written by Stanly Schmidt
I'm quoting this section of Stanley Schmidt's book because of two reasons 1- i agree with the whole thing and 2 - because i feel the need to try to help promote his book - he is a grate writer.
Religious and Sciences
Attempts to cure disease, and to understand and deal with such traumatic and uncontrollable events as birth and death and storm and famine, probable also contributed to development of religion.
In primitive societies, a person who had acquired some knowledge of medical practices that worked - whether through experience or being taught "the secrets" by earlier practitioners - would be in a position to wield considerable power.
To reinforce and retain that power, such people might be tempted to fortify it with an imposing array of rituals to impress the uninitiated and make sure they took the whole business seriously.
Enough humans seem fond of ritual that the strategy would often work and allow the development of a family entrenched priesthood.
The origins of the oldest religions are lost in prehistory.
The ones of which we have more or less detailed records came much later and were influenced to varying extents by those that went before.
So it's difficult to whether the earliest religious were more creations of particularly influential, or outgrowths of shared folklore.
it seems fairly safe. though, that most religions include rituals related to a belief in one or more powers higher than human, stories to explain the origins of world and life, and teachings aimed at inculcating and perpetuating a moral code.
Religion in some form has existed in most, if not all, human cultures.
Its exact shape has varied greatly, as has the degree of its influence on the surrounding cultures.
A writer who wants to create an original religion for an alien culture would be well advised to do some reading on human religions.
However. he or she would also be well advised to ask question that go beyond merely comparing human religions and trying to add another to the catalog.
For instance, would aliens necessarily have religions at all?
There seems to be something in the built-in programming of humans that impels them to seek answers to the kinds of questions that religions ask, and to create or willingly accept the kinds of answers that religions give.
It may be too much to assume that all intelligent species have the same kind of impulses.
Some, for example, might have intense and curiosity about the details of everyday life, yet either have no interest in the BIG questions or consider the BIG answers too far beyond comprehension to waste time on.
Often, in science fiction, a religion and the culture of which it is a part will be designed to serve specific needs of the story.
In "Unhuman Sacrifice," Katherine MacLean needed to show a culture with a ritual ( hanging youths Upside down for a week or so right before adulthood ) that was obviously stupid and barbaric to humans eyes, yet absolutely indispensable to the race that practiced it ( it was an essential part of their Cycle ).
In Newton and the Quasi-Apple, I had to put an alien's race's analog of a key Scientist from our own history (rather like a bit of Galileo and Newton rolled into one ) into conflict with a theocracy like the one Galileo Faced - but not too much like it.
As the example illustrates, science and Religion have many of the same concerns - and don't always see eye to eye about them, even though some prominent scientists have been churchmen.
Religion, though, has developed far more often in human history than science.
Why is that?
First, you must understand that science and technology are not the same.
Technology began when the first hominids rocks or sticks to change the shape of other rocks.
Learning to use fire and make spears and arrows and canoes were large technological advances.
That sort of thing can be done without science - that is, without an analytical understanding of the underlying principles.
A grate deal can be accomplished simply by tinkering and building on the tinkering of your forebears, experimentally finding things that work using them, Regardless of whether you understand why they work.
But there are limits.
Poul Anderson, in his speculations on the nature and origin in chapter eight of Is There Life On Other Worlds?, doubts that it's possible for such purely pragmatic craftsmanship to produce a sophisticated ship or an airplane.
I'm not sure i agree that it's impossible, but it would at the very least be a much slower process, likely taking more time than most species have.
Science adds an extra element that helps: theory.
Scientist observe, both personally and through the accumulated observations of others.
They attempt to formulate systems of rules that precisely describe the observations made so far and can be used to predict things that haven't been observed yet.
They then do experiments to test those predictions.
If the experimental results agree with the predictions, they provide support for the theory - additional reason to believe that it is, if not an exact description of the real world, at least a good and useful noble.
By "useful" i mean, among other things, that it can be used to design things that are expensive to build - things like bridge and airliners - and be reasonably sure they will work.
So there is a connection between science and technology.
Science makes possible kinds of technology that would be difficult to imagine, much less execute, without it.
But Anderson suspects, and i suspect he is right, that its development is from inevitable.
( My Neuton and the Quasi - Apple shows how a fundamental breakthrough crucial to species' development of science could be derailed by untimely exposure to a bit of advanced technology that doesn't seem to fit the theory.
What if Newton had seen an "apple" ( in this case an artificial construct of physics called "quasimaterial" ) that didn't follow the law of gravity?) Scientific method seems to have originated only once among humans, and the facts that it did seems to have depended on several social conditions coming together in a somewhat improbable combination.
It happened in the Renaissance, and required the fusion of several ideas or attitudes that had existed before, but never all at once, including the Hellenistic interest in mathematics and logic, the medieval Judeo-Christian emphasis on trying to establish rigorously which theory was right, and the emphasis on trade and handicraft during the Dark Ages.
One interesting question raised by Anderson concerns the relationship between the "hard" or physical sciences ( such as physics, chemistry and astronomy ) and the "soft" or "human" sciences ( such as psychology, sociology and economics ).
We can easily imagine a world on which the physical sciences have not progressed very far, but that may not imply anything about the state of the "soft" sciences.
they could, in fact, be better developed there than here.
Conceivably, the rapid progress of the physical sciences on Earth has interfered with the growth of the humans sciences, partly by attracting talented researchers away from them and partly by creating a perceived compulsion to use the methodology of the physical sciences in an area where something else might be more appropriate and effective.
In "Unhuman Sacrifice," Katherine MacLean needed to show a culture with a ritual ( hanging youths Upside down for a week or so right before adulthood ) that was obviously stupid and barbaric to humans eyes, yet absolutely indispensable to the race that practiced it ( it was an essential part of their Cycle ).
In Newton and the Quasi-Apple, I had to put an alien's race's analog of a key Scientist from our own history (rather like a bit of Galileo and Newton rolled into one ) into conflict with a theocracy like the one Galileo Faced - but not too much like it.
As the example illustrates, science and Religion have many of the same concerns - and don't always see eye to eye about them, even though some prominent scientists have been churchmen.
Religion, though, has developed far more often in human history than science.
Why is that?
First, you must understand that science and technology are not the same.
Technology began when the first hominids rocks or sticks to change the shape of other rocks.
Learning to use fire and make spears and arrows and canoes were large technological advances.
That sort of thing can be done without science - that is, without an analytical understanding of the underlying principles.
A grate deal can be accomplished simply by tinkering and building on the tinkering of your forebears, experimentally finding things that work using them, Regardless of whether you understand why they work.
But there are limits.
Poul Anderson, in his speculations on the nature and origin in chapter eight of Is There Life On Other Worlds?, doubts that it's possible for such purely pragmatic craftsmanship to produce a sophisticated ship or an airplane.
I'm not sure i agree that it's impossible, but it would at the very least be a much slower process, likely taking more time than most species have.
Science adds an extra element that helps: theory.
Scientist observe, both personally and through the accumulated observations of others.
They attempt to formulate systems of rules that precisely describe the observations made so far and can be used to predict things that haven't been observed yet.
They then do experiments to test those predictions.
If the experimental results agree with the predictions, they provide support for the theory - additional reason to believe that it is, if not an exact description of the real world, at least a good and useful noble.
By "useful" i mean, among other things, that it can be used to design things that are expensive to build - things like bridge and airliners - and be reasonably sure they will work.
So there is a connection between science and technology.
Science makes possible kinds of technology that would be difficult to imagine, much less execute, without it.
But Anderson suspects, and i suspect he is right, that its development is from inevitable.
( My Neuton and the Quasi - Apple shows how a fundamental breakthrough crucial to species' development of science could be derailed by untimely exposure to a bit of advanced technology that doesn't seem to fit the theory.
What if Newton had seen an "apple" ( in this case an artificial construct of physics called "quasimaterial" ) that didn't follow the law of gravity?) Scientific method seems to have originated only once among humans, and the facts that it did seems to have depended on several social conditions coming together in a somewhat improbable combination.
It happened in the Renaissance, and required the fusion of several ideas or attitudes that had existed before, but never all at once, including the Hellenistic interest in mathematics and logic, the medieval Judeo-Christian emphasis on trying to establish rigorously which theory was right, and the emphasis on trade and handicraft during the Dark Ages.
One interesting question raised by Anderson concerns the relationship between the "hard" or physical sciences ( such as physics, chemistry and astronomy ) and the "soft" or "human" sciences ( such as psychology, sociology and economics ).
We can easily imagine a world on which the physical sciences have not progressed very far, but that may not imply anything about the state of the "soft" sciences.
they could, in fact, be better developed there than here.
Conceivably, the rapid progress of the physical sciences on Earth has interfered with the growth of the humans sciences, partly by attracting talented researchers away from them and partly by creating a perceived compulsion to use the methodology of the physical sciences in an area where something else might be more appropriate and effective.
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