It may be true that our current scientific culture arose from religion, but it's easy to imagine it arising separately. There are even countless stories of times when scientific progress was hindered by religious thinking, situations where people tried to fit their ideas to some religious story and in doing so blocked their progress towards truth.
In addition to that, even if religion was a necessary prerequisite for modern science and we take that science is 'good', that does not mean religion is good. "The USA came about (in part) due to the use of slaves, take away slavery and we wouldn't have the USA" is not a good argument for slavery.
A side note, but the world is not really orderly, though maybe it is understandable. If anything, the world is filled with death, pain, and chaos; if any mind created it, it's a sadistic one.
Atheists were science blockers in Plato's day. They were called sophists, and didn't believe in gods, but used the beliefs of the people and fancy rhetoric to get what they want. Most of Plato's dialogues are debates with sophists.
You claimed that science exists because of religion, but did not show that religion is a requirement (or even catalyst) for science.
Organised science definitely requires a society (otherwise it would not be organised) and it so happens that historical societies tended to have some association with religion, but I would claim science arose from these societies despite religion, not because of it.
If science was an outworking of religion, rather than the society a religion happens to cohabit, why do we not see more and more science coming from societies with more and more religion?
> Atheists were science blockers in Plato's day. They were called sophists, and didn't believe in gods, but used the beliefs of the people and fancy rhetoric to get what they want. Most of Plato's dialogues are debates with sophists.
Sorry, not sure what the link here is.
Atheism is just not believing in gods, in the same way I don't believe we are living in a simulation. Even if the premise is true, as far as we can measure (so far!) there is no impact on us. Not believing in things that we can't experience or measure is the default for us in general.
I would go so far as to say that religions themselves only exist because we were trying to explain the world we live in, and were unable to with the tools and ideas available to us throughout history. Over the course of history many people have observed the same phenomena and come up with a multitude of ideas as to what is going on.
Many of those ideas go on to form the nexus of a religion, many hundreds or thousands of religions trying to make sense of the world. The ideas that hold up to interrogation, that are testable and can be observed repeatably, they become science. Science reduces the set of possible explanations to the ones that are feasible.
Didn't Aristotle basically say a projectile will move in a straight line until it basically "runs out of gas," even though everyone who's ever thrown something can see that's not true, just because he thought it ought to work that way?
Lets take in mind that we talk about a man, one single man with not much more than a deductive and logical brain. No fancy lab apparatus or computers here.
This man was hugely influential in logic. Created the sillogisms and developped one of the first logical syntaxes based in the concepts of true and false. "if A is P (is true) and P is C (is true); then A is C". relationships among true and false in double negatives, predicates, etc.
Lay the foundations of economy as a science and economic though. We call it "economy" because one of his disciples coined the term.
Hugely influencial in occidental medicine. Medicine must be evidence-based, deterring magical procedures.
So called the "father of biology". Wrote the first comprehensive treatise about zoology, covering and classifying more than 500 animals. Wrote a similar treatise about botany (mostly lost if i'm not wrong)
Hugely influencial in development of embryology and teratology. Described systematically the development of embryo in chicken and other animals. Developped laws about gestation time and clutch size related with size of animals that are still vigent.
(Most probably) the first cephalopologist or marine biologist. Described the hectocotylus in octopuses and explained his function.
Deducted correctly that all things in the space were moving in closed orbits. Was wrong about putting earth in the center of all universe, and though that orbits were circular; but to be fair the first telescope wouldn't be invented until, dunno, more than 1500 years later or so.
Introduced the phylosophical concept of first motor, "if there is movement in the universe and all that moves is pushed by another moving object, there must be a first cause for the movement of all the planets and things in the universe". The pale ghost of this concept can be still invoked if you repeat "Big bang" six times in front of a telescope's mirror.
Not to mention the thousands of his phylosofical quotes that are fondly repeated still today in lots of powerpoint presentations and motivational posters all around the world.
"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light" Harvey Dent? not, Aristotle.
All in just a man's life. The man was wrong in many things, but was incredibly smart, influential and prolific.