maybe.
To keep my reply short: You depend on your own ability to understand all subjects to form a belief. When a person accepts their ability to understand how something works,they can rely on a cause vs effect observation.
To many, their faith based actions resulted in effects that are significant enough to them that it meets and exceeds any and all criteria of acceptance of that belief as valid.
I personally think it is fine to be curious and ask questions but it is absolutely foolish for a person to expect they can understand any and all things.
For most of your curiosity, it seems you are attempting to group people and say "these people believe for this reason",I think it's better to try and understand individuals instead of groups if you're curious about motives.
> ...significant portion of thoughtful religious aren't more or less of that variety and do believe they've joined a mostly or entirely correct religion, miracles and supernatural occurrences and all being actually true.
I can't speak for others but I am 100% sure of not only miracles of the past but also miracles that happen in this day and age.
As some say: "There is no argument that can overcome experience". That is to say, if I literally saw legs grow right before my eyes for an amputee as an example,you can't convince me it didn't happen without asking me to stop believing my own five senses which I rely on to percieve reality itself.
I started to write out this really long elaborate explanation that had very clever metaphors and illustrations including comparisons between religious language and computer science. But the longer it got the longer it needed to be. One explanation begs another so to speak. So I guess what you really need is a believing friend that you trust, so you can discuss it at length. Since I can't be that for you, let me think of one tiny example to give a glimpse of how someone like me thinks.
"In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth..."
I don't share beliefs with Ken Ham, but what I see the Bible claiming about creation is that it was directed by an intelligent being (or beings, the number is vague in this text). Seven days? Sure. What does the word "day" even mean when there's no sun yet? In that case it means however long it took for the miracles described to happen. There were no words for time dilation or quantum mechanics or background radiation then. I'm assuming there will be more concepts concerning the beginning of time and the nature of the universe that we currently don't have a word for. The people who first wrote down that story weren't stupid. They weren't intentionally writing down contradictions. They knew there was no such thing as a day without the sun. They were describing a miraculous progression of creation. It wasn't science (even such as it then existed) it was religious narrative. The goal is not to get a reader's assent to the facts of the details but to point to a creator with power and purpose.
Your second question could be asked of any human I think. How much of this do you really actually believe is real or important? How often do you act on what you say you believe? I suppose it seems more scandalous for religious leaders because of the nature of their claims, but at the end of the day we're all just people.
Your third question is fascinating to me too. It is fun to read really good authors and historians explain their theories on this, but unfortunately it's all guesswork. The question is good though, because I feel like most people make broad assumptions about the sincerity of other times (and other cultures and religions for that matter). You've even done it to a degree by assuming what was important to the Greeks. Which Greeks? They were at one time a collection of city-states with competing interests. They were at another time an empire lead by a Macedonian. There are so many different peoples and times that we tend to wrap up and summarize as "Ancient Greeks".
I'll end by saying, I got to where I am (faith) by continuing to doubt. I tried to ditch my faith at different times, but I kept having nagging belief I couldn't get rid of. That part I still haven't figured out how to explain.
...if any big societal undertaking... seems motivated by religion, that's usually not the true reason behind it.
It's increasingly apparent that not even religion is motivated by religion. Since prehistoric times there have been economically unproductive but rhetorically skilled men who have desired strange sexual acts with typically off-limits partners, without the hassle of marrying or purchasing those partners. Those men have become shamans, priests, monks, gurus, and preachers. That's the purpose of religion.
> that it was most likely a political move masquerading as being motivated by theology.
Reminded me a bit of this wonderful conversation on "you are the worst".
> “I was defending our country.” “Oh, please. You weren’t defending anything except for the business interests of evil men.” “Jimmy, our country is the business interests of evil men!”
Taking that rule a bit further: politics begets religion, not the other way around.
That is: even in cases where political decisions seem to derive from religious beliefs, more often than not those very beliefs in turn derive from political decisions (and exist specifically as an implementation or assertion thereof). From the giant global religious institutions to the smallest of congregations, politics are constantly at play.
Your observation is correct. The reasoning is you can't get people to fight in a war or civil war or invasion by telling them "you're just like the other guys although your leaders doesn't like our leaders" Its easy to get them to fight if you can propagandize them into thinking the other guys have the wrong religious beliefs, they hate civilization, they oppose your lifestyle, they're deplorables, etc, then they'll fight.
This is why (small L) libertarianism and political centrism is hated by all groups of all opinions who are in power; you can't get people to kill for your profit using the rhetoric of "you have a nice life over there while I have a nice life over here".
I find the picture of Anaxagoras (the crater) rather annoying, because they didn't orient it with the light source coming from the upper left, as is (or used to be) kind of the convention on a computer screen.
My thanks to both you and the OP. I had to replicate this to see if it wasn't some sort of trickery.
Frankly this is a little unsettling; why am I primed to to recognise something "with the light source coming from the upper left"? Is it an effect of previous continuous exposure or a general principle of how the brain interprets lights and shadows?
The sun is normally in the sky above us, we build buildings with lights on the ceiling or high up on the walls, so it's reasonable that an image with a light-source above would be more understandable than one with a light-source below.
It's very unusual for a light-source to be exactly aligned with the thing it illuminates, so unusual that if you see it, it looks wrong[1]. It's reasonable that an image with a light-source to the top-left or top-right would be more understandable than one with a light-source directly above.
As for why "left" rather than "right", I don't have a good answer. When Microsoft redesigned Windows 3.0[2] to make the buttons look more like buttons (instead of just rectangular or rounded outlines), they decided to put the light-source at the top-left rather than the top-right. Why they chose that direction I don't know, but I notice the mouse-cursor also points to the top-left, the most important menu (the system menu) is in the top-left, the title bar is at the top and the menus in the menu-bar are left-aligned, etc. etc. I don't think there's a neurological reason why shading should have a top-left light-source, but if you're making an interface for people who read left-to-right, top-to-bottom and you visually organise everything in that same order, it makes sense to align shading in the same way as everything else rather than have it be The One Thing Out Of Place.
After trying some more angles, it seems "up" and "down" lighting makes the difference between "innies" and "outies", which hints the brain's interpretation of lights and shadows is in play here. "Left" or "right" doesn't seem to make a big difference.
I have no idea what the title "An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock, Not a God" has to do with the detailed explanation in the last three paragraphs of how he was exiled.
The misleading implication of the title seems to be the ancients were dumb for exiling someone who had a controversial scientific opinion; we'd certainly never do that now (LOL); the records and detailed explanation imply he was exiled simply for supporting the wrong politician.
Its exactly analogous to claiming James Watson was attacked because people didn't like the chemical bond structure of DNA.
> Anaxagoras was arrested, tried and sentenced to death, ostensibly for breaking impiety laws while promoting his ideas about the moon and sun.
This provides the context to understand that while the title is true at a surface level, his claims around the moon likely served as pretext rather than true cause.
You write:
> Its exactly analogous to claiming James Watson was attacked because people didn't like the chemical bond structure of DNA.
I disagree. An exact analogy would require that James Watson was actually attacked for his belief in the structure of DNA, which served as a pretext for the real claims against him. James Watson was attacked directly for his views on race.
If they would throw away the thinkers and ideas over those things does it really make a difference if it was a pretext or actual fundamentalism? It still goes down as rejected heresy and the avenue halted.
Also even though James Watson's racist ideas are pannes nobody questions the shape of DNA.
An Hipparchus (c. 190 BC - c. 120 BC) estimated the distance to the Moon in the Earth radii between 62 and 80 (depending on the method he used). Today's measurements are between 55 and 64, so it was quite good.
A lovely story and a useful reminder that every single scientific norm or fact we take for granted likely has thousands of years of thought, debate, controversy before reaching the relative stasis from which we build.
Well it's more of a story about how scientists who support the wrong politicians in ancient Greece might find themselves exiled if their side ends up loosing, regardless of their scientific beliefs.
"Democritus, a younger contemporary, dated his own life in relation to Anaxagoras’, saying that he was young in the old age of Anaxagoras (DK59A5); he reportedly accused Anaxagoras of plagiarism. Although Anaxagoras lived in Athens when Socrates was a youth and young adult, there are no reports that Anaxagoras and Socrates ever met. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates says that he heard someone reading from Anaxagoras’ book.... As with all the Presocratics, Anaxagoras’ work survives only in fragments..."
I wonder if this is actually the other way, that is, so many words and names of Greek origin are associated with ancient philosophy and classical wonders (Archimedes, Pythagoras, Parthenon, etc.) that these words end up sounding "great".
...if Anaxagoras knew that some people today would consider the earth flat and the moon made of literally cheese, he would have commited suicide himself.
I'm always suspicious when hearing tales about scientists who were punished for their discoveries by less enlightened minds. Looking into it, it mostly turns out they were either sentenced for other crimes or, as this article claims was the case here, that it was most likely a political move masquerading as being motivated by theology.
Which itself falls under another similar guideline: if any big societal undertaking (wars unfortunately seem to be the most common example) seems motivated by religion, that's usually not the true reason behind it.
Perhaps my own beliefs are colouring my interpretations, but it just seems like people's actual motivations tend to be pragmatic but they market their actions as being out of belief or morality.