On upper-class medieval persons, Bronze-Age goat herders, and semi-enlightened Englishmen, featuring full-color illustrative proof of the Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit

Almost enlightened, but not quite: Sir Frederick William Herschel, artist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

“Imagine we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would even embarrass a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach.

“There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago — while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate — or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress.”

Thus writes Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith. This particular passage shows up in a section about religious peoples’ insane insistence on clinging to tradition. The idea being, only in religion would the thoughts of a fourteenth-century person still be considered authoritative.

There is so much wrong with this that it nearly overwhelms my ability to make simple distinctions. But I will try to put some words together.

Well-educated fourteenth-century persons knew Aristotle as least as well as they knew St. Paul. And although poor benighted Paul is clearly right out, does not Aristotle at least have something to teach us, even today? My point is not that we should all become Aristotelians, but that “old” is not a synonym for “worthless.”

This passage is indicative of a radically anti-intellectual conceit that holds an alarming amount of influence within much of contemporary scientifically-motivated atheism. That conceit may be summarized: People who don’t know any science — especially religious people who don’t know any science — really don’t know anything worth knowing. They are equivalent to “Bronze Age goat herders.”

In his 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins used the disparaging phrase “Bronze Age desert tribesmen” to describe the source of and intended audience for the biblical book of Genesis, and this phrase has been transformed in the mouths of lesser atheists into “Bronze Age goat herders.” As in, “The Bible is a collection of fairytales written by illiterate goat herders back in the Bronze Age” (lifted from iloveatheists.com).

What’s so wrong with goat herders, I don’t know. Also not sure how illiterate people, goat herders or otherwise, could write anything at all.

While Harris does not actually mention the Bronze Age or goats, his passage demonstrates the selfsame conceit.

The basic idea of the conceit is simple. Way back a long time ago we weren’t so hot at science. We were babies then, so we clung to our religion like mama’s skirt. Now we’re growing up (some of us are already all the way grown up) and we must put away childish things, in the words of the Apostle (poor moron, he couldn’t help it).

First among these childish things is religion. All of it must go, now. My own rather strong religious impulses, for example, are relics of the bad old days and simply must be dropped. How? I must learn some science. And once I really understand science I’ll be fully awake and I’ll see that what I really need is to do is just relax and stop worrying, man, and enjoy my life. Because how could I possibly enjoy life while believing in God?

Zooming out: We are at a critical point in history, and the sooner we slough off the old religious crap the sooner we’ll be able to get on with the business of saving our asses. Because “God” sure isn’t gonna do it.

So we have the Bronze Age goat herders who knew nothing, and we have brilliant men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who may not know everything, but man they sure know a lot. What came between these endpoints of intellectual evolution? I mean, besides our poor birdbrained medieval person?

Sir William Herschel, that’s who. He was perhaps the greatest astronomer of his time, which was approximately the late 18th-early 19th centuries. He discovered Uranus (make up your own jokes) and infrared radiation, discovered that coral was an animal and not a plant, discovered a couple moons of Saturn (tbsp) and Uranus, was the first to realize that the Solar System is moving as a unit through space, and coined the term asteroid. Plus: He’s the namesake of the big crater on Mimas, the “Death Star” moon of Saturn (tbsp). He really had it going on.

But he just wasn’t free of the old God baloney. In fact, he was plum full of crazy religious-y ideas, like what we call today cosmic pluralism. Which is a belief that there is lots of intelligent life out among the far-off twinkly lights. Some people believe this on semi-scientific grounds today, but Herschel’s arguments were not scientific. Instead, they were based on analogy and a belief in a God of abundance who would not waste perfectly good worlds.

Alasdair Wilkins published a nice piece last week at io9. Entitled Cosmic Pluralism: How Christianity Briefly Conquered the Solar System, it addresses Herschel’s insistence that outer space is a full house. Wilkins writes:

To read Herschel is to be thrown into a weird world where surprisingly modern astronomical understanding freely mixes with completely bonkers ideas. He notes that the Moon probably has little or no atmosphere and probably little or no water, and yet he somehow sees this as support for its habitability:

“My answer to this will be, that that very difference which is now objected, will rather strengthen the force of my argument than lessen its value: we find, even on our globe, that there is the most striking difference in the situation of the creatures that live on it. While man walks on the ground, the birds fly in the air, and fishes swim in the water; we can certainly not object to the conveniences afforded by the moon, if those that are to inhabit its regions are fitted to their conditions, as well as we on this globe are to ours. An absolute, or total sameness, seems rather to denote imperfections, such as nature never exposes to our view; and, on this account, I believe the analogies that have been mentioned are fully sufficient to establish the high probability of the moon’s being inhabited like the Earth.”

You can admit it – William Herschel just kind of blew your mind with that logic, right? But even then, he’s not done. He uses this apparently now established high probability of lunar habitability to prove the Sun is also teeming with life.

So maybe, under the Bronze Age Goat Herder Conceit, Herschel lived at a time just before the really smart people came to disbelieve in everything but science. They still had some of that dreamy old theology hanging on around the eyes, but were definitely coming out of their slumber. The clarity of sunlight still mixed freely with the the creepy mirage of a generous God. Etcetera.

So we have four points on a curve: (1) The Bronze Age occultists who, dreaming, wrote the Bible for the poor needy goat herders in the first place; (2) our well-educated but idiotic medieval person who knows about nothing but the occultists’ dream; (3) the almost-awake but still woozy Herschel, and (4) our brightest and most clear-thinking contemporary persons, who are of course all atheists.

It’s too simple to be wrong.

Click on image for an enlarged version.

When you look at it like this, you don’t have to do any work; the Bronze Age Goat Herder Conceit just saunters into your mind and sets up house. It is self-evident. One is compelled to ask, How could the world be otherwise?

Oh well. It really does bother me that people like Harris and Dawkins pass this garbage on to people who don’t know better. But not as much as it it bothers me that people like Harris and Dawkins themselves don’t know better.

There is a better way, friends.

Coming soon: Some off-the-cuff theories to compete with the Bronze Age Goat Herder Conceit. I was going to propose a few in this post but I got a little carried away with the chart. So we all have that to look forward to.

A big Thank You goes out to Alert Reader Todd Timberlake, who pointed us to the Wilkins article. As for everyone else, keep on sending us interesting pieces when you find them; the Internets are huge, and we here at psnt.net are oh so tiny.

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