How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (52 page)

46. Scheiner, Christoph (1573–1650)

47. Steno, Nicolaus (1638–1686)

48. Stevinus, Simon (1548–1620)

49. Torricelli, Evangelista (1608–1647)

50. Vesalius, Andreas (1514–1564)

51. Vieta, Franciscus (1540–1603)

52. Wallis, John (1616–1703)

Table 14–1 shows the distribution of scientific fields pursued by these fifty-two stars.

Table 14–1: Scientific Fields

What is most striking about these data is the even distribution across fields. That held among both Protestants and Catholics and for both Continental and English stars.

“Enlightened” Scientists

Just as a group of eighteenth-century philosophers invented the notion of the “Dark Ages” to discredit Christianity, they labeled their own era the “Enlightenment” on grounds that religious darkness had finally been dispelled by secular humanism. As Bertrand Russell later explained, the “Enlightenment was essentially a revaluation of independent intellectual activity, aimed quite literally at spreading light where hitherto darkness had prevailed.”
⁸
Thus did Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and others wrap themselves in the achievements of the “Scientific Revolution” as they celebrated the victory of secularism, eventuating in the Marquis Laplace’s claim that God was now an unnecessary hypothesis.

Of course, not one of these “Enlightened” figures played
any
part in the scientific enterprise. What about those who did? Were they a bunch of skeptics too? Hardly.

First of all, thirteen of the scientific stars (25 percent) were members of the clergy, nine of them Roman Catholics. In addition, I coded each of the fifty-two stars as to their personal piety. To code someone as
devout
, I required clear evidence of especially deep religious involvement. For example, Robert Boyle spent a great deal of money on translations of the Bible into non-Western languages. Isaac Newton wrote far more on theology than he did on physics—he even calculated a date for the Second Coming (1948). Johannes Kepler was deeply interested in mysticism and in biblical questions: he devoted great effort to working out the date of the Creation, settling for 3992 BC.

I used the code
conventionally religious
to identify those whose biography offers no evidence of skepticism but whose piety does not stand out as other than satisfactory to their associates. An example is Marcello Malpighi, whose observations of a chick’s heart are regarded as one of the most remarkable achievements of seventeenth-century biology. Malpighi’s biography offers no direct evidence of concerns about God similar to Boyle’s or Newton’s. On the other hand, he did retire to Rome to serve as the personal physician of Pope Innocent XII, a very pious Counter-Reformation
pontiff, who surely expected a similar level of piety from those around him. If anything, then, I have underrated Malpighi’s level of personal piety, and I may well have done so in other cases, but I have not overstated anyone’s level of piety.

Finally, I reserved the label
skeptic
for anyone about whom I could infer disbelief, or at least profound doubt, in the existence of a conscious God. Only one of the fifty-two qualified: Edmond Halley—he was rejected for a professorship at Oxford on grounds of his “atheism.”

Table 14–2 displays the religious profile of these fifty-two scientific stars.

Table 14–2: Personal Piety

Clearly, the superb scientific achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the work not of skeptics but of Christian men—at least 60 percent of whom were devout. The era of the “Enlightenment” is as imaginary as the era of the “Dark Ages,” both myths perpetrated by the same people for the same reasons.

A Protestant Revolution?

In 1938 Robert K. Merton, soon to become one of America’s most influential sociologists, published a lengthy study in the history-of-science journal
Osiris:
“Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.” Rejecting the Marxist and secularist orthodoxies of the day, Merton proposed that Protestant Puritanism had given birth to the “Scientific Revolution.” According to Merton, this occurred because the Puritans had reasoned (and, presumably, they were the first Christians to do so) that since the world was God’s handiwork, it was their duty to study and understand this handiwork as a means of glorifying God. Thus, Merton argued, among Puritan intellectuals in seventeenth-century England, science was defined as a religious calling.

Merton’s whole argument was merely an extension of Max Weber’s claims about the role of the Protestant ethic in the rise of capitalism. And, like Weber’s, Merton’s position is untenable. Merton was certainly correct about the personal piety of the scientists he cited (despite claims of his early critics that those scientists must have faked their piety). But he went wrong in two ways. First, by keeping a narrow focus on England, he ignored the substantial Catholic participation in science at this time. Second, he misidentified English Protestant scientists as Puritans when most of them were conventional Anglicans.
⁹
Indeed, Merton’s definition of “Puritan” was so broad that essentially no Christian was excluded, not even Catholics.
¹⁰
In Barbara J. Shapiro’s pithy summation, “What [Merton] is essentially saying is that Englishmen contributed to English science.”
¹¹

The claim that the “Scientific Revolution” was the work of Protestants (let alone Puritans specifically) is clearly undermined by the data in table 14–3. Only half of the fifty-two stars were Protestants, and with the English removed, Catholics outnumbered Protestants by twenty-six to eleven, which approximates the distribution of Protestants and Catholics on the Continent in this era. As the scholar Paul J. Kocher aptly observed, “There was nothing in the dogmas of Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Puritanism which made any one of them more or less favorable to science in general than any of the others.… [In each, the majority held] that science should be welcomed as a faithful handmaid of theology.”
¹²

Table 14–3: Religious Affiliation

Escape from the University

Perhaps because Roger Bacon attacked universities as “adverse to the progress of science,” most modern historians of the rise of science have condemned the universities, especially since doing so provided additional grounds to attack religion.
¹³
Typical of this view was Richard S. Westfall, who in 1971 wrote, “Not only were the universities of Europe not the foci
of scientific activity, not only did science have to develop its own centers of activity independent of universities, but the universities were the principal centers of opposition for the new conceptions of nature which modern science constructed.”
¹⁴

In light of chapter 8, this seems very surprising; at the very least it requires an account of how the universities turned against science and became bastions of the received wisdom, having previously sustained generations of distinguished scientific progress. No such accounts have been offered. That’s because it never happened! The universities remained the primary institutional base for science in this glorious era, just as they had through the prior centuries.

For example, what eventually became the celebrated Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge, later known simply as the Royal Society of London, began when a group of scientists started holding regular meetings at the University of Oxford in the 1640s.
¹⁵
The move to London coincided with the rise to prominence of Gresham College, located in London; a number of English scientists held joint appointments at Gresham and at Oxford or Cambridge.

In addition, 48 of the 52 stars (92 percent) were, as historian Hugh F. Kearney pointed out, “university educated, not in the conventional sense of two or three years, but over an extended period [often] of ten years or more.”
¹⁶
Put in modern terms, these stars attended graduate school. For example, after four years at the University of Krakow, Copernicus went to Italy, where he spent six more years at the Universities of Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara. Had he not been trained in Italy, it is inconceivable that Copernicus would have made substantial contributions to astronomy. These findings are supported by an analysis of the careers of all 720 known scientists from 1550 to 1650, 87 percent of whom were university educated.
¹⁷
Moreover, 24 of the stars—nearly half—served as professors for at least a period of their careers.

This is as it should have been because, rather than being opposed to science, the universities in this era were especially committed to it. As the distinguished historian of science Edward Grant put it, “The medieval university laid far greater emphasis on science than does its modern counterpart.”
¹⁸

Why England?

Many have claimed that England was the primary setting for this scientific era. Merton focused exclusively on England in pushing his Puritan explanation, and the prominence of nonacademics among the London scientific set encouraged many to disdain the role of the universities. Although both of these interpretations are false, there is some basis for the view that England was exceptionally productive of scientists, as can be seen in table 14–4.

Table 14–4: Nationality

In fact, England does stand out, especially when we consider that in this era Italy had about twice the population of England.
¹⁹
It is legitimate to ask, why England? My explanation is that England led the way in science for the same reasons that it led the way in the Industrial Revolution—its substantially greater political and economic liberty had produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper middle class, sometimes called the bourgeoisie. Although the rise of the bourgeoisie occurred all across western Europe, it did so earlier and to a far greater degree in England (and the Netherlands). These matters will be pursued at great length in chapter 17; here it is sufficient to establish a few preliminary points.