­­­­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)

 

 

I will ease into this project of building a new moral code for us all by first explaining in more detail why I think this project is so urgently required of us.

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’s lives were brutish and short. 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. Life expectancy was under forty years.²

But people expected life to be hard, and, on the upside, they 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, they believed, 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. Most historians see the Renaissance as beginning in the mid-1400’s, but some argue that it really began more gradually earlier, about 1100. In any case, we can agree that life was miserable in the West by modern standards from the fall of the Roman Empire (around 453 A.D.) for at least 600 years. The main idea that drove the Renaissance was expressed most clearly by philosopher Francis Bacon. His book, Novum Organum, explained a new way of seeing and studying the material world.

For centuries before the Renaissance, most people who studied the material world had followed the models that had been laid down in the texts of the ancient Greeks or better yet the Bible. In particular, works by Aristotle told how the natural world worked, 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, our medieval 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 hundreds of 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 the skill and 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 lived and worked late in the Renaissance era (1561 – 1626), but he is usually given credit for articulating the new system of thinking that had been spreading across Europe.

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 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.” In short, discover nature’s laws.

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.