Stian’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update

... the modern sciences might offer some cause for optimism, and they are often held up as exemplars of justified knowledge. This accounts for attempts on the part of some social scientists and philosophers to mould their endeavours on the model of science. But the reputation of the natural sciences rests partly upon latent theological assumptions and partly on a suspect conflation of instrumentality with truth.

Until relatively recently it was not uncommon for university courses in the history of philosophy to leap from the ancient Greeks to Descartes as if nothing of philosophical import had been transacted in the intervening eighteen centuries.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that first-century Jews, Christians, and Pagans, like Biard's Mi'kmaq, had no conception of belief either, at least in our modern sense. ... We are more distant from past believers than we think, and the idea that we share with them a common epistemological vocabulary arises out of mistaken assumptions about the stability of meaning of terms like 'faith' and 'belief'.