I hope I don’t lose too many with that heading. I promise
not to list a bunch of dates and Greek names.
Philosophy is part of science. I’ll get to more on that
soon. Long before the word “science” was coined, there were the “Natural
Philosophers” in ancient Greece. That’s a good place to start for this blog
series which is about the line between and the gray areas around philosophy and
science.
Natural Philosophers
Those ancient Greeks were philosophizing about what things
are. They didn’t know about quantum physics or laws of motion and likewise,
much of what they concluded was wrong. We can give them a pass because they
were doing something new. They are set apart from earlier attempts to answer the
question “why” because they didn’t resort to wild claims about supernatural
forces or beings that lived up on inaccessible mountains.
Shamans
For thousands of years before them, there were the Shamans. Sorry,
I said Greece was the place to start, but I need to discuss what that “starting
place” grew out of. “Shaman” is just one title of this group that I’ll refer to
later. They, like the Natural Philosophers, also used methods of
experimentation and gathering of data but I’m distinguishing them because they
would also claim cosmic origins of their knowledge or include supernatural
explanations of their methods. I’m not trying to lessen their importance.
Without them most of us might not be here. As tribes of humans migrated around
the globe, to new climates and new ecosystems, they needed to learn. And they did,
quickly. If they hadn’t, they would have had a lot of trouble surviving. So, we
are the descendants of those who were successful. That’s just basic Darwinian
logic, but amazing, nonetheless.
They would find the healing herbs and learn to read the movement
of the winds and the waters. The reasons the Shamans spoke of sprites and
mystical explanations varied. It might have been for job security, to make it
look mysterious so others would think it required special powers to learn. In
other cases, it might have been a way to help others remember their lessons, or
a way to pass them on. A story or a dance is easier to remember than a formula.
The older the archaeology, the less we know about their thinking. Brú na Bóinne - Archaeological
Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne - UNESCO World Heritage Centre
If you go back in history further, something motivated us to
come together in groups of a few hundred, and to split off into smaller groups when
they grew larger than that. The size was conducive to some of them leaving for
days at a time to hunt, or to having some who could protect the young and
protect the mothers while they were vulnerable, and to help those who were sick
or hurt. Maybe as a lucky accident, or maybe by design, it allowed for
exploration and for figuring out how to make an arrowhead, how to corral a
mastodon, or just to stare up at the stars because they might tell them
something. Keeping the groups smaller allowed for social control of liars,
thieves, and freeloaders.
There are still Shamans on the Earth today Home - Flowering Mountain. Some
literally call themselves that. I don’t have a list of skills or abilities that
qualify one for the job. A modern version of a Shaman could be someone who
passes on oral traditions, or someone who forages for food or material to
create tools or works of art. It could include musicians or healers of any type.
The Grateful Dead
A friend of mine followed a band called The Grateful Dead
one summer while I was in college The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book by Tom Wolfe (thriftbooks.com). When she
told her story, she said, “Gerry Garcia is God.” Through experiences like hers
we recreate ancient discoveries. With enough people, and the right music, and
your own ability to let ourselves go with that flow, we can feel like it’s not us
that is doing the dancing, but something else, something larger than just ourselves.
Some of my friends thought that was a little weird, calling
a guitarist a god. We have methods now to figure out if such claims are true.
I’m sure my friend wasn’t the first to propose Gerry’s divinity, nor were my
other friends the first to be skeptical. In similar ways, young people discover
the wonders of nature through curiosity and experimenting. It can be a fine
line between encouraging that creativity and suppressing it in the name of
safety.
A good teacher today not only shows children how to pass a
science test but encourages them to discover science on their own. Kids also
recreate some of the not-so-scientific phases of our past, like “might makes
right”. It would be good for children to
develop the skills of sorting out reality before they start making decisions
about how to spend their summers. But I’m getting ahead of the discussion here.
The Axial Age
Moving on, a big leap in the transition from those ancient
days in Greece, and everywhere else, into the modern era, took place in the
last millennium BCE. Major philosophies and theisms coalesced, blossomed, and
were codified into the scriptures and words and common sense that still
survives in the modern world. We, the whole planet, are still discussing
exactly how “common” common sense is and what we should keep or throw away, but
I’ll get to that later. I bring it up because this period is significant enough
to be named. It was The Axial Age, and we can trace worldviews and current colloquial
sayings back to it.
Civilizations had grown and fallen before that, and we
should be careful, and not discount them. A simple distinction, my opinion,
between the ones before this time and now, would be that the earlier
civilizations emphasized “might makes right” over reflection on what “is”
right. The familiar names from the Axial Age include Confucius, Zoroaster, and
Siddhartha Gautama aka the Buddha (293) Documentary - The
Buddha - PBS Documentary (Narrated by Richard Gere) - YouTube. Judaism has
much deeper roots, but the Torah that has been handed down to us came together
after they were released from captivity by the Babylonians.
The Golden Rules
Common ideas, like how to put boundaries on the right of
self-defense, variations on the Golden Rule, how to maintain larger populations
and divide work, came from all these traditions. The phrasing varies, but the ideas are the same.
Many words have been spilled over the Axial Age. There is no
need for me to regurgitate them here.
It is important to note that questions about the nature of
faith and arguments about what gods are did not develop until hundreds of years
later. This was still a time of cultures being enmeshed with their spiritual
histories and governments making war because of beliefs. The philosophy behind
these questions became necessary when faith, politics, work, family, and other
parts of life were separated into the silos that most of us are familiar with
now.
Order
To complete our journey from the past to recent events, I’ll
quickly cover three types of societal order, Nomological, Normative, and Narrative. See an excerpt from: John Vervaeke Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas.
Nomological order can be traced back to the Shamans, up to
the foundational assumptions of science. It says there are laws that just are.
The methods of science allow for those laws to be questioned.
Normative order has codes to designate what is good, or what
is permissible, or not. They may or may not be logical. Moral codes are based
on some natural laws, something demonstrable. Purity codes might claim some
logic, but they are based on tradition. See an excerpt from: Vervaeke Episode 14 Cynics.
A Narrative order is a story that presents a point of view.
It’s a path to be followed with a promise of some future end. The Catholic
story is a good example. Luther came along and said their narrative is wrong,
that salvation is arbitrary.
Now
That brings up to the 16th century. Soon after Martin
Luther made his mark on history, Galileo made his bold claims about the
planets. Then came Newton. His formulas got us to the moon. The place where science
is trying to figure out what is going on with gravity and quantum mechanics,
and non-scientists are trying to figure out what that means to them is where
this blog series heads next. If you’re still with me, thank you.
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