Most ancient cosmology is wrong, for example we know absolutely that the sun is not a chariot pulled across the sky despite that being part of Hindu, Norse, Baltic, Chinese, and Greek theology. This despite Eratosthenes figuring out it was 93 million miles away. Why didn’t they ditch the untrue beliefs?
While the West had four elements, the East had five, because nobody had the tools to look for roughly a hundred, not that it stopped people trying to turn lead into gold (which we can in fact do now, but the ancients didn’t have nuclear reactors).
No microscopes to look for germs to suggest that misama wasn’t how disease spread. Aztec blood sacrifice doesn’t really help maize crops grow or the sun travelling across the sky. Pork and shellfish goes off quickly in hot deserts like the Middle East, but we’ve got refrigerators and health inspectors now.
The story of Noah’s Ark was taken seriously for a very long time, because nobody had any idea how many species existed and how that number was so large it could not possibly fit into a boat that small.
Some ancient Greeks argued that we could see due to light coming out of our eyes, a belief which is (IMO surprisingly) common today: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12094435/
False beliefs are the default. How do you go about eliminating them when they don’t feel any different to true beliefs?
Science is the best answer to that question that we’ve got so far, and when we find a better one we will use that instead, just like we switched from “verification” to “falsification” when we realised verification wasn’t actually possible.
Oh, I will clarify that even today, we believe things that we have no way of proving. We are different from the ancients, but perhaps less different than you might think.
Most ancient cosmology is wrong, for example we know absolutely that the sun is not a chariot pulled across the sky despite that being part of Hindu, Norse, Baltic, Chinese, and Greek theology. This despite Eratosthenes figuring out it was 93 million miles away. Why didn’t they ditch the untrue beliefs?
While the West had four elements, the East had five, because nobody had the tools to look for roughly a hundred, not that it stopped people trying to turn lead into gold (which we can in fact do now, but the ancients didn’t have nuclear reactors).
No microscopes to look for germs to suggest that misama wasn’t how disease spread. Aztec blood sacrifice doesn’t really help maize crops grow or the sun travelling across the sky. Pork and shellfish goes off quickly in hot deserts like the Middle East, but we’ve got refrigerators and health inspectors now.
The story of Noah’s Ark was taken seriously for a very long time, because nobody had any idea how many species existed and how that number was so large it could not possibly fit into a boat that small.
Some ancient Greeks argued that we could see due to light coming out of our eyes, a belief which is (IMO surprisingly) common today: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12094435/
False beliefs are the default. How do you go about eliminating them when they don’t feel any different to true beliefs?
Science is the best answer to that question that we’ve got so far, and when we find a better one we will use that instead, just like we switched from “verification” to “falsification” when we realised verification wasn’t actually possible.