Chapter 1 – Science Gets the Blame

            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 ancestors 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 war swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30 and 50 percent 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 (Frans Pourbus' portrait) 

The scientific revolution essentially began from a new method for studying the physical world, a method proposed most articulately by the English Renaissance philosopher, Francis Bacon. For centuries before the Renaissance, most people who studied the material world 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.

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 most 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 to his sons, intact, the beliefs, mores, and values of his ancestors.

                             Thomas Aquinas.

Was there any danger that the ancient Greek texts and the Bible might irreconcilably contradict each other? No. Several experts, including Thomas Aquinas, had shown that these two sources were compatible with each other. Even if inconsistencies were found, of course, the divine authority of the Bible resolved them. 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 or the teachers who taught the wisdom of the sages of old. But for most folk, deeply analyzing events in their own lives or analyzing things the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over 90 percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what the authorities told them because everyone they knew had always done so. A mind capable of memorization and imitation was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

The Renaissance changed all that. Bacon came late in the Renaissance era, but he is usually given credit for articulating the new system of thinking that had been sweeping over Europe for more than a hundred years by the time 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 themselves, by watching the real world closely and developing their own 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 create increasingly better models that allowed them to conduct increasingly 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.

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 those Bacon described—and arguably, they’d been using them 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 think about and discuss, one that was much more specific and material-world oriented than any of its predecessors had been.

                        St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, an architectural marvel of its time

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, increasingly, to produce useful results. Navigation, architecture, law, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare, and even the routines of daily life began to show greater and more frequent improvements because of the discoveries and inventions of science.