"The king asking some poor dude for a sign from the skies about the future had some influence on people watching the skies at all and making sense of it."
Some influence, yes; but a greater amount of astronomical progress in ancient times appears to have been motivated by very practical things such as keeping track of when to expect the rainy season to begin, or when the best time was to bring in the harvest, or (on shorter timescales) just how many more hours remained in the night.
I also imagine that just plain old human curiosity likely motivated a lot of the ancient astronomical exploration too.
I can't help feeling that, while religion and superstition have very often facilitated progress, that this progress would likely have been faster if the underlying motivations were different. And a lot of great progress results from purely accidental discoveries, however those accidents happened to come about. Such are the indirect benefits of human blundering. On those counts, I don't find religion or superstition any more useful than the many other forms of human blundering.
Also, your example of astronomers working as royal astrologers as a way of earning support money seems, to my cynical mind, like just a clever way of getting funding by taking advantage of the superstitious beliefs of others. No doubt many astronomers, great ones such as Johannes Kepler among them, honestly shared the popular personal beliefs about astrology's validity, but that doesn't mean that the historical overlap and shared origins of astrology and astronomy has been healthy for astronomy. Sure, astrology helped astronomy to get started, but that historical accident was (IMHO) not for the best of reasons, and it may have even hindered the progress of astronomy before the two disciplines diverged completely.
Some influence, yes; but a greater amount of astronomical progress in ancient times appears to have been motivated by very practical things such as keeping track of when to expect the rainy season to begin, or when the best time was to bring in the harvest, or (on shorter timescales) just how many more hours remained in the night.
I also imagine that just plain old human curiosity likely motivated a lot of the ancient astronomical exploration too.
I can't help feeling that, while religion and superstition have very often facilitated progress, that this progress would likely have been faster if the underlying motivations were different. And a lot of great progress results from purely accidental discoveries, however those accidents happened to come about. Such are the indirect benefits of human blundering. On those counts, I don't find religion or superstition any more useful than the many other forms of human blundering.
Also, your example of astronomers working as royal astrologers as a way of earning support money seems, to my cynical mind, like just a clever way of getting funding by taking advantage of the superstitious beliefs of others. No doubt many astronomers, great ones such as Johannes Kepler among them, honestly shared the popular personal beliefs about astrology's validity, but that doesn't mean that the historical overlap and shared origins of astrology and astronomy has been healthy for astronomy. Sure, astrology helped astronomy to get started, but that historical accident was (IMHO) not for the best of reasons, and it may have even hindered the progress of astronomy before the two disciplines diverged completely.
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