Help me with this "What if"

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Memetics is merely a hypothesis, or if you will a "model", for how ideas and sets of ideas spread, or fail to spread.

They spread because they are useful for those who hold to them (in an immediate way, or more often in a long-term statistical-Darwinian sense), or because they give emotional comfort, or in some cases both.

In the long term, memes or sets of memes can give their adherents a greater chance of socio-economic success. As individuals, or as societies. (Even mere emotional comfort can increase one's chances of sucess slightly, because there's less stress, so more energy to devote to gainful activity.)

Christianity clearly offers both some social benefits (at least long-term, such as counter-acting or trying to counter-act tribalism, along with an ideal of charity) and some degree of emotional comfort, but also some discomfort-causing factors (all that angst about sinning), and it's possible that the inherent pacifism in Christianity has a long-term cost (I think it has, but it's far from obvious that it's a significant cost).

Indo-European paganism, at least northen versions, offers little comfort (some flavours offer the promise of a pleasant or endurable afterlife, but mainly or only for the warrior elite) but no discomfort (there's no concept of sin - it's okay to have fun), and gives about as much social coherence as Christianity (lying and stealing is seen a shameful, at least within the tribe, and hospitality is a virtue, but it fails to promote universalism and (therefore) isn't big on charity).

Paganism is open-minded about new ideas. That makes it vulnerable to missionary activity (no immune system - my pagan ancestors were bubble children!), but also means scientific inquiry isn't halted by scriptural dogma.

On the other hand, there's a school of thought that says that scientific inquiry is greatly facilitated by the idea of montheism, especially a monotheism that says that a god created the world and then defined laws of nature which causes the world to function (to run like an engine), whereas polytheism tends towards everything happening being a direct act of a god, e.g. the sun god actively causes the sun to rise every morning.

It does make a lot more sense to study objective laws of nature (even if one's religion strongly promotes the idea that divine intervention in the form of miracles can happen, and even will happen several times in the lifetime of each believer, on average) than to try to study the whims of a multitude of constantly-active gods, which would be more akin to psychology than to hard or natural sciences, anyway. The later strikes me as futile. I can't wrap my head around trying to do science if one doesn't believe oneself to be in a universe that is at the very least largely mechanicstic.

Medicine went backwards in Christian lands in the middle ages (but not in Islamic lands. Although after the Golden Age, things went downhill there), suggesting that there might be some truth to the problem with scriptural dogma, but it is not true that progress halted completely for the entire duration of the middle ages, even though many make that claim (it's almost as silly as claiming that medieval Christians thought the Earth was flat). Maybe they didn't make a lot of progress, relative to how long the medieval period lasted, but they did make some. Some scientists were percecuted. Others weren't. Others again managed to achieve a bunch of results before they were stopped. Some science did get done.

So it's not 100% clear what the long-term consequences of this are.

In particular, it is not clear how pagans would do science (Poul Anderson offers one vision in the novella "Delenda Est" - he thinks they'd do science badly). I'm trying to figure out how that works in my Ärth setting (main among the still pagan Kelts), but those are just my own ideas, mainly based on the assumption of a largely-mechanistic universe, one governed by knowable and consistent laws (even if they're consistent but with rare exceptions), and aided by the inquiry opportunities offered by learnable magic (spells to sense and sometimes gauge or measure things, even if not to the same ridiculous pseudo-technological extent as seen in systems such as Rolemaster or GURPS Magic).