I have always seen greek tragedy as the precursor technology to the scientific method. If you didn’t know how the world worked you would advance confidently on a determined path, protected by the gods. If the gods turned their face from you…tragedy. But to me that’s another way of describing hypothesis and (failed) experiments. But before the scientific method was established, failure was related to the god’s scorn. Failures of Heroes are the most confusing and interesting, so they are retold. And, related, Christian forgiveness was critical technological advance to making scientific failures acceptable.
> And, related, Christian forgiveness was critical technological advance to making scientific failures acceptable.
So did it just take 1,600 years for that critical advance to express itself, or something? I judge Greek technology (and all technology is the result of scientific failures) to be greater than Medieval technology. Maybe you mean a "Protestant forgiveness?"
I would think it took 1600 years between a small group of weirdos intuiting that forgiveness was an important, perhaps even a key, virtue and society being organised in such a way as to actually be capable of expressing it in the realm of technology.
