Chapter 1 – Science Gets the Blame

                                        

                             

       Plato (l) and Aristotle (r). The School of Athens (Raphael) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 (Vanderbank) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 had 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, for over a thousand years, our forbearers believed the classic Greek works and the Bible, when taken together, contained every kind of wisdom (from ancient Roman times to the Renaissance) that human beings could want to know. A true gentleman’s life duty was to pass on to his sons, intact, the beliefs, morés, and values of his ancestors.

                                                        

                           

                                                     Thomas Aquinas (credit: Wikipedia) 

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. It had to be obeyed. 

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.