The
idea that throughout history science and religion have been in interminable
conflict is called the ‘warfare thesis’ and is unanimously dismissed by serious modern historians as baseless. Notwithstanding, certain atheists (of the
Dawkinian variety), along with the media, love to perpetuate the idea that
throughout history scientific progress has been hampered by the dogmatism and
superstitious thinking of religion; but the truth, as Oscar Wilde once quipped,
is ‘rarely pure and never simple’. It is crucial to disentangle historical fact
from propagandist fiction. The origins of the warfare thesis lie in the 19th
C, specifically with the work of two men – John William Draper and Andrew
Dickinson White. It is now recognised that these two men had political agendas
in mind when arguing their case, and the historical foundations of their work
are deemed unreliable.
John
William Draper (1811 – 1882) was the son of an English Methodist minister, a
chemist, a physician, and first president of the American Chemical Society. He
wrote A History of the Conflict betweenReligion and Science in 1874.
This book is actually one long, venomous anti-Catholic diatribe in which
historical “facts” are confected and causes and chronologies are twisted to the
author’s purpose. Whatever evil has been perpetrated in Western history Draper
places firmly at door of the Catholic Church (compare Dawkins’ Root of all Evil thesis) including
preventing the “proper” expansion of the human population. Much of Draper’s
book typifies the widespread Anglo-American, anti-Catholicism and racism of the
period - particularly opposition to new (Catholic) immigrants in America. While
easy to dismiss as inaccurate, cranky and a-historical, Draper’s work, and many
of his questionable anecdotes, has entered the common consciousness, proving
hard to displace.
At
first glance Andrew Dickinson White’s 1896 two volume work, A History of Science with Theology inChristendom,
seems more historically accurate, peppered as it is with apparent historical
documentation. Indeed, White was a historian at the University
of Michigan and later president of Cornell University. Despite appearances,
however, White’s arguments are scarcely better than Draper’s. White employs an
embarrassing array of fallacious arguments and a wealth of suspect or bogus
sources in support of his thesis. Amongst his more shameful methodological
errors are collectivism (the unwarrantable extension of an individual’s views
to represent that of some larger group of which he is a part), a lack of
critical judgement concerning sources, arguments based on ridicule and
assertion, failure to check primary sources, and quoting selectively and out of
context. It is to White that we owe the baseless notion that before Columbus
and Magellan the world was thought to be flat and that the Earth’s sphericity
was officially opposed by the Church. Similarly, his assertion that the Church
opposed human dissection is equally baseless; as is the belief – eternally
popularised by Hollywood
– that the medieval Church condemned all science as devilry.
Their
dubious scholarship aside, these books rely on a central and fallacious assumption:
that throughout history scientists and theologians formed two separate camps,
forever in conflict, with superstitious, ignorant and authoritarian theologians
imposing their will on enlightened, free-thinking and truth-seeking scientists. Such a distorted view of the history of
science and religion has influenced some of the more sophisticated thinkers of
our own time. For example, in his History
of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell relates how John Calvin’s critique
of Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe was an obstacle to
scientific progress. “Calvin,” wrote Russell, “demolished Copernicus with the text:’The
world also is stabilised, that it cannot be moved’ (Psalm xciii.I), and
exclaimed: ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of
the Holy Spirit?’“ Thus Calvin is portrayed as an ignorant, arrogant fool,
placing the authority of the Bible above scientific evidence, just the sort of
backward thinking religious zealot who obstructs scientific progress. The unfortunate
truth, for those who delight in seeing religious figures portrayed in such a simplistic
manner, is that Calvin made no such statement. Unfortunately, Russell didn’t
provide a source for his citation, but Thomas Kuhn attempted to track it down
when researching early responses to the Copernican theory. Yet neither Kuhn nor
anyone else could find anything like the quotation in any of Calvin’s writings.
However, the one place where it was featured most prominently was in Andrew
Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of
Science and Theology and Christendom. White cites a specific work by Calvin
but at no point in that work does Calvin state anything like what White
attributes to him. Historians now dismiss White’s citation as pure invention -
an invention that, nonetheless, found its way into the work of Bertrand
Russell, one of the most respected and influential thinkers of the 20th
C.
Another
myth that has permeated the popular consciousness, and one that even today is
cited by some leading thinkers and polemicists, is that of the confrontation
between the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce and Darwin’s ally Thomas H.
Huxley at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford on June 30, 1860, at
which the theory of evolution was being discussed. Delivering what he
arrogantly thought would be knock-out blow to Huxley, Wilberforce demanded of
Huxley whether it was “through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed
his descent from a monkey?” With consummate dignity, Huxley calmly replied that
if he had a choice between having “a miserable ape for a grandfather” or a
talented man who uses his gifts for “the mere purpose of introducing ridicule
into grave scientific discussion,” he would choose the ape any day. This tale has been related ad-nauseam by those wishing to highlight
the uninformed, backward thinking that religion is believed to foster. Again,
unfortunately for such people, this event never occurred. Contemporary accounts
of the meeting make no mention of this exchange. It is now believed to be a
journalistic invention originating thirty years later. As such, it tells us
very little about what actually happened at the British Association meeting,
but it does tell us an awful lot about the way the Darwin debate was perceived
in the latter part of the 19thC. It portrays Wilberforce as the ignorant,
backward thinking, and uninformed mouth-piece of religion. The truth was that
Wilberforce was thoroughly familiar with Darwin’s theory having written an
extended review of Origin of Species
five weeks prior to the 1860 meeting; a review that Darwin himself granted was
“uncommonly clever” and that it pointed out “with skill all the most
conjectural parts” of the book, identifying some serious weaknesses that Darwin
needed to address in any future work.
The Galileo Affair
Undoubtedly,
the most often-cited incident in the history of science-religion interaction is
the “Galileo affair”. Often presented as a simple clash between the dogmatic
and authoritarian Church and a humble, truth-seeking scientist, the reality is
actually very complex, involving intellectual, philosophical, political,
social, and personal clashes that go well beyond any naive (and propagandist)
science-versus-religion readings. In his Dialogue
Concerning the Two Great World Systems Galileo champions Copernicus’s
heliocentric theory of the universe over the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system. Set
at a time when the Church was waging a brutal war challenging its authority as
the source of truth (The Thirty Years’ War) Galileo’s challenge to the accepted
orthodoxy couldn’t have come at a worse time. But central to the discussion are
the questions “What did Galileo actually know
about nature? Did he know the Earth
moved on its axis and around the Sun? Did his telescope give him that knowledge?
Did he prove that Copernicus was
right?” The Church typically has been cast as the villain in the condemnation
of Galileo, but a great deal hinges on whether Galileo possessed knowledge and
was defending truth or was promoting personal opinion based on his beliefs. It
was Galileo’s insistence that Copernicus’s theory was physically true, and that
any reasonable person would conclude it to be true, that Galileo was called to
account. Had Galileo claimed that Copernicus’s theory was the most effective
means of making astronomical calculations, ignoring questions of physical
reality, there would have been no conflict at all.
While
it is true that certain Church affiliates, most notably Dominican friar Tommaso
Caccini, condemned as heretical Galileo’s views, it would be crass collectivism
to extend the actions of specific churchmen into a generalised statement about
Galileo versus “the Church”. There were clergy, theologians, and officials on both sides of the issue. Cardinal
Roberto Bellarmino, one of the most powerful churchmen of the day in Rome and a highly
important theologian, claimed that if there were an undeniable demonstration of
the Earth’s motion, then Scripture would have to be reinterpreted. The problem
was, Galileo had no such proof. Due to a debate at the time within the
scientific community regarding the reliability of instruments such as the
telescope, Galileo’s telescopic “proofs” were inconclusive. Galileo’s favourite
knock down “proof”, that the tides were caused by the Earth’s motion, is
completely wrong. The most widely supported astronomical theory in the early
17th C was that of Tycho Brahe, who posited that the inner planets (Mercury and
Venus) orbited the Sun, which in turn orbited the Earth along with the
remaining planets. In his Dialogue,
Galileo disingenuously fails to mention the Tycho Brahe model. One possible
reason for this is that the Brahe model accommodates all the predictions and
evidence that Galileo considered “proof” of the Copernican theory.
Galileo
emerges as a polemicist, an apologist for the Copernican theory. Galileo’s
arguments in the Dialogue are
rhetorical rather than conclusive. Although Galileo was ultimately correct
about heliocentrism, he was wrong to claim he had proof of it. From the Churches point of view, confusion would
result if the Scriptures had to be reinterpreted for every possible, yet
unproven, scientific system. (As an aside, it is interesting to note that many
of the accusations labelled against Galileo’s theory i.e. that it violated
commonsense experience, that it would subvert fundamental principles of
physics, and that no evidence supported it, are very much akin to the
accusations psi research is constantly subjected to)
These
examples suffice to show how the science-religion interplay has been distorted
for propagandist ends. The propagandist view is that science is on an
inexorable march, casting its inimitable light on enlightenment Europe,
dispelling the shadows of ignorance, tyranny and superstition, with religion
forever in retreat until one day religion is forever vanquished from the minds
of men, seen for what it is, the primitive and backward delusions of the
ignorant and stupid. In reality this representation is a modern one, a product
of political, social and cultural influences prevalent 19th C Europe;
and which, to this day, is unfortunately perpetuated by a vitriolic cohort of
atheists for whom the Enlightenment ‘project’ just hasn’t ‘panned out’ the way
they would have liked.
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