Sigmund Freud.

Now, 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 physical terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had dreams and feelings, and even outside in physical reality, they sometimes saw or did things, that by logic alone made no sense. 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 instinctive human drives, so we can often accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and even murder as natural. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake that are, by the laws of physics and common sense, not possible.

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 widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond science and even common sense.

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 symbolic 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, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Even wide awake, we can sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, his brain holds all he has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into it via sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect his moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance, but the patterns in those “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. The sciences of the mind have shown us convincingly that we can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were widely considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their model could explain all of human behaviour, they could make good 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, allowing researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains, are able, when a milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories of which they ordinarily have no conscious awareness.⁶

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behaviour. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, the vast majority of little girls are not consumed with a desire to grow a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy logic and common sense turned out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place at all. No more miracles.

If we consider just these three scientific theories—Galileo’s, Darwin’s, and Freud’s—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 of the universe. 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 aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed thoughts. (Donald Palmer’s book articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, science has not proved that the existence of God is impossible or that a universal moral code is impossible. But over the past four centuries, science has severely shaken the traditional idea of God and thus, inevitably, the 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 every form of theism and every form of moral code are mere wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of his existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and science into a single, consistent, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

But for now, we can say that science has almost levelled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of removing 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 one another. 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?

The point may seem a rather trivial one to most people in the West. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans throughout the world, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings they are having, will be the business of the 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.

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. However, what their torments mean to our argument today is nothing. Their anguish does not have any bearing on what science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does.

                     

                                                                Charles Darwin.

In the mid-1800s, Charles Darwin hit the faithful and their institutions and beliefs with probably the biggest of all the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. Life on earth, by Darwin’s theory of evolution, had evolved from a few simple cells to complex organisms with trillions of cells over the course of millions (or, he guessed, perhaps billions) of years.

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

Where was the Bible then? The first chapter of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, has billions of years of creation squeezed into a time scale of six days. The Darwinian theory of evolution says this is ridiculous. Furthermore, the theory implies that natural physical processes—those that can be observed, predicted, and even manipulated—can account for all of the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the concept of God is not needed in their discussion of what this universe is or what human beings are. It isn’t even relevant.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was a shock of such magnitude that Church 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 and silly. 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 so-called “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 “night airs”.

In spite of all of these accusations, however, the point of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is more complex than what the 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, 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 some bits of one ancient tribe’s history woven in. God was like Zeus or Wotan, a story-book character created by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.

                                 

                                                 Wotan  (painting by Konstantin Vasilyev)  

At this point, as science began to affect people’s material lives, it inevitably began to affect their deeper ways of thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional style of faith, some of the large-scale changes to the generally held ways of thinking that most people had subscribed to for so long were not happy changes. The same still holds true today.

                                        René Descartes.

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way 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 should be done.

Descartes separated science from religion and morality. Under his model, science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world of the body, but religion and its inherent morality must still oversee the activities of our minds and souls. 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 from matter. Under Descartes’s model, religion retains primary 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 manoeuvre then enabled him to separate the mind from the body and the realm of thought from the realm of faith. 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. Because we humans have issues and concerns in both realms, the sensory and the abstract, sooner or later we would have to deal with the logical conclusion that the two realms had to interact somehow in order for them both to involve and make sense to us.

Describing all the ways in which science sometimes eroded, and sometimes blasted, the traditional beliefs of the majority of people 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 paradigmatic, as did Freud.⁵

              Galileo Galilei, physicist, mathematician, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher

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 both events in the cosmos and events on the earth in subtle 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.

Today, Galileo and Newton’s picture of the solar system and how it works seems intuitive and obvious to most people. But Galileo in his time was seen by religious leaders as a demon. The Bible said God had made man as his special, darling creation. The earth had been created, along with all of its life forms, as a special home for us. Thus, the earth had to be the centre of the universe. Ptolemy also had said so, over a thousand years before, and his model of the cosmos fit neatly together with the teachings of the Church. Besides, the sun, the moon, and the stars moved across the sky from east to west. These things would not be possible if the earth were not the centre. 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 proved 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 it is predicated. 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 on reality. If one of our theories goes against what has long been society’s received wisdom on any subject, this contradiction, for scientists, means nothing. What matters is whether it fits the 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.)

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.