Just some thinking

[kippurbird]

I'm transcribing some things from chicken scratch script onto the computer. One of them is a short piece on the Yoruba religion. The person who wrote it said that they had a "very advanced system of cosmology".

Which gave me two simultaneous thoughts: One. What would an un-advanced system of cosmology be? Two. Isn't that rather condescending?

Comments

[emily-goddess.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's quite condescending.

I wonder what criteria they're using to judge "advancement"? Monotheism? Complexity? Accuracy compared to current scientific understanding?

[faded-enmity.livejournal.com]

Un-advanced = anything Paolini might come up with

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

In this context, I would assume it was some combination of scientific parallel and complexity.

An un-advanced system of cosmology would be that of more primitive religions or peoples, the ones where the entire universe consists of what they can see. This is especially true for those that believe they are INSIDE a container of some sort (sphere) and that the sun and moon are just lights moving on the surface of that container, etc.

[kevias.livejournal.com]

How long ago was it written? Back in the day, condescension was all the rage.

As for advancement, probably some comparison with the writer's own views of cosmology would provide the measure of advancement, sort of how like people are smarter the more they agree with you.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

Last February.

[kevias.livejournal.com]

Huh. I though researchers knew better than to use such loaded words these days.

[gjohnsonkoehn.livejournal.com]

Isn't that rather condescending?

Not necessarily, no. Cosmology is the study of the universe in its totality, and therefore it's entirely simple to construct a continuum of cosmological understanding; isolated cultures that believe they are the only inhabitants of a tiny world that extends no farther than their own territory would be at one end, and cultures that understand and accept a hypothetical Grand Unified Theory would be at the other. How 'advanced' a culture's cosmology is would therefore simply relate to how much of the universe it adequately explains, or even just acknowledges.