Chapter 1            Part A                                        

 Science Gets The Blame

Leonardo's representation of Plato (l.) and Aristotle (r.) 

         Science gets the blame (or the credit, depending on your point of view) for having eroded the base out from under the moral systems that our forefathers lived by and depended on. For the most part, it fully deserves this blame. Prior to the scientific revolution, people were pretty miserable in terms of their physical lives. Life was hard for nearly all folk and death came soon. Famines, plagues, and wars periodically swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been 30% to 50% (1.), and life expectancy was under forty years (2.). 

       But people knew where they stood in society, and they knew where they stood, or at least should be trying to stand, in moral terms, in their relationships with other people, from the bottom of society to the top. Kings had their duties just as noblemen, serfs, craftsmen, and women did, and sins had consequences. God was in His heaven; He enforced His rules – harshly but fairly, even if humans couldn’t always see His logic and even if his justice sometimes took generations to arrive. People knew that what goes around comes around. For most folk, all was right with the world.

            

   Francis Bacon 

         What the scientific revolution began from was basically a new method for studying the physical world, a method proposed most articulately by the Renaissance English philosopher, Francis Bacon. For centuries before the Renaissance, people who had studied the material world had nearly all followed the models of reality that had been laid down in the texts of the ancient Greeks, or even better, in the Bible. Works by Aristotle, in particular, described how the natural world worked in almost every one of its aspects, from atomic theory to biology to cosmology.

        Of course, on most matters, the Greeks were seen as having merely described in more detail, what had been created in the first place by God, as the Bible plainly “showed”. In most fields, original thought was not resented or despised. It was simply absent. Thus, the classic Greek works and the Bible, when taken together, were believed to contain every kind of wisdom that nearly all our forebears for over a thousand years (from ancient Roman times to the Renaissance) could want to know. A true gentleman’s life duty was to pass on, intact, to his sons, the beliefs, mores, and values of his ancestors.

Thomas Aquinas           



    Was there any danger that the ancient Greeks and the Bible might irreconcilably contradict one another? No. Several experts, including Aquinas, had shown that these two sources were compatible with each other. Even if inconsistencies had been found, of course, the divine authority of the Bible would have saved the day. For the folk of the West, for centuries, the Bible was the word of God. Period.

                
        In every field, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities – your priest and/or the sages of old. For most folk, deeply analyzing events in their own lives or analyzing things that the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over ninety percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what the authorities said because everyone they knew always had. A mind capable of memorization and imitation was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

               
         The Renaissance changed all of that. Bacon came late in the Renaissance era, but he is usually given credit for being the one who articulated the new system of thinking that had been sweeping over Europe for more than a hundred years by the time that he came on the scene.

    What Bacon said essentially was that he didn’t think the authorities were infallible. In fact, he proposed that people could learn about this world on their own, by watching the real world very closely and getting good ideas about how it worked. Then – and here came the crucial step – they could devise ways to test their models and theories of reality and keep coming up with better and better models that let them do more and more reliable, material-world tests, until they could predict precisely, in advance, something like: “If I do or see A and B, I know that C will result, within a reasonable time frame.”

    This proposed change to the method of learning at first seemed a bit silly and very likely to be a complete waste of time. Why spend months or years carefully observing and thinking and testing only to discover that Aristotle or the Bible had been right all along? The majority of medieval scholars assumed that this was all that would happen. Their confidence in the church authorities and the classics was near to absolute. Scholars might discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (they really did argue over this one), but the major questions had already been given answers that were beyond debate.  

     Of course, “Science” in the modern sense of the word was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s pronouncing how it could and should work. A few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like what Bacon was describing, arguably, for centuries. They simply hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. However, Bacon’s book on how the real world could and should be studied did give the Medieval scholars, who lived mainly in their books, a new model to discuss, one that was much more specific and material-world oriented than any of its predecessors had been.

St. Peter's Basilica in Rome 

    

    But whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the curious and creative men of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method to which Bacon gave voice began, more and more, to get reliable, useful results. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, law, warfare, even the routines of daily life began to be more and more frequently altered and improved by the discoveries and inventions of Science.

    At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, it inevitably began to affect their deeper ways of thinking. For many people, then and now, who were, and who still are, trying to hang on to a traditional style of faith, some of the large-scale changes to the generally held ways of thinking that “everyone” had subscribed to for so long were not happy changes.

Notes 

1. Hanawalt, Barbara; “Growing Up in Medieval London”; Oxford University Press; 1993; p. 55.

   2.“Life Expectancy”; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectation