Deleting Theology: Examining a Curious Historiographical Phenomenon (Part 4)
The uniqueness of Brooke’s work is that it encapsulated, summarized, and expanded upon—through a mesmerizing command of the sources—the growing rumors (or better: the massive sea-change) in historiography concerning the so-called “Warfare thesis” of the history of science and religion. The historian of science Noah Efron recollected that his first encounter as a Ph.D. student with Brooke’s newly minted work was so profound, that when he picked it off the fresh-arrivals shelf in the library, he sat down next to the shelf on the carpet (the book not having yet been catalogued for borrowing), and did not move until that evening when his wife came to pick him up. “The person she found crumpled on the carpet was different from the one she had kissed goodbye ten hours earlier,” he recalls.[2]
Rather than merely pointing out the variety of ways “religion” on the one hand, was related to “science” on the other, Brooke’s lengthy monograph argues in a stronger manner that “precisely because the boundaries [of science and religion] have shifted with time, it would be artificial to ask about the relationship between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as if modern definitions of their provenance had some timeless validity.”[3]While this also cuts in the direction of works that have too much of a Christian apologetic edge (in particular, while appreciative of the work of Stanley Jaki, Brooke finds his approach claiming Christianity essentially caused science to be much to simplified) Brooke in particular is taking aim both at the so-called “warfare thesis” popularized by John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White, and the “secularization thesis” of many like Max Weber that claims science, technology, and rationality fundamentally force religion and theology out of the picture.
Brooke thus spends the majority of his work looking at how the porous boundaries of science and religion were negotiated (and as we shall see in our final section, sometimes even illicitly fused together). As Brooke puts it elsewhere in his book Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religionco-authored with fellow historian of science Geoffrey Cantor:
[These grand stories of therelation between science and religion throughout history] are vulnerable because they are selective in their use of evidence. They gloss over the diversity and the complexity of positions taken in the past. Each tends to assume that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ can be given timeless definitions and that there is some inherent, some essential, relationship between them. … Many such attempts have been made in the past to construct an ideal model. The study of history is humbling because it shows how ephemeral most have been. [Thus there is] value in a historical approach if it alerts us to the way in which prior interests, political, metaphysical, and religious, have shaped the models that have been sought. … The point is that there is no single story one can tell about this.[4]Rather, as historian of science Peter Harrison argues in his The Territories of Science and Religion—a work which can fruitfully be viewed as the worthy spiritual successor to Brooke’s monograph—not only do science and religion emerge as increasingly discrete categories through time into the western historical consciousness, but also “understanding the manner of their emergence” is vital to comprehend the variety of subtexts at play that often go unseen in their present relations.[5]Synchronically, this means that in any given situation in historical analysis our typical disciplinary boundaries like science, economics, politics, society, theology, art, etc. … may be provisionally useful to describe historical activities, but these heuristics will ultimately blind us to the larger wholes and-or differently organized clusters of thought and activity that the historical actors would have recognized themselves as doing.
Paolo Rossi thus writes that historians frequently concern themselves with “an imaginary object” which is constructed from privileging an ahistorical perspective upon a variety of texts and “heterogenous disciplines.”[6]Or, as David C. Lindberg puts it, we tend to forget (and our large-scale stories tend to obscure) that “strictly speaking, ideas cannot clash and theoretical claims cannot, of themselves, engage in combat. It is people who fight over theoretical and methodological claims, people who clash over ideological issues. And when people are involved, human interests and local circumstances are inevitably present as well.”[7]Or, as he says elsewhere “We must constantly remind ourselves that ‘science,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘theology,’ and ‘the church’ are abstractions rather than really existing things,” and it is a serious mistake to allow our abstractions to become absolute objects serving as placeholders for scholarly historical analysis.[8]
To conceive of this history otherwise is often, as we have suggested, a major abiding legacy of positivism. Here we might take the startlingly frank admission of positivist H. Feigle:
A major example here is the still widespread picture of Galileo as proto-experimentalist who touted the mechanization and mathematicization of a now-disenchanted nature. This was largely the result of the positivist Ernst Mach’s picture of the man. “The main effect of Mach’s book in the various editions it went through between 1883 and 1912,” writes historian of science H. Floris Cohen, “was that it pinpointed Galileo as the central figure in the birth of modern physics.”[10]What was new about Mach’s book was that it purported to discuss the entire science of mechanics from a historical point of view … Galileo was now, in a seemingly well-documented manner, made the central focus of the first stage of the new physics.[11]At the same time, Mach’s focus generated a very distinct coloring to history—“a conception that has continued to fit in well with the prejudices of many philosophically and historically untrained scientists regarding the nature of their craft.”[12]And since confession is (said to be) good for the soul, I will admit that for a long time, I (along with quite a few other philosophers of science of recent times) have been a ‘sinner.’ Some of us have been satisfied with a ‘smattering of ignorance’ in regard to the historical development of the sciences, their socioeconomic settings, the psychology of discovery, and of the theory of invention, etc. A few of us, though proud of our empiricism,for some time rather unashamedly ‘made up’ some phases of the history of science in a quite ‘a priori’ manner—at least in public lectures and classroom presentations, if not even in some of our publications. … Even if the sources were not always complete, and not always accurate, they were available, but we rarely consulted them. Most of us have come to repent of this inexcusable conduct.[9]
Mach claims a radical discontinuity between Galileo and all who have come before him (particular those residing in the so-called “Dark Ages”): “[Galileo’s Dynamics] is entirely a modern science,” says Mach. “[It] was founded by Galileo … we must remark that no part of the knowledge and the concepts with which we are now familiar existed in Galileo’s time, but that Galileo had to develop this knowledge and these concepts for us.”[13]The way Mach presented Galileo severed him from his scholastic and Jesuit sources,[14]his theological commitments[15]and metaphysical background,[16]as well as underplaying the developments and contributions of the church in the areas of astronomical observation and mathematics in particular.[17]As an added bonus, it also separated Galileo from the Church, making for a convenient antithesis between Christianity and science when the Galileo affair was in actually fact far too complicated for any such binary.[18]Perhaps the most telling is its cameo in Bertrand Russell’s bestselling A History of Western Philosophywhere it is presented as a settled trope that with Galileo, “as everyone knows” the Inquistion “put an end to science in Italy.”[19]
The philosopher and historian Dudley Shapere collected a large number of textbook accounts of Galileo that were, in their essence, little more than a repetition of Mach’s trimmed-down caricature of Galileo as path-breaking empiricist.[20]The isolation of these “disenchanted” and non-theological features as part and parcel of the layout of beliefs among figures accorded a central place in the scientific revolution even occurs among arguments attempting to isolate such characteristics in order to combat them. For example in The Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer see these characteristics in Francis Bacon. Bacon, according to these two, touted the newly won scientific temperament of the “happy match” between mind and a disenchanted nature.[21]This is a peculiarly inverted reading of Bacon, who argued for the rise of empiricism in science precisely because the mind did notmatch the world—and this Bacon argued because the fall of Adam distorted human natural capacities to know.[22]
[1]John Hedley Brook, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
[2]Noah Efron, “Sciences and Religions: What It Means to Take Historical Perspectives Seriously,” Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectivesed. Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 245. It should be noted this entire volume was crafted as homageto Brooke’s work.
[3]Brooke, Science and Religion, 8.
[4]John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21. See also: John Hedley Brooke, “Religious Belief and the Content of the Sciences,” Osirisvol.16 (2001): 3-28. E.g. 5: “The principle consequence of this historiographical shift is to underline the artificiality of abstracting the ‘science’ and the ‘religion’ from past (and present!) contexts with a view to establishing some notional, unmediated, relations between them. Consequently, when we ask whether it is possible to show that a particular piece of science was shaped by religious belief or a religious belief by science, we have to recognize that the very terms in which we formulate these questions can at best be linguistic crutches—that behind and beyond them lie forms of intellectual life, together with social and political realities of great complexity.”
[5]Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3. Cf. Peter Harrison, “’Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, 39: “Once the constructed nature of the categories [of science and religion are] taken into consideration, putative relationships between science and religion may turn out to be artifacts of the categories themselves. Whether science and religion are in conflict, or are independent entities, or are in dialogue, or are essentially integrated enterprises, will be determined by exactly how one draws the boundaries within the broad limits given by the constructs.” Alasdair MacIntyre makes a similar judgment regarding the stability across time of the category of “ethics.” See: Alasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 3rded. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 11: “We all too often still treat the moral philosophers of the past as contributors to a single debate with a relatively unvarying subject-matter, treating Plato and Hume and Mill as contemporaries both of ourselves and of each other. This leads to an abstraction of these writers from the cultural and social milieus in which they lived and thought and so the history of their thought acquires a false independence from the rest of the culture. Kant ceases to be part of the history of Prussia, Hume is no longer a Scotsman. For from the standpoint of moral philosophy as we conceive it these characteristics have become irrelevancies.”
[6]Quoted in Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.
[7]David C. Lindberg, “Galileo, The Church, and the Cosmos,” When Science and Christianity Meet ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago: 2003), 33.
[8]Ronald Numbers, “Medieval Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 57.
[9]H. Feigle, “Beyond Peaceful Coexistence,” in R. H. Stuewer, ed., Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 3.
[10]H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 41.
[11]Ibid.
[12]Ibid.
[13]Ibid.
[14]William Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation: Volume 1 – Medieval and Early Classical Science (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1972).
[15]Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination From The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 117-202; Pietro Redondi, “From Galileo to Augustine,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, 175-210.
[16]Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 41.
[17]J.L. Heilbron, The Sun In The Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[18]For example, Galileo was deeply affected by his life as a courtier navigating the complex world of patronage mechanics and court politics. Far from “science vs. religion,” Galileo’s particular self-fashioning and his clash and eventual condemnation by the church cannot be understood outside of this context. See: Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 313-353 for the recontextualization of his trial.
[19]Russell, A History of Western Philosophy,556.
[20]Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 3-8.
[21]Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 2.
[22]Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 172-185; Stephen A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Bacon’s Thought (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006); Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
[23]See the slender but extremely helpful book by Michael E. Moore, Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg (New York: Punctum Books, 2013).
[24]Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2013), 1.
[25]Hilary Getti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999). Bruno had a “well-known and clearly expressed distaste for the new mathematics, which he saw as a schematic abstraction trying to imprison the vital vicissitudes of matter into static formulae of universal validity”; he prioritized “images and symbols” rather than “experiment or observation” and “never made an astronomical observation of his own” (2-3).
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