Truth
Religion and Science 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 17 September 2002
Later Jewish and Early Christian Thought
Much of the Old Testament has no conception of natural law. Natural phenomena and especially the more dramatic events, the thunder and the whirlwind, drought and flood, plague and famine are God’s deeds.
The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of Glory thundereth.Psalms 29:3
Even in a less anthropomorphic atmosphere, God is inseparable from natural phenomena:
Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,
And meted out heaven with the span
And comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure,
And weighed the mountains in scales
And the hills in a balance.
It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth,
And the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers;
That stretched out the heavens as a curtain,
And spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
I am the Lord, and there is none else,
There is no God beside me.
I form the light and create darkness;
I make peace and create evil;
I the Lord. do all these things.Isaiah 40:12,22; 45:5,7
Job reveals something different. Critics place this book later than 400 BC and therefore after The Sacred Disease. The author of Job definitely recognizes natural law. The argument of the book is based on the wonder and majesty of the laws by which God rules His world. If Job does not comprehend those laws, how can he hope to comprehend the purpose that is behind them? The Almighty arrogantly demands:
Dost thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades
Or loose the bands of Orion?
Dost thou lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season?
Or canst thou guide the Bear with her train?
Dost thou make the heavens to know the laws?
Dost thou establish the dominion thereof in the earth?Job 38:31-33
These laws are proof of the power, wisdom and goodness of God. The recognition of natural laws in Job shows the impact of Greek thought. In the yet later “Wisdom Literature”, the impact of Greek thought is greater. The relation of God to the natural laws has been modified by features characteristic of Greek physical philosophy. Not only does He not act on the world directly, but He is further removed from them than in Job. Another existence governs the laws of Nature and even makes them—Wisdom, an entity as hard to define as the Greek physis which it resembles. Wisdom is an attribute of Deity. She is omniscient, omnipotent, and:
She reaches from one end of the world to the other and ordereth all things well.Wisdom 8:1
God no longer acts directly but it is:
By His Word that He made all things and by His Wisdom then He formed man.Wisdom 4:1
This mode of thought sets itself deliberately against Greek thought. Among the Greeks various first principles had been adopted. Thales had proposed water, Heraclitus fire, Pythagoras the circling stars, Anaximenes air, yet other philosophers some vague essence that may be translated winds. The astrological science from Babylon had suggested the complex mathematical order of the heavenly bodies as the motive power of all things. The Wisdom ot Solomon, which was written in Alexandria about 100 BC, inveighs against all these:
Surely vain were all men in their natures, and without perception of God
Who could not, from the good things that are seen, know Him that is.
Neither by giving heed to the works did they recognize Him who hath wrought them,
But either fire (Heraclitus), or wind or the swift air (Anaximenes), Or circling stars (Pythagoras), or raging water (Thales), or the lights of heaven (the astrologers),
They deemed the gods which govern the world.Wisdom 13:1-2
Philo
The Alexandrian philosopher, Philo, contemporary with Jesus Christ, is even later in Jewish thought. Philo was far removed from the study of phenomena. If Philo represents Jewish feeling, religion and science were diverging, for he was conscious of being a philosopher in the Greek sense, and he betrays this consciousness in his works in a way that is not exhibited in any earlier Jewish writings.
Just as the Stoics treated Homer allegorically in their search for a justification of their views, so Philo dealt with the Old Testament. Allegorisation takes religion further from the scientific standpoint. Only in Philo’s attempt to deal with Creation does he approach the scientific.
Philo had the biblical Hebrew doctrine of Creation, which treats God as a separate existence outside the world which He had produced at a definite date by definite acts and which He continued to guide in every detail. But then Philo, basing himself on Platonic thought, developed a conception of a God without emotions, without attributes and consequently without name, changeless and imperceptible by man, self-sufficient. This God is simply existent and has no relations to any other being. Such is the God of the Platonic idea. Such a God could not act upon the world nor create nor guide it, though he might set it going for once and for all. The old Hebrew view and that of Philo were incompatible.
Under these circumstances, Philo resorted to a device which can be traced as far back as Heraclitus (535-475 BC). He introduced an entity between God and the world. Physis, phronesis, wisdom were similar previous attempts. Philo’s device was the logos. These and similar theological complexities diverted people’s attention from the study of phenomena into empty speculation.
S Paul
Yet another reason for the flight from phenomena in late Jewish and early Christian thought is that, ever since the Socratic revolution, a section of thinkers had regarded the material universe as containing something essentially without worth or even evil. The members of this school opposed Nous—that is Mind, Soul, or Spirit—to Hylë—that is, Brute Matter. The distinction had been emphasised by some interpreters of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. The worthlessness and evil character of the material world fitted in well with the Jewish doctrine of the Fall. The view had, therefore, no difficulty in entering Jewish thought, and through it Christian thought. Though Philo is at some pains to avoid the conclusion that the world is necessarily evil, it may be doubted whether his efforts are successful. Thus the “sins of the flesh” became a theological commonplace which passed over naturally, along with the logos, into Christian thought.
S Paul’s teaching was influenced by this idea of the physical basis of sin:
We know that the Law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.Romans 7:14
Christianity turned entirely away from phenomena. S Paul does not conceal his contempt for Greek physical philosophy, not because it is false but because it is irrelevant. Being irrelevant, with the fearful issue of salvation before him, it was also impious.
When ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by physis are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn yet again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?Galatians 4:8-9
With this contempt for the study of phenomena was soon welded another belief very widely current in Judeo-Christian literature. The “End of the World” was a constant preoccupation of that literature and is described over and over again in lurid colours. Now, in much of Greek physical philosophy, as in that of Democritus, this world is but one of a long series of worlds. The end thereof would mean but the beginning of another like world. This did not fit Judaeo-Christian ideas. If the world which had been created was to come to an end, a conception of the destruction of the elements themselves must be adopted:
The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.2 Peter 3:10
So long as that idea was prominent in men’s minds there could he no serious attention paid to phenomena. “The day of the Lord” rang the death knell of science. The development of Christian and of Jewish theology finished off all attempts at serious systematic aquirement of knowledge for many centuries. All of the knowledge necessary for piety was in the bible, and many Christians still think the same.
The Middle Ages
Despite the spread of philosophy based on science, the observational activity of antiquity was dying in the Pagan world from about 100 BC. About 200 AD, it expired with Ptolemy and Galen. The decay of observation came about through the growing obsession of all races, even the Greeks, with supernatural religion. Christianity was its death knell.
People had lost interest in the natural world and supernaturalism took over. Christianity was the supremely supernatural religion, the direct inheritor of the mysticism of the Persians. Weariness with the world led people to be obsessed with eschatology and Christianity had a central message that the End would be soon. Christian thought opposed the philosophical basis of Pagan thought—it was anti-scientific and averse to humanity being subject to natural law. The Early Church did not base its views on observation or verification in the least. Charles Raven, an Anglican professor of Divinity freely admitted in his book, Science, Religion and the Future, that:
Augustine and his successors decided that secular knowledge had no relevance for the Civitas Dei.
It began as dogma and proceeded through two thousand years as dogma. This was the real reason for the Dark Ages. Yet, with the passing centuries, Christianity’s need for a coherent philosophical system became more urgent. Plato’s Timeus was first pressed into service, then calls were made on Aristotle. By the thirteenth century Aristotelian philosophy was the main element of Catholic theology. S Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) built on the writings of Aristotle, capping a process that had been going on for centuries. His Summa Theologica, is a sustained intellectual effort, even though any scientist would reject it as a proper test of the evidence for its conclusions.
But although the Church professed to accept the Aristotelian philosophy, many elements of the Aristotelian philosophy were incompatible with the bible, such as the Aristotelian earth being spherical. Such details were simply glossed over without any mental effort—it was ignored—or held to he allegorical or held to have some mystical or moral meaning, and when all else failed, the bible was declared not to be written for the purpose of teaching science, and such things were mysteries of God. Apparent inconsistencies were insignificant. Even so, the Aristotelian philosopby had incompatible elements that could not be easily passed over—the indestructibility and uncreatability of matter, with the corollary that the universe must be uncreated and timeless.
The reason why Aristotle was able to stand alongside the bible without too much contradiction was because medieval scholars had only a precarious access to Aristotle. So for long the two sources could not be placed directly in confrontation. Aquinas and others tried to have translations of Aristotle’s works made direct from the Greek, but they were poor and uncommon. The writings themselves are obscure and their language difficult, even to a Greek scholar, and, because the church had espoused ignorance, Greek scholars were rare.
Averroes
Most medieval Aristotelian translations and commentaries were made not from the Greek but courtesy of Moslem scholarship. During the Middle Ages, people who spoke Arabic, called “Arabians” and “Arabists”, preserved Greek learning. In Europe, they were mainly Jews, and they differed among themselves about the interpretation of the Aristotelian philosophy.
The followers of the Moslem philosopher, Averroes (1126-1198 AD), held that the world was eternal, a view shared, in a veiled way, by some Christian writers, but it was heretical and could never have been accepted by the Catholic Church. The great Moslem thinker also denied the persistence of the individual soul. The other interpretation of the Aristotelian record considered the world as created. This was the view of the Jewish writer Maimonides (1135-1204 AD), whose account was generally current in Christendom. Maimonides exercised an immense influence on Christian scholasticism. Aquinas, who depended largely on Maimonides and similar writers, became seen as the protagonist against the atheistical Averroes. Aquinas held that the temporal character of the world could not be proved but must be accepted as an act of faith.
Such was Aristotle’s prestige that any view had to cite him to have any chance of a hearing. Now we know that Maimonides was mainly wrong and Averroes was mainly right in their respective interpretations of Aristotle. The cosmology and cosmogony that reached the West labelled with the name of Aristotle were travesties of his teaching.
The Middle Ages came near to understanding Aristotelian physics, but however interpreted, it was not science. It was not an organically growing body of knowledge but was fixed doctrine—the tradition of antiquity—dogma! No attempt was made, or could be made, to put it to the test of experience. The interpretation of Aristotelian doctrine sometimes seems like a conflict between the religious and the scientific standpoint, but it was not. It was not a conflict of faith versus observation, but of faith versus faith.
Masons
The scholastic’s universe was limited. The outer limit was the primum mobile, the outermost of the concentric spheres of which the Aristotelian world was composed. The structure and nature of all within the sphere of the primum mobile, Aristotle and Ptolemy had prescribed. The task of medieval “physics” was to elaborate that prescription in the same way as they found it—in the abstract. The medieval world thus knew nothing of experience on which science nowadays is founded.
Yet, humans are inquisitive, observing, and classifying as an animal. Christian Scholasticism could bottle it up, mask it and overlay it but could not and did not stop it. Just when the obsession with abstractions and the indifference to nature had reached their zenith among the learned, craftsmen taught as apprentices asserted humanity. The huge wealth of the thirteenth century Church reared vast cathedrals, and adorned them with images such as never were on land or sea. Their dislocated joints, impossible bodies and perspective, and fantastic anatomies tell of ignorance of the world and inability to look at it properly. But at the capitals of those columns and around the stone recesses for these anatomical monstrosities are ivy and vine, buttercup and columbine, growing, twining, shooting as they do in the craftsman’s own garden. The mason was a better naturalist than the professor, being unaware of what he ought and ought not to see.
Before long, the affection for the outer visible world spread to other and higher walks of life, and then entered the schools themselves. To love the world around and to watch its creatures is of the essence of humanity. Albertus Magnus (1206-1280 AD), the teacher of Aquinas, the typical medieval philosopher, shows in his works on natural history that the scientific spirit was again stirring. He marks the beginning of the modern scientific movement, but it would be centuries before observational activity obtained sufficient momentum or coherence to affect the religious standpoint.
Albert was not alone in his observations. Other observers were about, and some of them made discoveries of no mean importance. During the thirteenth century there was much interest in optics. The attention devoted to the subject led, in about the year 1300, to the application of lenses—which had been known to the Arabians—as spectacles. A similar process had led at an even earlier date to the adaptation of the magnet to the mariner’s compass. These are important practical discoveries that testify to the stirring of scientific observation and testing, but they led to no general laws. The lens led to no advance in the doctrine of refraction or in the theory of light. The compass revealed nothing of the nature of terrestrial magnetism to the medieval thinker. They were on the level of inventions rather than definite steps fn scientific progress. The application of these discoveries was more important than the principles involved.
The Close of the Middle Ages
The thousand years of the Christian Middle Ages produced no new general laws of nature, despite its instances of discoveries and inventions and some traces of real scientific advance. Yet observations were being made, albeit devoid of science, in the later Middle Ages. Consider the three great departments of Anatomy, Astronomy, Botany.
Dissection of the human body was practised from the thirteenth century onward and important additions to the knowledge of the time were made. Even so, the physiological theories of Galen prevailed without question in the textbooks of the time. Astronomy was the main scientific interest of the Middle Ages and important new observations were recorded. Yet none left the least impression on astronomical theory. Botany was the chosen study of the physicians whose remedies were chiefly of vegetable origin. Manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain many beautiful figures of plants. The magnificently illustrated works of the “German fathers of Botany” in the first half of the sixteenth century contain illustrations of herbs which in accuracy and beauty are unsurpassed. Yet these works are devoid of hypotheses.
In the period between the beginning of the thirteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century movements arose of importance for the history of culture:
- the firm establishment of the Inquisition,
- the religious upheaval known as the Reformation,
- the revival of learning, or Renaissance.
In the thirteenth century, the Church decided to institute a regular and legally established method of confirming faith and uprooting error—the Inquisition. Our horror at its methods, our indignation at its injustice, our detestation of its blood-stained and infamous history, our astonishment that Christians can pretend it never happened, tend to disguise that it also became an attack on the experimental method. By the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the officers of the Inquisition were suppressing scientific views because they were held to be dangerous to faith. In the previous centuries, there had been no such attack on science because then, experimental method was not advanced enough to produce any conclusions dangerous to theology, and officers of the Inquisition had not grasped its significance for religion.
The Reformation determined the religious geography of Europe. As in all cases of irrational faith, everyone holds their own faith as true and everyone else’s as false. But religious truth and falsehood are not scientific, and the establishment of the Reformed Religion had no special influence on experimental philosophy. The reverse is however true. The discoveries of the new-born experimental method helped the ferment of religious discontent which expressed itself in the Reformation, though, the reforming leaders from Wycliff to Calvin showed no more sympathy with the experimental method than did their Catholic opponents.
The Renaissance meant for science a rebirth of ancient science. The humanists were little more sympathetic to, or understanding of, the experimental method than the religious leaders. From Petrarch onward they brooded on ancient Greece and Rome. The modern application of the experimental method was based on the renewed acquaintance with Greek science. Improved access to Greek works of observational science gradually became possible through Humanism, but they made no great changes, at first, because the scientific views of the Middle Ages were those of the late classical period, and the revival of antiquity simply confirmed what was already current in Christian religion.
In the scholastic period, the interest was in classification, including classification of the “sciences”, for instance, in the pages of Vincent of Beauvais (1190-1264 AD), but it had no real science in it. Albertus took a real interest in Nature, but did not draw up general laws. He again was interested in making lists of characteristics as the most “perfect kind of science”, but did not cotton on to the idea of hypothesising and testing. Albertus took his Universals from Aristotle.
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon begins the search for natural laws. Personally he was jealous and censorious, and demanded of others standards he did not apply to himself. Despite his own constant demand for an investigation of Nature, and, despite the legends and his own claims as an investigator, he has left little evidence of his scientific achievements. For all his faults, and they have been copiously discussed, he realised in advance of his age the nature and application of the experimental method:
All sciences except this either merely employ arguments to prove conclusions, like the purely speculative sciences, or have universal and imperfect conclusions. Experimental science alone can ascertain to perfection what can be effected by Nature, what by art, what by fraud. It alone teaches how to judge all the follies of the magicians, just as logic tests argument.
Roger Bacon was not aware of opposing religion, believing he was writing in support of his faith. Even though Bacon offended the hierarchy of his own order, his views were not held to be heretical, unorthodox or subversive of religion by his contemporaries. Had learning sunk to such a low that even the Church had lost all conception of its danger? Today, religious faith has been shaken by the science of which Bacon was one of the prophets.
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464 AD) ranks as a real scientific investigator, for he cleady perceived the nature and some of the possibilities of the experimental method and did not hesitate to draw general laws from his conclusions. Nicholas was a trained mathematician and took much interest in astronomical and calendrical matters. He proposed a reform of the calendar similar to that which was adopted by Pope Gregory. He wrote:
I have long considered that this earth is not fixed but moves, even as do other stars. To my mind the earth turns upon its axis once in a day and a night.
In a short experimental sketch, On Experiments with the Balance, he says whenever weight is lost or gained the loss or gain can be accounted for by investigation—essentially the older Greek scientific view which formed the basis of the Epicurean philosophy. But then, he shows that earth in a confined vessel in which plants are growing loses weight. He infers that this weight is gained by the plants. He suggests also that the plants gain in weight from something that they take from the air, and he affirms that the air itself has weight. The book is written in what, for the time, is a revolutionary spirit. To find a parallel to it one would have to go back to Greek science, a subject in which Nicholas was deeply interested, or forward to Galileo. Nicholas had the germs of the idea of the Reign of Science, and on this account his theological and philosophical position is of special interest.
Nicholas comes to the conclusion that all knowledge is conjecture and that man’s wisdom is to recognise that he can know nothing. From this attitude of apparently pure scepticism he escapes by the mystic way. God, about whom we can know nothing by experience or reasoning, can be apprehended by a special process (intuition), a state in which all intellectual limitations disappear. Nicholas dimly foresees the approaching clash between the scientific and the religious standpoints, and solves the difficulty in the way chosen by many other scientific men since his day.
He accepts two forms of experience: an outer, subject to natural law, about which we may reason, and an inner which has no relation to such law and is above and beyond reason. The clergy have often considered the position impregnable from the scientific side, but it is only so if science has to prove that imaginary entities have no real existence. The parsimonious attitude of science is that there is no need for this other world, so it can be dismissed until someone finds irrefutable evidence for it.
