Abstract

Up to Spinoza, an attempt was made to see the Bible as truth, by which all else was judged. From that point on the criteria for determining what was truth lay outside the Bible, and the Bible was judged by what seemed to be the truth on the basis of these criteria from outside it.

John Bowden

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 17 September 2002

The Dawn of Modern Science

The period of the growth of the modern attitude to science was from about 1500 to about 1700. Until about 1600, the experimental method, though gradually more and more recognised in practice, was still regarded as sufficiently uncertain to be a philosophical issue. Scientists were few and their work as yet inconspicuous. During the later period the validity of the experimental method had become universal within its own field. This later period is opened by Descartes and Galileo, and reaches consummation in the work of Newton.

A long line of thinkers—Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), Antonio Telesio (1482-1534), Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588), Francesco Patrizzi (1529-1597), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Francis Bacon (1561-1639), Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), Mann Mersenne (1588-1648), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), and René Descartes (1595-1650)—all had some share in forging scientific thought, yet none, save the last, have left any deep impression. Associated with these philosophers are scientific workers, of whom the most prominent are Johannes Müller of Künigsbcrg (“Regiomontanus”, 1436-1478), Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).

The danger to the prevalent religious systems of the day was now becoming apparent:

• Pomponazzi died without the consolations of the Church;
• Telesio aroused the anger of the Church on behalf of its cherished Aristotelianism, and a short time after his death his books were placed on the Index;
• Bruno, the exponent of the philosophical implications of Copernicus, was burnt at the stake;
• Campanella, after twenty seven years in prison, was detained for three more in the chambers of the Inquisition;
• Mersenne escaped criticism by professing the narrowest theological orthodoxy;
• Descartes, despite his claim to be regarded as a faithful follower of the Church in which he had been born, consistently found discretion the better part of valour on all questions which involved theological judgment.

In contrast to these men are the character and fate of the practical investigators.

• Regiomontanus completed his work under the patronage of a Cardinal but unnoticed by the thelogians;
• Copernicus and Vesalius laid their axes to the tree of Aristotelian science and went their ways in peace;
• Tycho, in a Lutheran country, prepared the path for Galileo without suffering hindrance;
• Galileo finally polished the new intellectual instrument which since his day had been ceaselessly applied by men of science.

Copernicus

Copernicus and Vesalius, who both published a single book, published them in the same year, 1543, arguably the birth-year of modern science. Copernicus, much the older, was also much the more conservative of the two, and was more in line with comparatively conservative scholars like Nicholas of Cusa and Regiomontanus than with the more revolutionary thinkers such as Campanella and Telesio, who were perhaps more typical of the thought of the time. No man was ever more academic than Copernicus, and he inherited the learning of the Italian Universities, at several of which he studied.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his learning, he was not a first-hand observer. He had taken a small number of observations of eclipses and planets, but for the most part his results were obtained in the study. In his dedication to the Pope he recounted that he was induced to seek a new theory of the heavenly bodies by finding that mathematicians differed among themselves on this subject.

From certain notes in the preface to his work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs, he had anticipated opposition on religious grounds, giving him reason for a long delay in publication. The book immediately encountered it, even though it was not that revolutionary! He makes the earth move round the sun, but retains the ancient theory of the uniform circular motion of the heavenly bodies, and he does not make any attempt to treat the fixed stars as placed other than at a uniform distance from the centre of the universe, which thus remains spherical and finite. The bold speculations of Giordano Bruno, suggested by the work of Copernicus, introduced a limitless universe. So the Copernican hypothesis became intimately bound up with the relations of religion and science only in the century which followed its publication.

Vesalius

Vesalius was a contrast to Copernicus. Young, ardent, and combative, his life’s work was well nigh complete at twenty eight, and its effective and creative part was packed into the four years that preceded the publication of his Fabric of the Human Body in 1543. Delivered in the form of lectures and demonstrations to crowded audiences, it contains an enormous number of first-hand observations, accumulated while working under extreme pressure. The work at one stroke placed the investigation of the structure of the human body in the position of a science in the modern acceptance of that term. But vigorous and fearless in the demonstration of observed fact, Vesalius becomes timid and ineffective in the discussion of theory. He had not hesitated to attack the accuracy of the anatomical observations of Galen, but the physiology of Galen occupied in the mind of the age the same position as the physics of Aristotle, and Vesalius left the physiological theory of Galen even more intact than Copernicus left the physics of Aristotle.

Vesalius thought of man’s body in terms of design. Had he been inclined he would have been asking “Where is it heading?” and “Why?” For generations to come, people asked the same and Christianity answered them. Perhaps this is why Vesalius prosecuted his researches undisturbed by the ecclesiastical authorities. In the wake of the establishment of the theory of evolution, biological rather than physical science is the epicenter of the clash of science and religion. Yet, historically it was not. The successors of Vesalius continued to prosecute their studies until the nineteenth century, unnoticed or even directly aided by the Churches. It was the cosmic speculations of the astronomers and physicists, not the investigations of the biologists, that attracted attention of the less welcome variety.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was no practical scientist, but he had incorporated into his contradictory philosophy the conclusions of Copernicus. Although presented allegorically, his work vehemently attacked established religion. He rejected miracles, identified liberty and necessity, and considered prayer useless. Bruno, in his search for unity, regarded God as the universal substance. He adopted the Copernican theory, but extended it. The limitation of the sphere of the fixed stars was obnoxious to Giordano, and he moved the boundaries of the world to an infinite distance.

Giordano was burned at the stake at Rome, after seven years’ imprisonment, on 17th February, 1600. In the same year the experimental era was ushered in with On the Magnet, in which William Gilbert not only demonstrates experimentally the properties of magnets, but also shows that the earth itself is one. In the same year Tycho Brahe handed over the torch to Johannes Kepler. Tycho was the last of the older astronomers who worked on the Aristotelian view of circular and uniform movements of heavenly bodies. Kepler was the real founder of the modern astronomical system. The period from 1600 lies with the new men, Galileo and Kepler among astronomers and physicists, Harvey among biologists, Descartes among philosophers. The year 1600 is the end of the childhood of science.

Galileo

The seventeenth century opened with an extraordinary wealth of scientific discovery. The major departments of science were becoming clearly differentiated. The acceptance of observation and experiment as the only methods of eliciting the laws of nature reaches an ever-widening circle. But the biological advances, the idea of the automatism of animal reactions developed by Descartes, and further extended later in the century, and even the introduction and revelations of the microscope, did not disturb the theological world. What did was astronomy.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642 AD) lived a long life of almost unparalleled intellectual activity. Many of the products of his genius were of immediate practical application, many more involved profound modification of the current scientific opinions, yet others struck at the basis of the general beliefs of the day, and these are what concerned the Church.

The training of Galileo, as is shown by his notebooks written in or before 1584, had been along strictly scholastic and Aristotelian lines. Soon after, he began a systematic experimental investigation of the mechanical doctrines of Aristotle, the report of which circulated in manuscript in 1590 but was not publiched for 250 years. It contains objections to Aristotelian teaching, and a record of experiments on the rate of acceleration of falling bodies. These doctrines were announced from his professorial chair and in 1591 were demonstrated from the leaning tower of Pisa. By that famous experiment, he displayed, in the most public manner, the error of the Aristotelian view that treated the rate of fall as a function, not of the period of fall, but of the weight of the object. Galileo’s critical attitude to Aristotle, the bulwark of the scholastic system, earned him the virulent enmity of the academics. Immediately, it cost him his chair.

In 1604, a new star appeared in the constellation of the serpent. He showed that this star was without parallax, and so must must be beyond the planets and among the remote heavenly bodies. This remote region was, in the Aristotelian scheme, absolutely changeless. Though new stars had been previously noticed, they had been considered to belong to the lower and less perfect regions nearer to earth. To the same lower region, according to the then current theory, belonged such temporary and rapidly changing bodies as meteors and comets. Galileo had thus attacked the incorruptible and unchangeable heavens.

In 1609, Galileo made accessible two instruments that were to have a deep influence on the subsequent development of science, the telescope, with which his name is most frequently associated, and microscope, for long used almost exclusively by biologists, not Galileo’s forte. His first discoveries made with the aid of the telescore were issued in 1610:

• an immense number of hitherto unobserved fixed stars, at least ten times as many as had been catalogued.
• Star clusters were found to contain many stars too faint for recognition by the naked eye.
• Parts of the Milky Way and some of the nebulous patches were resolved into collections of stars of various magnitudes.
• The surface of the moon, so far from being smooth and polished, was found to be “very similar to the earth”, rough with depressions and high mountains. The height of the lunar mountains was even measured by means of the shadows that they cast.
• The four satellites of Jupiter were discovered. Comparing their movements to that of our moon suggested resemblances of our earth to the planet Jupiter.
• The outermost of the known planets, Saturn, was investigated. Peculiar appearances in it were noted by Galileo, though their interpretation as rings was the later work of Christian Huygens (1629-1695).

Most important of all the observations of the year 1610 were those on the inner planets and notably on Venus. An objection to the Copernican hypothesis, that the planets resembled the earth in revolving round a central sun, was that they should be luminous only in the direction of the sun’s rays, and should therefore show phases like the moon. Galileo observed and described the phases of Venus.

Though Galileo had earned the enmity of the Aristotelians, and had been attacked by hot-headed clerics, he was not yet in disfavour with the heads of the Church. In 1610, he observed dark spots on the surface of the sun, which narrowed continuously as they approached the edges of the sun’s disc. He regarded this as foreshortening showing that they were on the surface of the sun’s orb. The date and circumstance of the announcement were unfortunate, since they involved him in a controversy with a powerful Jesuit rival who not only claimed priority of observation but also put another interpretation on the spots. Aristotelian and Christian doctrine declared that the moon and planets were not habitable. Galileo’s critics declared it a natural corollary of his development of the Copernican hypothesis which he had now openly espoused.

A variety of interests united against Galileo. Academic Aristotelians had long been fuming against him, and Jesuits and some political churchmen now joined them. To them were united many of that intellectually timid and novelty-hating class that forms the conservative block in every age of every population, even in university circles. From at least 1614 onward, sermons were preached against him. The opposition gained force. The matter came before the Inquisition early in 1616 and Cardinal Bellarmine was directed:

To admonish Galileo to abandon these opinions and, in the event of a refusal, to command him to abstain altogether from teaching or defending or even discussing them. If he do not acquiesce he is to be imprisoned.

A few days later a decree was issued ordering the work of Copernicus to he “suspended till corrected”. In the following years, the agitation against Galileo gathered strength.

In 1623, something was hoped by him and his supporters from the accession to the Papal throne of Urban VIII, who, as Cardinal, had appeared not unfriendly to scientific research and to Galileo. In 1624, Galileo visited him but failed to obtain promise of any toleration for the new doctrines, even in a passive form. That year, Galileo published his Il Saggiatore, a work which draws a sharp distinction between qualities susceptible to exact numerical estimation and those which cannot be treated in this way:

No sooner do I form a conception of a material or corporeal substance, than I feel the need of conceiving that it has boundaries and shape, that relative to others it is great or small, that it is in this place or that, that it is moving or still, that it touches or does not tonch another body, that it is unique, rare, or common. Nor can I, by any effort of imagination, disjoin it from these qualities.

On the other hand, I find no need to apprehend it as accompanied by such conditions as whiteness or redness, bitterness or sweetness, sonorousness or silence, well smelling or ill smelling. If the senses had not informed us of these qualities, language and imagination alone could never have arrived at them. Wherefore I hold that tastes, colours, smells, and the like exist only in the being which feels, which being removed, these qualities themselves do vanish. Having special names for them we would persuade ourselves that these have a real and veritable existence. But I hold that there exists nothing in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, but size, shape, quantity, and motion. If, therefore, ears, tongues, and noses were removed, I believe that shape, quantity, and motion would remain, hut there would be no more of smells, tastes, and sounds. Thus, apart from the living creature, I take these to be mere words.

Galileo was distinguishing between what could be measured and what could not, at the time. This distinction has been made by scientists ever since, and is summed up in the phrase “Science is Measurement”. It has been the center of the more recent attacks of the clergy on science. They say that the universe of our experience is mainly made of qualities that are not measured, and so science is unnatural in insisting on measuring everything. Priests of the Church insist on certain unquantifiable things and priests of the opposite faith insist on quantifying everything. In the modern expression, they have their separate non-overlapping magisteria. Yet even scent is a measure. It can be strong or weak. Science finds ways of quantifying measures in common use by everyone.

For six years after Galileo’s interview with the Pope in 1624 for the purpose of obtaining toleration for his cosmic views, the philosopher was almost silent on the subject so far as public utterances were concerned. Then in 1630 he broke silence. Between that date and 1633 was played the final scene in the great drama of his contest with the Church.

By the beginning of 1630, after many years’ work, Galileo had at last completed the composition which was finally published as the Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World. The systems meant were the Ptolemaic and the Copernican.

Quite apart from the discussion of the relative position of earth and sun in the universe, the Dialogue presents the doctrine of the uniformity of the material universe, a point of view so familiar nowadays that it is hard to imagine that the Church for long opposed it. In the last remnants of old religiosity hanging on to the tattered flagpost of religion, the only occasions on which this uniformity is now questioned are in discussing the reality of miracles, and in discussing the relation of mind and matter.

The Aristotelian conception of the universe, which still ruled supreme in the seventeenth century, held that the events in the high supra-lunary sphere—cosmologies—were of a different order to our earthly happenings—terrestrial physics. Much of medieval philosophy was debate, prolonged through hundreds of years, of the relation of celestial physics to terrestrial physics. Everyone had considered the two must have been different till the time of Galileo. Even Galileo was in no strong position to discuss cosmology, but he suggested that it could be discussed on the terrestrial basis:

Since, as by a unanimous conspiracy of all the parts of Earth for the formation of its whole, those parts do congregate with equal inclination and, ever striving, as it were, at union, adapt themselves to the form of a sphere, so may we not also believe that Moon, Sun, and the other members of the solar system (corpi mondani) are likewise of spherical form by a concordant instinct and natural concourse of all their parts? And if any of their parts were violently separated from the whole, might we not reasonably suppose that they would revert spontaneously by natural instinct? May we not therefore conclude that, as regards their proper motion, all members of the Solar System (corpi mondani) are alike?

Galileo, having finished his Dialogue, obtained an interview with the Pope, who gave him to understand that no objection would be raised to publication if certain conditions were accepted. The more important of these may be thus set forth:

1. The treatment must be clearly declared to be theoretical, and this must be set forth in the preface.
2. The book, being concerned with the tides, had to end with: “God is all-powerful. All things are thus possible to Him. Therefore the tides cannot be adduced as a necessary proof of the double motion of the earth without limiting His omnipotence”.

The Church’s amendments were accepted and the book was issued at the beginning of 1632. It prophesies the development of cosmic theory, and suggests the uniformity of the material universe, foreshadowing the concept of universal gravitation and the first law of motion. Galileo’s opponents seemed not to apprehend the significance of the generalizations he was making, and concentrated their animosity on details opposed to the current orthodoxy.

The Dialogue is actually between three people, an advocate of the Copernican doctrine, an obstinate follower of Aristotle and Ptolemy—signifying the Church—and an impartial inquirer open to conviction. The demand that the Copernican view be treated as a mere hypothesis is complied with superficially, and the terminal argument, though included in the discussion as Galileo had agreed, is treated with scant respect. The tone of the work, witty and biting, leaves no doubt as to Galileo’s real opinions. The Aristotelian representative of Christianity is hopelessly stupid. The book accepts the Copernican view, but passes far beyond Copernicus, notably in rejecting the stars as fixed in a crystal sphere. Galileo knew they are at inconceivable but varying distance from our earth, and the absence of visible stellar parallax is explained by the vastness of this distance. The actual measurement of the parallax of a fixed star was not made until 1838 by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846 AD).

The Dialogue brought matters to a head. The Jesuits, being especially occupied with teaching, were specially enraged. In August, 1632, the sale of the book was prohibited and its contents submitted for examination to a special commission. They reported against Galileo, and he was obliged to recant while whispering that they still moved! Pietro Redondo claims that the Church’s real argument with Galileo was his atomism which was incompatible with the doctrine of the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic host. This would have been a serious heresy, however, and a serious scandal for the Church if Galileo was tried for it, so they used lesser charges against him. Perhaps it is true, but it looks like the Vatican trying to salvage something for itself from the story.

Kepler

In character and temper Johannes Kepler (1573-1630) was almost as much a contrast to Galileo as was Copernicus to Vesalius in the previous century. Kepler, a German Protestant, a mystic and dreamer, a mathematician rather than an experimenter, produced voluminous works that are now almost unreadable. He is a contrast with Galileo, the Italian Catholic, with his clear cold intellect, his unrivalled experimental skill, his wit, and his artistic and literary prowess. In sheer genius, the two men were not rivals but peers. On them, in equal measure, rest the foundations of the physical unity of heaven and earth.

Kepler’s idea of the universe was Pythagorean. He was convinced that the arrangement of the world and its parts must correspond with abstract conceptions of the beautiful and the harmonious. This faith sustained him in his vast computational labours. He chained himself for years to the drudgery of computation, without any outside assistance and without any devices, like slide rules or computers that have lightened such tasks since. A burning faith mudt have made such drudgery possible.

Kepler’s professed occupation was astrological calculation, but he was not cynically sceptical about the claims of astrology as were some of his contemporaries who earned their living in the same way. Kepler sought to verify the theory of the influence of the heavenly bodies on life, and, for this purpose, he kept all his life an astrological diary.

Kepler early adopted the Copernican view, and before 1595 he had turned his mind to the question of the number, size, and relation of the orbits of the planets. Kepler held the Christian idea that the universe was built on a moral plan, and a divine purpose. He was ever seeking the law he supposed bonded the members of the solar system together. Eventually, he decided that because there are only five possible regular solid figures (figures with equal sides and equal angles), and there are only five intervals between the six planets that he recognised, the five regular solids could he fitted between the spheres of the planets. The scheme, he held, confirmed the tenets of his religious belief!

Could there be a clearer example that science cannot be influenced by religion without ending up in comedy. Great religions all attempt to build such Keplerian schemes, rational to some extent. When science disturbs religious rationalization by turning to reality, bishops resent its intrusion.

Undeterred, Kepler pursued his object of the foundation of an astronomy in which demonstrable causes should replace arbitrary hypotheses. With this end in view, the next topic that he set himself to investigate was the relation of the distances of the planets to their time of revolution round the sun. He knew the time of revolution was not proportional to the distance. For that the outer planets were too slow. Why?

Either the moving intelligence of the planets is weakest in those that are furthest, or there is one moving intelligence in the sun that forces all round, but most the nearest, languishing and weakening in the more distant by attenuation of its virtue by remoteness.

In his use of such phrases as “moving intelligence”, Kepler was simp1y using the Aristotelian phraseology of the Middle Ages. The conception was familiar to the medieval philosophers, Christian, Moslem, and Jewish. Aquinas, Averroes and Maimonides all had a conception of intelligences moving the planets. They had derived this conception from Greek thinkers, and had adapted it to their various forms of theology. It was familiar to the scholastic thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

As the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth century Kepler received a great incentive to work by joining Tycho Brahe as assistant. By the death of Tycho in 1601, Kepler became effectively his literary legatee. The next nine years saw him largely occupied with the papers of Tycho and with work on optics, in the course of which he developed an approximation to the law of the refraction of light. In 1609 was issued the New Astronomy, with Commentaries on the Motions of Mars full of important discoveries and suggestions:

• Important truths relating to gravity were enunciated—that the earth attracts a stone just as the stone seeks the earth, and that two bodies near each other will always attract each other if adequately beyond influence of a third body.
• A theory of the tides was developed in relation to attraction by the moon.
• An attempt to explain planetary revolutions resulted in a theory of vortices not unlike that elaborated later by Descartes.

The work sets forth the cardinal principles of modern astronomy, the first two planetary laws of Kepler. Nine years later, Kepler enunciated his third law:

1. Planets move round the sun not in circles but in ellipses.
2. Planets move not uniformly but in such a way as to sweep out equal areas about their centres in equal times.
3. The squares of the period of revolution round the sun are proportional to the cubes of their distance (1618).

Every one of the foundations of the Aristotelian system had been undermined by Galileo or by Kepler, and their place taken by an intelligible mathematical relationship. Aristotelian physics and cosmology lay derelict. Only Galileo’s accusers defended them, being unwilling to test them for themselves. Scholastic Aristotelianism became as much an embarrassment to Christianity as the narratives of miracle became at a later date. It was as hard for the Church to rid itself of its scholastic heritage as it was at a later date to disembarrass itself of the dead-weight of miracle. As Giordano Bruno bravely said:

Perchance your fear in passing judgment is greater than mine in receiving it.

The Reign of Science: Descartes

René Descartes (1596-1650) was the first in modern times to propound a unitary and effective theory of the universe that became widely current. During his life, he made striking contributions both to scientific theory and practice, but these are less important than his attitude toward religion and the cosmic theory that he developed.

In 1633, Descartes heard of the condemnation of Galileo and withdrew his book, The World, which he was about to publish. His first publication was the Discourse on Method, in 1637. Want of clarity was always abhorrent to Descartes. Facts, theories and tradition were not clearly distinguished, so he aimed to divest himself of every preconceived notion and build knowledge from scratch. In his Discourse, he resolved:

• Never to accept anything as true which he did not know to be true, avoiding precipitancy and prejudice and comprising nothing more in his judgement than was absolutely clear and distinct in his mind.
• To divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible.
• To proceed in his thoughts always from the simplest and easiest to the more complex, assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence—to seek relation everywhere.
• To make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that he might be assured that nothing was omitted.

Revealed religion in the ordinary sense is erroneaous. If truth can be ascertained, it can be only by applying these principles, which apply generally—as much in religion as in mathematics or physics. The fundamental test of truth is that it can be clearly apprehended. “I think, therefore, I am”, is the most clearly apprehended of all truths, and personality cannot be an illusion. The conception of the soul as separate from the body was obvious to Descartes, and so must be true. Nor could the mind create something greater than itself, and so the conception of infinite perfection transcending humanity must have been put into our minds by infinite perfection itself—that is, by God. The trouble is that Descartes is himself on false ground once he steps beyond “I think therefore I am”.

But Descartes thought the form of the world was inevitable, because God had established the laws of nature and had lent them his concurrence to act as is their wont, and so the physical features of our world as any other must inevitably form as they have done on our earth.

He regarded matter as uniform—made of the same basic stuff, though divided and figured in endless variety. Matter is closely packed, without any vacuum, so, the movement of any part of matter produces the movement of all matter, and throughout the universe are circular vortices of material particles that vary in size and in velocity. The shape and finess of the particles shaped by motion among themselves in the vortices condition the different natures of the heavenly bodies. Fine dust is the first matter and forms the sun and stars. Second matter is the atmosphere or firmament enveloping tlw first matter. A centrifugal tendency of the second matter produces rays of light which come from the sun or the stars to our eyes. The third matter settles round the edge of the sun or star, like froth or foam, forming the sun-spots.

The vortices impinge on one another. If the central star be of greater velocity than a new vortex, it will dash through it and be seen as a comet. Sometimes an encrusted star will settle in that part of the new vortex whose velocity equals its own, and is then seen as a planet. The planets of our solar system have all been caught up in the sun vortex.

Regarding the phenomena of living things, Descartes declared that he was satisfied with the supposition that God formed the body of man and at first placed in it no rational soul. He knew of the circulation of the blood, and, basing himself on it, he developed a most elaborate and coherent theory of the action of the animal body. Man differed from animals, at least in his present state, in the possession of a soul.

For, when I examined the kind of functions which might, as consequences of this supposition, exist in this body, I found precisely all those which may exist in us independently of all power of thinking, and consequently without being in any measure owing to the soul.

He thus considered that humanity once existed without a rational soul, and were like animals, and that animals are still automata, having no soul. Only the soul distinguishes us. Once there is no good reason to believe we have a distinguishing soul, then we are simply animals like the others. The soul he associated with the pineal gland, a structure within the brain which, he thought, was not found in animals.

The Cartesian philosophy rapidly found adherents and spread in every country and was popular for several generations. In Descartes’ native land it won its way even among churchmen. Gradually, however, the errors on which it was based were exposed. Towards the end of the century, the theory of vortices became quite untenable, and inconsistent with astronomical observation. Nor did it fit in with either the cosmic system of Newton or the atomic theory which was reviving. The advance of physiological knowledge exposed the errors of Descartes in the interpretation of the workings of the animal body. Descartes is now considered a phlilosopher not a scientist.

Newton

The crown of the scientific movement of the seventeenth century is the work of Newton (1642-1727). Newton had before him the planetary laws of Kepler. He knew that for every planet the cube of the distance is proportional to the square of the time of its revolution, and he sought a material cause for this.

The laws of planetary and stellar motion had been gradually developed from the astronomical theories of the ancients. New laws and new mathematical relationships of the heavenly bodies had been discovered to replace old ones. The natural laws that governed the heavenly bodies had not yet been related to to the laws that govern earthly phenomena. Newton did it. He showed the law of the heavens was the law of earth—gravity. Using it, the stars have been measured, weighed and analysed. The same scientific process, directed to our own planet, has traced its history, determined its composition, demonstrated its relation to other bodies. The investigations of the physicist and chemist have suggested a structure in terrestrial matter similar to that of the stars and suns. The whole has been expanded into a unitary system. Living things have been examined with greater and greater powers of analysis and magnification. Wild creatures and birds are subject to laws, and natural biological processes are chemical reactions.

Experimental activity has shown, wherever scientists have looked, they have found law. Looking skilfully enough and patiently enough, with sensible hypotheses and experiment to test them allows natural law to emerge.

It might be said that descriptive science is the only real science because once beyond the descriptions some conceptual scheme arises. There is some truth in this in that all conceptual schemes are only partial—they are models of the underlying reality that allow us to calculate and predict. The precise details of these concepts might change from time to time in repsonse to new discoveries, but the whole is so well supported by the whole edifice of science across many specialised fields that it cannot be seriously in error.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science has shown that it is capable of explaining natural phenomena extremely well. The revival of atomic theory, with its essential corollary of the indestructibility and immutability of matter, which followed the work of John Dalton (1766-1844), led to a revival of Lucretian philosophy. The discovery of the law of the conservation of energy by Joule (1818-1889) strengthened this point of view. The same attitude was encouraged by the demonstration that the laws of chemistry and physics are effective in the workings of the animal body.

The doctrine of evolution of living forms could, be expressed in simpler terms, and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the view gained currency that species and even man himself were descended from lower forms.

Darwin

In the eighteenth century, many parish clegymen were amateur natural historians, and the churches were not opposed to it. The publication of the Origin of Species changed things. The church set up a battle and fought it fiercely for a decade or two. It lost but some Christians, like the isolated Japanese soldiers still fighting the second world war years after it ended, do not yet realise it. Nowadays no serious person, Christian or atheist, thinks that Darwin was wrong in his theory, yet certain Christians, mainly Fundamantalists, perpetuate a guerilla war, skirmishing here and there to create an illusion of relevance.

When Darwin first published in 1859, a good many of the more scholarly clergy including Charles Kingsley supported Darwin. The English professor of divinity, Charles Raven, makes out that it was scientists who opposed Darwin not the churchmen, yet he admits almost in the same breath that Darwin was so obsessed with his work that he was worried about slights by colleagues and highlighted their criticisms in his letters to others. Darwin accused “my dear old friend Falconer (Hugh Falconer, a palaeontologist) of attacking him and most vigorously”.

Darwin knew his work was revolutionary in offering a mechanism whereby species could change. That species could actually change had been long suspected by biologists, but they were intimidated by the likely response of the church and more importantly by the fact that there seemed no means by which changes of one species into another could happen. Darwin knew that some people stood firm on the biblical principle that God created species totally in the Creation, and so species could not change one into another. Anticipating criticism, Darwin labelled prominent scientists as “vehemently” and “unanimously” standing together opposed to the mutability of species.

Actually, Falconer was one who did not deny the mutability of species, but criticised Darwin on his explanation of it. Falconer later put forward a counter idea that was ignored, but has been revived in a modern form by Eldredge and Gould with their idea of punctuated equilibria. Darwin was unfairly and unwisely tarring all possible critics with the same brush and some of the prominent scientists resented it, attacking Darwin mainly for his inaccurate categorization of them, but not for his conclusions! It is for this reason that a review of the Origin of Species in Edinburgh Review accused Darwin of ignorance and indifference to the matured thoughts of his peers.

The reviewer in the Edinburgh Review was Robert Owen, the man who coined the word “dinosaur”, and noted as ungenerous and conceited. He categorized Darwin as an amateur who had produced no new evidence, but seemed simply to resent that Darwin had a solution. His inclination was therefore simply to reject it as a “ridiculous” “succession of miracles”. But Raven’s attempt to blame the criticisms of Darwin on to the scientists is a clerical ploy to exonerate the churches. It was the intervention of the Bishop of Oxford who really initiated the war, doing “enormous harm”, as even Raven admitted.

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was the third son of William Wilberforce, who had fought against the slave trade, but whom Cobbett had accused of hypocrisy because he had seen nothing wrong in the industrial slavery of his compatriots in mines and factories. Addressing a packed lecture in Oxford, Wilberforce scorned Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist later known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”. Bishop Wilberforce was about to find out why. Huxley made an extempore speech in reply that was so brilliant that everyone listened agog, and no one thought to record it. Wilberforce ended up a laughing stock, and the butt of cartoons. By 1863, Darwin was “conquering everywhere” as his friend Charles Kingsley put it. This was the hypothesis everyone had been waiting for, and it evidently stood up to criticism.

The anger that evolution generated in the clergy came from its successful refutation of Paley’s “Argument by Design”, the linchpin of Christian justification for God in Nature. Paley’s teleological argument in his Natural Theology had actually supplied evidence for evolution in that he adduced many examples of the adaptation of form to function, but his aim was to provide evidence of a “Designer”. It had become such a popular basis of theism that Christians treated it like holy writ itself. Darwin by proposing “chance” variation and the “natural selection” of the fittest variations to repeat the process dismissed both God and purpose in one stroke! Darwin had intended to be a clergyman and confessed that he was himself in a “muddle” about the implications of his theory for the “Argument of Design”.

Despite the commotion that this hypothesis evoked, it introduced no fundamentally new factor. That human bodies may be investigated as though they were mechanisms, the laws of whose working are progressively discoverable, had been known in antiquity and had been amply demonstrated by such later workers as Harvey, Stephen Hales and Claude Bernard. That the structure of man was comparable to that of the lower animals had been recognised since the days of Galen, and earlier, and was the constant theme of Cuvier, Owen, and others. The introduction of a general law to correlate these conclusions is a mere incident in the extension of the Reign of Science.

Two Cultures

Not long after Darwinism emerged, scientific method began to be applied to biblical history and criticism with Baur and Strauss in Germany. The churches began to panic. Since they had charge of education in the schools and universities, it seemed that they could control the curriculum, and so they did. They could not ignore science totally, as many would have liked, because of the growing demand for scientists from trade, industry, farming and government, so they put science out on a limb in its own faculty and tried to persuade the best students to choose the classics.

The number of schools in which there was any teaching of science was negligible; and even then the subject was only taken by boys who were adjudged incapable of success in classics or mathematics.

Charles Raven, Science, Religion and the Future

The “Two Cultures” was born. People had already noticed by the nineteenth century that the church had been repressive in the past, and, though they still showed respect to the parish priest or parson, they were less likely to do what he told them. Even so the continuity of church control on education meant that many scientists, even some prominent ones like Clerk Maxwell, were still devout Christians. The ones, who saw that science and religion held on to incompatible tenets, were not at all bulldogs like Huxley, and the tradition of the underemployed parson passing his time on scientific interests was also not yet dead.

So, there was still not a complete fracture into contending camps. The people of the overlap, the scientists who were Christians and the professional Christians who took science as a hobby, came out with the compromise position which Christians try to maintain until this day. Science was concerned with weighing and measuring, and therefore with our own real material world of the here and now. Religion dealt not with the temporal but with the eternal and not with the real world but the spiritual world of the soul and God, and faith in these things. Religion seemed only to be concerned with other-worldly affairs, so Christians added to their demesne something of the real world—moral authority. Thus Christianity defined its own realm in the real world beyond the scope of science, and believers need not worry any more about science!

Religion, revelation, and all that proceeds from them, are as much phenomena as are chemical reactions, or the migrations of birds, and, being detectable by the senses, are subject to examination by the senses and analysis by scientific method. They are psychological and social phenomena and subject to study. People like Michael Persinger are studying them. There is nothing special or supernatural about them, and it is time they were honestly studied by independent scientists rather than by mountebanks who have a vested interest in them.

Francis Crick, the discoverer with James Watson of the DNA double helix, insists that the burden of proving religion’s claims should fall on believers, rather than requiring science to disprove God’s existence. The burden of proof is on those making the positive assertion. If religious people claim they have an invisible Father or Buddy called Jesus, then they have to prove it. Otherwise they should first be asked to disprove that there is a Mars or a Venus causing strife and love respectively, phenomena which are at least obvious in the world.

The scientist who desires it has to find religious belief in the practical working of the scientific method, or abandon it as worthless. But James Watson says:

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours.

Scientists can be only atheists because science has no need of the hypothesis of God, but it does not mean good intentions need be abandoned in life. All existence has to be seen in relation to the whole of existence. It is experienced individually but is part of a greater whole, which is itself evolving. Pantheism was frequently considered in antiquity, and even in the Middle Ages. Many a student of science has turned to it in modern times, from the days of Spinoza onward. Pantheism is the natural religion of scientists.

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