WI: The Scientific Method Outlined in the Bible

11 Daniel then said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, 12 “Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13 Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.” 14 So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days.
15 At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. 16 So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.

That's not bad at all! The sample size might be a bit small (particularly given that the results weren't replicated), and ideally you'd want to have the experimental observer blind to which diet each person was on, but that's a matter of rigor rather than principle. One could do a lot worse for a fairly quick-and-dirty experimental intervention.

I think that if your goal is to develop an appreciation for the scientific method among Christians though, you'd need to have something like the above spelled out in the Gospels, and perhaps elaborated on in other books, like St. Paul's letters and so forth.
 

Deleted member 67076

Oral history is not good for this sort of stuff, nor did the ancient Hebrews really have the mindset for questioning and experimenting. Very authoritarian culture in some respects.

The problem with religion... ALL of them (save maybe a little bit less for budisms) is that basically it's a fight for power and dominance: priests can power and kings want power.
Confirmed for never having studied Buddhism's history.

A king has no specific reason to be a king unless there is a religion to back him. He needs priests to say that he's the rightfull king. He has money and armies. Priests need his protection and want more power.
That's not how it worked in China, or in West Africa, or the Swahili Coast, or many other places I could mention. I don't understand why you bring this up.

A prophet says "well, listen to me and shut up, I'm god's mouth and you should follow his path". Priests distord it a little bit. kings take advantage of that.

Now WTF the scientific methods is going to do here. If theyre is one thing that prophets, priests and kings don't want is common bozo asking themselves "and by the way, if we think a little bit, why are they in control of the city/country/tribe?"
Where do I even begin with this?
 
Well, there is this example of animal breeding, where Jacob's boss asks him what he can do for him to reward him for his good work:
“Don’t give me anything,” Jacob replied. “But if you will do this one thing for me, I will go on tending your flocks and watching over them: 32Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-colored lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages. 33And my honesty will testify for me in the future, whenever you check on the wages you have paid me. Any goat in my possession that is not speckled or spotted, or any lamb that is not dark-colored, will be considered stolen.”
34“Agreed,” said Laban. “Let it be as you have said.” 35That same day he removed all the male goats that were streaked or spotted, and all the speckled or spotted female goats (all that had white on them) and all the dark-colored lambs, and he placed them in the care of his sons. 36Then he put a three-day journey between himself and Jacob, while Jacob continued to tend the rest of Laban’s flocks.
37Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. 38Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, 39they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted. 40Jacob set apart the young of the flock by themselves, but made the rest face the streaked and dark-colored animals that belonged to Laban. Thus he made separate flocks for himself and did not put them with Laban’s animals. 41Whenever the stronger females were in heat, Jacob would place the branches in the troughs in front of the animals so they would mate near the branches, 42but if the animals were weak, he would not place them there. So the weak animals went to Laban and the strong ones to Jacob. 43In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and female and male servants, and camels and donkeys.
 
That's not how it worked in China, or in West Africa, or the Swahili Coast, or many other places I could mention. I don't understand why you bring this up.

Save that it's wrong. Check for example the Serer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serer_religion ) and its links with leaders.

To come back on topic you would just need something like thagt "explore and discover your suoorundings, try to understand lorts's realm and to share his knowledge". It would give at least a strong incentive to go the right direction.
 
What if the bible would have encouraged scientific exploration?

Let's say that the first chapter is just slightly modified with something like "And God created the divine rules that would control land, water, animals and everything between."

Somewhere in the bible it is also explained that the purpose of mankind is to constantly learn more about God's creation, to understand the rules on which he created the universe, that these rules never change - neither by humans nor by God and that man should always use his intelligence and creativity to improve the life of himself and his loved ones.

In addition there is a proto scientific method outlined on how mankind should pursue the quest to understand God's rules. For example:

God's rules are understood by first using the intelligence and creativity given to man by God to come up with a hypothesis on why God's universe is behaving in a certain way. Secondly man has to prove his hypothesis by conducting experiments that constantly produce the same result. Thirdly the result of the experiment has to be repeated by third parties.

Working on an ASB / sci-fi timeline where a concept similar to this is explored so it would be interesting to hear what you guys think would be the consequences of such a dramatic change in the bible :)

I see a lot of trouble for that passage to stay in the bible. After all the bible is a collection of writings that were connected together (and other writings who were kept out).

A god that does setup rules and god never changes them can lead the church (who decides what stays in the bible and what is kicked out) in trouble of explaining certain things like miracles. The partition of the red sea, sticks turning to snakes, walking on water, turning water to wine, feeding the masses with 2-3 bread and fish, the resurrection of a man after 3 days being dead and a mass-zombiewalk in jerusalem going totally unnoticed by all roman officials when jerusalem was occupied and far less important things were reported back to the capital would raise questions about these stories in the bible being true, subject to the scientific method and obeying the statement that god never changes the rules simultanously.
 
And we should not forget that basically the content of the Bible has been deciced much later (Nicaea in 325).
 

Saphroneth

Banned
That's not bad at all! The sample size might be a bit small (particularly given that the results weren't replicated), and ideally you'd want to have the experimental observer blind to which diet each person was on, but that's a matter of rigor rather than principle. One could do a lot worse for a fairly quick-and-dirty experimental intervention.

I think that if your goal is to develop an appreciation for the scientific method among Christians though, you'd need to have something like the above spelled out in the Gospels, and perhaps elaborated on in other books, like St. Paul's letters and so forth.
Point is, though, it was in there and the problem is that it was drowned in everything else.
The Bible (and other Books for religions of the book) tend to be huge and involved, and some have described them as "the big books of multiple choice" - so something like this gets drowned.
Same happens even with things considered today fundamental tenets of a religion - heck, in a survey about 25% of American Evangelicals agreed with the statement "Jesus is less divine than God the Father", making them full-blown Arians.
http://apastasea.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/survey-says.html
So if there's that much confusion about even the Nicene Creed, and if the Bible has been historically interpreted to be both pro-Slavery and anti-Slavery, it's hard (for me at least) to imagine the spelling out of the scientific method would get much more traction than the example I quoted - otherwise that kind of comparative testing would have been de rigeur by the end of the 4th century, and obviously it was not.
 

scholar

Banned
Such changes to Genesis exceed the conceptual ability of those superstitious nomadic shepherds that organized their oral tradition campfire stories into a comforting monotheistic explanation of the frightening and mysterious natural world that confronted them.
Any culture capable of perceiving nothing (a void), and then having substance being brought forth by word alone alongside other complicated abstract principles is more than capable of putting into words the basic idea of the scientific method which, depending on how you define it and understand it, had earlier iterations as far back as first millennium bc.

That, and from anthropological studies even the groups that we would categorize as primitive know about generalized knowledge, the formation of explanations about the outside world, and the idea that said formation would either pan out, or fall apart. There's even an entire branch of classical greek religious studies that states that the original greek pantheon was basically an early scientific method, just that over time the words became anthropomorphized and developed identities and stories on their own - especially as they were brought into contact with nearby religious figures that were absorbed into the pantheon like Apollo from Anatolia.
 
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scholar

Banned
I don't think that's what he's saying, but its more or less true given people in the present day have a wealth of accumulated knowledge as part of common sense that the progenitors of the Old Testament would not have.
True, but the scientific method was not just dreamed up by one man during the enlightenment. It was a long process that took earlier ideas on how to formulate knowledge and then systematized them in a list. The many hundreds or thousands of ways understanding the empirical world was understood in religious, philosophical, other epistemological, and ontological schools of thought were consolidated into a single simple list. The enlightenment era, keen on getting rid of the old and decrepit ideas of the past, along with anything associated to what they believed to be superstition, hoped on this new method and went for it.

I mean hell, the first millenium bc is actually something thought to be exceedingly conservative since even the most basic understanding of the natural world and any deal of metaphysical knowledge and debate all but necessitates a basic framework for the accumulation and testing of knowledge.

See for yourself.
 
Well, there is this example of animal breeding, where Jacob's boss asks him what he can do for him to reward him for his good work:

That's artificial selection and, while cool, is not the scientific method as discussed by OP. The OP is not asking for scientific information to be necessarily put into an ATL Bible, but the scientific method instead.
 
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