Did Science Start in 17th Century Europe?
Science today, both the social practice and its associated ‘body of knowledge’, has a plethora of features. Distinguishing which of these are peculiarities of today, others are historical artifacts, and yet others are constitutive. In this essay, we will attempt to come to a definition of science by arriving at its constitutive features, while observing what this definition tells us about the historical origin of science. We must be careful not to let our preconceived notion of science’s historical origin motivate our definitions of science. One of these preconceptions is to place modern science’s origins in 17th century Europe. In this essay, we will mainly focus on the issues with this claim. Alfred Rupert Hall has called the intellectual events which occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries “an a priori redefinition of the objects of philosophical and scientific inquiry” (A Rupert Hall). Is this a fair assessment? Let us sketch the intellectual achievements rightly credited to 17th century Europe. According to Steven Shapin, the scientific revolution pushed the following three ideas into mainstream European scientific thought1. First, that the laws governing the artificial are identical to the ones governing the natural. This change in perspective erased the Aristotelian distinction between human creation and nature – erasing any doubts about our potential to understand nature (typical under Christian teachings, which insist on the fallibility of the human senses), as well as increasing people’s optimism about the potentiality of human artifice. Second, that these laws are mechanistic in nature. That is, they describe nature in terms of passive matter subjected to physical forces manifesting themselves through touch, as opposed to active matter which seeks to actualize its potentiality or telos. Third, that the laws governing the heavens were the same as the ones governing the earth. Galileo argued this for the first time in his Almagest, following his observations of the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, and the lunar mountains. Descartes and Leibniz came up with their treatises attempting to explain the entire universe using simple laws, and their project was masterfully completed when Newton published Principia. These three changes in thinking are often thought of together as the mechanization of nature. To sum up, for the first time in history, the laws governing the natural world were thought to be mechanistic and universal. If mechanism and universality are constitutive features of science, then science starts in the 17th century. However, there are problems with making mechanism so central to scientific thought, because the mechanism defended by 17th mechanical philosophers was steeped in dogma and would not be accepted in the scientific community today. Indeed, the dogmatic obsession which mechanistic philosophers had with mechanism was the reason for many attacks on Newton’s Principia – gravity was seen as an occult force, and a return to the more primitive, Aristotelian, teleological worldview (where bodies ‘seek’ each other in a rather anthropomorphic fashion). Since the 1930s Physics has moved beyond the realm of mechanism, at least where determinism is concerned. In quantum mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, we have reinstated telos, albeit in a less poetic fashion as in the Aristotelian sense. Particles will move not by being “subjected” to forces passively, but by acting to minimizing a quantity called the action. Consensus among physicists today is that there is a priori no advantage over a teleological explanation versus a mechanistic one. Hence, the (re)appearance of teleology in 1930s physics was a shift in our way of thinking of nature, and not the destruction of science. Mechanism fell, but science remained standing. Hence, mechanism can’t be a constitutive feature. While mechanical philosophy is not a good constitutive feature of science, the crisis of intelligibility of physics in the early 20th can reveal what was. The UV catastrophe and the photoelectric effect are examples of phenomena which refused to be explained using the existing (mechanistic) explanatory apparatus. Imagine if, faced with the photo-electric effect and the strange explanations provided by Lorentz, Einstein, and Planck, the scientific community never accepted their explanations in order to save mechanism. This would be unscientific, and it did not happen, for the most fundamental assumption among scientists is that Nature has laws which are (somewhat) intelligible to humans. In order to preserve this core assumption, scientists were forced to change their notion of what counts as an intelligible explanation – rejecting classical mechanics (and its corollary – determinism) and adopting quantum mechanics. Indeed, this is reminiscent of what happened in the 17th century – the mechanical philosophers championed one kind of intelligibility (mechanistic, deterministic) over another kind (Aristotelian, goal-oriented) and won the battle of ideas. We have come to our next core constitutive feature of science: the belief that Nature follows laws which are intelligible to humans. This belief did not originate in the 17th century. In fact, both Plato and Aristotle made similar claims; the most famous one being’s Aristotle principle: Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly. The prominence of the mechanical philosophers in the 17th century means that the view of what counts as an intelligible explanation was redefined (and has been redefined since). This presents us with another issue with defining the birth of science. The contempt which 17th century scientists had for the animistic worldview became a threat to the legacy of pre-17th century science. Thomas Hobbes, for example, caricatured traditional physical beliefs by making sarcastic remarks about their animistic nature; as with the following example, taken from Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution. According to the Ancients, bodies descended because they were heavy. “But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they will define it to be an endeavor to go to the centre of the earth. So that the cause why things sink downward, is an endeavor to be below: which is as much to say that bodies descend, or ascend, because they do… [it is] as if stones and metals had a desire .. as man does”. Simply pointing out the anthropomorphism of animistic thought was enough to brandish it as unscientific. One is tempted to wonder what Hobbes would have made of Newtonian gravity or Maxwellian Electromagnetism. We return to the question of pinpointing those features of modern science which are constitutive. Another feature of modern science is that it is secular – it does not consider the opinions of any church. Asking ‘Is secularity a constitutive feature?’ amounts to imagining a world in which science is not secular and judging whether or not it remains science. Suppose that tomorrow astronomers found a written message from the Christian God in Latin, sprawled across the Dragonfish Nebula. Would this spell the end of science? Would scientists give up their attempts to study and explain nature? I argue that they would not. The ‘body of knowledge’ associated with science would not change (science makes no truth claims about the existence of God). Scientists would still run experiments and would still expect the same thing to happen whether an experiment is run yesterday, today or tomorrow. The discovery of God would not invalidate any current means of acquisition of scientific knowledge, but it would expand the legitimate means of gaining knowledge of the world – quantum physicists might start considering the opinion of the Christian, Orthodox, or Coptic Church. It seems that secularity is then not a constitutive feature of science - can this be right? No! Because as soon as God is discovered by observation, He exits the realm of faith, and enters the realm of the temporal, real, observable, and, yes - secular. For science to cease to be secular would be exemplified by a biologist making scientific claims about the animals which rely on faith in Jesus Christ – and this must strike the modern reader as grossly unscientific. Hence, we are forced to call secularism a constitutive feature. This is not to say scientists cannot be religious, or that the problems they choose to work on cannot be inspired by their religious worldview. But truth-claims about the natural must not be informed by faith. If secularism is another defining feature, where does it place the start of science? Where can we find in the past, among people engaged with explaining the natural world, the belief that religion should have nothing to do with it? One place we can exclude immediately is Europe in the early Middle Ages. The first impact of science on Christianity can be seen from the writings of the patristic writers. They argued that a good Christian should be mindful of his salvation, and should not penetrate further into the secrets of Nature than Scripture would demand and allow. Tertullian, sometimes called the father of western theology, has a famous saying: Nobis curiositate opus non est post Jesus Christum – nihil desideramus ultra credere - For us there is no curiosity after Jesus Christ, nor inquiry after the Gospel. The prevailing worldview among in the European and Byzantine world was that the secular pursuit of knowledge could interfere with the holy pursuit of salvation. Hence religion and science are placed in opposition, and somewhat in conflict. 17th century Europe is often portrayed as pushing religion back out of the domain of science. Hence Galileo, quoting a private conversation with Cardinal Baronius: “The Bible teaches you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go”, which ascribes religion and science as coexisting but with different functions, and, crucially, without interfering with each other. Again, the argument is not that 17th century scientists were agnostics. Just as there are many Muslim and Catholic scientists today who do not let their religion inform their scientific claims to truth, so too did 17th century natural philosophers argue that religion belonged to a different domain. The problem with this view is that many scientists revealed that they did not themselves believe religion and science to be separate. For example, the creation myth was used to uphold that most fundamental assumption in science – that the universe has rational, knowable laws. Kepler held that Nature obeys natural laws because God had used these laws in creating nature. We see, that, in fact, the cornerstone of science in the 17th century was held up by religion. Seeking for other examples of secularism in science also leads us to the Abbassid caliphate of the 8th and 9th centuries, centred around Baghdad. A period of great intellectual achievement in which saw the recovery of lost Greek and Alexandrian mathematics, astronomy, and physics. The Caliph Al Mamun is known to have encouraged learning among his subjects, sponsoring scientific missions such as one to measure the circumference of the earth. In apocryphal story, Al Mamun meets Aristotle in a dream, in which he asks him “what is good?”. Aristotle answers “that which is good in the mind”. Upon asking “what else?”, Aristotle responds “That which is good in the law”. It is not the mind which is controlled by religion, as with the patristic writers mentioned earlier, but exactly the other way around. Crucially placing “the mind” before “the law” suggests that the mind (or science) is the arbiter of all knowledge, even religious knowledge. This points to a certain secularism in establishing knowledge about the natural world, and hence a constitutive feature of science. In conclusion, we have found that the constitutive features of science are 1) The conviction that nature follows laws which are intelligible by humans. 2) That these laws are universal 3) That faith should not be involved in the gathering of information about Nature. Having arrived at these features, we have shown the difficulties that historians run into when arguing science begins in 17th century Europe. Mechanistic philosophy is not a constitutive feature, and secular theorizing and gathering of data about the natural world wasn’t unique to 17th century Europe.
Steven Shapin: The Scientific Revolution ↩︎