Science,
Monotheism, and
the Death of the World
Before there was wonder at the miracle of life, there was wonder about death and what it might mean. If life is the natural and comprehensible thing, death—its apparent negation—
is a thing unnatural and cannot be truly real.
From pre-Christian times, up through the Middle Ages, the world was widely experienced as alive. Life permeated everywhere, and the great mystery was death. This outlook had prevailed in an unbroken chain extending to a time probably predating the existence of our own species. More than four thousand years ago, humanity’s earliest surviving literature, Epic of Gilgamesh, is concerned with it.
In this respect, the major difference between pre-Christian times and the Christian era that followed was, for Christianity, God created the world and continued controlling it. With the coming of monotheistic domination, the world was subordinated to God’s absolute control, but the world itself remained alive, and able to teach divine lessons of its own. Nature was considered permeated by life, and even depicted as a goddess, although one subservient to God (Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1–42). The mystery of death lay in punishment for human disobedience to his commands.
The Renaissance strengthened this ancient view, through the growing influence of the pagan heritage of Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. As Pierre Hadot put it, the old pagan gods became “names or metaphors of the incorporeal forces animating the universe,” resulting in “a paganism that could cohabit fairly well with Christianity” (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 79). This “pagan” view was compatible with the church fathers’ long use of a Christianized Neoplatonism to understand the world.
However, it was also during the Renaissance that the view of the world as a lifeless mechanical place grew stronger, eventually displacing this ancient animism. In such a world, life became the mystery and its absence the normal condition of things. Science is often blamed (or credited) with animism’s demise, but the story is more interesting than this. Science played and continues to play a more complex and ambiguous role. The “death of the world” had several intertwining causes.
In the next part of this chapter I will cover this transition from an animistic to a mechanical view of the world. First, the death of allegory in much Christian thought, particularly Protestantism, severed the natural world from providing insight on Scripture. In addition, printing made modern science possible by enabling early scientists to easily communicate, sharing their discoveries and theories. At the same time, while major church institutions supported the desacralization of the world, they also channeled early science in directions that would not contradict Scripture. They unintentionally linked their theology with early understandings of the physical world, guaranteeing science’s future discoveries would abolish rational cases for Christianity. Within this larger context, early scientists gradually fused the medieval traditions of natural philosophy and magic, thereby elevating the status of experiments and other empirical investigations. This fusion supported arguments the world was best understood mechanically, even though Newton’s theory of gravity could not be understood mechanically.
The death of allegory
Chapter 2 described in part how the Protestant Reformation led to the death of allegory as an important tool in explaining the ways of God. As allegory’s role in Christianity shrank, Protestants in particular emphasized what they regarded as Scripture’s literal meanings, buttressed by claims of divinely supported inerrancy. The Bible became a book of sacred history and Christianity a historical religion, and Scripture a record of sacred facts (Harrison, “The Bible and the Emergence of Modern Science,” 124). Biblical literalism transformed not only how people thought about Christianity, it also transformed how the physical world was conceived. The physical world went from being a place filled with sacred meanings illuminating Christian theology to a mechanical system designed by a divine engineer (Harrison, “The Bible”). Augustine’s “Book of Nature” could no longer illuminate Scripture, for it contained no teachings beyond demonstrating God’s power and ability to design the world. Contemplating this world led to no more spiritual insight than contemplating a clock. The world became the stage on which a divine drama of salvation unfolded, strengthening what appeared to be its mechanistic elements at the expense of its living ones.
This theologically shaped perspective strengthened the case for what became the modern scientific view of the world. Especially in the Protestant world, knowledge of the nature was increasingly freed from subordination to theology. People were freer to explore this world, seeking its laws, so long as they avoided theological concerns.
Printing and science
As I explained in Chapter 2, printing made the Reformation possible. But printing did much more than this. It also made it possible for early scientists to create the networks of communication that ultimately grew into modern science.
Around 1439 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Mainz, Germany. By 1481, the tiny Netherlands already had presses in twenty-one cities and towns, and Italy and Germany each had them in at least forty. Growth continued exponentially. Within another twenty years, one thousand printing presses throughout Western Europe had produced eight million books (Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, 13–17). By 1550 there were at least three hundred printers and booksellers in Geneva alone (Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 410). Printing was at least as transformative of medieval society as the advent of the internet has been for ours, and for similar reasons: it transformed and simplified communication. Printing rapidly expanded the potential audience for new ideas, which could now rapidly spread far beyond personal connections. The Reformation was one result and the rise of modern science another.
Individuals fascinated with the challenge of discovering more about the world’s underlying principles have always been among us. They have also always been a minority, and therefore largely isolated from one another. Brilliant ancients had discovered the Pythagorean theorem; that solstices and equinoxes were natural events caused by the earth’s relation to the sun and moon; the distance of the moon from the earth; that the earth was round; and had even gotten within about forty miles from current calculations as to its circumference, and much more. But they lacked easy communications with like-minded people.
Nor did many of the most insightful think they were coming to the end of what could be discovered (Edelstein, The Idea of Progress). Pierre Hadot quotes the Roman Seneca as saying, “Many things that are completely unknown to us will be known only to the coming generation. Many discoveries are reserved for future centuries, when all memories of us will be extinguished” (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 169). Pliny the Elder observed, “There will come a time when our ignorance of such obvious facts will amaze posterity” (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 173). But the geniuses of those times worked alone, or within small face-to-face communities. Possibilities for the sustained growth of specialized fields of knowledge could not be supported with the limited numbers found in such communities, no matter how brilliant the individuals involved. The scientific mentality has always been with us, but science as a system for enlarging human knowledge is new, and its roots are in the printing press.
With communicating discoveries made easier by printing, early scientists could more easily inspire and benefit from one another’s work. People across Europe could be working on common issues. For example, the discovery of oxygen was made almost simultaneously by three scientists: a Swede, Carl Wilhelm Scheele; an Englishman, Joseph Priestley; and a Frenchman, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. Scheele was first to recognize the substance, but, using a different method, Priestley published first, and so is usually credited with the discovery. Lavoisier performed the experiments that proved what these men had discovered was in fact an element, and in doing so rebutted an important competing theory that burning was caused by phlogiston.
Until oxygen’s discovery, air had always been regarded as a basic indestructible substance, one of the four elements. Now it was known to be made up of multiple substances, which opened the door to investigating what these might be. Based on this discovery, many more scientists were inspired to search, and in short order more elements were discovered. Chemistry began moving from alchemy to science as we understand it.
However, the actual gas had been discovered about one hundred years earlier, by a Polish alchemist, Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636). In 1621, a Dutch engineer, Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel (1572–1633), had even used it to sustain life in a submarine (Poole, White, and Whipp, “The Discovery of Oxygen”). But networks of interconnected scientists did not then exist and so these events remain intriguing historical facts rather than building blocks contributing to the growth of knowledge.
Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the most brilliant thinker of the Renaissance, and perhaps in history. Along with his brilliant art, he was an engineer and an inventor, and he made original discoveries in anatomy, geology, optics, hydrodynamics, and more. But da Vinci’s role in the rise of science is small. While many of his discoveries could have been world-transforming had they been more widely known, da Vinci described them in a secret script, and never published. When others made these discoveries later, they got (and deserved) the credit for doing so. Only later was his script able to be read (Capra, The Science of Leonardo).
Science and the transformations it brought into the world depended on the printing press, and the networks of communication it enabled. But there is more to consider. Christianity’s role was more complex than simply turning the world from a place permeated by life to a divine stage set.
Christianity’s contradictory influence
The shift in viewing the world from organic to mechanistic did not automatically open the door to science. While seventeenth-century scientists were often encouraged in their research by their Christian faith, they were not encouraged by the ecclesiastical authorities (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 131). The Reformation had strengthened claims of biblical literalism on all sides, and, as Galileo’s fate demonstrated, the Bible contained much that, when taken literally, contradicted what people were discovering about the world. This led to conflicts between religion and science that had not characterized the medieval world. The distinction between the living human world and an external world of inert matter given its energy by God removed the material world from theological interest, at least so long as what was discovered did not contradict Scripture (Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 89–137). But when read literally, Scripture was filled with inaccurate accounts of natural phenomena.
Allegory and admitting not everything in Scripture could be understood literally had long provided a means for avoiding clashes between Scripture and what seemed true of the world. Further, arguments contradicting Scripture could be put in hypothetical terms, rather than as claims of fact. As Copernicus wrote regarding his hypothesis of a heliocentric universe with the earth orbiting the sun, “if the earth were in motion then the observed phenomenon would result” (Leveillee, “Copernicus, Galileo and the Church,” Finnochiaro, 16). But he refrained from saying it actually did. Copernicus described his theory as a useful tool enabling astronomers to correct mathematical errors that they discovered in their observations. Copernicus and many early scientists could argue math and mechanics were merely tools for finding the patterns an omnipotent creator had created as he willed. They said nothing about how he had actually done so (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 133–4).
However, as religious disputes led to an increased emphasis on biblical literalism, anything undermining its claim to truth anywhere potentially undermined Christianity as a whole. Churches are more than places of worship. They are also controlled by ecclesiastical institutions, and these institutions, Catholic and Protestant alike, were now fighting for their existence. What was at stake here were not only interpretations about the world, but the institutions claiming authority in determining which interpretations were correct.
Protestant and Counter-Reformation theologians alike suppressed a relative freedom of inquiry that had characterized medieval Christianity (Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 77).
Galileo’s arguments contradicted Catholic institutional interests at a time when the church was on the defensive, and worse, Galileo claimed he had discovered a truth and not just a useful tool. But Galileo’s claims were not just a Catholic problem. Martin Luther rejected any argument that the earth moved, saying “I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth” (Luther, Table Talk). John Calvin went farther, preaching some “are so deranged … that they will say that the sun does not move, and that it is the earth which shifts and turns. When we see such minds we must indeed confess that the devil posses them …” (Calvin, “Sermon”). The problem was not so much a particular church as the increasing dependence of all competing churches on biblical literalism.
Desacralizing the world not only encouraged what became scientific ways of thinking, it also increased the future tensions between religion and science because allegorical interpretations could not be applied to heal tensions when science contradicted Scripture. Toulmin explained the issues provoking religious attacks on men like Galileo and Bruno “all turned on the novel assumptions about the order of nature that made up the scaffolding of the modern world picture” (Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 144).
These early scientists found that mechanistic interpretations of natural phenomena, such as Galileo argued for the earth and the planets, were both immensely promising and very dangerous when they contradicted Scripture. They had to tread carefully.
Natural philosophers and magic
In a sense, modern science had two “parents”: natural philosophy and magic. “Natural philosophy” is sometimes thought of as the platform from which science arose. The story is more paradoxical. Natural philosophy had a long history in medieval Europe, and had become respected as one of two ways of learning about the world, the other being divine revelation.
Traditionally, natural philosophers wanted to describe and understand nature, and relied on philosophy and speculation to do so. In the Middle Ages it was dominated by Aristotle’s authority, an authority that began eroding during the Renaissance, when other classical pagan writers’ work became better known. Even before Galileo’s discoveries, astronomers had come to doubt the Aristotelian doctrine of the world being at the center of crystalline spheres through their studies of comets. So natural philosophy incorporated respect for careful observations. However, experiments were not a traditional part of natural philosophy and, given its frequent focus on astronomy, would have been impossible anyway.
Experiments and empirical investigation were originally more closely associated with medieval and Renaissance magic than with natural philosophy. Traditional authorities were not as important. Carolyn Merchant emphasized that the Renaissance magus sought knowledge in service to personal power (Merchant, The Death of Nature, 109). A practitioner of magic wanted to control the world around him, and hoped to achieve it by investigating it and its occult properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Natural Philosophy”). This may have been a crucial reason for their secrecy, for while science grows through shared knowledge, a quest for power is threatened by others’ power.
I previously described how oxygen was actually first discovered by a Polish alchemist, although in a way that did not contribute to science. But when applied within a new context, the techniques alchemists devised did. John Henry writes that leaders of the scientific revolution, “like the magicians, developed and extended the experimental method to make it one of the most fruitful means of investigating nature. The new philosophers recognized the validity of experimentally defined occult qualities” (Henry, “Magic and the origins”). Magical traditions contributed importantly to the rise of modern science (Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment). The natural philosophers used investigative techniques rooted in magic, especially investigations to discover connections between phenomena, rather than relying on respected authorities.
A good example of natural philosophy and magic coming together is the influence of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who played an important role in integrating these two traditions. A pioneering advocate of using empirical investigation in science, Bacon also considered “magic as an operative knowledge of hidden forms and the harmony of things, which displays the wonderful works of nature” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Natural Philosophy”). Bacon’s view of the purpose for acquiring knowledge as serving humanity helped to shift the magical tradition toward seeking power for the good of all (Merchant, The Death of Nature, 169).
The coming together of these two traditions was not without tension. What were thought of as “occult qualities” could not be explained mechanistically. They were two very different models of reality. After the mechanical wheel clock was invented in the late thirteenth century, it had often been used since as a model for mechanical views of nature (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 83). Like today, early scientists and others used the most advanced technologies of their time to shed light on what they were studying. Then it was clocks; today it is computers.
The clockwork model provided an alternative to the dominant animistic one, and over time it gained in persuasive power. For example, astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) wondered why, if all planets had souls, the ones farthest from the sun were less active than the inner ones. Perhaps, Kepler wondered, only the sun had a soul whose “force” moved the planets, the more strongly the closer they were to it. But this surmise of his was only a way station, and in time Kepler endorsed a fully mechanical model, writing: “My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, live being, but a kind of clockwork, insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a most simple, magnetic, and material force, just as all motions of the clock are caused by a simple weight” (Koestler, Sleepwalkers, 345).
Protestantism’s reduction of nature to inert matter given energy by God further strengthened the mechanistic model, facilitating early scientists’ separation from magical traditions. Methods of experiment, measurement, and prediction came naturally to people who studied mechanical processes, whether clocks or the universe. Francis Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton’s emphasis on analyzing what was measurable and quantifiable in the sensible world broke with magical practices, but not with its aspirations to exercise power over the world (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 123).
But the mechanical model was not without serious problems of its own. Newton’s concept of gravity required action at a distance, and was not itself mechanical. The mechanist G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716)—who, along with Newton, discovered calculus—criticized Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) concept of gravity as an example of occult forces acting on things with no physical connection. Newton responded that people should not make up hypothetical explanations of phenomena that clearly existed, but instead rely on the experiment and the mathematics. John Henry observed “Any magician from the preceding 700 years would have agreed with him” (Henry, “Magic and the origins”). One fascinating attempt to link the “occult” dimensions of Newton’s thought with mechanism helped inspire the rise of mesmerism. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was initially a Newtonian mechanist and physician who had successfully treated a hysteric with magnets. He hoped he had discovered scientific evidence that gravity and magnetism were closely related (Webster, The History of Theurgy, 238). In time he shifted away from mechanism to ultimately provide support for vitalism. As I read about his later work, it seems a kind of what, today, we call “energy healing.” But that is an avenue we will not explore here.
In science, mechanism’s triumph was not because all important phenomena could be explained mechanically, but because it was so incredibly useful where it did work. Newton himself was not a pure mechanist, arguing mechanism did not hold for all natural phenomena (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Newton’s Philosophy”). Newton was convinced God had created the laws he discovered, but was not bound by them, so that there was no mechanistic account for gravity did not bother him.
Despite the “occult” characteristics of action-at-a-distance implied in his theory of gravity, because the rest of his work incorporated it so spectacularly, Newton vastly strengthened the mechanistic paradigm. That a vast range of phenomena on Earth and in the heavens could be explained on the basis of a few universal principles lent strength to the idea the universe could be thought of as a great machine. Gravity’s nature was reserved for future work. Ironically, given his own views, today he is best known for discovering “Newtonian mechanics.”
A troubled relationship
Initially those relying on authoritative Scripture and those relying on empirical investigations largely agreed about nature and God. Most natural philosophers were believing Christians, and many were churchmen. Modern Protestant Christianity and the first modern scientists both generally saw the world as a collection of things, created and ordered for our use by God. While agreeing on the big picture, Protestants based this understanding on Scripture; early science explored its implications through empirical investigations.
By relying on his own reasoning rather than authority of the ancients such as Aristotle and Galen, or Scripture, Rene Descartes (1596–1650) is often considered the intellectual father of the Enlightenment. A man of wide-ranging interests, Descartes wrote on physics, cosmology, geometry, and physiology. As a convinced mechanist, he argued all physical phenomena could be explained in terms of contact between moving bodies and the motions and shapes of their parts. But Descartes was also a convinced Catholic.
Descartes is famous for writing “I think, therefore I am,” and for the argument he developed from it, which is usually interpreted today as freeing philosophy from the authority of the ancients and elevating the autonomy of the mind. However, Descartes saw the matter somewhat differently. For him, his reasoning demonstrated the necessity for not only God’s existence, but also for the case of the soul’s immortality. In his thinking, the soul was completely freed from mechanical matter, strengthening the case for materialism. As with so many others of his time, Descartes saw no tension between treating the natural world as divinely designed mechanical objects, and Christian theology (Gottlieb, “Think Again?”). Another of the greatest scientists of this time, the Protestant Robert Boyle (1627–91) was also active in spreading his version of Christianity (MacIntosh and Anstey, “Robert Boyle”). Boyle saw the two as interrelated, supporting mechanistic atomism for explicitly religious reasons: “to keep the glory of the divine author of things from being usurped or entrenched upon by his creatures” (Jacob, 1978, 215, quoted in Myers, 2013, 111). Boyle argued, “If water is endowed with the ability to avoid a vacuum, then in some sense it is possessed by a kind of rationality and this exists on a par with man. In turn, if man is fundamentally no different from the rest of creation, why should he think of God treating him differently … why then should he be concerned to live according to the rules of established religion here on earth” (Myers, The Earth, the Gods, and the Soul, 111–2). Matter’s passivity was theologically important for Boyle and others because it removed moral considerations from the nonhuman world. And when morality ceases to matter, what matters is power.
Power and spirit
The dominant medieval view of nature as alive had encouraged its contemplation (Harrison, “The Bible: A Rejoinder,” 157). Nature, as well as we ourselves, was part of a larger living order ultimately ruled by God. By desacralizing the world all moral weight was removed from the world, and concentrated in God’s will and in people insofar as they were obedient to that will. There was nothing really to contemplate in nature beyond its intricate construction as evidence of divine power. Mechanism was the ultimate outcome. Carolyn Merchant put the matter accurately, and bluntly: “The mechanists transformed the body of the world and its female soul … into a mechanism of inert matter in motion, translated the world spirit into a corpuscular other, purged individual spirits from nature, and transformed sympathies and antipathies into efficient causes. The resultant corpse was a mechanical system of dead corpuscles, set into motion by the Creator” (Merchant, The Death of Nature, 195). The magicians’ focus on power shifted into science as we understand it when it moved from power regarding occult forces and entities to power over material objects. Experiment as a method required the power to manipulate what was investigated. Prediction required the power to foresee what would happen. Explanation required the power to encompass what was happening within the framework of human understanding. And so scientific knowledge was intimately connected to the ideal of power as the ability to control. As God controlled a mechanistic universe, by discovering the laws of control, human beings could, in principle, do so as well.
This outlook had important implications beyond religion. Morality was removed from the world, and in its place was the power of divine will. This perspective also strengthened views of God as all powerful rather than all good. But hidden within this view, as I explained in Chapter 3, was the apotheosis of power as the ultimate value. If an omnipotent god did not create the world, and it was simply a material thing, the dominant value serving human beings was power over all within it.
When God’s role shrank to ever more transcendental levels, many Enlightenment thinkers concerned with freedom and individual liberty simultaneously became obsessed with despotic rulers who claimed to rule in the name of enlightened reason rather than religious authority. The philosophs agreed with the despots that ordinary people were incompetent to understand reality. Thus the competent needed the power to rule over them as a father ruled his family. Enlightenment values of reason and freedom attempted to meld with absolutist political power under the doctrine of “enlightened despotism.”
Absolute monarchs claiming this title, such as Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Leopold II, Maria Theresa, and Joseph II, implemented more or less policies of religious toleration and expanded education, public health, support for science, and other social reforms inspired by Enlightenment thinking. But in practice, Enlightenment values were used to replace the old “divine right of kings” argument that had fallen on hard times. The cake of claims to absolute power remained but the icing had changed to rhetoric about Enlightenment—rhetoric quickly abandoned in service to still greater power (Gay, The Enlightenment, 483–96). The language of mechanism proved a good servant to the exercise of power, as it remains today.
To be sure, some Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke argued for the existence of individual rights, but on balance, the immediate effect was to strengthen power over morality and hierarchy over equality. Unlike medieval defenses of domination, however, hierarchy was based on reason and expertise, not God’s will. This view was captured in the striking image of a giant man made up of thousands of little men, but with the all-powerful giant head of a king atop it as the frontispiece in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (see “Hobbes” in the bibliography for a link to the image). Even when limited and constrained by Christian assumptions, science’s elevation of power as a guiding principle would gradually undermine the moral foundations of the West (diZerega, Faultlines). But its full impact lay in the future. At first science opened new kinds of power up to humanity while proving to be a worthy handmaiden to the church.
Those who thought this would last, scientist and churchmen alike, were wrong.
Something new under the sun
Despite this widely assumed compatibility between science and particularly Protestant monotheism, the seeds for eventual divorce had been planted, and planted deeply. The growing scientific community had developed their own standards for investigating purely physical phenomena, standards unrelated to Scripture (Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture). Nature was a different text than Scripture and could be read independently from it. Most scientists believed that scientific discoveries would be compatible with Scripture, and offer independently verified evidence for the truth of its claims, but these beliefs were subordinate to the judgment of the community of scientists based on their evaluation of their research.
Science proved to be an entirely different way for seeking knowledge from what had gone before. Scientists might pursue truth, as had philosophers, theologians, and scientists of the distant past. But the context within which they worked had changed decisively. Whereas Scripture tipped theologians off as to what the truth really was, and philosophers sought to unpack the deepest implications of whatever philosophical tradition they followed, the better to understand truth, science did something different. As individuals, scientists might seek truth, but science as a system only exposed error.
Affirming truths versus exposing errors
The difference between religion and science was that the latter developed procedural standards regarded as fair by all involved for judging claims about the world, whereas religious authorities believed in the infallibility of Scripture, and of their interpretation of it. Even when they differed theologically, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, deists, agnostics, and atheists all could agree measurement, experiment, and prediction were particularly persuasive qualities for testing statements about the physical world. Claims that survived such tests could be at least provisionally accepted. Whereas the church sought to subordinate method and inquiry to serve an already agreed-upon conclusion, natural philosophy, and the science it birthed, subordinated conclusions to what emerged from the process of inquiry.
At its core, what we loosely call the “scientific method” is a way of discovering and rejecting errors about claims regarding reality. This “method” developed out of the natural give and take of people propounding theories and others seeking to test their validity. No truth could be regarded as certain, but the more a scientific explanation could be measured, predicted, and duplicated by others, and do so better than competing alternatives, the greater its persuasiveness became. Science does not so much discover truth as winnow out ever more subtle forms of error. As a system, science sought reliable knowledge (Ziman, Public Knowledge). Such open-ended methods of study could reveal unexpected outcomes able to dissolve long-accepted conclusions.
I am distinguishing fundamentally between science as a system and scientists as people. Being human, there were always heated arguments among scientists as to what counted for accurate measurement, an accurate prediction, or a fair experiment. What one scientist judged to be merely an anomaly that would be cleared up later, was another’s sign something was seriously amiss with the current understanding. Sometimes the one was right and sometimes the other, with no way to tell in advance. Human judgment always played a role, no matter how objective the experiments, measurements, and predictions sought to be (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge). However, the goal was always to minimize such grounds for differing, and consequently, the scientific community developed ever more precise methods to measure and predict.
More purely human motives could also intrude on the abstract ideal of disinterested people applying common standards to their own and others’ work. Pride, envy, greed, and dishonesty have played roles in all human endeavors, including science. But there have always been such people. What was new was that science had become a community of exploration that devised methods of exposing errors.
Every new generation of scientists was filled with people seeking to explore the margins revealed by what was already known. Sometimes their discoveries appeared to confirm existing frameworks, as discoveries in physics appeared to confirm Newton for two centuries. But at other times discoveries challenged existing Orthodoxy, and could rapidly transform “what everyone knew,” as had Albert Einstein’s discoveries, even though initially he did not even have a teaching position.
What few, if any, appreciated at the time was that the scientific community had given birth to something truly new: a community of practitioners able to correct even central misunderstandings in their model of the world. Every scientist could be to some degree influenced by bias and ambition, but science as a whole was not. As a system, science had become independent of scientists.
Scientific “truth” is always what has most successfully passed tests applied to it. “Truth” became something we could always pursue but never be certain we attained, because every advance was provisional, open to being replaced by a new, even more reliable, one.
Science’s foundational Christian assumptions
Although science’s original assumptions about the world were shaped by Christian dogmas, its methods for eliminating errors enabled science to outgrow them. By basing knowledge on freely given persuasion rather than an authoritative text, early scientists laid the foundations for much more than they imagined, and in directions neither they nor anyone else ever suspected.
The mechanistic revolution of the seventeenth century rested on Christian foundations (Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 129). Early scientists had to begin with some initial assumptions about the nature of the world in order to ask questions about it. The assumptions that seemed most reasonable were rooted in a Christian perspective, supporting a biblical view of reality. They assumed that, once answered, the questions they explored would validate these views. Science was to be another means for appreciating God’s actions on Earth.
Much of science’s subsequent history involved discoveries that eliminated foundational Christian assumptions, replacing them with alternative explanations better able to account for what scientists encountered. In the process, science transformed itself. Early scientists thought their discoveries would support Christian dogmas, but over time, space for God’s intervention in the world shrank to remaining “gaps” where we did not know something. For example, Newton thought God’s occasional need to rewind the universe’s “clock” was proof he existed. But later research eliminated any need for such a divine intervention, and so abolished that particular proof God existed.
This gradual filling and narrowing of the gaps in our knowledge, where God had supposedly acted, has never stopped. Much of science’s subsequent history involved discoveries undermining and ultimately eliminating ever more of its foundational Christian assumptions, replacing them with different assumptions better able to account for what scientists encountered. In the process, science transformed itself. By the time of America’s founding, God still very much existed for most well-educated people, but he no longer intervened in the world. Most of our nation’s founders were deists in this sense (Stewart, Nature’s God, 32–4).
We can get a sense of how deeply early science was immersed within a Christian worldview by looking at Stephen Toulmin’s division of these initial assumptions into two groups: one concerning the created world of nature, the other applying to humanity as distinct from and superior to nature. From this perspective, whereas the Bible taught us about the world of people, it did not claim to teach us much about the world of nature and matter (Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 109–115; Merchant pointed out a minority of early scientists looked at nature differently, and their perspective was long overshadowed by the judgments of the majority: Merchant, Death of Nature, 103–36).
Nature
1. Nature is governed by fixed laws established a few thousand years ago. These laws were originally considered as reflecting God’s will.
2. Physical nature is composed of inert matter. Motion and change were the result of conscious entities, especially God.
3. Physical objects and processes do not think. Unlike earlier times, matter could not think because thinking is not mechanical.
4. God created stable systems in which material objects found and maintained their place.
5. Physical reality exists in a hierarchy of higher and lower, with God at the top, providing motion for all through a divine hierarchy.
Humanity
1. What is most human about us is our capacity for rational thought and action. Experience provides sensory inputs and the conscious mind handles them rationally.
2. Rationality in humans and mechanical causality in nature follow different rules.
3. Therefore, our actions cannot be explained by any causal science of psychology. Science deals with material objects, physical processes, and causal relations whereas the human mind is not described in terms of causal regularities.
4. Human beings can create stable systems in society like stable physical systems in nature. Social institutions can be designed rationally.
5. Humans are part rational and part causal, with the latter rooted in our physicality. Emotions are rooted in our physicality, and so are causal. By contrast, reason is intellectual and spiritual.
6. Emotion frustrates and distorts reason and so should be distrusted. Rational calculation gets preference over any emotion.
Over time these biblically based assumptions were rejected in favor of very different ones. But the value most deeply underlying these assumptions remained unchallenged. All the methods developed by scientists excelled at studying phenomena insofar as they were things. We measure things, we predict things, we experiment on things, but insofar as what we study is not a thing, these traditional methods become less practical. Science was regarded as ill-suited to study human beings because ultimately human beings were not things.
Dissolving boundaries
Mechanism depends on two insights. First, that things are not conscious in any relevant sense; and second, that boundaries can be clearly distinguished. A force applied to one thing will move it in some way, and if it encounters another thing, will influence it. A machine has parts and in a good machine the parts should be as durable as possible. Once energy is applied from the outside, they work together in predictable ways because of their shape in relation to one another. But over time science gradually dissolved the rigid boundaries between nature’s “parts,” setting the stage for another problem on which we will focus in Chapter 6: the nature of consciousness.
When Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) proposed the sun and not Earth as the universe’s center, he began the dissolution of this theologically derived idea that we were fundamentally distinct from the rest of the universe. Seen from this perspective, Galileo further weakened the boundary between Earth and the heavens when he discovered the planets and moon were as material as the earth. Newton’s discoveries united a wide range of seemingly distinct phenomena, from falling apples to tides, as phenomena all governed by a single set of predictive equations. In all of them, connections between disparate phenomena were discovered that had not been previously imagined. But still the boundary between people and Earth seemed secure.
But these discoveries had merely set the stage for what was to come.
Evolutionary theory was the most fundamental challenge of all to this boundary-centered view. Darwin and his successors demonstrated how all life was interwoven, connected through networks where complex biological orders emerged from simpler systems, be they organisms or the ecologies within which organisms lived. Far from being absolute distinctions between different life forms, species were temporary patterns along a line of descent. As more was learned about genetics, these patterns could frequently entwine with similar patterns, as with our own sharing of Neanderthal genes. Species were mutable and had blurry boundaries. Along the way, evolution upended Genesis and demonstrated we are connected far more intimately than we had imagined to the rest of Earthly life.
Einstein demonstrated that matter and energy were different states of the same “stuff.” Matter is very far from inert. Even more unsettling, the passage of time varies from place to place and people looking at the same place while moving at different speeds will observe different amounts of time passing relative to a third observer. No objective “now” exists in the universe. And recent work on the nature of time suggests it may be still more difficult to comprehend that this (Brooks, “Quantum time”). Whatever the universe might be, it is definitely not a machine.
Boundaries still exist, but their nature is different from what they were once thought to be. Today the scientific community would endorse very different principles:
1. The laws of nature are not mechanical.
2. The world is billions of years old, in a universe even older, probably originating in a Big Bang. Even this universe, vast beyond human comprehension, may itself be but one of innumerable other universes.
3. Far from being inert, matter is a form of energy where its quantum foundations exist in a state of radical indeterminacy.
4. Mental and moral life are subject to scientific investigation.
5. From organisms to complex societies and ecologies, complex “higher” phenomena emerge from “lower” simpler things and relationships.
6. There is no qualitative distinction between human beings and other living organisms.
7. Emotion is an essential dimension of rationality.
8. Matter and awareness reciprocally influence one another, although just how this happens is almost universally called the “hard problem.”
One traditional theologically rooted assumption remains relatively un-challenged because it has played such a fundamental role in science so far. The world is fundamentally objective, devoid of any inner meaning of its own and ultimately devoid of awareness. What is subjective is ultimately not real. I shall return to it.
The death of nature … and of God
I have described how life was expelled from the world in stages. First, the animacy of the world was reduced to subordination to divine will. Then all life was concentrated in that being or ourselves, with the world being inert matter moving in accordance to laws imposed by divine power. Then the realm of divine power began steadily to shrink, as God became a “god of the gaps.” The gaps continued shrinking until many came to think of God as simply a place holder for what was not yet known.
As this discovery process worked its way through our edifice of knowledge, the chief casualty was the plausibility that a creator god was actively involved in ordering the world. His revelations and miracles were necessary in order to achieve a predestined divine plan involving his specially created human beings, and they supposedly existed where things happened that we could not understand. Evidence for God was in the gaps in our knowledge. Those gaps have steadily diminished. Today, many people assume that, in time, the gaps will close completely. The last holdout, among people who believe in a supreme deity and accept science as our most reliable source of knowledge, is the god of deism, a being who set the whole process into motion, and now sits back and observes us, perhaps as we might observe our goldfish.
But the case for secularism is not nearly so strong as its advocates believe. Science has indeed administered the coup de grâce to any reasonable case for the monotheistic god. Nietzsche was right, we have killed that god, and by so doing undermined the stability of a world based on assumptions rooted in that belief.
But if God was not alive, life now became the mystery. How could life exist in some things in the universe and all the atoms and molecules that made it up not be alive? Perhaps life is also an illusion rooted in deterministic laws regarding nonliving matter? At present scientists and philosophers making this claim can only offer a promissory note. The physical explanation for consciousness also remains a promissory note.
There are reasons to believe these notes will never be redeemed. Christian de Quincey offers what I believe is a wiser question: “Instead of asking, ‘How can I know if any other being is sentient?’ The more reasonable question is ‘How can I know if there is any other creature without consciousness or sentience?’” (de Quincey, Radical Nature, 86). Alexander Wendt emphasizes the subject-object dichotomy is itself not objective, but is “produced by acts of ‘objectification,’ since it is only by taking our mind out of nature that the world can be constituted as an object” (Wendt, Quantum Mind, 66–7; Wendt also cites Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter, 36–51). Science did not undermine belief in an inspirited world or in the existence of awareness as a fundamental aspect of reality. These denials remain assumptions ultimately based in Protestant theology. Science’s tools for investigating the world assumed this was true, and so sought to replace awareness in any form with objective measurement and prediction.
The original motive was a good one. In a Europe torn by religious war and oppression, all arising from beliefs resisting any rational examination, it seemed truth about the world could be best approached by eliminating as much subjective belief as possible. By eliminating subjective involvement, and becoming spectators rather than participants within the world, we might truly find out the truth about it.
But as we have seen, science by its very nature cannot discover truth, or if it does, scientists cannot know it did so. All science can do is eliminate error, and in that way get us closer to whatever truth might be. From this perspective, insofar as it is a source for error, subjectivity is a problem to be minimized as much as possible. And since we do not know the truth, it is best to eliminate subjectivity as far as possible from science. But in fact it is subjective judgment that enables scientists to discover errors in current beliefs and insights into more reliable explanations.
I will argue that there are no good reasons for rejecting views of the world as ultimately nonconscious stuff. But before going there I want to describe how I came to know this is so. For my interest in polytheism and a living world where such phenomena exist is not based on philosophy or science, but on direct encounter.
This book is inspired by a many-decades-long effort to make sense of these experiences while still honoring science, the modern world’s most inspiring and unique way of increasing knowledge on which we can depend.