Most known for rejecting all knowledge of the material world

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The Christian religious sect most known for rejecting all knowledge of the material world, including knowledge of the earth, is the Gnostic sect called the "Encratites", and more broadly certain strands of early Gnosticism.

Key points:

Gnosticism (1st–3rd centuries AD) often taught that the material world, including the earth, was created by a lesser, ignorant deity (the Demiurge) and was therefore inherently corrupt or evil. Many Gnostics believed salvation came through gnosis (spiritual knowledge), and not through understanding or engaging with the physical world.

The Encratites, a Gnostic-influenced sect, rejected marriage, procreation, and often wine and meat — seeing material existence as a trap for the soul. Some among them extended this rejection to all worldly or scientific knowledge.

Other radical Gnostic sects like the Manichaeans or Marcionites also viewed the material world as evil and unworthy of study or interest.

In essence, these groups believed that the earth and all worldly knowledge were distractions or even deceptions keeping the soul from returning to the divine realm.

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Many ancient Indian and Persian ascetic currents denied the value of worldly knowledge and attachments centuries before Christ.

The Śramaṇa movements (c. 7th–5th centuries BCE) in India—ancestors of Jainism and Buddhism—practiced extreme renunciation, viewing sensory knowledge and material life as obstacles to liberation .

In Jainism, the Digambara (“sky‑clad”) sect went so far as to renounce clothing entirely, treating all material goods as impurities .

Zoroastrianism (c. 2nd millennium BCE in Persia) itself was dualistic, and while it forbade certain mortifications it set a precedent for later Persian movements like Manichaeism, which regarded matter as intrinsically evil .

In ancient Greece, philosophical schools also modelled radical disengagement from worldly learning:

The Cynics (4th–3rd centuries BCE) famously rejected conventional education and possessions, living “like dogs” to demonstrate freedom from material trappings .

Pythagorean communities combined communal living with strict lifestyle rules, treating philosophical insight as superior to empirical study .

The 3rd‑century CE prophet Mani synthesized Persian, Christian, Buddhist, and Gnostic themes into Manichaeism, explicitly teaching that the physical cosmos was a prison of darkness and worldly knowledge a distraction from the “Kingdom of Light” .

By the late 1st century CE, various Gnostic sects within and alongside early Christianity argued that the material world was the ignorant work of a lesser god (the Demiurge) and that “true” salvation came through purely spiritual knowledge (gnosis) rather than observation of nature . One offshoot, the Encratites, extended this to reject marriage, meat, wine—and by implication any scholarship tied to worldly life .

In medieval Europe, the Cathars (12th–14th centuries) revived dualism, holding that the “evil god of this age” fashioned the flesh and that salvation required complete repudiation of material studies and bodily concerns .

Even beyond strictly dualist or Gnostic groups, monasticism in Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu settings canonized the renunciation of secular learning as the ideal path to union with the divine .

Thus, the pattern of seeing the earth, the body, and sense‑based knowledge as corrupt dates at least to 7th‑century BCE India and 2nd‑millennium BCE Persia, and recurs in Greek ascetics, Persian dualists, Christian Gnostics, medieval Cathars, and monastic schools of several faiths