History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science | Page 5

religious systems.--
The military, engineering, and scientific activity, stimulated by the
Macedonian campaigns, leads to the establishment in Alexandria of an
institute, the Museum, for the cultivation of knowledge by experiment,
observation, and mathematical discussion.--It is the origin of Science.
GREEK MYTHOLOGY. No spectacle can be presented to the
thoughtful mind more solemn, more mournful, than that of the dying of
an ancient religion, which in its day has given consolation to many
generations of men.
Four centuries before the birth of Christ, Greece was fast outgrowing
her ancient faith. Her philosophers, in their studies of the world, had
been profoundly impressed with the contrast between the majesty of the
operations of Nature and the worthlessness of the divinities of Olympus.
Her historians, considering the orderly course of political affairs, the
manifest uniformity in the acts of men, and that there was no event
occurring before their eyes for which they could not find an obvious
cause in some preceding event, began to suspect that the miracles and
celestial interventions, with which the old annals were filled, were only
fictions. They demanded, when the age of the supernatural had ceased,
why oracles had become mute, and why there were now no more
prodigies in the world.
Traditions, descending from immemorial antiquity, and formerly

accepted by pious men as unquestionable truths, had filled the islands
of the Mediterranean and the conterminous countries with supernatural
wonders-- enchantresses, sorcerers, giants, ogres, harpies, gorgons,
centaurs, cyclops. The azure vault was the floor of heaven; there Zeus,
surrounded by the gods with their wives and mistresses, held his court,
engaged in pursuits like those of men, and not refraining from acts of
human passion and crime.
A sea-coast broken by numerous indentations, an archipelago with
some of the most lovely islands in the world, inspired the Greeks with a
taste for maritime life, for geographical discovery, and colonization.
Their ships wandered all over the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The
time-honored wonders that had been glorified in the "Odyssey," and
sacred in public faith, were found to have no existence. As a better
knowledge of Nature was obtained, the sky was shown to be an illusion;
it was discovered that there is no Olympus, nothing above but space
and stars. With the vanishing of their habitation, the gods disappeared,
both those of the Ionian type of Homer and those of the Doric of
Hesiod.
EFFECTS OF DISCOVERY AND CRITICISM. But this did not take
place without resistance. At first, the public, and particularly its
religious portion, denounced the rising doubts as atheism. They
despoiled some of the offenders of their goods, exiled others; some
they put to death. They asserted that what had been believed by pious
men in the old times, and had stood the test of ages, must necessarily be
true. Then, as the opposing evidence became irresistible, they were
content to admit that these marvels were allegories under which the
wisdom of the ancients had concealed many sacred and mysterious
things. They tried to reconcile, what now in their misgivings they
feared might be myths, with their advancing intellectual state. But their
efforts were in vain, for there are predestined phases through which on
such an occasion public opinion must pass. What it has received with
veneration it begins to doubt, then it offers new interpretations, then
subsides into dissent, and ends with a rejection of the whole as a mere
fable.

In their secession the philosophers and historians were followed by the
poets. Euripides incurred the odium of heresy. Aeschylus narrowly
escaped being stoned to death for blasphemy. But the frantic efforts of
those who are interested in supporting delusions must always end in
defeat. The demoralization resistlessly extended through every branch
of literature, until at length it reached the common people.
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Greek philosophical criticism had lent its aid
to Greek philosophical discovery in this destruction of the national faith.
It sustained by many arguments the wide-spreading unbelief. It
compared the doctrines of the different schools with each other, and
showed from their contradictions that man has no criterion of truth; that,
since his ideas of what is good and what is evil differ according to the
country in which he lives, they can have no foundation in Nature, but
must be altogether the result of education; that right and wrong are
nothing more than fictions created by society for its own purposes. In
Athens, some of the more advanced classes had reached such a pass
that they not only denied the unseen, the supernatural, they even
affirmed that the world is only a day-dream, a phantasm, and that
nothing at all exists.
The topographical configuration of Greece gave an impress to her
political condition. It divided her people into distinct communities
having conflicting interests, and made them incapable of centralization.