Hey,
@Muad'zin,
I agree with 90% of what you say, here...
...but I hope you won't be offended if I push for additional information, or minor corrections, on two points?
(WARNING: I'm about to be pedantic. Probably nobody here gives as much of a crap about this as I do, since it's sort of a hobby. Anyone who is bored by history should just
skip this and go to the next-posted ghost story.)
Re: "A thousand years ago lightning, famine, war, pestilence was all caused by divine intervention.": We want to be careful that we don't attribute beliefs to our
recent ancestors that were only held by our
extremely distant ancestors. What you say is likely true
ten thousand years ago, or
five. But a
thousand years ago the standard astronomy textbook for the educated in Europe was Ptolemy's
Almagest (which correctly describes the distance of the
spherical earth to the stars as being "so vast as to make the earth itself seem a mathematical point of no size"), and various
Bestiaries (like that describing the rhinoceros of India, from which the Greek "mono-ceros" was translated to the Latin "uni-cornos," birthing the medieval unicorn tapestries), and the
Code of Justinian (with its trial-by-jury and legal proceduralism still referenced in the Napoleonic code and thence to today's European courts). All these were legacies of the Roman era widely consulted in Charlemagne's push for literacy in the 800's. Before that, even in the era of
pagan Rome, you'd have had guys like Marcus Aurelius and the neo-Platonists attributing all of the above to natural forces. The neo-Platonists were Classical Theists, and saw God (singular) as the
ultimate cause for the ability of natural forces to -- sorry to use philosophical jargon, but if I'm pushing for accuracy I have to say things accurately --
instantiate the Platonic forms of their substantial types, but that's a rather more
abstract kind of causation than the more cartoonish Zeus hurling thunderbolts! Then of course Christianity is legalized by Constantine, and 75 years later, made official under Theodosius. That brings in the Genesis 1 Judaic notion that the natural visible world is just stuff, rather than gods: The sun and moon aren't divine, but are merely "lights" to be hung in the sky by God for the convenience of illuminating the day and the night. By the time Augustine of Hippo, a former neo-Platonist, is writing on such things around 400 A.D., the view that every lightning-strike is the capricious act of an individual deity is
culturally gone, especially from the educated class, except as a mock-superstitious joke or a legacy of earlier pagan etymologies. Of course everyone in that period thinks that God
can intervene in nature to smack someone with lightning, but they presume that normally He just grants natural forces their
intrinsic natures, and they do what they
normally do by
carrying out what is natural to them.
Sorry, that's a lot of detail! ...but my reason for raising it is that
so many folks believe a sort of historicist Urban Legend about the medievals: That they thought the earth was flat, didn't know the size of the universe, and perceived nature as non-intelligible. But not only were they
not like that, but they actually made that
same criticism of
the barbarians who'd been invading them for the previous 500 years! It's one of the things they considered "barbaric" about them.
Re: "And the other part being that we hope they exist. Because sheer random chance being more scary then no afterlife, or no gods nor conspiracies pulling our strings.": First, of course I recognize the paraphrase of Rush's "Freewill"
...but I'm not sure the attitude you describe is
psychologically accurate of people "a thousand years ago" or more. In fact that notion of what's more scary (or less scary) is mostly American, and less than 150 years old.
If one presumes a sort of non-judging "grandfather in Heaven" (as is popular in modern "Moral Therapeutic Deism," to use Christian Smith's term for it),
then the existence of God becomes merely comforting, full-stop. But that's
not the idea that was common from 400 A.D. to 1000 A.D., at all! The God of the "patristic era" is the "righteous judge" of the Psalms and of Jesus' preaching on Gehenna, bringing with Him a crushing weight of moral obligation: "Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." Folks in that era thought sheer random chance, and
oblivion instead of an afterlife, would be far less scary than hell (!), and the segment of the population who took religion seriously (never 100%) thought going to hell was a
realistic possibility. So we don't want to ascribe the attitudes of 20th/21st century post-Christian North American youth culture to the Roman, Byzantine, and Carolingian eras. Before that, of course, was the era of Greek, and then Roman, polytheism. Their "afterlife" was a dusky amnesiac Hades; and the interaction of the gods with men was largely
capricious. To the degree they believed in nature being
predictable, that brought them
hope; for
apart from that, nature could be viewed only as a meaningless and unjust threat from the gods. The sheer
arbitrariness of the gods' behavior left them looking over their shoulders all the time, periodically sacrificially appeasing the gods like a woman trying to placate an abusive boyfriend. That's why Owen Barfield and G.K. Chesterton describe the whole attitude of classical literature towards "life and the cosmos" as a sort of "resigned pessimism": There's no point to it, it usually sucks for no reason, and then you die.
...
None of that is to deny your basic premise,
@Muad'zin.
Yes, we're pattern-recognition creatures. Yes, we sometimes psychologically prime ourselves for wish-fulfillment (or, fear-fulfillment). Yes, we can assume that most reports of spooky goings-on are going to turn out (if it were possible to examine them adequately) to have resulted from imagination, or prevarication, or self-deception, or misunderstanding. And if you replace "most" with "all," I won't get persnickety about that (even if I think I have good reasons to disagree).
It's really more the Urban Legends about history you were using as
supporting evidence -- the popular notions about how people felt about topics like God/gods and nature, and what kinds of views brought them hope or fear, in previous centuries -- that I was keen to push back on. If you read what
they said for themselves, it turns out they were quite reasonable, and far less superstitious than pop-culture caricatures give them credit for. They lacked the
technology for investigating certain things, of course! ...but they did as well as anybody could expect with the tools they had available, and it looks very much like they'd have thought about the natural world much as we do, if only high-powered telescopes and microscopes had existed at the time.
Okay. Done now. Sorry for the length.