The Victorians started with a huge societal bias for mysticism. It was even coded into law, making atheism effectively illegal. Digging out from under that moun

The Victorians started with a huge societal bias for mysticism. It was even coded into law, making atheism effectively illegal. Digging out from under that mountain of shit was a huge job with little room for nuance. Science is even today not very secure (cf. antivaxx, flat-earthers), so being open to non-causality is still hard. Similarly, geologists had to carve their field out of universal insistence on catastrophism. Appealing to a catastrophic explanation in geology was akin to appealing to God in physics, or "life force" in biochemistry. It has been a productive esthetic. But catastrophes really do happen sometimes, and are the explanation for, e.g., the eastern Washington state Scablands. It was very hard for geologists to allow that. Thus the K-T bolide strike was very, very hard for them, and the Younger Dryas boundary strike that killed off the mammoths and the Clovis culture is still hard for many. Historians have had to begin to adjust to results from archaeology, carbon dating, surface luminescence, pollen analysis, and population genetics, where everything used to depend entirely on preserved texts. They still have not internalized big, organized, pre-literate societies, and societies like the Harappans whose entire written corpus is forever lost.