The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.
The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it—quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah—the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar—ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the early days—to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah’s altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout “The Lord is God!”—peer review.
And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.
Back in the old days, people actually believed their religions instead of just believing in them. The biblical archaeologists who went in search of Noah’s Ark did not think they were wasting their time; they anticipated they might become famous. Only after failing to find confirming evidence—and finding disconfirming evidence in its place—did religionists execute what William Bartley called the retreat to commitment, “I believe because I believe.”
Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion’s being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works—like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for . . .)
Back in the old days, saying the local religion “could not be proven” would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.” From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Although it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent—it could be alien teenagers.) The vast majority of religions in human history—excepting only those invented extremely recently—tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they’d actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn’t even know the difference.
The Roman Empire inherited philosophy from the ancient Greeks; imposed law and order within its provinces; kept bureaucratic records; and enforced religious tolerance. The New Testament, created during the time of the Roman Empire, bears some traces of modernity as a result. You couldn’t invent a story about God completely obliterating the city of Rome (a la Sodom and Gomorrah), because the Roman historians would call you on it, and you couldn’t just stone them.
In contrast, the people who invented the Old Testament stories could make up pretty much anything they liked. Early Egyptologists were genuinely shocked to find no trace whatsoever of Hebrew tribes having ever been in Egypt—they weren’t expecting to find a record of the Ten Plagues, but they expected to find something. As it turned out, they did find something. They found out that, during the supposed time of the Exodus, Egypt ruled much of Canaan. That’s one huge historical error, but if there are no libraries, nobody can call you on it.
The Roman Empire did have libraries. Thus, the New Testament doesn’t claim big, showy, large-scale geopolitical miracles as the Old Testament routinely did. Instead the New Testament claims smaller miracles which nonetheless fit into the same framework of evidence. A boy falls down and froths at the mouth; the cause is an unclean spirit; an unclean spirit could reasonably be expected to flee from a true prophet, but not to flee from a charlatan; Jesus casts out the unclean spirit; therefore Jesus is a true prophet and not a charlatan. This is perfectly ordinary Bayesian reasoning, if you grant the basic premise that epilepsy is caused by demons (and that the end of an epileptic fit proves the demon fled).
Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law—before legislative bodies; religion laid down history—before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals—before Women’s Lib; religion described the forms of government—before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars.1 The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area’s having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what’s left.
Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left. Take a culture dump from 2,500 years ago. Over time, humanity will progress immensely, and pieces of the ancient culture dump will become ever more glaringly obsolete. Ethics has not been immune to human progress—for example, we now frown upon such Bible-approved practices as keeping slaves. Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?
Intrinsically, there’s nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs. And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you’re crazy. But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you. Most people’s concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible’s moral problems. Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time.
Maybe someday, humanity will advance further, and anyone who endorses the Bible as a source of ethics will be treated the same way as Trent Lott endorsing Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign. And then it will be said that religion’s “true core” has always been genealogy or something.
The idea that religion is a separate magisterium that cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie—a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe. You have to admire its sheer brazenness, on a par with Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The prosecutor whips out the bloody axe, and the defendant, momentarily shocked, thinks quickly and says: “But you can’t disprove my innocence by mere evidence—it’s a separate magisterium!”
And if that doesn’t work, grab a piece of paper and scribble yourself a Get Out of Jail Free card.
1 The Old Testament doesn't talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe, perhaps because it was too busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore mens clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era.
Here you are making the claim that Old Testament miracles were bolder and more daring than New Testament ones because the Old Testament writers felt they could get away with a lot more because they knew that their contemporaries lacked the means to verify or discredit their claims. You imply that if not for the fact the Romans were better record keepers, the New Testament would be filled with more outlandish passages about God obliterating whole nations (i.e, Rome) or maybe more Red Sea splitting episodes.
The assumption you are making here is that the New Testament writers were more careful to avoid making easily falsifiable claims because people during their time had the means (libraries and records) to easily discredit them. I agree that people did have the means to discredit the claims of the New Testament writers but I disagree that their claims were any smaller or showy than the claims of the Old Testament writers.
For example, when the Apostle Paul, who wrote at least 1/3 of the New Testament, was addressing King Agrippa, a Pagan King, he spoke of the verifiability of his statements in a positive light.
For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner.”—Acts 26:26
One of those things that Paul was telling King Agrippa about was the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is arguably the boldest and most daring claim of the entire scriptures, Old and New Testament. Think about it. It’s a claim that a public figure experienced a very public execution, rose from the dead 3 days after being confirmed dead and ascended to heaven in front of 500 eyewitnesses. Paul spoke this boldly in front of a Pagan King who was very familiar with the events he was talking about and had the resources to verify the facts. By the way, he spoke this while his life was on the line.
There were many eager and motivated enemies of Christianity who had all the means necessary to squelch the outlandish claim of resurrection. The whole Christian faith rests on this miracle of the resurrection of Christ. According to Paul’s own words, Christians are the most pitiful creatures alive if the resurrection did not truly occur (1 Cor. 15:19). Surely, the enemies of the faith wouldn’t have missed any opportunities to discredit the claim that Christ resurrected. If they could, they would have gladly produced the dead body of Christ and ended the whole Christian religion overnight. The New Testament writers also named real places and people in their accounts. Many of these people and places were still around by the time they committed the Gospel accounts to paper. Surely, unbelievers familiar with the events and people involved could have pointed out lies and deceptions before they continued to spread.
In addition, all the disciples suffered dearly, even to the point of the cruelest martyrdom, believing they will one day resurrect physically the same way they saw their Lord resurrect. It makes sense that people will die for something they think is true but have no way of verifying (suicide bombers dying for the promise of 70 virgins in paradise), but it doesn’t make sense for people to die for something they know is a lie invented by themselves (the disciples and the resurrection of their Lord). I wouldn’t put myself or my family at risk of death for the sake of something I fabricated, knowing it isn’t going to gain me guaranteed wealth, fame, or power. This absurd thing is exactly what people imply the New Testament writers were willing to do.
When assessing the eye witness accounts of the New Testament writers it would be unreasonable to not consider that they might have actually just been telling the truth. But I know….that’s just too scary of a thought.
Along with the Bible, I suggest that you study the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Lotus Sutra, as exemplifying the mind-state of the epoch of religion. And then contemplate yourself as a Homo sapiens living in the next epoch, that of science.