Truth
Religion and Science 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 17 September 2002
Early Religions
The legends and beliefs of primitive peoples seldom provide anything in the way of a complete explanation of life. A religious system implies an attempt to understand the world as a whole and an acceptance of the view that the world, being comprehensible, must have certain governing principles which can be widely traced through it. The Empires of the ancient Near East had such religions. Egypt provides a series of systems of theology. The later Egyptian religion is syncretic. Earlier systems fused together creating a patchwork. Yet each was an attempt to explain man and the World and their relation to each other, and man’s origin and fate. Thus it was not just religion but also science! Religion and science were so interconnected that they could not be separated.
Mesopotamian peoples were similar. Religions seek to justify themselves and to explain their origin and nature in a manner that conforms with observed phenomena. Ritual tends to develop into a legal system, and attempts are consciously made to fix tradition. The great living religions are still doing this. They still claim to have an explanation of the world in which their followers live. Such cosmologies were once what appealed in these religions to the rationalising mind. Such cosmologies now form an obstacle to the gaining of wisdom and the psychological progress of humanity where they were once an aid.
Early Greek Thought
The scientific approach was first differentiated from the religious by the Greeks. Was it because of this that no complete Greek cosmology, incorporated in a religious atmosphere, developed in Greece. Nineteenth century authors brought up in the cloying Christian atmosphere of Victorian Britain always described this as a disadvantage. In fact a great advantage was swamped by religion, as it usually is. The superstitions of the Jews were considered the greatest of religions, and the Greeks were seen as lacking in something for never getting to that stage of delusion.
These authors said the Greeks had no canon of sacred literature, even though Homer was exactly that for them. Victorian superiority had declared them fairy stories, so they were not considered sacred. Particularly noteworthy is that in the whole corpus of Pagan classical literature—Greek and Latin—no work by a priest has survived. For them piety was a practical and personal matter and did not need to be vaunted by priest or layman. Their lack of intellectual interest in religion left the way open for them to develop science—the Greeks—and technology—the Romans.
The Greeks, at an early stage, learned that the world was orderly. Traditionally the discovery is attributed to them, but it is curious that a central principle of the religion of their neighbours and enemies, the Persians, was the concept of “Arta” which is universal order. Even the philology of the words is likely to be the same. Either the Greeks had the idea from the Persians or both had it from a common source when they were related tribes on the Eurasian steppes. The first is more likely because there is no sign of the concept in the earlier Greek works, and it only appears at about the time that the Medes and then the Persians start to become important on the world stage. The difference was that Order for the Persians was a religious idea, but the Greeks were fortunate or sensible enough to have no equivalent religion!
Order meant the world was subject to law, and, by investigation, the components of this law could be discovered. It was with the Greeks, and especially with the Ionian Greeks, that the scientific idea was born, and it can be traced back among them with some clearness to the sixth century BC, the very century when Cyrus conquered the world. The careful and accurate observation of nature did not began with them—in such observation every hunter must be an expert, and even palaeolithic hunters will have been careful observers. Nor did the Ionian Greeks first formulate general laws concerning natural phenomena, for the Egyptians knew of certain mathematical laws by 1700 BC at the latest. The Ionian, Thales of Miletus (c 640-c 546 BC), founder of Greek geometry and astronomy, predicted the eclipse visible in Asia Minor on May 28, 585 BC, but his data were from the astronomers of Babylon. Astronomical observatories had been set up in the great cities of the Euphrates valley as far back as the eighth century BC, when professional astronomers were taking regular observations of the heavens. Similarly, rational Greek medicine can be shown to have been preceded by Babylonian and Egyptian writings, and the Greek god Asklepios was Babylonian. Comment
Science
The Greeks did not invent the practice of science, but the scientific idea, the conception that the world was knowable by investigation. In ancient times this idea led to philosophy—in modern times it has transformed our lives, and has shaken to the core the set of ideas that are called religions. These changes have not been always and everywhere to the good, because science has scarcely impacted on the psychology of human beings, and people have to know how to use powerful discoveries wisely. Our leaders still live in the Stone Age and still think they are handling flints. That is where humanity is failing. The general effects of the scientific idea throughout the ages favour science as beneficent. Contrary to the claims of religionists, it has not destroyed mystery at all, but has shown humanity the mystery and vastness of the world that religion has no way of equalling.
In Greek thought, rational ideas became applied to the known physical universe. The process is that nowadays called science—a department which in antiquity was not always clearly separated from other modes of thought and particularly was linked with philosophy. These rational ideas came gradually to be universally applied among the Greek philosophers who worked before the close of the fifth century BC. Far back in the history of Greek thought, people are feeling their way to an interpretation of that universal principle which they distinguish as physis, a word which survives in our modern terms, physics, physiology, physical and physician.
Physis meant at first growth or development, the essential element of all existence, and it was specially applied to living things. The idea dawned that this growth followed definite rules which differed in different cases but which had a common character. By transference, physis came to be regarded as this rule or manner of development itself, and so came to mean roughly a natural law.
As knowledge grew, these rules or laws were traced more and more widely, and the philosophers tried to discern that which was behind them. Some saw in it an individual and personal power, and gave physis an existence apart from the individual laws which had been traced. Physis was being personified, and had any religious sentiment emerged in the Greeks like that of the Persians and Jews, Physis might have been deified. Fortunately, the Greeks never took this step, but the tendency to do so was there in Greek thought.
When the Greek world was absorbed into the Roman Empire, Roman cultural imperialism Latinized Greek thonght. Physis was mistranslated as “natura”, meaning birth rather than growth. Emphasis therefore changed from the idea of law to the idea of origin. Contrast two works in which these words are used. A Greek work of about 400 BC, ascribed to Hippocrates, is entitled On Man’s Physis, On How Things Happen in Man, a scientific attempt to explain man’s body, by ideas based on observation. Compare it with the work of the Latin philosopher, Lucretius, who died about 55 BC, and wrote De Rerum Natura, On the Origin of Things, a philosophical thesis which seeks to explain the entire workings of the universe on a particular hypothesis about its origin.
These two works are entirely different and perhaps incompatible. One is a work of pure science in which the investigator is interested only in a particular problem and explains it in terms which might obtain universal assent. The other is a work of philosophy or religion, in which the writer is less interested in the solution of any special problem than in finding a common element behind them all.
The position gives us the key to some of the subsequent relations of science to religion and philosophy. The man of science decides on a narrow field to investigate, then through testing his hypotheses empirically, he establishes laws in his appointed area, seeing unity behind apparent diversity. Science is based in practice. Another class of thinker, the philosopher, generally eschews restrictions. He tries to arrive at answers through pure reason, and so is a theoretician, but ultimately, to be any use in the world, the philosopher’s conclusions have to be tested against reality just as the scientist’s do.
Hippocrates
If Greek philosophy sought to give a rational basis to our knowledge of the world, Greek medicine first put that rational basis to the test. The first writer to make clear this separation between science and philosophy is the physician, Hippocrates of Cos. His book, composed a little before 400 BC, is the first in which the scientific is clearly set against the religious point of view. It deals with what is described as the Sacred Disease, the condition that is nowadays called epilepsy.
The book presents to the reader two opposing views of the nature of disease. One view is based on the phenomena ascribed by religion to the action of supernatural powers. He rejects it. The other view is a scientific hypothesis—disease is the effect of a natural law. In a concise form, Hippocrates writes:
As regards the disease called Sacred, I believe it to be no more divine than other diseases, but like them to have its own physis. Men regard its origin as divine from ignorance and wonder, since it is a peculiar condition and not readily understood. Yet if reckoned divine merely because wonderful, then instead of one there would be many sacred diseases.
To me it appears that they who refer such conditions to the gods are but as certain charlatans who use divinity to cloak their ignorance. They give out the disease to be sacred and adopt a treatment that shall be safe for themselves, whatever happen. They apply purifications and incantations and all manner of charlatanry, but mark they also enforce abstinence from unwholesome food. All these things they enjoin, they say, with reference to the divinity of the disease. If the patient recover, theirs is the honour; if he do not, it is the god, not they, that is to blame, seeing they have administered nothing unwholesome.
But consider! Surely if certain diets aggravate the disease and it be cured by abstinence, then the god is not the cause of the disease, and they who seek thus to cure it are, by this very act, showing that it is not divine. Nay, more, their assertion of its sacredness and divinity savours of impiety, as though there were no gods.
If these fellows professed to bring down the moon, to darken the sun, or to induce storms, should we not accuse them of impiety, whether they claimed this power as derived from the sacred mysteries or from any other knowledge? Nay, more, even if they could do these things, I, for my part, should still not believe there was anything divine therein, since the divine would have been overpowered by human knowledge and have hecome subject thereto.
Surely then this disease has its proper nature and causes whence it originates, even as have other diseases, and it is curable by means comparable to their cure. It arises, like them, from things which enter and quit the body, such as cold, the sun, and the winds, things which are ever changing and never at rest. Are such things divine or no? As you will, for the distinction matters not, nor is there need to make this distinction anywhere in Nature, wherein all things are alike divine and all are alike natural, for have not all a physis wnich can be found by those who seek it steadfastly?
A clear conception of natural law has here emerged. The writer is entirely without opposition to the dcctrine of the existence of a separate and ultimate cause of all things, but he refuses to confuse that cause with natural law. He has distinguished sharply between science and religion.
Towards the end of the fifth century BC there were several schools of thought in Greece that claimed to explain the material universe. One of these schools, that of Democritus, was very important for its influence on later thought. Democritus (c 470-c 400 BC) was the founder of the atomic theory. He regarded atoms and the void as the only existences. Everything, even the phenomena of life and thought, he explained from the action of these atoms, moving in the void. Atoms, he held, were eternal, being neither created nor destroyed, though the combinations in which they occur constantly changes. Atoms were infinite in number. Motion of atoms had always existed. Democritus held that by consequence there must have been an infinite number of worlds which passed through their various stages of growth and decay. Everything, in his system, was explained on mechanical grounds without introducing any idea of an intelligent cause working toward an end.
The Revolution in Greek Thought
The earlier phase of Greek thought terminates with the fifth century with Socrates (470-399 BC). Socrates was skeptical of all human knowledge, and he and his followers were little concerned with physical philosophy. The Greek philosophers before the time of Socrates had largely concentrated on the physis of the sensible universe and had developed a system of physics. Socrates was interested in conduct. In seeking guidance for right conduct, he supposed that the soul of man partook of the divine. He reached the conception of an immortal soul, the existence of which he maintained as an article of faith, but not of knowledge. He thus rejected the whole structure that the physicists had reared. Nor would he have any parley with the conflicting theories of these men, of whom…
…some conceived existence as a unity, others as a plurality; some affirmed perpetual motion, others perpetual rest; some declared coming into being and passing away to be universal, others altogether denied such things.
So, he was not quite as bright as his admirers make out, and he regarded as futile all attempts “to pursue knowledge for its own sake”. Nevertheless, he recognised the existence of Practical Wisdom (phronesis), leading to right action. It was phronesis against physis. In due course of time phronesis evolved like physis and tended to be personified under various names, eventually being deified as the Goddess Sophia.
The Socratic school depressed for a time but did not destroy the activity of Greek physical philosophy. From the dialogue between them came the main streams of later Greek thought. One stream was Socratic, and led to Plato and the doctrine of ideas, the Neoplatonists, and ending up in an indifference to worldly happenings. The other stream, that of physical philosophy, having recovered from its submergence, revived in the popular school of Epicurus (342-270 BC). Curiously, both streams, in the Neoplatonic and the Epicurean schools, became inimical to science and western understandings of religion. The western development of both science and religion came through other systems of thought: for science that of the Peripatetics and their successors in after ages, and for religion that of the Judeo-Christian superstition.
Plato
Plato (427-347 BC) followed his master, Socrates, in being dominated in his thinking by ethics. Both convinced that Truth and Good existed and were inseparable, Plato set out to resolve into one comprehensive theory the discrepancies of ordinary thinking. In doing so, he developed the so-called doctrine of ideas, a doctrine destined to he of great moment for the relations of religious and scientific thought. The nature of this doctrine and the manner in which Plato reached it has been briefly set forth by his pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC).
In his youth, Plato became familiar with the doctrines of certain philosophers that all things perceived by the senses are ever in a state of flux and there is no knowledge concerning them. To these views he held even in later years. Socrates, however, occupied himself with ethical matters, neglecting the world of nature as a whole, but seeking the universal in these ethical matters. It was he who fixed thought for the first time on definitions. Plato accepted his teaching but held that the problem applied not to anything perceived by the senses but to something of another sort. His reason was that the common definition could not be a definition of things perceived by the senses, because they were always changing. Things of this other sort he called “Ideas” and things perceived by the senses, he said, were different from these “Ideas” and were all called after them.Aristotle, Metaphysics 1:6
Thus “ideas” or concepts became for Plato something solid, while our perceptions of the material universe became something vague. “Ideas” were not thoughts, as we use the word, but were effectively the souls of everything—perfect notions of them—and such a theory easily allies itself with religion. Christianity sought the assistance of Plato’s theory of “ideas”, but it was not helpful to scientific advance.
Plato expresses a great admiration for mathematical principlcs and he regards mathematics as exhibiting that type of certitude and exactness to which other studies should conform. Plato’s thoughts assume a mathematical guise, and he sometimes approaches the views of Pythagoras (sixth century BC), who had attached a moral and spiritual value to numbers. Plato’s successors, the so-called Neoplatonists also assumed this Pythagorean attitude to numbers. Plato was less favourable to the physical sciences, and regarded with scorn the materialistic theories of earlier writers. Democritus was the most influential of these. Plato treats Hippocrates with respect as typical of the scientific investigator in antiquity, but he shows no inclination to follow in his footsteps. He thought phenomena relatively unimportant, and did not have those qualities which lend themselves to patient, inductive observation.
Yet, the great philosopher had to conceive of a cosmic theory, and it appeared in the Timeus, showing the depth to which natural science can be degraded by a great mind trying to find specific purposive meaning in all parts of the universe. The trend of Platonism, and of the schools that arose from it, was always away from observational science, though not unfriendly to mathematical development.
The physical philosophers of the fourth century, of whom Aristotle is the most permanent, were more successful than Plato in their efforts at constructing a coherent cosmic theory. Aristotle, a great thinker but weak in mathematics, was a competent naturalist, and the cosmic scheme he produced, unlike that of Plato, took in a mass of observational data, notably in biology. Even so, its basis was not that of observing but was certain preconceived notions which did not and could not depend upon observation. Observations had to be fitted into the scheme artificially and often with difficulty.
The general history of later Greek physical philosophy closely parallels that of science in the West in modern times. The philosophical scheme, once established, becomes part of the religious thought and any attempt to disturb it is resented. The men of science are confined to adjusting details of the scheme. When Aristarchus of Samos (c 250 BC) tried to show that the earth moved round the sun, he was denounced by the Stoic Cleanthes (c 301-232 BC) as impious, just as Galileo was by the Catholic theologians in the seventeenth century.
The Aristotelian System of Physics
The Aristotelian system of physics was more or less absorbed by various philosophical schools of antiquity and eventually played an important part in Christian thought. Its bases are:
- Matter is continuous.
- All matter is made up of combinations of the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, each of which in their turn contain the four qualities, hotness, coldness, dryness, and moisture, in binary combination.
- The earth is a sphere. It is fixed as the centre of the universe, which is itself spherical.
- Stars and planets move with uniform velocity in concentric circles round the earth.
- Circular movement is the most perfect conceivable and represents the changeless, eternal, and perfect order of the Heavens as contrasted with the mutable, mortal, and imperfect order that prevails on this our earth.
- The universe is finite.
Aristotle’s system was universally accepted for 2000 years, roughly from 350 BC to 1650 AD, but certain corollaries to it obtained less wide or more partial acceptance.
Later Greek Thought
By the end of the fourth century BC, ancient science had reached the zenith of its creative activity, but work continued in the next two centuries, by the Alexandrian school, with which names such as those of Euclid, Herophilus, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy are associated. These men were heirs or successors to a great heritage, the Lyceum of Aristotle and the Academy of Plato, though Archimedes stands out as a man brilliant in his own right. A complete and coherent scheme of the physical universe had been given by Aristotle and was not fundamentally altered by later investigations. The corner-stone of the Aristotelian scheme, in common with nearly all Greek physical philosophy, was the view that substance is not created, a point emphasised by Aristotle himself, and inherent in the scientific method of investigating the universe. Matter is for the ancient physical philosophy uncreatable and indestructible. Aristotle says:
That nothing comes to be out of that which is not, but everything out of that which is, is a doctrine common to nearly all the natural philosophers.Aristotle, Metaphysics
The Greek scientific scheme would doubtless have found itself in violent conflict with the religious system of the day if formal religion among the Greeks had reached the dogmatically legal importance it had reached among the Jews. Among the Pagan Greeks little opposition is encountered until late times. With Greek popular religion mainly a question of state ceremony and relatively undogmatic, few points of contact existed between priest and philosopher. Though there was no open conflict between religion and science in the Pagan world, popular religion continued to be undermined by physical philosophy.
The Stoics
In a world in which, to use the phrase of Lucretius (c 60 BC), “nothing is ever begotten of nothing by divine will”, and in which “things cannot then ever be turned again to naught”, it must be that all things act by rules inherent in matter. Then as now people asked: “What is there then left that is ourselves, our real inner self-conscious selves?” The question was variously answered. The Stoic philosophy, the most popular and the most religious of the later Pagan schools, rep1ied that the man himself is left with his will, which gives him the power to play his part like a man, doing his duty in that walk of life to which Providence has called him. We are just parts of Nature.
Thou hast subsisted as part of the whole. Thou shalt vanish into that which begat thee, or rather thou shalt be taken again into its Seminal Reason by a process of change.Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), Stoic Emperor
Such philosophers would take little interest in Nature which could seem kind or monstrous. For what reason should they seek to know Nature more intimately—Nature the compassionless, the tyrannical, the cruel. Stoic and Epicurean literature show in later antiquity a flagging of scientific curiosity. Men were weary of the world. Epicurus wanted people to know only enough about her as to remove all fear of supernatural interference.
With scientific interest decaying, and world weariness spreading, people sought alternatives in a welter of philosophic sects, of contending oriental cults, of rhetorical exercise, of the hundred intercrossing currents that made up the spiritual life of later antiquity. Then came astrology—the idea, not that humanity might control their fates, but that they might foresee them and so prepare themselves for them. Astrology came, as a task of the “Chaldean” specialist, to the West from the East and was eagerly absorbed into popular as well as into philosophical thought. The future could be read but who cared about precisely how. Leave them to the Chaldeans! It was the end that mattered.
In the concentric universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy and their followers the outer spheres of the stars and planets must surely influence and control the central globe of the earth and with it the fate of man. So, at least, the Stoics saw it and faith in astrology became part of the Stoic creed. It gave an inevitable interrelationship of all things. In the presentment of the world thus made, there was no room for those anthropomorphic gods, belief in whom was still urged by the priests and held to by the multitude. The spread of science, or of what passed for science, had led at last to a complete breach between the official faith and th e opinions not only of the educated classes but of all intelligent men. The idea of the interdependence on one another of all parts of the universe, produced a new form of religion. The world itself must be divine.
Deity only means Nature.Pliny
God, if there was a God, had made the world and in making it had made its laws. The laws were the effectual rulers, and it was in those laws that the Pagan world was interested. Why should men of flesh and blood regard a far-off, frigid lawgiver, who could not and did not have regard to them?
The position was the opposite of that of those later eighteenth century Deists who “sought through Nature, Nature’s God”. Nature that made God meaningless. Science, linked with Stoicism, assumed a skeptical if not cynical mood.
God is outside the world and could not be expected to care for it.Pliny
Pliny recognized the idea of immortality as the “childish babble” of those possessed by the fear of death. After death, Pliny and Lucretius sensibly knew, any human is as they were before they were born.
Lucretius, the Epicurean, found comfort in the utter inevitableness of death, and freedom from fear of it. And, for the Stoic, the important thing was life and the duties that it brought, allowing everyone to live and die nobly. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius emphasised this wonderful duty that we have. Romans had forsaken their early gods, the personal Beings whose propitiation and comforting presence had filled their fathers’ lives. They had abandoned the images of their ancient deities to embrace the feet of a lovelier goddess—Natura. Yet science had not yet developed sufficiently to begin to offer rewards in a world that often seemed cruel and unjust. Pessimism and anxiety clouded the thought of the later Pagan world. Romans had the alternatives of the oriental cults whose gods Charles Singer described as “mad magicians” and to whose ranks another one was soon to be added. The Romans fled into the false hope of Christianity.
Comments
John Vrettos
I have enjoyed reading the AskWhy section on Science and Religion. However, I find that you emphasize too much the idea that the early Greeks borrowed ideas from their Mesopotamian neighbors, especially when you say “The Greeks did not invent the practice of science, but the scientific idea…” As you yourself point out, the Greeks were the first people to separate science from religion, and to ascribe order to a rational universe that can be known by observation. Their neighbors, meanwhile, still gave mystical meanings to their observations. While they collected data, there is no collection of works from say, Egypt, that formulates rules or laws that describe the data beyond rules of thumb. It is the difference between c^2=a^2+b^2 and 3-4-5 right triangle, the right triangle being a mystical symbol of some sort. Unlike the Greeks, who thought abstractly about mathematical ideas, the Egyptians were only concerned with practical arithmetic. The mathematics of Egypt, at least what is known (to my meager knowledge), can essentially be called applied arithmetic. It was practical information communicated via example on how to solve specific problems; science, on the other hand, is the making of general rules to describe observation.
The neighbors of the Greeks did collect a great deal of data which the Greeks used, but to say that what came before the Greeks was science in practice, I disagree with. You widen your definition of science, however, in acknowledging that even the primordial hunter makes careful observation of his world—but this leads to no quantifiable descriptions, let alone the idea that the universe is ordered and rational. I suggest the book Greek Ways by Bruce Thornton for the ideas of an expert in the field of Greek culture, above and beyond the hastily written humble opinions of a chemist. Thornton addresses these ideas much better than can I.
Mike
Thanks for your interesting and considered note on science in the ancient world. I cannot say that I disagree with what you say, but quite where to draw the line between a “rule of thumb” and a “general rule to describe observation” could engage philosophers, scientists and historians for a long time. Science needs the observations first, and that really, inadequate as it might be, is why I consider that ancient people are putting their toes in the ocean of science when they begin to collect data for inductive purposes even though they are not formally making hypotheses in a scientific way and testing them as we now would. D E Smith’s history of Mathematics tells me that the Egyptians had their 12 x 30 + 5 calendar in 4000 BC. It must have involved a long period of observation to devise and surely a calendar is a rule. So, while giving the Greeks the credit they deserve, the other ancient civilizations built the footings for their edifice.
