How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (53 page)

The first is that from earliest days the pursuit of knowledge was the work of persons whose status was less than aristocratic. Aristotle tutored future kings, but he was the son of a physician. Recall, from chapter 8,
historian Hastings Rashdall’s observation that most students at medieval universities “were of a social position intermediate between the highest and the very lowest—sons of knights and yeomen, merchants, tradesmen or thrifty artisans.”
²⁰
Although there were universities all across western Europe, in the seventeenth century more students enrolled in “the English universities than at any time until the nineteenth century,” as Kearney pointed out.
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In fact, beginning in the 1540s England saw a remarkable explosion of education at all levels, resulting in a huge increase in literacy and a corresponding leap in the sale of books.
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This was fully consistent with the Elizabethan court, where “commoners” such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake played prominent roles in the queen’s service.

Something else equally remarkable was taking place in England at this time: lesser aristocrats were, in effect, joining the bourgeoisie from above. As the historian Lawrence Stone reported, “They were pouring into the universities and the Inns of Court.”
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For that reason, perhaps, English scientific stars in the era were far more likely to have been of bourgeois origins than were Continental scientists, as can be seen in table 14–5.

Table 14–5: Class Origins

These codes apply to each scientist’s family.
Nobility
means one’s father had a title.
Gentry
includes people of high social status but no title, such as government officials, large landowners, and, as Deirdre McCloskey put it, “any dignified people just below the aristocracy.”
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Bourgeois
fathers were in business or were members of the professions, clergy, professors, and the like.
Lower
refers to those who rose from peasant or laboring backgrounds, there being only three among these stars—Marin Mersenne’s parents were peasants, Johann Glauber’s father was a barber, and John Ray was the son of a blacksmith.

But even though England produced more scientists, the principal fact about this wonderful era of science is that it was spread across all
of western Europe. And for good reason: it was the normal result of the organized pursuit of knowledge that was fundamental to Christianity.

The Christian Basis of Science

Science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was
possible
and
desirable
. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatically asserted to a distinguished audience of scholars attending the 1925 Lowell Lectures at Harvard by the great English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who explained that science developed in Europe because of the widespread “faith in the possibility of science … derivative from medieval theology.”
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This claim shocked not only his audience but Western intellectuals in general when his lectures were published. How could this world-famous thinker, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the landmark
Principia Mathematica
(1910–13), not know that religion is the unrelenting enemy of science?

Whitehead had recognized that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science, just as non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific enterprise everywhere else. He explained:

The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief … that there was a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? … It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of faith in rationality.
²⁶

Whitehead was, of course, merely summarizing what so many of the great early scientists had said. René Descartes justified his search for the “laws” of nature on grounds that such laws must exist because God is perfect and therefore “acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible.”
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That is, the universe functions according to rational rules or laws. The great medieval Scholastic Nicole d’Oresme said that God’s creation
“is much like that of a man making a clock and letting it run and continue its own motion by itself.”
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Furthermore, because God has given humans the power of reason, it ought to be possible for us to discover the rules established by God.

Many of the early scientists felt morally obliged to pursue these secrets, just as Whitehead had noted. The great British philosopher concluded his remarks by pointing out that the images of God and creation found in the non-European faiths, especially those in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science. Any particular natural “occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot” god, or might be produced by “some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There is not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.”
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It should be noted that given Judaism and Christianity’s common roots, the Jewish conception of God is as suitable to sustaining science as is the Christian conception. But Jews were a small, scattered, and often repressed minority in Europe during this era and took no part in the rise of science—although Jews have excelled as scientists since their emancipation in the nineteenth century.

In contrast, most religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition do not posit a creation at all. The universe is said to be eternal, without beginning or purpose; never having been created, it has no Creator. From this view, the universe is a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and (perhaps) arbitrary. For those holding this view, the only paths to wisdom are meditation or inspiration—there being nothing to reason about. But if the universe was created in accord with rational rules by a perfect, rational creator, then it ought to yield its secrets to reason and observation. Hence the scientific truism that nature is a
book
meant to be read.

Of course, the Chinese “would have scorned such an idea as being too naive for the subtlety and complexity of the universe as they intuited it,”
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as the esteemed Oxford historian of Chinese technology Joseph Needham explained. As for the Greeks, many of them also regarded the universe as eternal and uncreated—recall that Aristotle condemned the idea “that the universe came into being at some point in time … as unthinkable.”
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And as seen in chapter 2, the Greeks treated the cosmos, and inanimate objects more generally, as living things, and as a result they attributed many natural phenomena—such as the movement of heavenly bodies—to
motives
, not to inanimate forces. As for Islam, the orthodox conception of Allah is hostile to the scientific quest. There is no
suggestion in the Qur’an that Allah set his creation in motion and then let it run. Rather, it is assumed that he often intrudes in the world and changes things as it pleases him. Through the centuries, therefore, many influential Muslim scholars have held that efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy because they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act. Thus did the Chinese, Greek, and Muslim images of God and the universe deflect scientific efforts.
³²

It was only because Europeans believed in God as the Intelligent Designer of a rational universe that they pursued the secrets of creation. Johannes Kepler stated, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony imposed on it by God and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
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In his last will and testament, the great seventeenth-century chemist Robert Boyle wished the members of the Royal Society of London continued success is “their laudable attempts to discover the true Nature of the Works of God.”
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Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that
they found them
. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again. For, as Albert Einstein once remarked, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible: “
A priori
one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.… That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly being reinforced as our knowledge expands.”
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And that is the “miracle” that testifies to a creation guided by intention and rationality.

Of course, the rise of science did engender some conflicts with the Catholic Church, as well as with the early Protestants. That in no way diminishes the essential role of the Christian conception of God in justifying and motivating science; it merely reflects that many Christian leaders failed to grasp the important differences between science and theology. Christian theologians attempt to deduce God’s nature and intentions from scripture; scientists attempt to discover the nature of God’s creation by empirical means. In principle, the two efforts do not overlap, but in practice theologians have sometimes felt that a scientific position was an attack on faith (and some modern scientists have in fact attacked religion, albeit on spurious grounds). In early days, a major dispute took
place because both Catholic and Protestant theologians were reluctant to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe, let alone not the center of the solar system. Both Luther and the pope opposed the Copernican claim, but their efforts to defeat it had little impact and were never very vigorous.

What about Galileo?

Unfortunately, this modest conflict has been blown into a monumental event by those determined to show that religion is the bitter enemy of science. They have turned Galileo Galilei into a heroic martyr to blind faith. Voltaire reported: “The great Galileo, at the age of fourscore, groaned away his days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, because he had demonstrated by irrefutable proofs the motion of the earth.”
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The Italian gadfly Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789) added that Galileo was “put to the torture, for saying that
the earth moved.
”
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It is true that Galileo was called before the Roman Inquisition and charged with the heretical teaching that the earth moves—around the sun or otherwise. And he was forced to recant. But he was neither imprisoned nor tortured; he was sentenced to a comfortable house arrest, during which he died at age seventy-eight. More important, what got Galileo in trouble with the Church were not his scientific convictions nearly as much as his arrogant duplicity. It happened this way.

Long before he became Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–44), while still a cardinal, Maffeo Barberini knew and liked Galileo. In 1623, when he published
Assayer
, Galileo dedicated the book to Barberini (the Barberini family crest appeared on the title page of the book), and the new pope was said to have been delighted by the many nasty insults it directed against various Jesuit scholars.
Assayer
was mainly an attack on Orazio Grassi, a Jesuit mathematician, who had published a study that (correctly) treated comets as small heavenly bodies; Galileo ridiculed this claim, arguing (wrongly) that comets were but reflections on vapors arising from the earth.
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In any event,
Assayer
prompted Pope Urban to write an adulatory poem on the glory of astronomy. So what went wrong?

It is important to put the Galileo affair in historical context. At this time, the Reformation stood defiant in northern Europe, the Thirty Years’ War raged, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation was in full
bloom. Partly in response to Protestant charges that the Catholic Church was not faithful to the Bible, the limits of acceptable theology were being narrowed, and this led to increasing church interference in scholarly and scientific discussions. Urban and other leading officials were not, however, ready to clamp down on scientists; instead they proposed ways to avoid conflicts between science and theology by separating their domains. Thus, Friar Marin Mersenne advised his network of leading scientific correspondents to defend their studies on grounds that God was free to place the earth anywhere he liked, and it was the duty of scientists to find out where he had put it.
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More-cautious early scientists adopted the tactic of identifying scientific conclusions as hypothetical or mathematical, hence being without direct theological implications.