If God is talking to bronze age goat herders, what kind of knowledge is going to be useful to them? What will they manage to pass down to future generations without mangling it horribly? If they were to be given information about scientific concepts so advanced that only God (or aliens or time travelers) could have given it to them, they wouldn’t have the foundation of knowledge to grasp it, the vocabulary to explain it, or the technical means to exploit it. Anything they can actually understand and act on is necessarily going to be something that is not beyond their means, and therefore we are right back where we started with stuff they could have figured out on their own.

Suppose God did explain something far beyond human understanding, and they wrote it down as best they could. Even if it wasn’t completely incomprehensible to the guy writing it down, it’s still going to be totally lost on future generations if it isn’t anchored in a more comprehensive understanding of how things work. Without context, it will lose all meaning and will be reinterpreted by later scholars who will try and find a meaning that they can understand. It would become a part of mythology and folklore, and would be unrecognizable by the time science catches up to the original ideas. You might have people point out similarities, but they’d probably be taken as seriously as the ancient aliens guys.

Look around bro, isn’t that proof of God?

In the same way as Nostradamus predicted events? Probably. In the same way as what we define as science? No.

There are examples yes, Dr Fatima on youtube talks a lot about the philosophy of science and how it’s not such a rigid, prescriptive process as a lot of people - including scientists - seem to think.

When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things

That video has three stories of phenomena that were unknown to western science until ancestral knowledge revealed them. The first two you could argue are just traditionally acquired knowledge that has gained a veneer of supernatural language, but “voodoo death” is literally named after the fact that a voodoo curse can kill someone.

I’d reccommend her whole channel if this stuff interests you. Particularly Gravity is a Social Construct, and How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method.

I’ve heard it speculated that certain religious dietary restriction such as Kosher and Halal prohibit many of the foods that would have been most difficult to render safe with the available technology. Without anything resembling modern germ theory, they couldn’t articulate any scientific justification, so it was just “God says these lobsters aren’t food.” And yet, the people who believed that probably got less food poisoning than the people who didn’t.

The problem with “prophecy” is that its impossible to check before it’s useless information. Unless the holy book used specific descriptions, you’d be left with Nostradamus type language that can’t be identified until after it comes “true”.

I knew a guy who thought some of the mythical beasts in revelation were a prediction of helicopters. So suppose he’s right, there would be no way to understand or predict helicopter technology using scripture, you have to wait until after helicopters are known to make the connection.

I have a few thoughts on this. For context, I’m a Christian with equally big interests in science and theology.

A. Remember that scripture wasn’t written to us 21st century people. It was written in a context, in a language, at a time, for a culture, all different from what we have today. So for us to understand scripture we have to understand the context surrounding when it was written. This means hypothetical differences also need to go through this filter. For your examples of Native Americans or bacteria, what would the early Israelites have done with this information? I’d say it would have been seen as a weird side detail likely wouldn’t have survived being part of an oral tradition. Especially the bit about bacteria, since they didn’t have a word for it.

B. I don’t think that’s the point of the Bible. The way I describe it is “God’s biography”. A bunch of authors all wrote their part to try to communicate who God is and what he has done. These authors all had the chance to live close to God, and got pointers on topics to write about, then they all write about God.

C. I’ve had a similar conversation with some of my friends. We were playing “that’s a question” (party board game about guessing what answer this specific player will choose), and the question of “would you prove God’s existence/nonexistence?” came up. We’re all Christian, so we were talking about proving that God does exist, and we basically came to the answer that God has clearly built the world in a way that does not absolutely prove his existence, so he must have chosen to not prove it for some reason. Our best guess was that if it was proven, a lot of people would follow him out of obligation instead of love.

Science is effort following the scientific method. Hypothesis, observation, analysis, reproducibility, etc. So no.

there has been jesuit scientists, like descarte, and other scientists that produce astrophysics/astronomy works.

The reason is simply that the people who wrote those books were ignorant.

No. There’s far more examples of scientific advancement discovery being shot in the knees by theocratic groups than the alternative. Religion is a social tool used for shaping human interpretations of their role within human society, not a legitimate way to enhance our understanding of the world.

I would go as far as to say that having a strong association with a religious organization is an incredible detriment to any technological or scientific advancement.

House of Wisdom in Baghdad brought about some of the foundational texts of Islamic and European medicine till the 19th century.

Mystical experiences concern themselves with the relationship of the finite to the infinite. Tolstoy wrote about this in Confession:

I had asked: what meaning has life beyond time, beyond space and beyond cause? And I was answering the question: ‘What is the meaning of my life within time, space and cause?’ The result was that after long and laboured thought I could only answer: none.

In my deliberations I was continually drawing comparisons between the finite and the finite, and the infinite and the infinite, and I could not have done otherwise. Thus I reached the only conclusion I could reach: force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the infinite, nothing is nothing; and I could go no further than that.

It was somewhat similar to what happens in mathematics when, trying to resolve an equation, we get an identity. The method of deduction is correct, but the only answer obtained is that a equals a, and x equals x, or o equals o. Precisely the same thing was happening with my reasoning concerning the meaning of life. The only answers the sciences give to this question are identities.

And really, strictly rational knowledge, such as that of Descartes, begins with complete doubt in everything and throws aside any knowledge founded on faith, reconstructing everything along laws of reason and experiment. And it can provide no answer other than the one I reached: an indefinite one. It was only at first that I thought knowledge had given an affirmative answer, Schopenhauer’s answer that life has no meaning and is evil. But when I went into the matter I realized that this answer is not affirmative and that it was only my senses that had taken it to be so. Strictly expressed, as it is by the Brahmins, Solomon, and Schopenhauer, the answer is but a vague one, an identity: o equals o, life presented to me as nothing is nothing. Thus, philosophical knowledge denies nothing but simply replies that it cannot solve the question, and that as far as it is concerned any resolution remains indefinite.

Having understood this, I realized that it was impossible to search for an answer to my questions in rational knowledge; that the answer given by rational knowledge simply suggests that the answer can only be obtained by stating the question in another way, by introducing the question of the relation of the finite to the infinite. I realized that no matter how irrational and distorted the answers given by faith might be, they had the advantage of introducing to every answer a relationship between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution. Whichever way I put the question: how am I to live? the answer is always: according to God’s law. Or to the question: is there anything real that will come of my life? the answer is: eternal torment or eternal bliss. Or, to the question: what meaning is there that is not destroyed by death? the answer is: unity with the infinite, God, heaven.

Well, the Bible says, the sun was created after Earth. So fuck that.

As a kid I was always fascinated how people thousands of years ago could otherwise know that the upper end of human life is 120 years.

I’m an old, and I keep waiting for modern medicine overcome Genesis 6.3.

Yes, but it’s not what you’re thinking, and they could be known at the time, just not through scientific method, but we had to rediscover them.

In Abrahamic religions the eating of pork is prohibited because pork is an “unclean” animal, and indeed pork is one of the most dangerous meats to consume when not cooked properly. This could be divine knowledge, or people simply realizing that those who ate pork got more sick than those who didn’t.

Another example is about meditation and other mental health from oriental religions. The science to back up that is very recent but they have been doing it for thousands of years and have been claiming all of the benefits that we’re now discovering. But also this could have slowly evolved by observing yourself which is a lot of what meditation is about, so who could have thought that self inspection would allow you to understand yourself better?

So at the end of the day I don’t think there’s any example of what you’re looking for, because anything we know now they could have guessed back then and would not necessarily be divine knowledge. Accurate precognition would be an example of something we would have no explanation for, but that has never happened, most prophecies are abstract and open to interpretation.