"Science and the Scientific Revolution"
Winning Essay

 

Written by Sean McNeme

History is filled with fascinating stories and meta-stories that often interweave in more ways than we can grasp. The Scientific Revolution is no exception. We can speculate about many different causes for the revolution. In this essay, I'd like to focus on one such possibility. It is not uncommon to hear people say that science and religion are, and always have been, at odds. I disagree. I would like to explore the possibility that science as we know it has religious ideas to thank for enabling its emergence. Science has a habit of continually undermining the legitimacy of long standing traditions, whether it is Aristotelian science, the Ptolemaic world view, the origins of humanity, or any number of other traditional views. Science introduces new ideas, often at the expense of old ideas. Dr. Peter Dear briefly mentioned that some people have made claims regarding the significance of society's structure with regard to scientific advancement. The case I would like to make is that we should care deeply about the Scientific Revolution not only because we directly benefit from science in so many ways, but also because it is evidence of the transformative power of individualism. Empowerment of the individual leads to social diversity, which in turn is a catalyst for change which can be seen by taking a meta view of the history leading up to the Scientific Revolution. We live in an overtly individualistic society, so it is worthwhile to understand the relationship between the individual and tradition, as well as how science fits into that picture. I will begin by examining the emergence of individualism through Christianity and how it may have enabled the paradigm shifts affected by the Scientific Revolution, and finally, I will examine some of the major details of the revolution.

In order to understand the circumstances surrounding the time of the Scientific Revolution, we must first take a journey back through time to the emergence of Christianity. Prior to the emergence of Christianity, it was largely believed that everything had an innate destiny or purpose, or as Aristotle suggested, everything has a purest form. One of the assumptions that follows from this way of thinking is that inequality between humans is inevitable and natural, not something that can be altered via choice. The view suggests that each person is born into a particular station in life and expected to play a certain role in society and religion based on the innate nature of the person. A person's identity as well as purpose are pre-determined and essentially unchangeable. These ideas go all the way back to the times of domestic gods and ancestor worship. The advent of Christianity introduced two new ideas: the first being that a person's morality, identity, and destiny can be the result of a personal choice that comes from deep within the individual. The second fundamental idea promoted by Christianity is that everyone is equal in the sense that everyone can make the same moral choices. These ideas are closely tied to each other and complimentary to each other. These are the ideas that the apostle Paul was championing as he set out to share the message of the Christ not only with Jews but also with 'gentiles' (this was contrary to Jewish traditions). These ideas are also the foundation of classical liberalism, even though at that point in history this line of philosophy had not yet universally progressed to that conclusion. Christianity promotes the idea of "treating your neighbors as yourself." Regarding this issue, Dr. Larry Siedentop says in his book, Inventing the Individual, "Now, the identity of individuals is no longer exhausted by the social roles they happen to occupy. A gap opens between individuals and the role they occupy. That gap marks the advent of the new freedom, freedom of conscience. But it also introduces moral obligations that follow from recognizing that all humans are children of God." Christianity offered for the first time the possibly of a God who operates through human agency. The central message of Christianity was two-fold, individuals have freedom of choice, and because of that, everyone is equal, and conversely, because everyone is equal it follows that everyone has freedom of choice.

The events of the few hundred years following the advent of Christianity are fascinating. The core message of Christianity suffered a major setback at the hands of Constantine and subsequently the Roman Catholic church with the introduction of orthodoxy and the Biblical Canon, especially when the orthodoxy was eventually forced on people. This connection is not immediately obvious, but Dostoevsky explains it beautifully in a story titled "The Grand Inquisitor" (227) in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. The story is set in the sixteenth century and is a commentary on the Reformation era and Catholicism. Dostoevsky suggests that Jesus, largely through the agency of Paul (the blind man whose scales fell off) and his sixteenth century counterparts, offered freedom to humanity. He then goes on to suggest that the Roman Catholic Church labored diligently over the centuries to confiscate that freedom because freedom alone does not satisfy the needs of humanity, and we are largely incapable of even understanding freedom. The orthodoxy of Rome reestablished an aristocratic, or elitist social order, essentially eliminating the deeply personal choice and inner conviction that comes from taking one's own destiny into his own hands. They replaced it with relatively meaningless outward actions that need not come from within the individual. The difference between these two paradigms is evident in the words of Tertullian, who is probably most commonly known as the father of Latin theology, "We worship one God... There are others whom you regard as gods; we know them to be demons. Nevertheless, it is basic human right that everyone should be free to worship according to his own convictions. No one is either harmed or helped by another man's religion. Religion must be practiced freely, not by coercion; even animals for sacrifice must be offered with a willing heart. So even if you compel us to sacrifice, you will not be providing your gods with any worthwhile service. They will not want sacrifices from unwilling offerers-unless they are perverse, which God is not" (226). Catholicism restored the old order of things where people were given a cookie-cutter religion and morality. These were based on tradition, physical actions, and property rather than deliberate individual choice. Because of Rome, the development of individualism may have stagnated for something like a millennium (or I may simply be ignorant of the events of that period).

Orthodoxy values unity by encouraging everyone to think and believe the same things; it discourages diversity. Individualism encourages diversity, admittedly often at the expense of unity. There is what I believe to be a universal truth; diversity is a catalyst for change, acutely so with respect to the type of change we call progress. We owe our very existence to diversity, the organic diversity of life, which is a catalyst of biological evolution. Social and political change require social diversity. Cheetahs make prime example of how limited diversity can be detrimental to the system as a whole. Cheetahs are in danger of extinction fundamentally because they lack genetic variability, they are all nearly clones of each other. They survived a bottleneck about twelve thousand years ago. This lack of genetic diversity hinders their ability to change and subsequently adapt to their changing environment. Likewise, orthodoxy and adherence to tradition are attempts to minimize diversity, which effectively limited the Church's ability to adapt to a changing social environment. In the case of Catholicism, this can be seen by the social change affected by the Protestant reformation. If Rome had been less attached to the idea of orthodoxy, then maybe they could have survived the reformation unscathed. The turning point of my case is that before such massive changes as those affected by the Scientific Revolution could take a serious hold, the stranglehold of orthodoxy and tradition had to be loosened. Not only did Luther, Calvin and all the other individuals who furthered the cause of the Protestant reformation effectively loosen the grip of Catholicism, but they also actively promoted individualism, disguised as religion. I think this helped to set the stage not only for the Scientific Revolution, but also for the enlightenment and the great awakening (which also inadvertently furthered the cause of individualism through religion). The Scientific Revolution was a time of massive changes in the way people approached knowledge and understanding.

One of the earlier changes that occurred regarding the Scientific Revolution, according to David Wooton, was a shift from relying on the past for knowledge to looking to the future. In his book, The Invention of Science, he explains that prior to this time, it was the general consensus that there was 'nothing new under the sun,' and that knowledge was to be obtained by looking to the past, to the writings of Aristotle, for example. Wooton says it was believed that ancient civilizations like Rome and Greece were far more advanced in the past than contemporary society. He says, "History was assumed to repeat itself and tradition to provide a reliable guide to the future; and the greatest achievements of civilization were believed to lie not in the present or future, but the past in ancient Greece and classical Rome" (61). Wooton says that the discovery of America along with the voyages of Vespucci lead to the development of the terraqueous globe, which he claims was a critical pre-condition for the astronomical revolution that followed. The terraqueous model is essentially the model we use today where the earth and water share the same center of gravity. Prior to the development of the terraqueous model, there were many different models that were based on the Aristotelian concept that the earth is composed of the four elements: earth, wind, fire and water. Many, if not all, of these models gave the water portion of the globe a different center than the earth portion, which Copernicus realized was incompatible with a moving earth. Wooton goes on to say "As far as the two-spheres theory was concerned, the voyages of Vespucci were deadly. The new facts were killer facts. As it happens, this is the first occasion since the establishment of universities in the thirteenth century on which a philosophical theory was destroyed by a fact" (136) This may demonstrate a paradigm shift between the Aristotelian way of deriving perceptions from philosophy, toward the more modern paradigm where knowledge is expected to be derived from fact (in theory at least).

Many of the Aristotelian ideas were undermined during the Scientific Revolution. The idea that the heavens are uniform and unchanging was disproven first by Tycho Brahe's supernova, or 'new star,' in 1572. The idea that heavenly bodies are perfectly spherical was disproven by Galileo's telescope and his discovery of the 'handles' or 'ears' of Saturn. Galileo undermined the idea that the heavenly bodies are made of ether and that the earth is unique with the discovery that the moon is made of rock and the discovery of the moons of Jupiter in 1610. This discovery introduced evidence that even a body made of rock can indeed be in motion. In 1609, Kepler published his New Astronomy, which depicts Mars moving in an elliptical path, and is contrary to the Aristotelian view that the heavenly bodies move at uniform speed in perfect circles. In 1610, Galileo also dealt another blow to the traditional view of the universe with the observation of the full phases of Venus. The Ptolemaic system could allow for partial phases of Venus, but not full cycles. This was direct proof that Ptolemy was wrong. The Ptolemaic system was built on many auxiliary assumptions of an Aristotelian nature which Galileo's other discoveries cast reasonable doubt upon. In 1559, Realdo Colombo published On Anatomy, which refuted a number of claims put forth by Galen. Galen was considered the authority on anatomy and medicine. His ideas were distinctly Aristotelian. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, "For Galen the fundamental constituents or elements (stoicheia) of physical bodies are the hot, the cold, the wet and the dry. It is also legitimate to state that the elements are fire, air, water and earth." Colombo elucidated the nature of the pulmonary vascular system among other things.

The Scientific Revolution also saw radical changes in philosophical approaches to knowledge and understanding. One of the most obvious cases is Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon set out to form an entirely new approach to science. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, "Bacon's struggle to overcome intellectual blockades and the dogmatic slumber of his age and of earlier periods had to be fought on many fronts. Very early on he criticized not only Plato, Aristotle and the Aristotelians, but also humanists and Renaissance scholars such as Paracelsus and Bernardino Telesio." One of Bacon's major points was that our perception of reality is inherently biased, and he sought to overcome that by introducing more empirical methods of inquiry. Rene Descartes's contributions to philosophy are also critical to this time period, because he encouraged doubt as a tool for gaining knowledge. He encouraged people to question all the auxiliary assumptions that worldviews are built upon. I think that he took this idea further than is practical, however it inherently encouraged people to search for truth through vigorous reevaluation of traditional views and beliefs, among other things.

In conclusion, I have made a case that Christianity helped to advance individualism, which facilitated greater intellectual diversity, which in turn was needed in order to set the stage for the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was a time when major traditional views that had been held for over a millennium were overthrown in the realms of science, medicine, and philosophy. While I realize that there were obviously many more forces at play that lead to the Scientific Revolution, I think that the development of individualistic philosophies played a critical role.

 

Works Cited

Singer, P. N., "Galen", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/galen/>.

Klein, Jürgen, "Francis Bacon", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/francis-bacon/>.

Wooton, David. The Invention of Science. Penguin Random House UK, United Kingdom, 2015

Tertullianus, Quintus. "To Scapula I-2." Documents in Early Christian Thought. Edited by Wiles, Maurice and Santer, Mark. Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual, The Origins of Western Liberalism. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Garnet, Constance. Nelson Doubleday, Inc, Garden City, NY.