I’ve been doing a lot of research into Judaism. They seem to encourage asking tough questions and taking the answers seriously, which is good.
After reading a bit of the Torah, it got me thinking, why aren’t there any references to people who could not have been known to its followers at the time? No mention of East Asians or Native Americans. Did God just forget about them when he talked through Moses? Or he thought they weren’t important enough to mention?
Then it got me thinking some more. What about science? Wouldn’t it be effective to convince followers of legitimacy if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it? Say, “And God said, let there be bacteria! And then there was bacteria.” But there is nothing like that. Anywhere, as far as I can tell. Among any religion.
I’m not a theologian and I’m always interested in learning more, so any insights would be helpful.
Edit: A lot of responses seem to be saying “people wouldn’t have had a use for that knowledge at the time” seem to be parroting religious talking points without fully understanding their implications. Why would God only tell people what they would have a use for at the time? Why wouldn’t he give them information that could expand the possibilities of what they were capable of? Why does it matter if people had a word for something at the time? Couldn’t God just tell them new words for new things? If God was only telling them things that were relevant to them at the time, why didn’t He say so? Also, how come he doesn’t come back and tell us things that are relevant now, or at least mention that he isn’t coming back?
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Can’t say I’m aware of any examples of our modern scientific understanding being present in a religious text. I did a painfully in depth bible study class in highschool and we sometimes discussed that a lot of old testament (and thus the Torah) is very very old and likely comes from people doing their best to understand their world and merging it with myth over the ages. That’s probably the closest you’ll get, depending on what you consider “science.”
One other possibility is that stories like the flood could essentially be “recordings” of historical events. Someone correct me, it’s been yonks since I read into it, but as I recall there are a number of different flood stories that come from the same region (ancient Mesopotamia? if we’re talking Judaism), so it’s entirely possible that it’s based on a real one, perhaps even multiple.
Yes, but it’s not what you’re thinking, and they could be known at the time, just not through scientific method, but we had to rediscover them.
In Abrahamic religions the eating of pork is prohibited because pork is an “unclean” animal, and indeed pork is one of the most dangerous meats to consume when not cooked properly. This could be divine knowledge, or people simply realizing that those who ate pork got more sick than those who didn’t.
Another example is about meditation and other mental health from oriental religions. The science to back up that is very recent but they have been doing it for thousands of years and have been claiming all of the benefits that we’re now discovering. But also this could have slowly evolved by observing yourself which is a lot of what meditation is about, so who could have thought that self inspection would allow you to understand yourself better?
So at the end of the day I don’t think there’s any example of what you’re looking for, because anything we know now they could have guessed back then and would not necessarily be divine knowledge. Accurate precognition would be an example of something we would have no explanation for, but that has never happened, most prophecies are abstract and open to interpretation.
In Abrahamic religions the eating of pork is prohibited because pork is an “unclean” animal, and indeed pork is one of the most dangerous meats to consume when not cooked properly.
Yet plenty of people ate pork and didn’t suffer any noticeable setback. This is a myth, or rather some kind of apologetics aimed at attempting a rational explanation at something which wasn’t decided by rationality.
Don’t even get me started on the broadcloth bullshit that is the entire section of “oriental” 🤢 “medicine”.
FFS.
Wrong, it could be based on plenty of solid, evidence based objectives and cultural materialisms that sadly might be lost to time, atleast from the context of these religions.
Some armchair historians have theorised that sweating remove toxins from the body and pigs that dont sweat very well might be bad to eat because of toxin accumulation in their bodies, but this has been debunked some time ago. Toxins don’t accumulate to significant levels, neither does sweating remove them in any meaningful manner.
The strongest indicator is that this idea that pigs = dirty comes from abrahamic religions that all developed in the middle east and the levant - arid, inhospitable regions with precious water sources.
Also important to note is that this idea also did NOT originate independently in other regions where water and the vegetative life it spawns, was more plentiful.
There are some valid concerns when raising pigs in arid climates:
- Food hygiene: Meat, especially non-lean meat, spoils quickly in hotter climates. Further pigs eat anything including garbage, waste, and carrion meat, spoiled or otherwise, meaning higher chance of parasite/ disease transmission.
plenty of people ate pork and didnt have any noticeable setback Yeah, but if enough people from your village puke+shits themselves to death every once in a while after eating pork, and you can’t find any other valid reason, you might just blame the pork.
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Shitty sweat glands: Pigs have very ineffective sweat glands that are really shitty at keeping them cool. Instead, pigs cool themselves down by wallowing in water or mud. In a desert setting were water and mud are rare if at all available, pigs tend to get very hot and resort to wallowing whatever is closely available - which as it turns out, especially in an animal pen, is pigshit.
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Food economy: Pigs are both omnivorous and need more water and shelter than other desert livestock like goats or sheep - desert animals survive on less water, and have fur coats that protect them from the harsh sun. In a place where resource conservation was a necessity, it is costlier and harder to raise pigs and the returns from them was consequently less.
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Symbolic: Okay this is not a very strong evidence based approach but people watching pigs eat their own shit and wallow in them makes people not want to associate with it.
Now in regions with ample rainfall and forests, keeping pigs is easy. Just stay near a river or pond and you’re good. Pigs are even capable of foraging for food in forests themselves, though a pig farmer that lets his pigs do that will lose a bunch to wild animals and other people. Pigs are efficient converters of food into meat, and they can pretty much eat human leftovers and byproducts that come from farming, which you were doing anyway.
Take for example Europe and China: Both have had pigs as cornerstones in their diets. Europe survived winter months with preserved pig products like hams and sausages. In China, pigs are even more important. It’s practically unavoidable and their cuisine reflects that.
Now one might raise a relevant question: If abrahamic religions, due to their locations of origin, hates pork, why doesn’t Christianity, an abrahamic religion, place as much focus on avoiding it? I can’t be sure of the answer to this one; Jesus in the new testament does say that every animal under the sun is game for food: the old testament does prohibit pig as food, but the new testament overwrites the old. My best bet is that Christianity, with it’s apostles travelling all over the world, spread into and flourished in non-arid regions - and given that the new testament removed the restriction on pork, it also flourished as a food source under it.
Bacon
But tons of people are pork with nothing happening do it’s a bullshit hypothesis.
Yes, and lots of people eat raw chicken and nothing happens to them, I guess you also think Salmonella doesn’t exist, or that we would be unable to figure that out, because of that. Lots of people can do something without it affecting them negatively and that still be a bad idea. And it’s also possible for someone keeping tabs to notice these sorts of correlations.
No. There’s far more examples of scientific advancement discovery being shot in the knees by theocratic groups than the alternative. Religion is a social tool used for shaping human interpretations of their role within human society, not a legitimate way to enhance our understanding of the world.
I would go as far as to say that having a strong association with a religious organization is an incredible detriment to any technological or scientific advancement.
God of the gaps: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
The Quotes section is great.
People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don’t have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it’s divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.
http://www.thelastquestion.net/
The God of the Gap will always live at some level.
Nice… this reminds me that I need to finish Robot Dreams.
In the same way as Nostradamus predicted events? Probably. In the same way as what we define as science? No.
Look around bro, isn’t that proof of God?
I dunno, the seas haven’t overtaken us, so I have to question the extent of Poseidon’s power. That is the god you meant, I’m sure.
What I see in the world is a lot of proof that people have gods
No.
As a kid I was always fascinated how people thousands of years ago could otherwise know that the upper end of human life is 120 years.
I’m an old, and I keep waiting for modern medicine overcome Genesis 6.3.
Well, the Bible says, the sun was created after Earth. So fuck that.
The problem with “prophecy” is that its impossible to check before it’s useless information. Unless the holy book used specific descriptions, you’d be left with Nostradamus type language that can’t be identified until after it comes “true”.
I knew a guy who thought some of the mythical beasts in revelation were a prediction of helicopters. So suppose he’s right, there would be no way to understand or predict helicopter technology using scripture, you have to wait until after helicopters are known to make the connection.
In December 1980 an Apple will arise no man can eat. Invest thy money in Master Jobbes’s machine and good fortune will tend thy days.
Check out www.lawofone.info. The first few sessions (they’re short) say what happened in ancient Egyptian and South American cultures when aliens came and tried to share the simple thought that “we are all one.” Shit devolved into human sacrifice. Apparently we can’t handle anything even approximating religion.
Science is effort following the scientific method. Hypothesis, observation, analysis, reproducibility, etc. So no.
Occam’s razor:
Humans created religion. These things aren’t found in any religious texts because people, with their superstitions and limited knowledge, made these religious texts.
Just look at more “modern” religions, like scientology, drawing on elements of science-fiction for its mythos.
Religion is made up by people. Stop trying to support religious psychosis.
I have a few thoughts on this. For context, I’m a Christian with equally big interests in science and theology.
A. Remember that scripture wasn’t written to us 21st century people. It was written in a context, in a language, at a time, for a culture, all different from what we have today. So for us to understand scripture we have to understand the context surrounding when it was written. This means hypothetical differences also need to go through this filter. For your examples of Native Americans or bacteria, what would the early Israelites have done with this information? I’d say it would have been seen as a weird side detail likely wouldn’t have survived being part of an oral tradition. Especially the bit about bacteria, since they didn’t have a word for it.
B. I don’t think that’s the point of the Bible. The way I describe it is “God’s biography”. A bunch of authors all wrote their part to try to communicate who God is and what he has done. These authors all had the chance to live close to God, and got pointers on topics to write about, then they all write about God.
C. I’ve had a similar conversation with some of my friends. We were playing “that’s a question” (party board game about guessing what answer this specific player will choose), and the question of “would you prove God’s existence/nonexistence?” came up. We’re all Christian, so we were talking about proving that God does exist, and we basically came to the answer that God has clearly built the world in a way that does not absolutely prove his existence, so he must have chosen to not prove it for some reason. Our best guess was that if it was proven, a lot of people would follow him out of obligation instead of love.
clearly built the world in a way that does not absolutely prove his existence
There is nothing we observe that requires supernatural explanation.
We have multiple plausible naturalistic and quantitative theories about the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, and the origin of matter and spacetime.
At this point you need God to explain the Universe the way a fish needs a bicycle.
The Talmud says there are evil spirits that cause sickness and I’ll fortune, and for each person there are a thousand on their left and a thousand on their right. That sounds like bacteria to me. People back then didn’t have a use for numbers bigger than a thousand or a word for microbes.
If God is talking to bronze age goat herders, what kind of knowledge is going to be useful to them? What will they manage to pass down to future generations without mangling it horribly? If they were to be given information about scientific concepts so advanced that only God (or aliens or time travelers) could have given it to them, they wouldn’t have the foundation of knowledge to grasp it, the vocabulary to explain it, or the technical means to exploit it. Anything they can actually understand and act on is necessarily going to be something that is not beyond their means, and therefore we are right back where we started with stuff they could have figured out on their own.
Suppose God did explain something far beyond human understanding, and they wrote it down as best they could. Even if it wasn’t completely incomprehensible to the guy writing it down, it’s still going to be totally lost on future generations if it isn’t anchored in a more comprehensive understanding of how things work. Without context, it will lose all meaning and will be reinterpreted by later scholars who will try and find a meaning that they can understand. It would become a part of mythology and folklore, and would be unrecognizable by the time science catches up to the original ideas. You might have people point out similarities, but they’d probably be taken as seriously as the ancient aliens guys.
