Exam Review: Ancient Rome and the Scientific Revolution |
The Origins of Modern Science
The scientific revolution Modern science arose in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The events of that period are known to us as the scientific revolution. The first (in 1543) was the publication by Nicholas Copernicus of his heliocentric model of the solar system.1 Among the developments that followed were Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Galileo’s telescopic observations, Newton’s law of universal gravitation, and experimental studies of gases by the chemist Robert Boyle. It is significant that the scientific revolution occurred in a culture permeated with a Christian worldview and striking that nearly all its leaders were deeply committed to the Christian Faith. Both Copernicus, an administrator of the Roman Catholic Church, and Johannes Kepler, a Protestant, were devout Christian believers. Galileo remained faithful to his church, despite the opposition of individuals in the academic and ecclesiastical establishments who were unable to accommodate his discoveries to their Aristotelian view of the world. Newton spent more time studying the Bible than doing science,2 and both Newton and Boyle were prodigious theological writers. Why did modern science arise in Christian culture? One can ask the question: Why is it that modern science arose in the Christian culture of Western Europe, rather than in ancient Egypt, Greece, China, or the Middle East? Though non-Christian societies made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy, none of those societies produced anything remotely like modern science. For science to get going, one needs a set of presuppositions, or foundational beliefs, about the natural world. These beliefs include the following: 1. The universe is good, and it is a good thing to know about it. If people believe that matter is evil, they won’t be inclined to investigate it. 2. The universe is regular, orderly, and rational. If people believe that material behavior lacks order, they won’t bother to study it. 3. This order could be of two types. It could be necessary order, in which case we should be able to discover the order by pure thought. Alternatively, it could be contingent order, in which case we must discover the order by observation and experiment. Belief in necessary order is disastrous for science, whereas belief in contingent order is essential to its development. 4. Human sense perception and reason are basically reliable, and the regular patterns of material behavior are intelligible to the human mind. These beliefs seem obvious to us, but only because we live in a culture that has held them for hundreds of years. Other cultures held quite different beliefs about the material world. A number of historians have suggested that modern science arose in a Christian culture because core Christian beliefs provided the presuppositions needed for science to get started. British scholar, R. G. Collingwood, has written: “The presuppositions that go to make up this Catholic faith, preserved for many centuries by the religious institutions of Christendom, have as a matter of historical fact been the main or fundamental presuppositions of natural science ever since.”3 How do these presuppositions follow from core Christian beliefs? 1. The scientists of the 17th Century believed the material world to be good because God had made it good. Genesis 1 ends with the comment, “God saw all that he had made and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Moreover, the essential goodness of matter is affirmed by the Incarnation. 2. The founders of modern science believed that the universe is regular, orderly, and rational because God is personal, rational, and faithful. 3. They believed that the order of the universe is contingent because the existence and behavior of the created world depends on the will of a sovereign Creator. The importance of this theological perspective, for science, is that one cannot deduce the behavior of the natural world from first principles. God could have made a world that behaved in any way he wished, so if you want to know how the world does behave, you have got to go and look. Hence, the importance of observation and experiment, an approach that distinguished the science of the 17th Century from the deductive approach of the ancient Greeks.4 4. 17th Century scientists believed that the behavior of the material world is intelligible to human reason because God has made us in his image and given us a mind with which to think. All these beliefs follow from the Christian doctrine of creation. 19th and 20th Century Christian scientists It is true that there was a decline of religious faith among scientists following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Nevertheless, Darwin’s work does not seem to have shaken the faith of the great physicists of the 19th Century. Michael Faraday, James Joule, Lord Kelvin, and James Clerk Maxwell, for example, were all devout Christian believers. In the 20th Century, the astronomer Arthur Eddington, Charles Towns and William Phillips, Nobel laureates in physics, and Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, have publicly affirmed their belief in God. Collins has expressed the spiritual wonder of scientific research in these words: “When something new is revealed about the human genome, I experience a feeling of awe at the realization that humanity now knows something only God knew before.”5 I mention the theistic beliefs of these leading scientists, not to claim that most contemporary scientists are theists, but simply to challenge the popular image of conflict between science and religion. The Scientific Revolution
In Chapter 2 we retold Arthur Eddington’s parable of the fisherman who, after a lifetime of fishing with a three-inch mesh net and never catching any fish shorter than three inches, concluded there were no fish in the ocean shorter than three inches. Just as his fishing net determined what he caught, so our conceptual nets determine what we catch in the ocean of reality. Beginning with physics in the 17th century, then in chemistry in the 18th century and biology in the 19th century, scientists discarded older theological and philosophical nets for those of the modern scientific method—and worked a revolution in the process. All cultures other than modern Western culture have conceived of reality as having a spiritual dimension that could be known through religious experience. In the Western religions, God was understood to be the creator of the world, and believers could understand nature only by seeing it as God’s handiwork, designed to fulfill God’s purposes. Because nature was the creation of God, it was good; indeed, it was infused by the spirit of God. Reality was understood to have the structure of a cosmic drama, and as actors in that drama, persons were responsible agents. Not surprisingly, scientists find in reality only what the conceptual net of modern scientific method allows them to catch—what is measurable, what can be discerned through sense perception and scientific instruments, and what is replicable in scientific experiments. The physicists of the 17th century believed that the ultimate constituents of the world were (quantitatively distinguishable) atoms, and that change was the result of their (quantitatively distinguishable) rearrangement in accord with universal causal laws. Matter was inert, dead. Qualitative colors and sounds were exiled from “objective” nature to the “subjective” minds of observers. The real world is matter in motion, a realm of pure factuality with no inherent moral structure; nature is not purposeful. Science is “value free.” Although 20th century quantum mechanics discerns a level of indeterminacy in nature, classical science was deterministic. Indeed, much science continues to hold that our character and our actions are determined by our genes and biochemistry, our environment and various contingencies of reinforcement. Science has radically extended our conception of the universe in terms of both time and space. Ours is not the cozy world of traditional religion, in which the earth was created to be our home a few thousand years ago. According to modern science, the earth came into being some 4.6 billion years ago, an incidental by- product of the cosmic evolution that began with the big bang some 10 or 20 billion years earlier. And from the time Copernicus displaced our world from the center of a divinely created universe, the earth and its inhabitants have seemed increasingly insignificant in the overall scheme of things. As Carl Sagan once put it, there are cataclysms and catastrophes occurring regularly in the universe and on the most awesome scale. . . . It seems likely that every time a quasar explodes, more than a million worlds are obliterated and countless forms of life, some of them intelligent, are utterly destroyed. This is not the traditional benign universe of conventional religiosity in the West, constructed for the benefit of living and especially of human beings. Indeed, the very scale of the universe—more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more _than a hundred billion stars—speaks to us of the inconsequentiality of human events in the cosmic context. (1974, pp. 290–292) Because science is willing to question the old “truths,” we discover new truths and progress becomes possible—both in knowledge and, through technology, in our physical well-being. But if science makes progress possible in human affairs, it appears to deny progress in cosmic affairs. The forces of nature are indifferent to good and evil; science offers no assurance that all things work toward what is good. Evolution, as biologists understand it, has no moral or spiritual purpose, and the second law of thermodynamics tells us that in the long run the universe will run out of energy and die in the cold darkness of space. One goal of traditional religion was to structure and sustain an understanding of reality as trustworthy; religions provided people with moral and spiritual guidance in living their lives. Science makes no such claims. Rather, its goal is to provide the kind of knowledge that gives us predictive power and, through technology, control over our environment. The philosopher E.M. Adams puts it this way: Before the scientific revolution, humankind faced reality asking, What is demanded of me? How do I set myself right with reality? From within the modern scientific worldview, by contrast, we ask: How do I impose my will on the world? How can I control it (1993, chap. 3)? Arguably, this has been the most profound revolution in human history. Of course, the great scientists of the scientific revolution were not atheists, and, as we shall see, there are ways of reconciling science and religion. As it is practiced, however, science assumes that God is irrelevant to understanding nature, for scientific method prohibits appeal to miracles, divine purposes, religious experience, or Scripture in its explanations. And, at least implicitly, science has become the arbiter of intellectual respectability; the modern scientific worldview pervades the curriculum. Yet, students might well wonder whether there is more to reality than scientific nets can catch. Indeed, might our understanding of nature be distorted if we rely on scientific method only? Of course, theologians, using different nets, claim to catch other dimensions of reality. Galileo’s Discoveries An Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei built on the new theories about astronomy. As a young man, Galileo learned that a Dutch lens maker had built an instrument that could enlarge far-off objects. Galileo built his own telescope and used it to study the heavens in 1609.
Then, in 1610, he published a small book called Starry Messenger, which described his astonishing observations. Galileo announced that Jupiter had four moons and that the sun had dark spots. He also noted that the earth’s moon had a rough, uneven surface. This shattered Aristotle’s theory that the moon and stars were made of a pure, perfect substance. Galileo’s observations, as well as his laws of motion, also clearly supported the theories of Copernicus. Conflict with the Church Galileo’s findings frightened both Catholic and Protestant leaders because they went against church teaching and authority. If people believed the church could be wrong about this, they could question other church teachings as well. In 1616, the Catholic Church warned Galileo not to defend the ideas of Copernicus. Although Galileo remained publicly silent, he continued his studies. Then, in 1632, he published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. This book presented the ideas of both Copernicus and Ptolemy, but it clearly showed that Galileo supported the Copernican theory. The pope angrily summoned Galileo to Rome to stand trial before the Inquisition. Galileo stood before the court in 1633. Under the threat of torture, he knelt before the cardinals and read aloud a signed confession. In it, he agreed that the ideas of Copernicus were false. Galileo was never again a free man. He lived under house arrest and died in 1642 at his villa near Florence. However, his books and ideas still spread all over Europe. (In 1992, the Catholic Church officially acknowl- edged that Galileo had been right.) http://jmcentarfer.tripod.com/ch22_1.pdf Francis Bacon Rejects Superstition and Extols the Virtue of Science
Francis Bacon (1620) The discoveries which have hitherto been made in the sciences are such as lie close to vulgar notions, scarcely beneath the surface. In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms [be] derived from things by a more sure and guarded way, and that a method of intellectual operation be introduced altogether better and more certain. … There is no soundness in our notions, whether logical or physical. Substance, quality, action, passion, essence itself are not sound notions; much less are heavy, light, dense, rare, moist, dry, generation, corruption, attraction, repulsion, element, matter, form, and the like; but all are fantastical and ill-defined. … There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried. … It is not to be forgotten that in every age natural philosophy has had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with,–namely, superstition and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion. For we see among the Greeks that those who first proposed to man’s uninitiated ears the natural causes for thunder and for storms were thereupon found guilty of impiety. Nor was much more forbearance shown by some of the ancient fathers of the Christian Church to those who, on most convincing grounds (such as no one in his senses would now think of contradicting), maintained that the earth was round and, of consequence, asserted the existence of the antipodes. Moreover, as things now are, to discourse of nature is made harder and more perilous by the summaries and systems of the schoolmen; who, having reduced theology into regular order as well as they were able, and fashioned it into the shape of an art, ended in incorporating the contentious and thorny philosophy of Aristotle, more than was fit, with the body of religion. … Lastly, some are weakly afraid lest a deeper search into nature should transgress the permitted limits of sobermindedness; wrongfully wresting and transferring what is said in Holy Writ against those who pry into sacred mysteries to the hidden things of nature, which are barred by no prohibition. Others, with more subtlety, surmise and reflect that if secondary causes are unknown everything can be more readily referred to the divine hand and rod,–a point in which they think religion greatly concerned; which is, in fact, nothing else but to seek to gratify God with a lie. Others fear from past example that movements and changes in philosophy will end in assaults on religion; and others again appear apprehensive that in the investigation of nature something may be found to subvert, or at least shake, the authority of religion, especially with the unlearned. But these two last fears seem to me to savor utterly of carnal wisdom; as if men in the recesses and secret thoughts of their hearts doubted and distrusted the strength of religion, and the empire of faith over the senses, and therefore feared that the investigation of truth in nature might be dangerous to them. But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is, after the word of God, at once the surest medicine against superstition and the most approved nourishment for faith; and therefore she is rightly given to religion as her most faithful handmaid, since the one displays the will of God, the other his power. … primary source document 1: osiander challenges the views already in place before the revolution5/31/2015 Editing Copernicus: The Preface to De Revolutionibus
Andres Osiander (1543) To the Reader Concerning the Hypotheses of This Work: There have already been widespread reports about the novel hypotheses of this work, which declares that the earth moves whereas the sun is at rest in the center of the universe. Hence certain scholars, I have no doubt, are deeply offended and believe that the liberal arts, which were established long ago on a sound basis, should not be thrown into confusion. But if these men are willing to examine the matter closely, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing blameworthy. For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as the past. The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough. Perhaps there is someone who is so ignorant of geometry and optics that he regards the epicycle of Venus as probable, or thinks that it is the reason why Venus sometimes precedes and sometimes follows the sun by forty degrees and even more. Is there anyone who is not aware that from this assumption it necessarily follows that the diameter of the planet at perigee should appear more than four times, and the body of the planet more than sixteen times, as great as at apogee? Yet this variation is refuted by the experience of every age. In this science there are some other no less important absurdities, which need not be set forth at the moment. For this art, it is quite clear, is completely and absolutely ignorant of the causes of the apparent nonuniform motions. And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. However, since different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same motion (for example, eccentricity and an epicycle for the sun’s motion), the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him. Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell. http://piedmont.k12.ca.us/phs/faculty/mcowherd/advanced-placement-european-history/primary-sources-unit-seven-scientific-revolution-the-enlightenment/ |