it is [...] as incompatible with known _facts_ about reality as is
the Egyptian book of the dead, or any other tome of "knowledge"
put together by benighted prehistoric savages.
This is what I do not understand:
A few thousand years ago, we had a rash of holy books. No doubt the
oral tradition was already ancient by that time, but one nice side
effect of writing everything down is that one can have a literature, in
which people make arguments that build upon not only their own thoughts
and experiences, but also on the arguments that others have made before
them.
Naturally this leads to a formal concept of logic and proof, with a
usual outcome being that when one builds upon earlier results, one
should be careful to somehow discharge each assumption somewhere within
the canon itself. (naturally, the more inconsistent your holy book,
the easier this task becomes)
So, for several thousand years, we have a lot of intellectual activity,
all over the world, going into textual interpretation -- along with the
attendant mechanics of close reading and fine argumentation. Once
people get serious about doing modern science, only a few hundred years
ago, this machinery carries over nicely -- in fact, in many ways it is
easier to interpret reality than to interpret a text.
Why, in all that time, did it not seem to occur to anyone that asking
questions of the world, (especially of those worlds which are believed
to have been created by the same urge who inspired the book) would lead
to some immediately useful answers?
-Dave
