Can an intelligent species develop science BEFORE it develops religion?

Question

Our distant ancestors did not understand the world in which they lived. They saw female animals giving birth, along with their own females, and probably concluded that the universe was 'born' out of a female God - the pagan Earth Godess. Later, as men took charge of society, Gods replaced, or were added to, the Earth Godess myth. Other cultures worshipped the Sun as the bringer of life. Still others developed strange variants of their own.

BUT, could an intelligent species bypass these tens-of-thousands of years of mythology and develop a purley scientific explanation of existence WITHOUT going through the 'religious age' first?

Can you offer a path of cultural development a species would need to take in order to reach, say, our own level of scientiic knowledge without having developed religon? A culture in which spirituality has ALWAYS been satisfied by science?

Or, is this process - religion first, then science later - the only logical path intelligent species can follow?

Answer 1

i cant speak in behalf of the alien species you were hypothetically asking about, i can only speak in behalf of our race. i dont think it's a necessity but studying the first civilizations on earth seems to imply that religion doesnt make a humanity enlightened at all. Barbaric sacrifices & elaborated warfares were at play. Only now that science has finally opened a door of understanding, but majority of people still despise it due to religious sentimentality.
i do not know if our genes were naturally designed to believe in a higher being but i do know that it does adhere in the deepest part of our mind.
i may theorize that an alien civilization far more advance than ours, may have simply bypassed "the religion-science later" path due to unknown circumstances. but id like to add, they might not need to search God through prayers & religious studies, they simply might have found God(who ever designed the intricate laws of the universe) & made peace with that reality.
with that said, i beieve that any intelligent creature in the vast universe will always have lingering questions of how it was created & who was responsible for it.
Once there is a big void, we have always have to fill it up with something big.

Answer 2

Science and Religion are two in the same. Just two different perspectives looking for answers to all the same questions. They both came from our earliest Human nature to ponder, explore, attempt to understand, and to survive the world in which we lived (and live in now), and to give us a footing of where we stand in it as self-aware beings in our world. Self-awareness, there's an interesting concept to question. What weren't we happy about rummaging for vegies through the sludge that inspired That to come about??

Fear of the unknown and the things we couldn't control sparked the invention of Gods, and Worship. Those within the group fearless enough venture behind the Wizard's curtain and find the midget controlling all the smoke and lights, and from it figure out how to do something better ways than before, became the scientists, which sparked the intelligence evolution of inovation that brought us to the tune we see today.

Who's to say Religion and Science didn't emerge together? Perhaps they sparked one another from a single abstract idea. Or perhaps they emerged as seperate concepts by two different people at the same time. There are no records of early mankind as of yet found to debunk either possibility. So your question, as it it asked, can afford no answer outside of mere speculation.

Science, Religion, It's all relative to basic Human abstract thought no matter how you try to slice and dice it into little tiny pieces for endless debate within one prefered frame of understanding. Logicality, which is neither scientific nor religious, is born from and dwells only in common sense. Common Sense comes from discovery through trial and error. What role Religion plays in logicality can only stem from the perspective one places on the discovery. And so common sense is subject to what you can make of it from what direction and level of evolution (learning) your own mentality has expanded to at any time, which happens to be the very inspiration for Debate amongst Humans all alike since no two people think exactly alike.

So what came first - the Chicken, the Egg, Science, Religion....

What came first? The Need came first. What happened after that only Nature can tell at this point.

Here's a new question for anyone pondering this issue...

Imagine just for a moment if, for the earliest of Religion's sake, someone listened to the volcano brimsrone lecture from the old man shaking the stick at everybody...
...and put the flint back...

What would you be debating now?

Answer 3

I actually think that "religion" and "science" blur into one thing the further back one looks.

Things that previous civilisations took to be the cutting edge of science, now look to us to be religious mumbo-jumbo (e.g. the world is supported on the back of a giant turtle).

Who's to say that future civilisations won't look back at our age and think of our science and beliefs as religion.

It is human nature to try to make logical sense out of what we see around us, but we can only do this by relating it to our own experiences. To ancient man it would have seemed perfectly logical that a god controlled a volcano, or the flooding of the Nile, or the passage of the sun across the sky and so on.

.........and what about Creationists? They would say that their view of the creation is science - evolutionists would say it is religion.

We may not worship as such at the altar of science, but our interpretation of what we see around us is still modified by the limits of our knowledge. We struggle with the concept of infinity - yet the universe may prove to be infinite.........we struggle with the concept of more than four dimensions - yet there may prove to be many more (may be even infinitely more).

As it is a subjective where religion crosses over into science, then I believe it is impossible to reach a scientific rationale (if that is indeed where we have reached) without going through the religious belief system first.

Answer 4

good question! from the beginning of time as we know it we have been visted by ufos, some say.is god an alien? if so where did they come from?(or he /she)religion is a personal thing, ask 100 people get 100 different aswers.i would say yes to your question because aliens may not have a religion as some people see it.what they see may totaly different than us.just look at all the different religions we have here.is there a god?who knows?

Answer 5

Can't you just envision an average society of different intelligent species where it would be normal to view humanity as an abnormal species reveling in its superstitious, chauvinistic, primitive, and hidebound religious beliefs?

Answer 6

"Or, is this process - religion first, then science later - the only logical path intelligent species can follow?"

this is right without a doubt...religion is just like science...dont see them as opposites or whatever...they are continous on the scale of congruence...the only surpprising thing is religious people ignore facts that we now have

Answer 7

Religion is what helps us exist before science takes its place; an intelligent entity would most likely find it crushingly depressing to be lacking any answers as it follows the road of science in order to get to them and thus comforts itself with religion. If it is possible to develope science before religion then it is improbable and incredibly difficult to imagine happening correctly.

Answer 8

I find it hard to think of a species developing science before religion, with us anyway i think science developed from certain people believing there has to be a better explanation

Answer 9

Religion forms the base for all of a person or society's beliefs including the way in which they view the world around them.

Answer 10

If it's truly intelligent..