alt Hacker NewsExcept that Christianity inherited this philosophical concept of a rational and predictable world, and the concept of natural laws from Greek philosophy, which was thoroughly pagan. The dominant philosophical movement in the ancient world was Stoicism, which was deterministic. They certainly didn't get it from Judaism.
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There was lots of borrowing over time.
iirc Judaism picked up the immortality of the soul from Hellenism in the Ptolemaic era, arguably inadvertently since they were NOT fans of Greek culture.
And Neo-Platonic influences on the early Christian church were the key to opening the door to the Renaissance 1000 years later.
The Greeks and the people Of Judea had a pretty harmonious relationship and there was an intellectual cultural exchange. My understanding is that there were discussions surrounding monotheism and polytheism that the Greeks found satisfying.
It was way more than just the idea of a deterministic world. For example the idea that the world is Gods creation made it godly to discover the Lords laws for the world.
And more unique Christian theology like the Fall of Man, which made human thinking inherently corrupted by original sin, led to the argument that this could (must) be alleviated by new rational and objective methods. To quote from:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12857?...
> experimental knowledge was also deemed to be the more appropriate form of knowledge for a fallen world. It was commonly argued that while human beings in a prelapsarian state may have had direct access to the essence of things owing to a natural affinity between the mind and nature, that connexion had been lost as a consequence of the Fall. Knowledge after the Fall would now have to be painstakingly gathered from observations, aggressive experimental intrusions into (a fallen) nature, conducted by numerous individuals, over extended periods of time, and yielding only makeshift and probabilistic knowledge. Francis Bacon accordingly proposed that the object of the new natural philosophy was to seek, as far as possible, to restore the original connection between the human mind and the natural world that had existed in our prelapsarian condition.82 Subsequently, Robert Hooke, the first curator of experiments at the Royal Society, wrote that on account of an innate ‘derived corruption’, human beings have a natural tendency towards error. ‘These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason’, he concluded, ‘the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy’. Experimentation was thus a palliative for original sin