I’ve finally gotten around to watching Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” mini-series (thanks @11sideup for the prod).
I’m absolutely fucking pissed. By around 500BCE...
... we knew that the Earth is round and orbits the Sun.
... we knew that stars are other suns, and that they were very far away.
... we knew that the Earth was tiny, and other worlds likely existed.
... we knew what the Milky Way was.
... we knew that disease is caused by germs, not demons.
... we knew about evolution.
... we knew that things could exist as matter but be invisible, such as air.
... we had considered how to build a robot.
... we had contemplation of a natural world without regard for god myths.
... we knew about, and were using, the scientific method.
We were right. We didn’t have all the specifics or the details worked out, but we were right. We had the starting points, we were on the right path.
What happened? Superstition, mysticism and ultimately religion, in pursuit of magic and societal power and control.
We lost in the order of 2000 years to this shit. We still haven’t recovered. We’re still struggling against modern-day Pythagoreans in a variety of flavors of science-denial and science-misrepresentation.
I knew that we’d figured out a few things, such as Eratosthenes calculating the circumference of the Earth, but I had no idea how advanced this thinking had really been. We didn’t just lose it, we went backwards.
How absurd that we got the right answers, then succumbed to magic and delusion and tossed them away?
Believers like to pretend that “religion invented science.” No, it didn’t. Scientists invented science. Then science was squashed by primitive magical thinking, and millennia later, religion pretended to invent science again.
Where would be be, and how much death and suffering would have been avoided - due to both the benefit of a long scientific tradition, and bypassing history’s barbarous tradition of superstition - if this bullshit had not taken hold?
Penn Jillette is quoted as saying:
“If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.
If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true, and someone would find a way to figure it all out again."
We know this because we’ve already done this.
