Nornagest comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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That's just a more emphatic way of stating the premise, isn't it?
Religions are certainly models of the world, or at least of certain parts of it: fertility, cosmology, all those things with mysterious causes. And it's true that the lines between religion and philosophy (including natural philosophy) were awfully blurry in pre-modern thought; I'd actually put the watershed there relatively late, somewhere around Darwin or a little earlier. But calling religions methods of producing knowledge carries certain implications which don't necessarily follow from a conception of religion as a model of the numinous world: "knowledge" is a fairly strong word, much stronger than "thought" or "belief".
I'd say a more productive approach would be to call religions the first totalizing systems of belief: there are other and earlier paths to knowledge (nonhuman animals can learn from experience, but we don't observe worship among them), but before the Classical period all the Western attempts at organizing knowledge and belief into a comprehensive system of the world wound up looking pretty religious. When people start limiting themselves to talking about knowledge, you don't get religion, you get philosophy: often religious philosophy, yes, but that's a proper subset of all religious topics.