­­­­Chapter 1     Science Gets the Blame

                                          

                        

                                       

                                                  Two giants of Western culture

                      Plato (l) and Aristotle (r). From Raphael’s The School of Athens 

                                           (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 forbears lived by and depended on. For the most part, it fully deserves this blame. Prior to the scientific revolution, people were very miserable in terms of their physical lives. Life was hard for nearly all folk and death came soon. Famines, plagues, and wars regularly swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30 and 50 percent¹, 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, as did nobles, merchants, craftsmen, and serfs – and all their wives – 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 sometimes His justice took decades to arrive, people knew “what goes around comes around.” And if they were good, they knew they would go to a beautiful place after they died. For most folk, all was right with the world.

How sincere was their faith? Men worked for generations on cathedrals, on top of all the other labor they had to do. They believed they’d gain status in heaven if they served God here on Earth. And cathedrals were but one kind of example. Heroic toils on a local lord’s lands were performed generation after generation, and Crusades were fought in faraway lands by people who trusted nigh on to absolutely the belief system and code of behavior that they’d been taught.  

                     

                                                  

                                                  Francis Bacon (Vanderbank) 

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Then came the Renaissance with its scientific revolution. It was expressed most clearly by the English Renaissance philosopher, Francis Bacon. His book, Novum Organum, explained a new method for seeing and studying the world.

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, the Bible. In particular, works by Aristotle described how the natural world worked in almost every one of its aspects, from Ontology to Biology to Cosmology.

In addition, 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 just absent. Thus, for over a thousand years, our forebears believed the classic Greek works and the Bible, taken together, contained every kind of wisdom that human beings could want to know. A gentleman’s life duty was to pass on to his sons, intact, the beliefs, morés, and values of his forebears.

                       

                                             

                                                             Thomas Aquinas

                                 (credit: Fra Bartolomeo) (Wikimedia Commons) 

Was there any risk that the ancient Greek texts and the Bible might contradict each other? No. Many experts, including Aquinas, had shown these two sources were compatible. 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, to be believed and obeyed implicitly. 

For over a thousand years in the West, in every field of human knowledge, 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. Or, if you had time, you read the relevant texts. But for most folk, 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 their authorities told them. Everyone they knew always had. A mind able to memorize and imitate 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.

Essentially, what Bacon said was that the authorities were just people. They were fallible. They should be questioned. He proposed that people could learn about this world themselves, by watching real events closely and developing their own ideas about how things worked. Then – and here came the crucial step – they could devise ways to test their theories of reality and create increasingly better models that allowed them to conduct more and more reliable, real-world tests, until they could predict, well in advance, “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? Most 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 describing how it should be done. In every era, for centuries, a few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like those Bacon described. They just hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. But Bacon’s book on how the world should be studied gave scholars a new model to think about and discuss, one much more specific and real-world oriented than any of the earlier models had been.

   

                                  St. Peter's Basilica, scientific marvel of its time

                                 (credit: Patrick Landy, via Wikimedia Commons)

Whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the creative folk of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method Bacon articulated began to get results. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare – even the routines of daily life began to undergo radical improvements because of the insights and inventions of Science.

At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, inevitably, its ways began to affect their deeper thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional faith, the changes to the old, generally accepted ways of thinking were not welcome. The same still holds true for many today.

                                   

                            

                  

                                                               René Descartes 

                        (credit: Frans Hals [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way of thinking, a sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: René Descartes. He spent years manoeuvring to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning about the material world should be done. (We need to keep in mind that when Rene was 4 years old, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for spreading views that the Church did not like. Descartes knew all about Bruno’s case. He was understandably wary of offending the authorities of his time.) Descartes offered his readers a way of thinking about thinking that was more nuanced and sensitive to the authorities than was Bacon’s. But Bacon lived in Protestant England; he could afford to be more unorthodox.

Descartes separated Science from Religion and, thus, from moral theory. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world, the world of the body, but Religion and its inherent morality must oversee the activities of our minds and souls, which are not in any way physical. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of bodies or anything else made of matter. Under Descartes’s model, Religion retains control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science.^3,4

Descartes’s clever maneuver enabled him, in his writing at least, to separate the mind from the body and the realm of faith and morality from the realm of physical experience. It was a move that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked. But he only delayed the inevitable. Humans have concerns in both “realms”, the concrete/sensory and the abstract/moral, so sooner or later we must deal with the fact that the two realms must interact somehow in order for them both to involve, and matter to, us. Descartes knew full well of this problem in his philosophy, but could find no solution to it.

Describing all the ways in which Science slowly eroded or, sometimes, violently shattered, the traditional beliefs of the societies of the West would fill a whole encyclopedia. We can be content with looking at just three such ways. I chose these three because I believe they are the key ones, as did Freud.⁵

                       

           

                         Galileo Galilei (Tintoretto)  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

First, the astronomers shook the traditional view of the heavens. In 1543, Copernicus proposed a new model of our universe. Instead of the earth being at the centre with the rest of the heavenly bodies like the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolving around it, he said the sun was at the centre of our solar system, and the earth was just one more planet – along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – revolving around the sun. Supposedly, his idea was proposed only for discussion purposes, so he was not attacked by the religious leaders of his time. But in the 1600s, Galileo and, later, Newton took up and refined the Copernican model. They discovered a set of natural laws that described events in the cosmos and on the earth in mathematical formulas that gave precise predictions about phenomena like falling objects, fired cannonballs, eclipses, comets, and planetary orbits – phenomena that had previously been given only inaccurate, conceptually messy, ad hoc explanations.

And all these scientific laws could be stated in mathematical formulas that could then be used to make very accurate predictions about how cannonballs, comets, falling objects and the moons of Jupiter move and will move. Their explanations and predictions about reality were literally amazing.

Today, Galileo and Newton’s picture of the solar system and how it works seems intuitive and obvious to most people. But Galileo was seen by religious leaders in his time as a demon. The Bible said God had made man as his special, darling creation. The Earth had been created, along with all its life forms, as a special home for us. Thus, the Earth had to be the centre of the universe. Ptolemy had said so, over a thousand years before, and his model of the cosmos fitted neatly with the doctrine of the Church. Besides, the sun, moon, and stars moved across the sky from east to west. These things would not be if the earth were not the centre of the universe. What fool could question these obvious truths?

Galileo did and almost paid with his life. He was forced to recant under the threat of horrible torture. Galileo had begun his higher education studying medicine. He knew what they could make him say once they began to apply their racks and thumbscrews. With his telescope to back him up, he tried hard to persuade the pope and his agents that the evidence showed the Copernican model was correct. They weren’t interested; in fact, they became angrier. So, he signed where they told him to sign. But according to one version of his story, as he left the building, he pointed up at the moon and said, “It still moves.”

That statement deeply reveals the kind of thinking on which Science is founded. It could stand as a statement of the fundamental belief of Science. Material reality is what it is. Our role is to learn about it by observing it, formulating theories about it, and doing experiments to test those theories. We can’t impose our views onto reality. If one of our theories goes against society’s received wisdom on any subject, this contradiction, for scientists, means nothing. What matters is whether the theory or model fits observable, real-world evidence.

Aristotle and the authors of the Bible and even last year’s scientific theories have no more of a monopoly on truth than any one of us. Most crucially, we can always go back to physical reality and test again. Let reality be the arbiter. That is the method and belief system to which scientists are committed. (The Catholic Church pardoned Galileo in 1992, nearly 360 years after his “offence.” The Copernican model of the solar system, the one that Galileo championed, has been generally accepted as the correct model since about 1700.)

Some scientists have also been deeply religious people whose scientific findings have clashed with their religious beliefs. The history of Science is filled with accounts of people who felt they had to drop their faith in the Bible, usually after much personal anguish, in order to continue to pursue Science. (Darwin suffered deeply over what his own Theory of Evolution meant about his faith.)

However, what these scientists internal torments mean to our argument today is nothing. These scientists’ anguish does not have any bearing on what Science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does.

                                   

                             

             

                                                             Charles Darwin 

                (credit: George Richmond [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

In the mid-1800s, Charles Darwin hit the faithful and their institutions and beliefs with Science’s second blow to the body of traditional belief, probably the biggest of all the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. He showed that over the course of millions (perhaps billions) of years, life evolved from a few simple cells to complex organisms made of trillions of cells.

Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain all life forms on Earth in all their many subtle variations. Fossils in the rocks all over the world show the stages through which life has developed and spread. Chemical and physical tests of fossils give consistent, predictable results that clearly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this earth, developed very gradually, from a few simple cells, through myriads of forms, over billions of years.

Where was the Bible then? The first book of the Bible, Genesis, portrays all the history of the pre-human universe as happening in six days. The Darwinian Theory of Evolution says this picture is silly. Furthermore, the theory implies that natural physical processes – ones that can be observed, measured, predicted, and even manipulated – can account for all the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the Bible is not needed in their discussion of what the universe is or what human beings are. The Bible, for Science, is pretty much irrelevant.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was a shock of such magnitude that Christian authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling from it and still lashing out at it. Scientists who believe the theory gives a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying. The evidence is there – mounds of it. What evidence is there for the alternate explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of priests, prophets, and disciples with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated, examined, or tested. It just isn’t Science.

In fact, how can the “faithful” – who every day derive most of the comforts of their way of life from the ideas, discoveries, and inventions of scientists – be such ingrates? It’s a sure bet that however much they may want to criticize the broad range of studies and activities called “Science”, they don’t want to starve, and they don’t want their electricity turned off. They certainly don’t want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious “miasmas”.

In spite of all of these accusations, however, a main intention of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is more complex than what my last couple of paragraphs portray. For now, this small section on the Theory of Evolution can be summarized by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience – life – and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of myths and poems, with bits of the history of one ancient tribe (the Hebrews) woven in. Yahweh was like Zeus or Wotan: a myth kept going by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.

                         

                                

                                   Sigmund Freud (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

All of this may seem bad enough, but it gets worse. The third significant way in which Science eroded Religion came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Humans had long felt that many things in this world could not be explained in scientific terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, which both Science and daily experience had shown resided in their brains, they had dreams and feelings that, by Science alone, made no sense. Even in physical reality, away from all dreams, they sometimes saw or did strange things that seemed to have no logical explanation.

Cruel or lustful thoughts and acts were bad enough, but at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we’ve come to know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and murder as natural. The traditional wisdom had explanations for them all. We are morally “fallen” creatures, the Bible says.

But people also have weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re awake that, by the laws of both Science and common sense, are not possible.

                                

                                           

                                  The Nightmare (Fuseli) (credit: Wikipedia)  

Why do people have dreams and waking visions of angels or demons hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountaintops bathed in orange light and standing on their hind feet? Night after night, many of us dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Other people, wide awake, see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond Science and even beyond common sense. In those times, “The Devil made me do it!” was an acceptable explanation for otherwise unexplainable behavior.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored-up memories that combine and recombine to form narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs – needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply, he can’t consciously access them, no matter how he tries. Under stress, his brain transmits images into his optic nerves – the opposite of what normally happens. So even wide awake, we sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories are not recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, her brain holds all she has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into her brain via her vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect her moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be predicted in advance, but the patterns in “paranormal” experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. 

People have visions of angels when they have been reading about miraculous cures for the very illnesses under which they have lately been suffering. They dream of tidal waves after watching a TV show about a recent big one in Japan. They see ghosts of their dead fathers after days of feeling guilty about how they neglected him while he was alive – the dream coming just before what would have been his 80th birthday. The sciences of the mind have shown us – with evidence – that we can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their models could explain all of human behavior, they could make high probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model portraying all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain – even though he can’t recall the experiences at will – is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery and allow researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains are able, when milliamp currents are turned on, to recall all kinds of memories which they are ordinarily not aware of.⁶

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behavior. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, we no longer believe little girls are consumed with a desire to have a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy both logic and common sense can now be explained rationally. The dreams and visions are products of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place.

No more dreams sent from God. No more waking visions. No more miracles.

If we consider just these three scientific theories – of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud – what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own lustful, aggressive, self-absorbed thoughts. (Palmer articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, Science has not proved that a universal moral code is impossible or that the existence of God is impossible. But over the past four centuries, Science has badly shaken traditional ideas of God and thus, also, traditional ideas of morality. (The two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see.)

However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that all forms of theism and all moral codes are wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what right and wrong are. Then, we can reason our way to a new view of God.

But for now, we can say that Science has almost levelled the pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let’s make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the masses of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of ending our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are, and how we should try to act – toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. 

If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do? They’re human, like I am. I know all humans make mistakes. Therefore, I’ll work out my own moral code. Thank you, anyway.

And perhaps it is worth pointing out here that there are still people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe, and God made the universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and the miracles described in the Bible really did happen, parting a sea, walking on water, and all. But the trend of the last five hundred years is unmistakable. More and more people are having less and less confidence in the old ways of explaining the world with each passing decade.

The point may seem a trivial one to many people today. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? But it turns out that our caring about these matters is vitally important. If we don’t believe in Christian moral codes anymore, then they must be replaced with something. Our moral codes enable us to live together in communities and just get along. That space in our lives can’t stay empty. A moral code is not a luxury to be used and enjoyed when we have time for it. A moral code is what we consult just to move through ordinary days. What matters? What doesn’t? What should I do about these things? Every moment of every day of ordinary experiences.  

Explaining in more detail how morally vacant Science has been, so far, and why humans all over the world are struggling to cope with the loss of their moral codes – even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts they are having – will be the business of our next chapter.

Notes

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901.http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.