A huge surprise to the ancient Greeks, who outlined the concept of reason centuries before Christianity appeared, and invented a fair amount of math and the foundations of empiricism while they were at it.

In fact Christianity halted scientific progress in the West for around a millennium. Before the Renaissance rediscovered Greek philosophy, the Christian world operated on hierarchy, rhetoric, scholasticism, and violence.

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jimbokun 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

All of those things predate Christianity.

Well maybe not scholasticism.

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nephihaha 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The ancient Greeks had the opportunity to invent the steam engine, but didn't. They had the beginnings of steam power, but slaves were cheaper.

	▲	notlenin 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		common misconception: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... > As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship

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AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They did. But they never developed it into science in the modern sense.

They had a universe in which the gods did random things for random reasons. That didn't lead them to expect a rational basis for the construction of the whole universe, and so they never investigated in the way that early modern science did.

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tempaccountabcd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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