Monotheism’s disenchantment of nature enabled scientific exploration and atheism
Evidence
Secularism based on science and reason is often portrayed as anathema to religion, particularly among some new atheist thinkers who are critical of religion. But if you have followed the reasoning in this book, you can see that secular societies are really an outgrowth of prosocial religions. Not only because they essentially serve similar functions with comparable methods in sustaining large-scale cooperation. The monotheisms laid the groundwork for the modern secular world in other respects as well. Historian Marcel Gauchet notes two striking continuities between the three monotheisms and the secularisms they ushered. First, it was the monotheistic religions that reduced the role of the sacred and the supernatural from the material world, confining them to a supreme God who created it. Thus, the world, which in polytheism had always been infused with the supernatural, became a material world of cause and effect. In time, this allowed for some to imagine a distant God who created the world but did not actively manage it. It became possible to probe these cause-effect relations by scientific methods. Second, the monotheisms introduced another innovation—other gods were denigrated as false gods. Thus, the monotheisms may have inadvertently planted the seeds of atheism: if people can deny the existence of other gods, it’s only a matter of time before they start denying the existence of any gods. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 561
Categorization
- XREF: Gauchet’s monotheism-to-secularism continuity parallels the reader’s Big God analysis — religion creates the very conceptual world that later makes it optional. — connects to: The Scientific Revolution’s death of nature licensed nature’s manipulation — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 761; Treating nature as a vegetable made it both manageable and non-atheistic — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 906; Theistic scientists attacked mechanism for excluding divine purpose and providence from nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 911