If possible, it'd be cool to learn about various times, e.g. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantium, Arab/Ottoman, Renaissance, etc...
What was the scientific and what was the "religious" views of each time?
This collection of ancient descriptions of the causes of earthquakes may prove helpful: http://samizdat.mines.edu/liner/earthquake.pdf
To look at one example from Herodotus's history (see a quote of the passage here ), the Greek historian reports that a fissure was created by Poseidon with an earthquake. But he then suggests that Poseidon's intervention might not have been necessary - if Poseidon had had to use an earthquake to create the fissure, perhaps it was actually just an earthquake; why invoke divine intervention to explain it? This kind of skeptical theism is pretty typical in the Greco-Roman world. Earthquakes could be signs from the gods, and you needed to be careful to interpret their meaning carefully. But they also just seemed to happen, and were part of how the world worked. This doublethink is more of a contradiction to us than it was to ancient people; we like to separate natural and supernatural explanations, but they were ok seeing the natural and supernatural working together on different levels. Hence, in the ancient world, it was possible for earthquakes to be simultaneously, on a surface level, caused by natural forces (sometimes the earth just shakes), while also signifying in a deeper, but equally true sense, the will of the gods (which could be read and interpreted by priests who knew what it meant). They weren't one or the other (natural or divine), but both at the same time.