This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
Codswallop.
While it is true that the transmission of these founding ideas of science was mediated by the Church, all the sources of modern science, all the ruling assumptions, came from the Greeks, directly, as when the neo-Platonists were rediscovered in the Renaissance, or when Michael the Scot translated Aristotle in the Muslim university of Toledo under Averroes (Ibn-Rushd), or via the logical tradition that sprang from the neo-Platonists' interpretation of Aristotle's and Plato's works, via Boëthius' Isagoge.
As to the idea of an ordered world that mirrored the transcendent realm of mathematics, well, Pythagoras, anyone? Studied almost continuously throughout western and eastern European history. Influential upon Plato.
But the really important innovation, the one that all science since has been based upon, is the ideas of the Milesians, beginning with Thales in the sixth century BCE. He proposed that there was a material principle that explained all things. Hitherto, throughout the ancient near east and Mediterranean, things were what they were at the whim of a god or gods, and had a sympathetic relationship between each other based on resemblances and words. You cannot study what things will do if they can, at any time, become a swan or a tree or a spirit.
The traditional default view of the ancient religions was that things were made out of the bodies of gods (or Titans, in the case of Greek Olympian religion), and partook of that mystical nature. Thales account that all things were made of water led to the development of the idea of recombining elements, Democritus' atomism, and utimately Daltonian chemistry, Galilean and Newtonian physics and so on. Astronomy itself was founded on the ideas of Aristotle, that the universe was composed of two spheres, the firmament of stars and the terrestrial globe, leading to Ptolemy's notion of geocentric concentric spheres. Without this, later astronomy would have been impossible. The formation of heliocentrism was in part due to the afforementioned rediscovery and translation of the neo-Platonists into Latin.
It is a constant and annoying myth propagated by theological apologists that the beginnings of science owed their start to the Church or to Christian, or even just theistic, traditions, and this is false in any substantial sense. Yes, medieval scholars like Jean Buridan, Roger Bacon and Nicholas Oresme did some experimental work and criticised the physics of Aristotle. But they did so by engaging with the nominalists and with Aristotle himself.
The sole direct influence I know of, although there may be others, is the idea of natural law, a moral theory about legal institutions that may have influenced the later idea of proposing laws of nature. But even this relies more heavily on the Greeks than theology, and is merely a linguistic borrowing.
So let's have no more of this "science relies on Christianity" or "Islam" or "Judaism" crap, OK?
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Exactly!
A fair coin is as likely to turn up heads as tails. He thinks this is theology?
He's got his head so far up his ass he can see out his ears.
It occurred to me last night that what Paul Davies has been trying to do is the Christian analogue of what the Hindutva folks have been doing over in India. When the discoveries of science clash with your prior beliefs, you can either deny the science (the Young-Earth Creationist plan) or you can subsume them within your religious system, doing a certain amount of violence to the science in the process. Hindutva partisans do this by looting Western postmodernists for talk about how science is "just another metanarrative" (and hey, we never metanarrative we didn't like). The memes we associate in the Western world with the political "left" are adopted by the hyper-nationalist Indian "right", in order to neuter the threat which science poses.
Davies is doing the same thing, only by chanting Newton's name instead of Feyerabend's.
Oh, and I'm glad I'm not the only one to make the point about Greek science.
"(and hey, we never metanarrative we didn't like)."
That... was physically painful. I'm suing for brain whiplash.
I'm still baffled as to how a deity which made everything up on a whim (Genesis), interfered constantly with its own laws (the walking dead?) and promised to rewrite everything shortly (Revelation) is supposed to be a stable, orderly and lawful basis for anything.
@Stephen Wells,
Given the kind of stability exhibited by human society at the time, I'm sure the ancient Hebrew deity was a veritable paragon of benevolence and constancy.
Also, a lot of the reason that Revelations didn't end up in the Apocrypha is that Roman society had pretty much fallen to pieces at that time, and had been falling to pieces for a long, long time before. It was no great leap of faith to believe that the end times were upon us, therefore the acceptability of apocalyptic literature. (As far as I can conclude from a bit of amateur reading, that is.) Why the more Reason and Progress type churches don't chuck it now is beyond me, though.
I think you're both wrong. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had all sorts of influences, to be sure; Greek, Christian, esoteric; it was an intellectually promiscuous time. And they all relied on Greek technical achievements. But the decision to only look at quantitative properties has no precursor in Greek or Christian thought and the notion of a physical law (if there even is such a notion in science) simply follows from quantitative analysis of anything.
OK, John, I see how the invocation of the supernatural is a 'science stopper' and why any belief system that is inclined to invoke the supernatural at any stage would tend to stop science.
But Milesians? Thales? Giving credit to the Greeks for thinking in terms of natural causes is like giving Democritus credit for atomic theory, or Heraclitus for evolutionary theory; in terms of priority in the line of thought that led to the present, technically correct---but missing the point. Anyone who does science presumably infers some degree of lawfulness to the universe by definition, else there would be no experimental expectation whatsoever. And it is a historical fact that science prospered within monotheism, rather than in a polytheism of tree-nymphs and Apollo's chariot. So it is likely to be fruitful not to pooh-pooh the Greek's seminal influence, but at least to ask why it is that monotheistic cultures tended to promote science more than polytheistic ones.
The reaction here and other places says a lot more about our concerns with our own 'God-botherers' than with the history. Would that we didn't live in a world where we have to imagine the possible abuse of scholarship by the creationists, because I think that tends to overreaction. Would that we could simply say something along these lines: '...that the apparent lawfulness of the universe and the presumption of same by scientists is consonant with some limited versions of monotheism says nothing about the correctness of any particular creed.'
Of course, we don't live in the world, hence the intensity on these threads and a strange willingness on the part of some of our colleagues to overlook the shortcomings of certain naturalistic accounts out of fear that criticism can be interpreted as a de facto endorsement of religion.
But religion and science do have an intimate history, and what the pseudoscientists might do with that fact doesn't make it untrue. Perhaps we should simply concede their interaction, but then argue the other way around: that it is the scientific impulse toward investigation of the natural world that has 'selected' for less overtly superstitious forms of religion. Thus, the stream of thought that emerged in 6th-century Greece found wider, fertile channels within some versions of monotheism, and since this tended to lead to prosperity, those versions flourished at the expense of 'less enlightened' cousins, which should lead, synergistically, to the growth of science, and so forth....
Anyway, as always, love your blog...>Scott
"science prospered within monotheism"
Science in the west prospered within a monotheistic society. I don't think you can draw it any further out than that. We're talking about a time when broader society was religious by default, and secularism wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye. That doesn't mean that monotheism per se had anything to do with the science. I'm sure that Indian and Chinese scholars would have words to say on that front too.
What about the Chinese? The Chinese had very sophisticated astronomy, and advanced mathematical formulas for predicting eclipses (as opposed to merely recording them). Did they have a concept of a lawful Universe in the sense that European scientists did?
And don't forget commerce. The ability to determine if the planets and stars (and other aspects of the Universe) followed a quantitative, lawful path depended on the presence of instruments that had a high degree of precision. These were often developed directly (or indirectly) from the need for precise navigation for commerce, and in turn the need for better navigation drove the development of better astronomical tables, which ultimately lead to the formulation of Kepler's laws, and Newton's laws which relied on these very tables.
So, in this op-ed article, Davies failed to give due credit to the Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, etc. for the contributions they all made to the development of what we now call science. Was that his point? No, it wasn't.
Although, at first glance, he does appear to equivocate on the meaning of faith, it seems to be curiously at odds with what I remember of his previous writings in this area, such as The Mind Of God where he seemed to have no trouble distinguishing between evidenced and unevidenced belief or faith.
To my mind, he is drawing a parallel between the Christian answer to the origination question of "God did it" and the answer he was given by other scientists of "That's just the way it is." Both are saying, in effect, that we must take on faith that there is an answer but that we may never know what it is. It's a bit like looking at a magic trick by someone like David Copperfield, asking "How was that done?" and being told "David Copperfield did it" or "It's just a magic trick". It's a legitimate question but neither is much of an answer.
I notice that, on the Richard Dawkins website, a poster called Steve99, while not agreeing with everything Davies wrote, is dismayed by the vehemence of the attacks on a man who is both a respected scientist and one of the best authors of popular science books around today. I am inclined to agree. Davies may lean too far towards deism for some tastes but he is far from being a Christian apologist.
Ian Spedding, as you may know, there has been an extensive debate over the use of the term "faith" in the first post thread. What Davies is claiming is that the assumption that the universe has a structure is based on the claim that God is rational. This is simply false. It is just an assumption, that's all, and those who pursue physical science have no need to justify the assumption that the universe has structure, as it can be overturned simply by finding that the universe is not amenable to scientific investigation (and then we'd all be living in a truly postmodern world).
Historically it is wrong,a nd philosophically it is wrong. Perhaps there's another way it is right. I'd love to see it.
As to demeaning Davies, qua scientist, I don't think anyone has done that.
I saw some derision over at PZ Mwhahaha's that implied that he was a crank/kook/pseudoscientist etc. but I didn't see any of that here.
There are a couple of problems with this:
* The ideas of a spherical earth and firmament were not original with Aristotle. Both of them had been well established by the time of Plato.
* The notion of geocentric concentric spheres was not Ptolemy's. His theory was based on a system of deferents and epicycles. Not even the deferents of his system were centred precisely on the earth (although their centres were fairly close to it). Nor were they precisely concentric.
Parmenides was the first of the Greek philosophers known to have described the universe as a system of concentric spheres, although his description was only qualitative. Eudoxus, a younger contemporary of Plato's and an older one Aristotle's, constructed a fully fledged mathematical theory of the solar system using concentric spheres. This was later improved by Callippus and subsequently adopted by Aristotle. Aristotle's single specific contribution to the theory was to turn the spheres from (probably) imaginary mathematical devices into real physical spheres made of solid matter. If anything, this contribution was probably more of a hindrance than a help to the later progress of astronomy.
The system of concentric spheres didn't account very well for the observed motions of the planets and was abandoned within 150 years for theories based on eccentric circles, deferents and epicycles, introduced by Apollonius in the late third century BC. Although these were difficult to reconcile with the idea of the planets being attached to solid spheres it didn't stop Ptolemy and some Arab astronomers from trying to do so.
David, you are right about the origins of these ideas. I was incredibly sloppy when I posted (comes of being annoyed). I meant to say that the mediation of these ideas via the Aristotelian tradition was the basis for early modern astronomy. Ptolemaic astronomy was held in regard because it elaborated Aristotle's version. As I recall (it's some years since I taught this) Eudoxus and Callipus are only known through Aristotle's works, and the two sphere hypothesis was known in the late middle ages as his hypothesis.
Thanks for the correction.
Not quite. Aristotle's Metaphysics is one of two main sources for the details of the Eudoxan/Callippan system. The other is an extract from a lost work by Sosigenes quoted by Simplicius in his commentaries on Aristotle's de Caelo. Sosigenes's account was based on a history of astronomy by Eudemus (also now lost), and is somewhat more detailed than the one given by Aristotle.
David your account of the evolution of Greek astronomy is correct in most of its details but your claim that the Aristotelian theory of concentric spheres was abandoned is false. It never disappeared within Greek astronomy and was one of several competing theories and as such resurfaced very strongly within Islamic astronomy especially in the work of Averroes. Mediaeval astronomy, because of the strong reliance of mediaeval philosophy on Aristotle, was an unhappy and in fact contradictory alliance of both Aristotelian and Ptolemaic astronomy for which Peuerbach found a wonderful and highly influential compromise in his New Planetary Hypothesis (Nuremberg 1472) which together with his Epitoma (co-authored by Regiomontanus) was the leading astronomy text book in the 16th century, also used by Copernicus amongst others. The 16th century also saw a strong renaissance of pure Aristotelian astronomy in the work of Fracastoro. In his Sphera, Clavius, the leading authority on astronomy at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, regarded radical Aristotelianism ala Fracastoro as the greatest threat to Ptolemaic astronomy much more serious than Copernicanism.