Ironically, I think the one group of ancient people that did the best was the group that wasn't motivated by religion at all: the Greek philosophers of antiquity. Democritus and Epicurus, for example, correctly guessed that the cosmos was made of atoms, millennia before there was any way to experimentally confirm such an idea. If they had claimed divine revelation led them to this belief, it would probably have been the most impressive example of a religion correctly anticipating a later scientific discovery.

But it makes me wonder - were there any religions whose guesses about the cosmos were much better than average?

A couple of minor points:

Christianity had a broader focus and thought of itself as a universal religion in a way Judaism never did.

From what I have read, Judaism was an evangelical religion before it was eclipsed by Christianity. It is estimated that at one point roughly 10% of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, which could have only been attained if non-Jews were converting to Judaism.

There are still millions of theists who believe in a tiny cosmos, created by God a scant few millennia ago and destined to end in the imminent future.

I have butted heads (figuratively, of course!) with a few Christians who actually argue the opposite, that the vast extent of the cosmos is only further evidence in their eyes of the greatness of the God of the Bible. When I ask them what the rest of the universe is for if all that matters is for humans on one small planet in just one of billions of galaxies to accept Jesus and be saved, they just dismiss it as being part of God's plan that we just can't know at this time.

There are still millions who believe the Earth is the only place that matters in the grand scheme of things.

Even worse, there are still millions who believe that even Earth doesn't matter -- that they can despoil it with abandon, precisely because they expect God to come along any day now and, after a few years of inconvenient tribulation (for everyone else, while they are safely raptured away), completely rebuild the Earth anew.

In other words, they see our life-giving planet as disposable, and some even go so far as to say that to act otherwise (by recycling, conserving resources, etc.) shows a lack of faith in God! It's a terrifyingly disturbing mindset, literally glorifying the practice of environmentally destructive waste. The rational mind boggles.

~David D.G.

* The Universe was created at the beginning of remembered history or not long before.

* The Universe is eternal, and was always much the same way that it is today.

The latter possibility was popular among various Greco-Roman philosophers, notably Aristotle, the atomists and Epicureans, and the Stoics. However, most Christian theologians until the last few centuries took it for granted that the Universe was only 6000 years old or thereabouts; in Bk. 18 of his "City of God", Augustine harrumphed at those who claimed that the Universe is much older than 6000 years.

Many present-day fundies continue to believe in such a limited timeline; they believe that the Universe is only about 6000 years old and they believe that Jesus Christ's Second Coming or the Rapture or whatever will happen any day now. In fact, many fundies seem to skip from the "Bible time", as it might be called, to some time in the last few centuries when True Xianity was supposedly reintroduced. In fact, some fundies seem to believe that True Xianity was kept going all those centuries by a colony that hid away in the mountains of Switzerland. They moved there when the Church got corrupted in its early centuries, and they moved out after the Reformation broke that fake Church's hold on northern Europe.