Urdlen's best boy
Deep Crawler
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Possibly, but it beg the question of why comparing to 1000 BC. Also is it so unrelated when advanced metallurgy requires more advanced furnaces etc.The advancement of Weapon and Armor technology has little to do with the advancement of science as a philosophy. The changes that drove a culture to the point where they were using transitional armor couple have developed independently.
And FR has Red Wizards & Athas has no gods & Eberron has railways... etc. So every D&D setting of note has basically room for empiricists/atheists, etc baked into the setting.D&D has both divine and arcane magic. Despite the existence of divine activity, there was enough time in Oerth's history to give rise to an independent source of knowledge centered around the study of arcane magic. If I had to guess the philosophy behind it specific to Oerth, it is probably the realization by a few that "the divine" is, in some ways, just folks with immense powers but also with agendas that can be exploited to gain a measure of independence.
Oerth's version of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment would likely be ignited when this idea gained critical mass among the dominant cultures of Oerth. And it will be very messy.
Esp when factoring adventurers typically are hotheads & marginals.
That's somewhat true but also not totally. For starters we'd expect there to have always been contrarians & skeptics, which are really the only things needed to qualify and go towards empiricism.The point is that circumstances can lead to independent traditions even when divine powers are real and active. The main thing I observed about history is that over time, new ideas and possibilities are developed. Humanity slowly, over time, collects a recipe book of ideas that exist both independently and interact with each other. Eventually, given the right circumstances, they will combine into new possibilities that muddle things up even further and in unexpected ways.
I am not saying that there is some grand scheme of progress. Only that things turn out the way they do because of what folks had in their recipe books at the time. That book at that time was dependent on how older recipe books were set up, which was dependent on even older books going all the way back when folks were trying to survive in the African savannas and make sense of their world.
eg emperor Whatever the Vth says he's a god. You don't need an elaborate scientific understanding to say "no he's not"
My point is merely that there's always been skeptics, and yes how many etc depends on materiial conditions, institutions etcI am aware of these, and I apologize for not being able to compress the entire history of religious and scientific evolution into a one or two paragraph answer.
Hence my mention of multiple Renaissances throughout history and across the world.
I will say that across the world, the 6th to 4th century BC seemed to be a time when many cultures gained a lot of new ideas and philosophies in a short amount of time. I am sure this stuff happened before, and we just don't know about it. Also, given the length of human history, random circumstances mean that there will be some time periods where multiple things are happening side by side across many regions, even if they start out unconnected.
& the counterpart is that likewise blind & total faith in miracle healing etc wasn't that monolithic in the past. If anything, from synchretism to developpment of science & medicine, & study of hardliner movements (eg Savonarol, or fundamentalist mvts in the Ottoman Empire, etc) is that it's not possible to extrapolate that everyone believed in miraculous healing by clergy in the past. What's more likely is that most people did kinda believed while cherry picking, with some outright rejecting & others being hardliners/fundamentalists/etc.
Because returning to the crux, that's the nature of the real world, all you need to do to reject a (non demonstrable) idea is not believing in it. What you have to believe and disbelieve is fundamentally different in a world where deities are materially tangible. Though, you are right that these things might take a different form given the other variables (arcane magic), but those would make disbelief* more likely.
*edit: rejection despite knowledge, here
And on the concept of Renaissance: is it multiple renaissances if it happens constantly? Really, it's cultural exchange & diffusion, which follows developpment of States & trade, with the centermass(es) of exchange varying through time - indeed based on material, institutional, etc change. Expressions of disbelief are recorded there because that's where all expressions are more likely (due to paper, education, etc) and they're more likely to become more "liberal" (in the old meaning) due to trade & the multiethnic nature of empires - and thus make it possible to say things which would be harder to say in a more tight-knit community, as well as record them.
In conclusion I don't think it's true that all people in the past accepted all faith claim in the absence of science (so to speak) and I also think even if it was, the comparison would be limited because it's a fundamentally different situation.