Christianity is a dumb fairytale that only stupid people believe
Christianity is a dumb fairytale that even intelligent people are fooled by.
How can someone so smart believe in something that only morons do?
Plenty of things that smart people fall for just as morons do. Credit default swap and subprime mortgages are fine examples. There are plenty of hedge funds full of PhDs and even Nobel laureates that went bankrupt.
nearly every single great scientific work or piece of literature in history was created by someone who was religious.
Unless you can prove that being religious aided their scientific work, I don't see how this is even relevant. Can you demonstrate cause and effect?
The short answer to your question is that the concept of a supreme divinity that fixed universal laws of how the world would always operate after he or she set it in motion paved the way for both the scientific method and rationality.
(The former being empiricism and the latter being...mostly pure math I guess, which often turns out surprisingly useful)
If you're a pagan, and it's all up to where you happen to be and the mercurial whims of local spirits to decide whether or not your kid's gonna die of hypothermia in a bad winter, there's little incentive to "figure out the way the whole world works" while you're trying to scrape calories out of the frozen dirt.
Christianity is a dumb fairytale that even intelligent people are fooled by.
Plenty of things that smart people fall for just as morons do. Credit default swap and subprime mortgages are fine examples. There are plenty of hedge funds full of PhDs and even Nobel laureates that went bankrupt.
Unless you can prove that being religious aided their scientific work, I don't see how this is even relevant. Can you demonstrate cause and effect?
The short answer to your question is that the concept of a supreme divinity that fixed universal laws of how the world would always operate after he or she set it in motion paved the way for both the scientific method and rationality.
(The former being empiricism and the latter being...mostly pure math I guess, which often turns out surprisingly useful)
If you're a pagan, and it's all up to where you happen to be and the mercurial whims of local spirits to decide whether or not your kid's gonna die of hypothermia in a bad winter, there's little incentive to "figure out the way the whole world works" while you're trying to scrape calories out of the frozen dirt.
(I'm agnostic, for the record.)