3d ago

Are there any examples of a religion giving scientific knowledge that could not have been known to people at the time?

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?

44 comments

I'll give two answers to this question, from the perspective of a Christian reading the Old Testament/Torah.
Wouldn't it be effective to convince followers of a religion if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it?
This is interpretative, but if there is a God, he seems big on free will. Why give humanity the option to sin in the garden at all? Why not just reveal himself in the sky each morning? Why even bother creating a universe that can be explained without him? There's an abundance of easy ways God could make himself irrefutable, and yet in the Bible he makes us "in His image", and offers us choices like that tree in the garden.
Furthermore, why even create us to sin in the first place? My interpretation of the Torah is that God is big on relationship, and that free will is a key part of that. Just like a human relationship based on a love potion is kinda creepy, and a pale imitation of something real, it seems like God doesn't want to be irrefutable.
--
I think that's the more relevant answer to your question, but I'll also give the only example that comes to mind of the Bible seemingly imparting "scientific knowledge", which is to look at the laws around "cleanliness". Someone else already mentioned some "unclean" animals, but if you read more, they pretty consistently seem like good advice around bacteria. Some examples of times you need to "purify" (essentially take a bath) that seem like common sense now:
being around dead bodies
touching blood that's not yours
having your period
etc.
Reading this as a modern person aware of germs, many of these "laws" seem like they would have kept the death rate of faithful Jews a lot lower than their neighbours in that day.
Let’s say you’re arguing in good faith. What if I offered you a different conception of God?
You’re reading the Torah. Have you read the Gnostic gospels? They are early Christian texts & beliefs, some that run roughshod over the beliefs in Judaism. Some Gnostics believed YHWH was a false God, because why would God say, “You must believe in me?” Or why would he genocide the earth with a flood?
Other people have said it, but religion is made by humans. However, what if God was more like the Dao/Tao? Maybe it’s not a person (that’s a human notion), but more like a spring or fountain? Like a source of goodness? Or it’s a foundational substrate for metaphysical realities?
You say, “Why has no holy text predicted what science has revealed?” To me, it sounds like, “Why hasn’t a pig flown?” I think the critique misaligns religion with a goal.
Science reveals the physical world to us. We know there’s an inherent gap between what we observe and some sort of capital T Truth. We could be brains in a vat, a demon could have us hostage, etc. Religion lives in the gap, and I’d say it can reveal things. What it reveals isn’t about the physical world, though.
When I read a Bible verse, a Buddhist Sutra, or hear an Islamic Surah, it connects me to our species. I go to church for the people, the community. The values resonate with me, and I think my family & kids are better off because of that environment. I have science to explain the physical world.
I’m a Unitarian Universalist, so I look at religion in my own way (was an atheist for 20 years prior). Have you tried reframing God as not “old man in the clouds?” If you have, does that framing change how you read the Torah?
P.S. Check out some of the discussion of quantum science and consciousness. Some are arguing that consciousness is the metaphysical reality. Everything may be conscious, but certain conditions may need to be met for the emergence of it in physical reality. Some people have also theorized that all electrons are the same. Some fun theories out there.
Not religious texts specifically, but books in general - human imagination often creates something that is later discovered or invented. So I don't know why it would not be true of older books.
Religion is made up by people. Stop trying to support religious psychosis.
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.
  
  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.
  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.
  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.
  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
I know many will not like what I am going to say but still ...
The Bible mentioned scientific facts long before they were discovered. For example, around 3,000 years ago, Job 26:7 said that God “hangs the earth on nothing,” describing the earth suspended in space—centuries before scientists understood this. Over 2,700 years ago, Isaiah 40:22 said that God “sits above the circle of the earth,” indicating its round shape, long before it was widely accepted.
Later, in the mid-19th century (around 1851–1852), the physicist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) helped formulate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As part of his theological reflections, he cited Psalm 111:2—“Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them”—to affirm that scientific inquiry only deepens reverence for a Creator.
There are few other similar examples like these in the Bible.
- The distance you can see standing on the earths surface looks like a circle. If he called it a sphere that would be more interesting.
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?
It's difficult to answer if your premise is that the Torah is truthfully the word of god.
If you take a neutral, or opposite viewpoint, it's very simple and obvious to answer. If people created the Tora, and they either had no knowledge or no interest during the creation process, it's obvious why they are not mentioned.
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?
This makes me think of shamans using powdered materials to create colorful sparks when thrown into a fire. It's entirely based on existing material and physical phenomenon, but through knowledge and ignorance, can be used as a tool of misguidance and misinterpretation.
Why wouldn’t he give them information that could expand the possibilities of what they were capable of?
You're asking so many questions that throughout so many religions and gods can not be answered. You get more and more confused.
If you shift the perspective, and don't assume a god as a premise, I think it's fairly obvious to answer. If instead of asking "why did god do it this way" you ask "if this exists now, how did it reach this today through history, why is it presented the way it is, and who originally created it an why", will you reach a conclusion of "god did it because x", or something else?
It is good that you are asking these questions. What does it mean if there are such uncertainties about these religious documents? What value do they hold? Who gives them their value? And why? How was it in the past, and how is it today?
What are alternative explanations? What is more fundamentally true vs arbitrary or artificial meaning? What views are more likely, what claims are more likely truthful, what is complete or incomplete, what is selective or encompassing, what served personal, community, political purposes vs what are fundamental truths?
Well, the Bible says, the sun was created after Earth. So fuck that.
In the same way as Nostradamus predicted events? Probably. In the same way as what we define as science? No.
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.
The reason for this is simply that the people who wrote those books were ignorant.
I suspect you might get examples of things that sort of resemble a later discovery that someone believing the religion in question might interpret as divine revelation of that thing. Some of the christians in my family like to take the "let there be light" thing and claim that it's talking about the big bang, anecdotally.
I think I remember some religion out there having a concept that resembles microorganisms, before such organisms were discovered, I think Jainism but I'm not confident about that.
- Some of the christians in my family like to take the "let there be light" thing and claim that it's talking about the big bang, anecdotally.
  But that's probably not even right. In my understanding, the Big Bang wasn't actually bright, because the first phase of the universe was a superhot but opaque quantum soup. Even the weak nuclear force took time to become distinct from the electromagnetic force. I don't know if energy packets of a combined electroweak field count as photons exactly.
  Regardless, the first light as we know it (in the sense that it could traverse the universe) wasn't until a few hundred ~~million~~ thousand years after the Big Bang, when the whole mess had cooled enough to become transparent. We now call that initial light the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
  Edit: Misstated the age of the CMB
I know some Muslims claim the Qur'an gave scientific foreknowledge: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qur%27anic_scientific_foreknowledge
- I got a free copy of the Qur'an last year and it's packed with stuff like this, it's kinda annoying because I just wanted to understand the actual text. It's all the same stuff I've seen Christian creationists talk about, obviously false if you understand the basics but it'll probably deceive lots of people who don't.
  
  obviously false if you understand the basics
  Do you have examples?
Science is effort following the scientific method. Hypothesis, observation, analysis, reproducibility, etc. So no.
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.
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?
No, those were called witches and they burned them out of fear.
That was also just never the purpose of religion. Religion fills gaps in our knowledge and addresses the existential crisis by promising us some form of afterlife because humans really struggle to accept that they're random and meaningless and that their consciousness just dies with the body.
There's theories that the talking burning tree was probably a weed tree and they were just tripping balls, and that wouldn't be the first religion spawned from accidental or intentional use of psychedelics.
It's also very likely the origin stories are just that, stories. Most likely because storytelling was just how language worked: like the Darmok episode of StarTrek TNG. Or just kids: we don't infodump on kids, we tell them stories because stories bring context and narrative.
My belief is that at least all the judaic religions are just a metaphor so far detached its true meaning is lost to time, and interpreting any of those further is a complete waste of time. Any scientific prediction is equally likely to just be a coincidence than evidence of divine knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
House of Wisdom in Baghdad brought about some of the foundational texts of Islamic and European medicine till the 19th century.
Mystical experiences concern themselves with the relationship of the finite to the infinite. Tolstoy wrote about this in Confession:
I had asked: what meaning has life beyond time, beyond space and beyond cause? And I was answering the question: ‘What is the meaning of my life within time, space and cause?’ The result was that after long and laboured thought I could only answer: none.
In my deliberations I was continually drawing comparisons between the finite and the finite, and the infinite and the infinite, and I could not have done otherwise. Thus I reached the only conclusion I could reach: force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the infinite, nothing is nothing; and I could go no further than that.
It was somewhat similar to what happens in mathematics when, trying to resolve an equation, we get an identity. The method of deduction is correct, but the only answer obtained is that a equals a, and x equals x, or o equals o. Precisely the same thing was happening with my reasoning concerning the meaning of life. The only answers the sciences give to this question are identities.
And really, strictly rational knowledge, such as that of Descartes, begins with complete doubt in everything and throws aside any knowledge founded on faith, reconstructing everything along laws of reason and experiment. And it can provide no answer other than the one I reached: an indefinite one. It was only at first that I thought knowledge had given an affirmative answer, Schopenhauer’s answer that life has no meaning and is evil. But when I went into the matter I realized that this answer is not affirmative and that it was only my senses that had taken it to be so. Strictly expressed, as it is by the Brahmins, Solomon, and Schopenhauer, the answer is but a vague one, an identity: o equals o, life presented to me as nothing is nothing. Thus, philosophical knowledge denies nothing but simply replies that it cannot solve the question, and that as far as it is concerned any resolution remains indefinite.
Having understood this, I realized that it was impossible to search for an answer to my questions in rational knowledge; that the answer given by rational knowledge simply suggests that the answer can only be obtained by stating the question in another way, by introducing the question of the relation of the finite to the infinite. I realized that no matter how irrational and distorted the answers given by faith might be, they had the advantage of introducing to every answer a relationship between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution. Whichever way I put the question: how am I to live? the answer is always: according to God’s law. Or to the question: is there anything real that will come of my life? the answer is: eternal torment or eternal bliss. Or, to the question: what meaning is there that is not destroyed by death? the answer is: unity with the infinite, God, heaven.
there has been jesuit scientists, like descarte, and other jesuit scientists that produce astrophysics/astronomy works, and some catholics. Just not the crazy fundamentalists, where everything can be explained by "god" or because of god is moral, never heard any good things come out of evangelicals or some protestants.
No. By definition of what you're asking, some person practicing the religion would have to know it already.
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.
Look around bro, isn't that proof of God?
- No.
- What I see in the world is a lot of proof that people have gods
- 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.
There are examples yes, Dr Fatima on youtube talks a lot about the philosophy of science and how it's not such a rigid, prescriptive process as a lot of people - including scientists - seem to think.
When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things
That video has three stories of phenomena that were unknown to western science until ancestral knowledge revealed them. The first two you could argue are just traditionally acquired knowledge that has gained a veneer of supernatural language, but "voodoo death" is literally named after the fact that a voodoo curse can kill someone.
I'd reccommend her whole channel if this stuff interests you. Particularly Gravity is a Social Construct, and How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method.
Edit: the downvotes on this with absolutely no explanation of what's wrong are a perfect example of why science struggles with these concepts. Anything that doesn't immediately fit the schema of what western respectable rational people expect gets dismissed out of hand.
I know by making this edit I'm inviting the most incurious assholes to mansplain to me why I'm wrong, but maybe someone will actually engage with the points.
Not sure if I'm following you correctly but the two main problems, for lack of a better word, getting in the way of religion adopting science is that it requires 1) change the already "proven to work" model they already had for ages and 2) some critical thinking and openness to new ideas. As for point 2, it not be much required, but it's population averages we're talking about, so that makes it more difficult.
Buddhists probably had figured out a lot of things about the workings of the human mind way before science did.
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.

44 comments