Chapter 1         Science Gets The Blame                  Part A 

                      

                       Plato (l.) and Aristotle (r.) (from Raphael's 'The School of Athens')   

            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, and craftsmen did, and all of their wives 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 "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 stated most articulately by Renaissance 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 of 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, morés, and values of his ancestors.

                                                           

                                                                  Thomas Aquinas

                                                       
            Was there any danger that the ancient Greek texts 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 most of the folk of the West, for centuries, the Bible was the word of God, absolute and final.

                
            In every field, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities – your priest or the teachers of the classic works. For most folk, analyzing the 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 told them 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, 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 that one), but the major questions had already been given answers that were beyond debate.