SCIENCE AND THE IRRATIONAL
"My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others."1
This was the inimitable Bertrand Russell venting his personal resentment of religion. It seems that he had suffered acutely as a child because of his Christian upbringing, and later, having emancipated himself from the superstition, blamed all of mankind's evils on religion.
And yet, in his own essay, "On Being Modern-minded," Russell observed: "In former days, men wished to serve God...Every religiously minded artist was convinced that God's aesthetic judgments coincided with his own; he had therefore a reason, independent of popular applause, for doing what he considered his best, even if his style was out of fashion..."2
He correctly places Copernicus among those who wished to reveal the works of God to man, and toiled ceaselessly to record and interpret the planetary poetry. "There was no single moment in history when science replaced mysticism as a means of explaining the workings of the world; but the lives of two men neatly circumscribe the transition, which occurred (for them, at least) more or less as the sixteenth century became the seventeenth," observes John Gribbin, in his superb book, Science: A History.3 The two lives he mentions are those of Galileo Galilei and William Gilbert. And he places Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler solidly under the title "The Last Mystics". (He should also have included Carl Linnaeus: "Like so many of his contemporaries, he saw himself as uncovering God's handiwork in his classification of nature, and he said on more than one occasion that the number of species existing on Earth in his day was the same as the number created by God in the beginning."4)
But that is misleading. For mysticism continued to influence science throughout the Enlightenment and beyond. "In other years, when scientists acknowledged their motivations more freely, they often openly confessed their nonrational, mystical, or religious convictions...Galileo, a pious man, looked upon the laws of nature as works and evidences of the Deity equal in authority to the evidences of the Scriptures....Until about a century ago, the typical scientist openly asserted that the physical world could not be understood without resort to fundamental theistic assumptions."5
Thus Newton affirmed in 1692: "When I wrote my treatise [the Principia, 1687] about our system, I had an eye on such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose."6 Gribbin himself cites the instance of Carl Linnaeus: "Like so many of his contemporaries, he saw himself as uncovering God's handiwork in his classification of nature, and he said on more than one occasion that the number of species existing on Earth in his day was the same as the number created by God in the beginning."7 The theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 — 19944), once wrote a "Defence of Mysticism".8
"In analyzing the Newtonian conception of force, Richard Westfall arrives at the conclusion that modern science is the result of the wedding of the Hermetic tradition with the mechanical philosophy.(emphasis original)"9 In 1975, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, in her book The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, revealed that Newton's contemporaries complained that his "forces" were actually "occult qualities". "Newton's forces were very much like the hidden sympathies and antipathies found in much of the occult literature of the Renaissance period."10
Hermes Trismegistos was believed to be Moses' contemporary: his writings gave an alternative account of creation, one in which man played a more central role. God, according to Hermes, had made man fully in his own image — not just as a rational animal, but as a creator in his own right. Man can imitate God, and he can create like the Creator, through alchemical applications — doing away with disease, want and old age. "It was a heady vision, and it gave rise to the notion that, through science and technology, man could bend nature to his wishes. This is essentially the modern view of science, and it should be emphasized that it occurs only in Western civilization. It is probably this attitude that permitted the West to surpass the East, after centuries of inferiority, in the exploitation of the physical world."11
Retracing our steps a little, we shall recall the heliocentric preoccupations of Copernicus: these were directly influenced by Hermeticism. Inspired by Platonic mysticism, Hermeticism emphasized the source of light, the sun. The 15th Century Florentine translator of both Plato and Hermetic writing, Marsilio Ficino, composed a work that very nearly idolized the sun: the young Copernicus was heavily influenced and went back to his native Poland to work on the problems of the Ptolemaic astronomy.
Therefore, the leading minds of Europe — Paracelsus, John Dee, Comenius, J.V. Andreae, Fludd and Newton — sought in alchemy "the perfection of man by a new method of knowledge".12
It would appear, therefore, that modern science would have been quite impossible without religion as a source of inspiration; pace Bertrand Russell, religion contributed more than the calendar to civilisation.
Notes:
1 Bertrand Russell, "Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?"
2 Bertrand Russell, "On Being Modern-minded", from Unpopular Essays, Blackie & Son (India) Ltd, 1979, p. 68
3 John Gribbin, Science: A History 1543 – 2001, Penguin, 2003, p. 68
4 ibid., p. 219
5 G. Holton and D.H.D. Roller, Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Addison-Wesley, 1959, p. 235
6 ibid, p. 236
7 John Gribbin, Science: A History 1543 – 2001, Penguin, 2003, p. 219
8 G. Holton and D.H.D. Roller, Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Addison-Wesley, 1959, p. 238
9 Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume Three, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 261
10 Quoted in Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume Three, p. 261
11 "science, history of." Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite.
12 Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume Three, p. 261
