Ojuice5001

Aristotle had a list of three levels of analysis of anything, which he called the "three acts of the mind." I think they can be applied to the history of thought, with interesting results that illuminate both theological and scientific thought. First of all, the three acts of the mind are:

1. Understanding what something is
2. Discovering true proposititions about it
3. Proving more truths about it through logic

Now, the acts of the mind build on each other. To discover a proposition, you have to understand its terms, and to prove anything, you have to discover some premises to work with. It follows that the history of cognition would have to start with an emphasis on understanding, and work its way up to discovering and proving. So let's begin at the beginning--prehistoric man.

(Needless to say, all humans engage in all three acts of the mind. I'm talking about emphasis, not making all-or-nothing statements.)

When noun-verb grammar (like modern languages have) began to take hold, people needed to come up with a way to say anything they could think. To do this, they had to understand the natures of different objects in their world, and create nouns that reflected the various objects in the world. They also needed verbs. A lot of new tools were invented in this period, and notice what was required to think of them. In many cases, all you needed was an understanding what the tool was, and some basic craftsmanship. To think of a spear, you just needed to understand the idea of a pointed rod of stone, wood, or metal. To think of a wheel, you just needed to come up with shaping a hard, strong substance into a circle. To harness fire, you just need to grasp the concept that when it touches wood or grass, it will transform it to ash and release heat (fire-starting was not always necessary). And so on. In supernaturalism, people looked at the activity of the world and noticed that there were not only natural concepts to grasp, there were supernatural concepts that had relevance to the world too.

The transition to discovery was gradual, and came in the Bronze Age. In most ways it was mostly complete by the time of Abraham, but some of Socrates' strength comes form an emphasis on understanding the meaning of terms. It was presided over by the Egyptian gods, and that's one reason why the Egyptian gods seem stranger than gods who revealed themselves later. Once it was complete...

Discovery is the second act of the mind. It started to take root in the enterprise of agriculture; agriculture required few new concepts, but a lot of new discoveries about animals, plants, soil, weather, etc. Humans began making explorations away from their homelands, which started geography and history. They took an interest in the stars and the oceans. They shifted to a need to find things out about the world. Greco-Roman paganism and Abrahamic religion are both products of this era, and it shows. Roman paganism discovered more gods than any other religion except its contemporary Hinduism, and Yahweh wrote the Bible, which has a high tendency to tell you propositions (some true, some not).

The transition from discovery to proving is not yet complete; I'd say it's about a third done. It is presided over by the post-Enlightenment gods. Descartes is the father of modern thought, and the impetus for a proof-emphasis came from Descartes to a large degree. Now, this shift started by affecting more everyday stuff, rather than affecting science or theology first. But by now a lot of philosophers of science think that science is leaving the era of dramatic new discoveries. And where do you go after discovery? Proof, the third act of the mind. As for theology, well, that deserves a separate paragraph.

It was easy to see supernatural properties when the emphasis was on understanding what something was. And it's not especially hard to discover something about the supernatural. But proving things about the supernatural is another matter. I think the reason is that in nature we can perceive the cause, operation, and effect, but in supernature we see the effect, sometimes the cause, but very seldom the operation. For this reason only a minority are gaining any knowledge of the supernatural, and most are losing it. If today's major religions are wrong, this is especially true, because any false doctrines of theirs are liable to be disproved. For instance, you can prove that an omnimax god is unlikely to be the world's creator, but you can't prove the truth of polytheism--only discover it.

Now, this picture of history is reminiscent of Comte's, but his anti-religious background got in the way and made him see the three stages as rivals. He liked the third stage better than the other two. But I have tried to show that supernaturalism is based on a combination of the first and second acts of the mind, that modern philosophies are based on the second and third acts to a de-emphasis on the first, and that all three acts of the mind lead to truth.