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There's a reason religious philosophy took precedence over "scientific" thought in those times. And it wasn't because people were dumb.

• laser 9y ago
  Was it because they had a philosophy of hierarchical power that ensured the ruling class maintained rule by the utmost power, divine right, over the populace? One in which all suitable ideas would be approved and any unsuitable ones taught would cause their professor to be excommunicated or worse?
  • ewzimm 9y ago
    Fortunately that kind of abuse of power has been around for thousands of years. People have interpreted it as damage and routed around it. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but perpetually. Some of the most established organizations today started as grassroots responses to power imbalances.
  • dang 9y ago
    Please don't do religious flamewars on HN. They're boring, and never lead anywhere new or good.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    That's a fairly standard tactic. [T]he universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "'venerable institutions'" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they . .. [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (Mill 1981: 429: and 1988b: 350). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters. Hans E. Jensen, "John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution". Review of Social Economy, Pages 491-507 | Published online: 05 Nov 2010 DOI: 10.1080/00346760110081599 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599 Refs: Mill, J. S. (1981) Autobiography and Literary Essays. Mill, J. S. (1988b) Journals and Debating Speeches.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dredmorbius 9y ago
  Your comment says little and explains less. You might consider improving one or both scores.
  • meric 9y ago
    People preferred religious philosophy as a framework to model the universe because it has proven to hold families and villages together for thousands of years. The non-religious philosophy - in those times there was no scientific method and it basically amounted to what Aristotle said. And by the Middle Ages, what he said has become increasingly irrelevant, while Christianity have been refined for the past thousand years. It boils down to an ideology that was adaptive (at least evolutionarily speaking) versus and ideology that was nothing more than dogma. Of course almost a thousand years has passed, and people in this time see the situation has completely reversed, religion now seen as dogma and non-religious philosophy is the ideology that has adapted to humanity's changing needs.
    • losteric 9y ago
      Religion fulfilled two roles in the primitive world: Explaining how the world worked, and how an individual should behave in the world. It took a long time for society to mature and learn. The accumulation of knowledge enabled rationally explaining the world from scientific first principles, and rational self-governance from philosophical first principles. Holy books are an artifact from a more primitive time, when experience was spread so thin it had to be accumulated across generations in singular books. If anything, those ideas survived because they lacked flexibility - their persistence reflects built-in error-correction that minimized mutations over time.
      • dredmorbius 9y ago
        If I can amplify on that second function, it also had a few components. One was guiding people in how to live within typical social and community structures -- mostly smaller towns. The other was providing for people to act in a reasonably predictable way, across great distances or times. Realise that a typical large pre-industrial empire might span a few thousand miles, meaning that a journey from one region to another would take days, weeks, sometimes months. Sea and river travel was preferred to land, but ships were restricted to harbour from November to May, in the Northern Hemisphere. Which meant that a provincial regent or magistrate might be on his own for months at a time. As business and commerce expanded, those also required trust. (It's not surprising that the first financial networks developed either among specific subcultures, particularly the Jews, who had dispersed throughout Europe, were restricted from owning land or participating in trades, and had strong ties to other areas, or families, such as the Rothschild banking empire, founded by brothers in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples.) Religion effectively provided that structure, firmness, to both social relations and political and business behaviours. With the addition of considerable other overhead.