The Unnatural Nature of Science Page 7
Even though the Chinese were the most persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena before the Renaissance, they did not develop a planetary theory and they did not have access to a geometrical theory. There was no Chinese Euclid. There were several classical astronomical cosmologies in China – that most commonly held took the planets and stars to be lights, of unknown substance, floating in an infinite empty space, and this fitted in with the infinities of time and space postulated by Buddhist thinkers, in which it took untold time for an object thrown from one Buddhist heaven to reach another.
The conception of the universe common to all Chinese philosophy is neither materialistic nor animistic: it is magical, even alchemical. The universe is viewed as being a hierarchically organized mechanism in which each part reproduces the whole. Man is a microcosm which corresponds with the whole universe – man’s body reproduces the plan of the cosmos.
In religious Taoism, the interior of the body is inhabited by the same gods as the universe; there is a correspondence between the organs of the body and the holy mountains and seasons. The five organs of the body, its orifices and passions, correspond, for example, with the five holy mountains, the sections of the sky and the five elements – earth, fire, water, metal and wood. Understanding man thus provides, at the same time, an understanding of the universe.
Central to Taoism is the intimate link between nature and man, between human society and the universe, together with the idea of the cyclical nature of time. Thus all the ideas dealing with the nature of the world were intimately linked to man himself. In the Taoist view, all beings and things are fundamentally one. The opposing of opinions is disliked, because this involves a personal view and so loses sight of the whole. The person who wants to know Tao is told, ‘Don’t meditate, don’t cogitate … Follow no school, follow no way and then you will attain to Tao.’ Knowledge was to be discarded, for the ancient Taoist thinkers had an intense mistrust of the powers of reason and logic to develop anything resembling the idea of the ‘laws of nature’.
Confucianism, the other dominant Chinese religio-philosophical tradition, is mainly about human conduct and much less about nature: it is about personal cultivation, aesthetics and purity. Confucian interest in cosmology was quite limited, though there were attempts to try to harmonize the traditional theories of Yin and Yang and the five elements. In one scheme they give birth to each other or overcome each other. It was essentially a numerological scheme linking man to nature – the four limbs being equivalent to the four seasons, for example, and the 366 bones corresponding to the days of the year.
These Chinese philosophical views contrast sharply with that of the Greeks, who had managed to distance man from nature. In fact it is almost universal among belief systems not influenced by the Greeks that man and nature are inextricably linked, and such philosophies provide a basis for human behaviour rather than explanations about the external world. These philosophies confine their curiosity to what affects man.
Could it be that these philosophical beliefs prevented the origin of science in their societies? On receiving a letter asking why it was that science arose only once, and in Greece, where it was confined to a tiny élite, and then persisted only in the West, Albert Einstein replied:
The development of Western science has been based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility of finding out causal relationships by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion one need not be astonished that the Chinese sages did not make these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.
It is true that the Chinese did not possess geometry, but perhaps their philosophy and the absence of capitalism were also important.
There was a long gap between the founding and flowering of Greek science and the next flowering in the time of the Renaissance. The interval between Archimedes and Galileo was almost 1,800 years. Archimedes and Euclid thrived at a time which coincided with the rise of Roman power. While the Romans were impressed by Greek culture, they were quite uninterested in the achievements of Greek science. Science and philosophy were relegated to a low status. Why science finally persisted in the West is not known but is the subject of extensive studies.
A case can be made for the importance of Christianity in fostering, in the West, the rationality, in the sense of logical arguments and reasoned discussion, that was necessary for science, and in also providing a system in which there was the possibility – even the conviction – that there were laws controlling nature. Such a conviction was unique to Christianity.
There is, however, a real methodological danger in looking for elective affinities between Christianity and science. If, for example, science had revived in some area of the world other than Catholic Europe, one would, I think, have little difficulty in explaining why Christianity prevented the rise of science – for, after all, Christianity is based on virgin birth and resurrection from the dead and relies heavily on untested dogmas – and one would find some other elective affinity to explain why it arose where it did. It is with such reservations in mind that the case for Christianity playing an important role in Western science must be considered.
The relationship between religion and science is an intimate one, but a most important aspect of the Christian religion alone is its role in supporting and fostering rational thinking. A key concept in Christian thought is that of order and law as manifested by God, the Creator. God, so it is claimed, even seems to approve of quantification: ‘You have disposed everything in measure, number and weight’ is quoted by St Augustine when discussing whether or not God knows all numbers including the infinite. Though St Augustine had serious doubts about the value of natural science, feeling no dismay if Christians were ignorant about the motion of the stars, he had no doubt about reason itself, which he not only held in high esteem but regarded as a divine gift.
Most important, early Christianity became enmeshed in metaphysical arguments which were closely linked to the nature of the physical world. Questions were asked about the purely physical nature of Jesus and how he could have two essential natures. Such questions gave rise to Arianism, a Christian heresy of the fourth century, which claimed that Christ is not truly divine but a created being; only God is self-existent and immutable. The relevance here is that logical consistency and reasoned argument, inherited from the Greeks, were important features of early Christianity.
The historian Pierre Duhem suggested that a decisive feature for the origin of science was the Christian refusal to accept the ancient pagan dogma of the divinity of the heavenly bodies. Failure to abandon such a view, according to which the sky determined events on earth, was perhaps even a brake on Greek science. But then, on the other hand, perhaps it was astrology – essentially non-science – that maintained an interest in astronomy.
Christian scholasticism was concerned with ideas like Being, Essence, Cause and End. It provided answers to the sort of questions that children ask – questions such as ‘Who made the moon?’ and ‘Why …?’ The harmonizing of Christianity with Aristotle was due to Thomas Aquinas. In the middle of the thirteenth century, Arabian-Aristotelian science was disturbing the true believers in Europe: perhaps for the first time, Christian believers and theologians were confronted with the rigorous demands of scientific rationalism. An important influence was that of Averroës, the outstanding representative of Arabic philosophy in Spain. He regarded Aristotle’s physics as divine and without flaw for the last 1,500 years. In order to avoid a contradiction between faith and reason while remaining true to Islam, he asserted that religious knowledge was entirely separate from rational knowledge as acquired in scientific studies. Opposing the spread of such ideas into Christianity, Aquinas held that theology is a ‘science’: it is knowledge that is rationally derived from propositions that are accepted as certain because they are revealed by God. Nature is quite distinct from man and has necess
ary laws. God exercises a supreme government over nature which conforms to the laws of a creative providence that wills each being to act according to its proper nature. Whereas nature cannot but conform to inalienable law, man has free will.
Aquinas treated motion as a branch of metaphysics and, following Aristotle, believed that everything that moves is moved by something else. God thus exists as the prime mover, for otherwise there would necessarily be an infinite regression of prior causal motions. By making Aristotle orthodox and compatible with Christian beliefs, a licence was given for cosmology to become a creative element in Christian thought, and permission for scientific thinking was granted.
The Christian picture of nature, especially as seen through Aquinas’s eyes, is completely different from that of the Chinese. To take another example, fundamental to Buddhism is the idea of continual rebirth: that the whole world system goes through an inevitable process of growth, duration and destruction. Nothing, not even the gods, has a permanent existence. Reincarnation is a central feature. As the Catholic historian Stanley L. Jaki has said, ‘That in all cultures – Chinese, Hindus, Mayan, Egyptian, Babylonian, to mention only the significant ones – sciences suffered a stillbirth can be traced to the mesmerizing impact which the notion of eternal returns exercised upon them.’ Reincarnation goes against a set of laws governing nature in a causal way.
While emphasizing the contribution of Christian society to science, the contributions of Islam must also be recognized. Islamic scholars also continued the Greek tradition, and it may not be irrelevant that Islam offers a unifying perspective of knowledge and considers the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue. It could, of course, not have been Christianity alone that was responsible for the flowering of science in the West in the sixteenth century.
Another way of considering the change in thinking that culminated in the scientific revival is related to economic factors. Max Weber has pointed out how ‘every economic rationalization of a barter economy has a weakening effect on the traditions which support the authority of a sacred law’. And by ‘rationalization’ he means ‘that there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’.
The idea of rationalization is at the core of Weber’s concept of industrialization. While the concept is complex, a key aspect is the ‘substitution of the unthinking acceptance of ancient custom, of deliberate adaptation to situation in terms of self-interest’. Perhaps it is this self-interest, then, that drives science, for self-interest is the best road to understanding, rather than vice versa. All this is intimately bound up with the development of capitalism. But, Weber argues, it was not just the capitalist spirit that drove science: the change in ethical outlook brought about by the Reformation was perhaps also essential, for the Protestant ethic encouraged a belief in progress and rational inquiry.
The view presented here is that only those societies influenced by the Greeks developed science. Is this really so? Some anthropologists have argued that the beliefs of so-called primitive peoples are similar to those of science. In African cosmologies, for example, the gods of a given culture are part of a scheme which helps interpret the diversity of everyday life in terms of the action of relatively few kinds of ‘forces’. These ‘forces’ are not really causative agents but are the result of the activities of life ancestors, heroes, water-spirits and so on. And indeed diviners and witch-doctors do provide explanations of a causal kind which are what one might call ‘common-sense’, or mythological, explanations. All the explanations are related to human conduct, not to curiosity about nature itself, and they are, of course, devoid of all the key characteristics of science.
In these traditional cultures, the possibility of alternative concepts or mythologies is simply absent: the system is closed. The Azande tribesman, for example, cannot think his thought is wrong. Because his web of belief in relation to witch-doctors and oracles is so tightly woven, it is the only world he knows. Failures of prediction by witch-doctors are ‘excused’ by making use of other beliefs. Nothing that occurs, even repeated failure, will be used as evidence against the belief system. The Azande have the convictions of any religious group whose beliefs cannot be altered by secular experience (see Chapter 6).
An interesting feature of traditional African communities is the complete lack of admission of ignorance about some question which the people themselves consider important. So, while they might admit to not knowing where the world comes from, this is primarily because it is a question without interest. For questions relating to disease or crops, this is never the case, and an explanation is always offered. Indeed, no important event ever passes without an explanation. If someone is killed by accident – by a falling branch of a tree, say – there has to be a definite explanation, framed in terms of revenge or sorcery. The idea of chance and unpredictability is not acceptable. This, of course, precludes any possibility of thinking in terms of probabilities, which play an important role in scientific thinking.
The lack of curiosity about natural phenomena is very relevant, for it was self-conscious questioning that made Thales and the Greeks both unique and so important. Indeed, one of the characteristic features of magical thought that makes it so different from science was made clear by Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic: once initial premisses about the nature of the world are accepted, no subsequent discovery will break the believer’s faith, for he can explain it away in terms of the existing system. This is an important statement of how science does not proceed. A Greek poem by Agathias (AD 536–582) about a farmer, Kalligenes, who consults an astrologer about his crops, illustrates this nicely:
The astrologer cast his stones across the board,
Studied them, wiggled his fingers and said:
‘If, Kalligenes, there is rain enough
On enough of your land, and if the weeds
Don’t take over, nor frost wreck the lot,
If a hailstorm doesn’t knock it all flat
If the deer don’t nibble, if no calamity
Up from the earth or down from the sky
Occurs, the signs show a good harvest
Unless there’s a plague of grasshoppers.’
So how did thinking break out of this mould? Perhaps the answer lies in the ideas about religion and rationality provided above. But what is interesting is that it is unlikely that it was science itself that caused the decline in magic.
According to Thomas, magic was on the decline before the rise of science and technology in the Renaissance. How otherwise, for example, can one account for the fourteenth-century Lollards, a religious sect who renounced the Church’s supernatural protection against disease or infertility yet had nothing with which to replace it? Even in the seventeenth century the decline of magic in relation to medicine was not due to an improvement in treatment – William Harvey’s discoveries about the circulation of the blood (which, ironically, were made in the context of Aristotelian thought) did nothing practical for medicine. It can even be argued that medical innovations based on science did little to prolong life until the nineteenth century.
Perhaps for most people, then and now, it is authority in the form of education and received opinions that determines their basic assumptions about science, religion and magic. As the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones so aptly wrote, ‘The average man of today does not hesitate to reject the same evidence of witchcraft that was so convincing three centuries ago, though he usually knows no more about the true explanation than the latter did.’
Unless one has a specific self-aware and self-critical curiosity, even basic biological principles can be ignored. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu claimed that among some Australian aborigines, although intercourse is in some way associated with pregnancy, it is generally considered only to be one of the conditions, not the cause. ‘The effective cause of pregnancy, and nothing else, is the immigration into a woman of a spirit-child from a specifically known external source, such as a totem ce
ntre, an article of food, a whirlwind and the like.’ Such beliefs do not represent conclusions arrived at in the course of discussion or reflection. They are, however, beliefs which are repeatedly verified: they work, therefore they are true. Girls marry at puberty and will not bear children before marriage. Intercourse is frequent, yet some girls have babies and others do not. Thus the relationship between intercourse and childbirth is far from obvious. However other anthropologists have argued against the idea that some primitive people are ignorant about the relationship between intercourse and childbirth, since these people have experience of animals. On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that even at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain the biological function of intercourse was not understood. There was a deep conviction that the sperm alone was responsible for creation of the embryo – a belief dating back to Aristotle. For this reason, ‘Every naturalist, and indeed every man who pretended to the smallest portion of medical science, was convinced that his children were no more related, in point of actual generation, to his own wife, than they were to his neighbours.’ The mammalian egg was only discovered in 1827.
Persuasive evidence for the unnatural nature of science is that for thousands of years the mythology and cosmology of almost all cultures entertained neither a critical tradition nor curiosity about nature. The idea that man is innately curious is a partial myth: man’s curiosity extends only to what affects his conduct. How otherwise can one explain the widespread lack of curiosity about nature for its own sake in society after society? And the historical perspectives I have offered support a view of the evolution of science as a very chancy affair. Like the evolution of life itself, there needed to be very special conditions for science to have started at all as it did in Greece. (The same is true for the alphabet, which also had a unique origin in Greece.) In Wonderful Life, Stephen Gould has emphasized the role of contingency – accident – in biological evolution. Considering human evolution, he writes, ‘Arguments of this form lead me to the conclusion that biology’s most profound insight into human nature, status and potential, lies in the simple phrase, the embodiment of contingency: Homo sapiens is an entity, not a tendency.’ If, he argues, the tape of evolutionary history were to be rerun with slight differences which let Homo sapiens expire in Africa, then Homo sapiens might never appear again. There is no guarantee of progress towards human beings of our form or potential. If the dinosaurs had not mysteriously disappeared – a cosmic catastrophe perhaps – and been replaced by mammals, we would not be here. ‘In an entirely literal sense, we owe our existence as large and reasoning mammals to our lucky stars.’ And so it is with science. There was no inevitability that science should have arisen in Greece, or that it should have been sustained by the intellectual climate of Christianity and capitalism. It is not clear whom we should thank – perhaps the planets again, because thinking about them undoubtedly played a major role in the history of science. Without the planets there would, for example, have been no Copernicus. But it is always to Miletos and to Thales that it is necessary to return. We must thank him and his contemporaries.