A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.
If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it. You don’t have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is. People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them. The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.
There are two failure modes to watch out for.
The first is when people start worshiping their own ignorance and refuse to update the rules as their understanding of the underlying principles improves.
The second is when people recognize that the idea of “God” as an old man with a long beard who lives in the clouds is patently ridiculous and assume therefore that all of the principles and rules intended to “stay his wrath” may be ignored with utter impunity.
To the first type I generally point out that whatever creator they believe exists gave us our intelligence as well, and refusing to use that gift to the utmost would be an insult.
To the second I like to suggest that, since “Thor” is imaginary, maybe they should go stand in an open field and wave a metal stick around during the next thunderstorm… A “primitive” understanding of something is not the same as being stupid, and a few thousand years of experience that says, “If you do X, bad things happen,” should not be ignored lightly.
A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.
If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it. You don’t have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is. People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them. The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.
There are two failure modes to watch out for.
The first is when people start worshiping their own ignorance and refuse to update the rules as their understanding of the underlying principles improves.
The second is when people recognize that the idea of “God” as an old man with a long beard who lives in the clouds is patently ridiculous and assume therefore that all of the principles and rules intended to “stay his wrath” may be ignored with utter impunity.
To the first type I generally point out that whatever creator they believe exists gave us our intelligence as well, and refusing to use that gift to the utmost would be an insult.
To the second I like to suggest that, since “Thor” is imaginary, maybe they should go stand in an open field and wave a metal stick around during the next thunderstorm… A “primitive” understanding of something is not the same as being stupid, and a few thousand years of experience that says, “If you do X, bad things happen,” should not be ignored lightly.