Science and Religion

Rob Iliffe

Science and Religion

• Some people argue that faith is incompatible with the rational scientific approach,

• Since science involves the critical scrutiny of robust empirical evidence and openness to being wrong,

• While religious faith is not the sort of belief system that can be shaken or corrected by any sort of evidence.

• Others, notably some practising scientists, believe that the science and religion inhabit different parts of human endeavor,

• While still others hold that Nature itself is worthy of admiration and respect, almost on a par with worship.

Peace and War?

• Historians of pre-1900 science have to recognize that most scientists were practising or even devout Christians

• they have offered 3 general ways for understanding relations between science (natural philosophy) and religion 1500-1800:

• That they were in harmony with each other;

• That they were at war with each other;

• That they were independent from each other.

• No single one can capture the complexity of the historical situation so there are limited lessons for the present time.

Two Paths

• Before 1800, one can see two trajectories:

• 1. ‘secularization’ and ‘disenchantment’ lessened belief in supernatural events or explanations,

• By explaining more and more phenomena (comets, mental disease) in ‘natural’ terms

• 2. The development of ‘Natural Theology’ held that scientific progress revealed the aesthetic and rational foresight (the Mind) of a mathematically sophisticated, designer God.

• How did these processes occur at the same time?

Scientia and Sapientia

• According to Augustine (early C5th CE), Christian wisdom (sapientia) was superior to pagan learning (scientia).

• Christians held that God created the universe from nothing; He was intimately connected to the World.

• Augustine criticised Greek scientific learning for being godless, overconfident and internally inconsistent (there were different philosophies of Plato and Aristotle).

• But he also believed that some Greek doctrines might be true.

• Medieval (1200-1500) scholars made strenuous efforts to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity

The ‘Two Books’

• Medieval Christians argued that God created Two Books: Scripture (the Bible) and Nature

• The languages of both books, and the exegetical approaches required to understand them, were related.

• Science (natural philosophy) was thus a religious activity, and the scientist was a Priest of Nature

• A central issue was how scientific knowledge and references to nature in the Bible were related.

• Did the Bible give a true or full account of the natural world?

Copernicanism

• Heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of Copernicus (in On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, 1543).

• Earth was now another planet, with humans removed from the physical and functional centre of creation.

• The Sun was a star, and other stars were suns, probably with their own solar systems

• This opened up possibility of life on other planets.

• Heliocentrism caused problems for biblical exegesis, but this could be solved by suggesting that prophets spoke to ordinary people in a predominantly visual language.

Disciplinary re-arrangement

• The Copernican effort to explain away geocentric passages in the Bible meant that Bible should not be assumed to have anything to say about the natural world.

• However, scientists were now not only pointing out that ecclesiastical authorities had been wrong for centuries,

• But they were now telling theologians how to do their job, degrading their authority.

• Key moment was Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), which resulted in his condemnation of 1616, and ultimately, his trial and house arrest in 1633.

Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)

• In 1613, in the face of severe criticism of Galileo, his friend Benedetto Castelli defended the religious orthodoxy of heliocentrism to Cosimo’s mother, the Grand Duchess.

• In 1615, with the support of friendly theologians, Galileo wrote a letter to Christina arguing that true (i.e. heliocentric) philosophy and religion were separate but compatible;

• Any perceived difference between the two was to be attributed to the inadequacies on behalf of interpreters,

• in this case, theologians who lacked sufficient mathematics to understand Copernicanism. But he had no demonstration of it.

• The Trial was totemic for later accounts of the science-religion relation.

Reversing the Fall

• Embedded within Christianity was an understanding of the sacred direction of time;

• The first humans (Adam) had known everything but very quickly they had become sinful and corrupt, losing rational and perceptual integrity.

• For Francis Bacon and others, science would restore this original knowledge.

• Scientific instruments, for example, could reverse the corruption of cognitive and sensory abilities.

A divine metaphysics

• In the early modern period, natural philosophy was usually carried out in association with a ‘divine metaphysics’ that described God’s relationship with his creation.

• ‘Mechanical Philosophers’ argued that God was intimately related to the World but He was not the same as the World.

• There were many disagreements about how God’s existence was related to the existence of a vacuum, to an infinite cosmos, and to living things.

• E.g., if the World was ‘full’ (a plenum’), there was no room for God to act on his Creation.

Secularisation

• Throughout the early modern period there was a gradual tendency to explain various events and bodily states in ‘natural’ terms.

• This included

– mental disease, previously explained as the result of possession by demons,

– various phenomena attributed to witchcraft

– And heavenly events such as the appearance of comets.

• Naturalist arguments were used most by ‘godly’ natural philosophers to defend the rationality of their enterprise.

The Limits of Reason

• However, the vast majority of scientists believed in God, and worked in a religious framework.

• Indeed, Reason and philosophy were used to defend religious belief against excessive scepticism.

• For example, scientists often excluded implausible examples of spiritual activity in favour of examples that were supported by credible witnesses.

• This was the same process used to support other strange ‘matters of fact’.

Natural Theology

• In the late C17th, the ‘Argument from Design’ increasingly underlay practice of natural philosophy.

• Most common example was ‘clock’ analogy.

• Experimenters such as Robert Boyle made use of natural theological arguments to thwart the perceived atheism and materialism of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza.

• The logic of this Argument was powerful, and new findings in microscopy, anatomy, natural philosophy and astronomy reinforced belief in a beneficent Creator.

Physico-Theology

• Commentators were increasingly confident about using ‘secondary causes’ to explain biblical events.

• in his Sacred History of the Earth (1681-9), Thomas Burnet gave naturalistic explanations for events such as the Creation, the Flood, and the End of the World.

• Many used the doctrines of Newton’s Principia, especially his account of comets, to explain the same events.

• However, Newton himself was hesitant to use his theories in this way, not least because he did not believe that the Bible gave an account of the natural world.

Newtonian Natural Theology

• Newton’s Principia (1687) was crucial for Natural Theology.

• Newton told Richard Bentley in winter of 1692-3 that he had composed the work so that intelligent people might have their belief in God reinforced.

• Newton’s work showed that universe was written in a mathematical language and created by a supremely intelligent geometer;

• The cosmos’s exquisite and intricate harmony made it impossible to have arisen by chance, an argument with numerous modern descendants.

The end of natural theology?

• The secularising process, in conjunction with scientific knowledge, eroded traditional views about the existence of supernatural events.

• Philosophes like Voltaire mocked tenets of traditional religion while

• Natural theological arguments, such as the watchmaker analogy, were condemned as logically invalid and anthropomorphic by critics, notably David Hume.

• Yet paradoxically, natural theology reached its peak influence in the early 19th Century.

Louis-Etienne Boullee,

Design for a Cenotaph of

Sir Isaac Newton (1784)

William Paley (1743-1805) –

Natural Theology … Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the

Deity (1802)

Emphasised watchmaker argument against evolutionary theories, epitomizing the analogies that

Hume had condemned.

His arguments regarding the perfect interplay between

structure and function in ecological niches was important for Darwin.

Reverend William Buckland published Vindication of Geology

in 1820, arguing that evidence from geology was compatible with biblical accounts of Creation and

the Flood.

Findings at Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire seemed to show that

hyaenas, elephants etc. had pre-existed the Flood.

Published his views in Remains of the Flood in 1823 but by mid-1830s he thought that a literal

account of Creation could not be confirmed by geological evidence.

Charles Lyell (1797-1875)

Attended Buckland’s lectures;Prof. of Geology at Kings College London in 1830s, following his

Principles of Geology, 3 vols(1830-33). Deeply influential on

Darwin

Believed that, in attacking ‘catastrophism’, he had placed

geology on a scientific footing, and freed it from Mosaic chronology.

Key work in renaming various eras, arguing that Earth had existed for

an ‘indefinite’ period of time