Sure, the Victorians did - they had already found the dinosaurs bones and realized they represented animals that no longer existed by that point. But in the 18th century or even pre-Victorian 19th century? Not so much. Thomas Jefferson was eager to find the mammoths, that he felt were obviously living in North America, after some bones were unearthed. Extinction as a natural phenomenon wasn’t really contemplated as a possibility. It was only in 1796, in a talk given by Georges Cuvier in Paris, that he argued that, contrary to popular belief, the mammoth was no longer to be found in North America, and proposed, for the first time, the idea that a species could go extinct. (The very usage of “extinct” to describe something happening to a species only appears well after the dodo was wiped out in the 17th century, but still wasn’t acknowledged, until Cuvier, as a phenomenon that could happen in other circumstances.) It took some time (and some dinosaur bones) for the idea to be accepted.
Also acceptable space pope!
Not this one, tho…
Boo, bad space Pope! BOOOO!!!
“terrible lizards”… those were just Lizard People, we just didin’t have the internet back when their bones were discovered to verify this by FACTS.
Don’t forget that Evangelical outfits in the US keep funding expeditions to places like Africa in order to locate supposed dinosaur-like cryptids, on the grounds that their proven existence in the present will somehow disprove evolution and make creationism true by default.
citation needed
There are some quite popular religons that are not Abrahamic. Are they also being nailed into coffins with dinosaur bones?
Well, if Yoy is an AI then he/she/it is slightly better than some of the other new names around here, when it comes to raising that particular suspicion. Maybe it’s an A/B/C/D experiment in comparative AI engine Turing-blogging?
This is true, but only for those willing to let science define tighter bounds around what their religion can assert, or who are willing to only acknowledge scientific results in a certain scope and pretend the core insights and processes don’t apply outside that scope. Today this is so normal we don’t even really have to think about it, and we often consider it weird when people aren’t willing to do one or both of those things. The intellectual arguments and workarounds are well established.
And saying the scientific method was developed by religious people seems a bit of a stretch when used as an argument for compatibility? To develop science you need educated people, with time for contemplation not spent in manual labor, who are willing to notice and question deeply held assumptions that don’t quite fit observation. Before the modern world, that’s wealthy people and religious people, but more the latter than the former. And when you look at the actual major figures, they often weren’t exactly devout beyond what was required of their station at the time. Newton was a unitarian who studied the occult. Galileo had very little respect for the Pope and the church. Most of the foundations of science were either imported from ancient Greece by way of the Middle East and the discoveries of various Islamic scholars, or were developed in Protestant countries that had already started breaking from some parts of Catholic Christianity (so what was a few more parts to change?).
Just as one example, Newton was an alchemist and spent much of his free time using numerology to figure out when the world would end… He saw no contradiction in that.
He wasn’t an atheist, as far as I know (maybe I’m wrong on that and you have some evidence to the contrary)… Opposing an institution isn’t the same thing as being an atheist. Martin Luther opposed the church, and he sure as shit wasn’t an atheist.
And let’s not forget that Muslims also contributed to our understanding of the world from scienticif perspective, not just Europeans… as you say, but they were also obvious religious.
And they also had religious faith… 
Obviously, not Christian, but…
So, plenty of people find ways to square their faith with science. It’s seen as at odds largely due to the culture wars in the modern era.
The entire branch of science known as “genetics” started with the work of Gregor Mendel, the son of struggling farmers who became an Augustinian Friar. His observations stemmed directly from the manual labor he regularly engaged in as a gardener.
Religious faith and scientific discovery have always coexisted. People contain multitudes.
@Mindysan33 @Brainspore You’re both right, of course, but being an atheist… basically wasn’t a thing in Europe or the Middle East for most of history? Or at least so rare and objectionable that it didn’t get talked about and recorded. There is basically no possible scenario where major figures in that era of history became famous scientific visionaries while also being atheists in any way anyone else could have figured out.
All of these distinctions between personal belief and institutional support, or between private and public actions, or between natural and supernatural explanations, are all very modern distinctions that mostly aren’t how things worked backed then. That all happened during and after (and as an indirect result of) the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution.
Like, yes, Newton was interested in alchemy and numerology and saw no contradiction in that. Why would he? What epistemic state could he have possibly occupied that would cause him to not think of these both as perfectly reasonable and interesting questions for research?
Similarly, why would Gregor Mendel have thought his peas would show anyone anything other than another example of God’s glory and greatness in how He arranged creation?
But over time, the kinds of people who asked and answered questions based on observation and analysis kept finding themselves having to draw boundaries on where they relied on received religious answers, and had to reinterpret teachings as metaphor and symbol, in ways that not long before would have gotten them excommunicated, killed, imprisoned, shunned, or otherwise punished. It doesn’t mean there’s no room for religion in the modern world, but it does mean the word “religion” refers to a much smaller domain/scope than it once did.
Honestly, I think it goes back much farther than that. Old Testament miracles were large-scale impressive feats of God’s might. They were written down long after they supposedly happened, in an era where no one otherwise had written records (except for the Egyptians, whose records didn’t corroborate the relevant stories). New Testament miracles, though, were small and local. The Four Evangelists couldn’t have gotten away with claiming big miracles, because the Romans would have immediately called them on it. Similarly, nowadays no one cares much about whether miracles really happen and break the laws of physics, because we’ve collectively decided that’s not important and created justifications for why faith doesn’t depend on miracles. But what Jesus actually said (at least in John 15:24) was that without the proof of his miracles, it wouldn’t have been a sin to not believe in him.
The Gish of Gish Gallop fame was a YEC who developed the technique to “debate” scientists, and it was, and remains, stupidly effective if you let them get away with it.
Here is some history on the topic of atheism (wikipedia, so… grain of salt and all that)…
The POINT was that many of the key figures in the development of science as we know it WERE people of faith, and they squared it just fine. Same with many modern scientists today.
Sure. I think the concept of atheism got super-charged with the enlightenment in the west, and took on new, political, culture war feelings more recently too. New Atheism is organized in some ways like the fundamentalist they claim to oppose.
But religion is a broad historical phenomenon. Far too often, I think we assume that our modern understanding of religion and how it actual exists isn’t historically grounded, but in our current understanding of what it is, and how it functions. But religion is broad and amorphous enough to change with the times, and to be used/abused/shaped in a variety of ways by a variety of people…
I don’t think that’s held up by the reality of modern faith practices today. If anything, there are far more kinds of faiths and ways of thinking about the space that religion holds than ever before. It’s pretty clear that for many, it fills a need that other forms of knowledge and understanding just don’t. It might not be for me, but as someone who studies history, it behooves me to understand that, rather than just dismiss it out hand.
The point is that Gregor Mandel used the scientific method to dramatically expand human knowledge about the nature of life and the universe. He saw no contradiction between that pursuit and his religious faith, just like many people of faith today.
It’s true that some people look to religion as a security blanket or an excuse to avoid the work of pursuing new knowledge; if you imagine you know everything important already then you get to feel smart without having to read more than one book. But much more often religion is used to build a sense of community and to give people a framework for thinking about how to live their daily lives.
Most modern people of faith don’t have any real problem acknowledging the existence of dinosaurs because a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis was never one of the most important parts of their religious lives anyway.
Yes, and I think that putting all people of faith into that category is a huge error that just takes stereotypes as facts and allows people to dismiss literally most of humanity because it confirms their biases (the whole “god delusion” nonsense from Dawkins)… weirdly, it’s a very unscientific view to take, rather than being curious and interested in how people actually live their lives and square the many contradictions that come with being human.
So just FYI, despite their earlier stance on Galileo’s theories the Vatican has supported astronomy research for centuries, and still does modern, cutting-edge research today.
I think the basic deal is that the development of science like evolution made it sensible to think a reasonably complete worldview doesn’t need to have one or more gods putting everything together. It didn’t at any point make it mandatory. Enough learned people, scientists included, have gone all different directions on that point.
To be clear, I also think the OP headline is misguided and that there are many ways to be religious. I find religion fascinating and love to learn about what all kinds of people believe, and why, and what it means to them. There’s definitely a lot of knowledge and wisdom in the world’s religious traditions, and throwing it out is a mistake.
But just as you noted upthread, Christianity has often been much worse at thoughtful exegesis than Judaism or Islam. Plus, Europe didn’t become a major center of scientific development until after it started breaking with Catholic doctrine (yes, I’m sure both are related to the printing press at least as much as each other).
“Religion” is doing fine. “Religion” as it was understood by the Christians who existed in Europe before the scientific revolution is basically dead except among those who refuse to learn the lessons scientific inquiry has brought us. The lack of need for conflict between religion and science is largely a result of past conflicts between the two, which science (or just non-religious empirical investigations more broadly) mostly won, causing the scope of religion to shrink. We no longer rely on religion for understanding astronomy, meteorology, physics, epistemology, geography, history, biology, civil law, criminal law, jurisprudence (remember trial by ordeal or by combat?), medicine, and a bunch of other things. We have whole libraries of moral philosophy to replace the supposed need for a divine lawgiver to tell us what Good means. Heck, even most of the devout Christians in the world don’t act as though they really believe most of what the Bible says God expects of them.
Will religion keep existing and be valuable in the future? Absolutely! But I have no idea which parts will continue to be excised by growth in non-religious understanding, or when.
… gotta catch 'em all 
