For most of recorded history, the relationship between what we now
call "religion" and "science" has been intimate and
productive. It is indeed quite recent that we can meaningfully distinguish
between these two areas of human life and knowledge, a feature of modernity and
the rise of field knowledge. The separation of knowledge from spirit is a
curious result of the scientific revolution, which cannot be understood from
church history and the politics of late medieval Christian theology.
RENE SPORTTES
Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650. He and Isaac Newton
are probably the main contributors to the scientific revolution. Their primary
question was not "How do I make science suitable for the Bible", but
"How can we achieve both clarity and certainty about the world God has
created". The excessive persecution inflicted on their recent forebears by
the Catholic Church diminished the ultimate authority of this body in the human
mind, and both sought to assist in the overall reformation project of seeking a
source of divine revelation outside of doctrine and church tradition. For
Descartes, therefore, the non-ecclesiastical source of truth or certainty was
the human mind and its reasoning power; for Isaac Newton it was the magnificent
unity of mathematics and the universal, observable and testable laws of
physics.
Why was Descartes so concerned with the question of judgment? With
other natural philosophers, Descartes did not intend to dethrone God, but he
believed that he could restore to God a certainty of place that no amount of
ecclesiastical mismanagement, error, or prejudice could undo. Modern science
was born in search of a new basis for certainty in a rapidly changing world.
But how can we be absolutely sure of sense perception when our
senses sometimes deceive us? To know this, Descartes looked elsewhere for
certainty. He sought it in radical doubt. Anything that can be rationally
doubted, he argued, cannot be certain. So he set out to see if there was
anything at all that could stand doubt, and on this one certain thing he would
restore knowledge. The only certainty that Descartes was able to convince
himself of was his own thought, present even in dreams. And thinking, he
argued, requires a source of thought. He concluded thus: "I think, therefore
I am." Descartes believed that he could reconstruct certain knowledge
piece by piece so that doubts could not creep back in. If thinking means that I
exist as a thinker, then I, or at least my mind, must also come from somewhere:
this is how Descartes arrives at God as the source of mind."
FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)
Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Descartes, took a radical
approach to the problem of certainty. Although we do not know whether he and
Descartes were aware of each other's work, it is interesting that both
expressed a similar approach to truth, albeit in a different way. Bacon argued
that this certainty came only from the immediate senses. Everything else is an
assumption. Even memory, Bacon argued, is conjecture, no matter how deeply I
remember a thing. Once out of sight, sound, smell, and touch, the thing in
memory no longer exists with certainty. Anything other than directly
understanding the mind is called.
ISAAC NEWTON (1643–1727)
Newton believed that mathematics was the path to certainty and
thus to truth. He assumed that knowledge about all natural phenomena could be
derived from mathematics. He was convinced that the universe operates in
obedience to certain universal laws. This assumption allows the observer to
apply the rules that work at any location to all locations.
1. Mechanistic view:
Newton was a Christian who believed he served a theological
purpose in revealing the mechanics of the universe. The mechanistic universe as
described by Newton represented a real conceptual shift from the earlier
understanding of the cosmos itself as a place of disorder and arbitrary forces.
He convincingly demonstrated the possibility of a rational, universalizing
theory for all reality. The epistemological principles he invoked ultimately
related to a rational God as the author of the unity of the physical universe.
Being perfect, God is also perfectly rational, and thus created the world using
perfectly rational physical laws. He argued that no rational deity would
violate the universal laws that he created in perfect rationality. Rationality
is accessible to the human mind.
1. Modesty
This is the first rule where he claimed that when there are
multiple plausible explanations for a given phenomenon, the scientist should
always opt for the simplest one. "Nature," he asserted, "is
pleased with simplicity, and does not affect the pomp of superfluous
causes." Nature here is a reflection and image of God, because God is
rational, unified and one - he is simple. The basic rule by which science makes
decisions therefore has its theological origin in the simplicity of God.
Simplicity, in this sense, is a philosophical term denoting the oneness and
unity of reality and the original force of reality, which for Newton is God.
2. Same effect, same cause
The second rule is a consequence of the first. Sometimes the rule
of parsimony is insufficient to determine the true and sufficiently explanatory
cause when two effects are the same. He argued that scientists should always
infer that where the effects are exactly the same, the cause is the same.
3. Universality
Here Newton takes his decisive step toward a universe absolutely
unified in all its parts by original design rather than by intrusive divine
power. For example, a piece of granite found with a particular hardness and
weight per square inch can be considered a piece that has the same weight and
hardness per square inch as other granite found in other parts of the world.
This leads him to make his famous claim about gravity and its applicability not
only to chunks of granite but also to stars and galaxies. This rule allowed
Newton to abandon once and for all the idea of a three-tiered universe
(heaven, earth, and hell below) as a reasonable and therefore pious picture of
the universe.
4. Refusability
Newton's fourth principle for science states that a workable
theory should stand and be considered true until it is proven false after
careful testing by empirical evidence. He argued that no theory could be viable
unless physical evidence analyzed according to the rules of parsimony, similar
effects, and universality supported it.
Descartes and Newton argued that nothing is beyond the reach of
human understanding. Newton has no doubt that sufficient reason, observation,
and testing of observed phenomena would ultimately yield absolutely true (and
immutable) knowledge of the world by providing the eternal (and immutable) that
governs the world. He believed that the human gift of reason was the image of
God, and that through reason one could slowly eliminate error through careful
search, experimentation, and testing. The world changes according to these
laws, but the laws do not change. Newton used to say that these were the
thoughts of God.
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