Science and atheism require many simultaneous conditions to flourish, unlike religion

Evidence

Unlike religion, which is historically ubiquitous, science arose only three times—in ancient Greece, in medieval Islam, and in the modern West. And these three sproutings of science were culturally dependent—Greece inspired Islamic science, which in turn rescued it from oblivion, replanting roots again in its modern Western version, which then took off. In the first line of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Literacy, atheism, and science obey the same Anna Karenina Principle: they are hard to arrive at. They are alike in their fragility and complexity; they need many things at once to be viable, and the absence of one critical factor can doom the whole enterprise. But once all the necessary conditions are firmly established, they can flourish. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 629

Categorization

• XREF: Anna Karenina Principle connects to Jared Diamond’s use of the same concept in Guns, Germs, and Steel for domesticated animals.