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NOTE Origins of Science in the Age of Faith

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As Ralph was saying, my field is rhetoric, and that may be a field of study not well known to some of you.

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And the reason that I would guess that, that you don't know much about the field of rhetoric, has a lot to do with the topic of my talk.

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Most people don't know much about the profoundly positive influence that Western religion has had on science in its history,

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for reasons that are very similar to why most moderns today don't know what rhetoric is.

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Some parts of history are more vulnerable to suppression in any given milieu than others.

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My topic, the historical relationship between science and religion at the onset of the modern period

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that we often call the Scientific Revolution, is one of those historical subjects.

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Rhetoric is another.

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Rhetoric fell into decline in the 19th century

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as institutionalized science was on its ascendancy.

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There's a direct relationship between the demise of rhetoric

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as a field that had been the queen of the humanities

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in the Middle Ages in the 19th century.

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It had always been central to higher education.

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Its demise coincides with the ascent of science because the university institution was revolutionized in the 19th century.

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Universities became science-centered institutions in the latter part of the 19th century.

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Previously, higher education, the university was a creation of the Christian Church, and the center of higher education was theology.

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In the 19th century, the center is taken out, it's vacated, like when scientists clone something, they pull the nucleus out of an egg.

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You take the nucleus out, you put a different one in.

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The nucleus of higher education was removed in the 19th century,

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the theological nucleus of higher education, and a scientific nucleus was put in.

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Well, you get a different kind of a being when you have a scientific nucleus.

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And you have a kind of a being, an organism, a university organism,

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in which its component parts have different relationships to one another.

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and one another.

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Rhetoric, my field, became peripheral in that organism.

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It had been central when higher education had a theological center because theology

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and public discourse, which is what the art of rhetoric is about, go hand in hand.

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Theology has to be argued and debated and discussed.

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It can't be discovered in a laboratory and the technical skills that scientists need in mathematics and natural history don't have much usefulness for theology.

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So rhetoric went out with science when science became the dominant institutional presence in higher education.

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How much rhetoric went out is, of course, varies from one society to another.

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I have a colleague who visited the Soviet Union in the late 80s, just a few years before its demise.

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And he was in Moscow giving some academic talks.

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He, like myself, he's a rhetorician.

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And professors from universities in the Soviet Union came hundreds of miles.

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There were professors that came from Kiev all the way to Moscow.

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Professors who were making $30 a month came to Moscow to hear them.

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They'd never heard a lecture on rhetoric.

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Not only had they never heard a lecture on rhetoric,

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They've never seen a book on the subject.

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The academic field that had been the queen of the humanities in the Middle Ages

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disappeared from historical memory in the Soviet Union.

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Something analogous to that has happened in the United States, but not with the same kind of severity.

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That situation in Soviet Russia is very much analogous to the modern Western historical memory of the relationship between science and religion.

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It's almost non-existent.

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This is an event in history.

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This erasure of historical memory is something that began to occur notably in the 19th century.

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There's a transitional period in the 19th century in which this erasure took place.

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I call this the great ideological divide.

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There is a point in history in the 19th century after which people ceased to know that science and Christianity were intimate partners

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throughout the Middle Ages and throughout the period of the modern scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

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Before this time, before the great ideological divide, I just roughly date it to 1850, but that's just really a guess.

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It's something that's building steam in the 19th century, but has a very critical effect ultimately on historical memory.

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Before that time, intellectuals who were notoriously hostile to Western religion still knew this.

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Auguste Kant, the French philosopher and the father of classical positivism, wanted to replace Catholicism with a new religion of humanity.

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Kant sensed that societies need a spiritual dynamic, people need worship, the state has to be tempered,

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The interests of state have to be tempered by a spiritual authority.

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He wanted to take humanity as a whole and make it the new object of worship, the God of humanity.

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So Kant was intensely hostile to Catholicism, wanted to completely replace it,

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but he understood what almost no one understands today,

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The fact that the greatest patron of science throughout history was the Christian Church.

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That was ambiguously clear to critics of Christianity in the early part of the 19th century, but

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became virtually unknown in the latter part of the 19th century.

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How severe has the problem become, since that time in the last 150 years, that we find very learned individuals making historical statements that are completely unfounded.

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What is the most successful popular book on science ever published? This is it.

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Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, 20 million sold.

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And this is, I don't know if you can read this in the back, I will read it for you.

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But this is a statement that Hawking makes at the very end of the book,

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in a little appendix dedicated to Galileo, a little statement of Hawking's about Galileo.

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Since Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.

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His renowned conflict with the Catholic Church was central to his philosophy,

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for Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works,

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and moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.

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Now, Stephen Hawking is no dummy, he's considered perhaps the figure in theoretical physics most comparable to Einstein in the latter part of the 20th century.

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Why would Stephen Hawking make such a bonehead statement?

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Well, the answer is very similar, is very simple. Hawking's history comes from science textbooks.

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He has a textbook knowledge of scientific history. And this account of the history of science is a standard feature of introductory freshman textbooks on astronomy and biology and physics and so forth.

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The idea that science didn't exist until around the time of Galileo, because it is fundamentally antithetical to faith, and therefore, until people were willing to stand up to faith, like the brave Galileo,

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is antithetical to faith, and therefore until people were willing to stand up to faith, like the brave Galileo, put his head on the chopping block,

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standing firm in defense of the Copernican hypothesis, until people were willing to do that or powerful enough to do that, science had no footing.

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People didn't know or believe that the world was intelligible to the human intellect.

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That, of course, is pure moonshine.

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Even 15 minutes worth of scientific history, as written by the historians, would decimate that position.

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Scientists believe the standard position in the scientific community is that everything had evolved.

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Everything except one thing, science.

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Science was created. It burst forth from Galileo's mind in the 17th century, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.

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It just suddenly came into being, and the church collapsed in response to it. It was defenseless and helpless.

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Well, I talk about this great ideological divide. The facts of the history of this relationship between science and religion

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are almost completely unknown to our world, because I don't think that revisionism by itself is enough.

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This is a revisionist talk, but it's a talk designed not merely to examine the facts of history,

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but also to try to cultivate some understanding of why this kind of profound historical blind spot

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could originate in such a sophisticated world as ours.

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Well, I'm going to go back and trace the historical relationship between science and religion

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through three periods of history in discussing this.

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The medieval period, which I date roughly from 1100 until 1600, this is my evolutionary tree.

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Science did evolve, we can be certain of this.

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Science seems to have evolved in three stages.

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There's a medieval period to science. Of course, we could talk about a fourth period in classical antiquity.

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The philosophers of classical Greece and other civilizations of the Mediterranean region

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made great contributions that were, of course, incorporated into modern science, but I don't have time for that.

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Much of classical science was appropriated by the medieval, so we really collapsed those two periods together.

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We have a medieval period in scientific history that runs from around the 12th century to 1600.

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Of course, it continues to go on, but eventually loses steam.

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A period that I call Baconian Science, a more correct term for this would be modern science,

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but the word modern science is confusing. People associate that with today.

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But I mean the modern period, the period of the Scientific Revolution, the period of the Enlightenment, the early Enlightenment in Western Europe.

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And then a contemporary period that I call a period of positive science, beginning roughly the middle of the 18th century with the French Enlightenment.

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And of course this blindness that I call the great ideological divide is something that begins to emerge in the enlightenment and eventually takes hold and becomes not merely a part of the intellectual attitude of secularists, a small handful of French secularists who inhabited the salons of Paris,

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but becomes a part of the general view of history,

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the history of the relationship between science and religion.

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So, the medieval period.

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Really, historians of medieval science would break up the Middle Ages into two distinct periods,

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a period before 1100 when there wasn't a whole lot of science going on in Europe

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and then a period after 1100 when science really begins to pick up steam in Europe.

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The reason that there's a sudden transformation in science's fortunes in the 12th century

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has to do with Aristotle.

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The corpus of Aristotle's works is again introduced into Western Europe

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in around this time and almost immediately it becomes the centerpiece of inquiry in philosophy

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and in that particular branch of philosophy, natural philosophy from which modern science descends.

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When we get to Galileo, way up here at the beginning of the modern period, we're looking

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at an intellectual figure who is a descendant of this movement that begins in the 12th century.

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Developments in science that begin to take shape in the 12th century continue to evolve

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and grow and spread from one university to another in Europe and create the cultural

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intellectual groundwork that a great mind like Galileo could exploit.

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Galileo's science is Aristotelian in its essence.

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The science of Galileo isn't new.

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It's merely a revision of the kind of science that was introduced into Europe in the Middle Ages.

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Now that should astonish you, because typically we're told that the Middle Ages are the dark ages.

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People were oppressed intellectually. They were told not to question, not to think too hard.

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Scientists were imprisoned and tortured, silenced continuously by the Church.

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That's mostly myth, much of it created by Voltaire in the 18th century and others, many others.

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The Catholic Church embraced this pagan philosopher, Aristotle, with very little difficulty.

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There were conflicts, of course, between the new science of aerosol that was being introduced into Europe and theology, as you would expect.

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But interestingly, the conflicts were liberating for science rather than oppressive or stifling.

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There are two moments in the 13th century when the church in France,

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which of course was the center of higher education in Europe, the University of Paris,

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there are two occasions in the 13th century when the church decided that it had to step in

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and challenge some of the Aristotelian doctrines

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because they were running a field of theological teachings

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that were pretty central to the Catholic faith.

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And these are our course called the Paris Condemnations.

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The Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, outlined certain teachings of Aristotelian philosophy

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that were contrary to Catholic doctrine.

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And many of these teachings were scientific in nature.

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Aristotle says that objects cannot move in a vacuum.

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Something has to be pushing them.

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There has to be some force that is acting against an object in order for it to move.

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So motion within a vacuum is an impossibility.

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So in the Aristotelian cosmology, the whole of the universe has to be filled with something.

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Of course, this is where the idea of the ether comes from, this old idea, not really abandoned until the 19th century, fully abandoned, that there had to be some kind of matter filling the whole, wholeness of space, you couldn't have a vacuum.

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Well, that was one of the ideas of Aristotle's that the Church said can't be held as true.

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You can, of course, teach it, but you can't hold it as a scientific truth because it limits God's sovereignty.

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And various other aspects of Aristotelian thought were similarly challenged.

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Rather than stifling the science of the 13th and 14th centuries, this event in history, the Paris condemnations of Bishop Tempier, actually stimulated science because it prevented Aristotelian science from becoming stagnant, becoming dogma itself.

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Suddenly, this door opens up for natural philosophy of speculation.

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In the next century, we have a couple of natural philosophers, Burden and Oresme, who, I'm sorry, I've left out a letter.

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Not long forgotten, but very important in the development of medieval philosophy, Buridan and Aresme are beginning to anticipate ideas in physics that would later become established by Galileo and Newton.

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Newton's concept of inertia is anticipated by these natural philosophers in the Middle Ages.

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Because the counterbalancing influence of the theological condemnations, of course, stimulates creative speculation.

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Well, let's imagine, Burden and Aresme say, let's imagine that space was a vacuum.

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Let's just postulate that as a premise, and then try to see to what extent we'd be able to make sense out of motion in space under those circumstances.

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And we see movement in thinking towards the kind of physics that would eventually come to fruition in Galileo several centuries later.

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There are a number of reasons why science took hold of the European intellect in the Middle Ages in a way that it had never done before.

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One of the reasons that science took hold was because European religion, unlike Greek religion,

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the religion of the paganism of Aristotle and Plato and other scientists of that period,

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philosophers of that period, European conceptions of human nature are influenced by the Bible

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in addition to the traditions of Western philosophy.

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We all know that Platonism had a profound impact on Christianity.

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And when Aristotle's natural philosophy became known in Europe,

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it had an even greater impact on Christian thought, mostly through Thomas Aquinas,

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who we heard about earlier today.

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But the classical philosophy of human nature,

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interpreted by people who are also steeped in biblical thought

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produces a different kind of an outcome.

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Science in classical antiquity tended to run aground

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because of its own rationalism.

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When I say rationalism, I don't mean that in the pedestrian sense

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of rationalism as skepticism against religious claims.

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In fact, I mean the opposite.

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Rationalism in Classical Antiquity was the doctrine that the human intellect is divine.

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There's an absolute divide in Plato's thinking between the essence of the human intellect and the physical person.

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They're separate things. The purpose of philosophy is to get in touch with the spirit side of human nature, the intellect,

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and to learn to overcome the influence of the body.

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That's the essence of rationalism.

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Rationalistic societies, like the Society of Greece,

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tend to champion science because they think that the human intellect is the real deal.

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It's sacred, it's created, it's supernatural in its power.

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And so there's a kind of optimism there about what the human intellect can do and that drives science.

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Societies that historically societies like the society of the Roman period and the sophisticated side of Greek society and societies that challenge that fundamental notion, science never happens.

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Rationalism is pretty much an essential ingredient of science. There has to be a faith in the integrity of the human intellect and most often that comes from religion.

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It comes from some kind of religious conception such as Plato's conception

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that we are spirits trapped in the prison of a bodily cave.

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The problem with rationalism of that kind is that

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it tends to become overly confident in the power of the mind

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unaided by observation, unaided by experience.

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Science, as we know it today, operates out of a kind of dialectic, a kind of interchange between speculation,

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products of the intellect, the reasoning mind, and experiment, and testing, and observation, and so forth, data.

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There's a kind of a healthy dialogue that makes science go.

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How do you find that balance?

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You don't typically in an intellectual culture

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that's exceedingly rationalistic,

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because the rationalistic intellect thinks

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that the mind can do it by itself.

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And this is where Aristotle went wrong.

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Aristotle really is the moderate in classical science,

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interestingly enough.

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It's Aristotle that says, you've got to balance

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What the mind seems to think against experience.

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And that's really what makes Aristotle the father of science, truly,

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because he understood that fundamental insight,

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that science involves this kind of balance.

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Problem was, though Aristotle could say that,

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he had a great difficulty living it as a scientist,

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as did his contemporaries.

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Even though he said you had to test the speculations of mind against reality,

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the Greek scientists really didn't do that very much.

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And this legacy in Aristotelian science was passed on to the Medievals.

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It's characteristic of Aristotelian science in the Middle Ages.

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They say experiment, experiment, experiment, but they really aren't doing the experiments.

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They talk the talk, but they can't seem to walk the walk of experimentation.

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But there is an ethic in Judaism, there is an ethic in Christianity that offsets the excessive rationalism of Greek religion.

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And of course, it finds its unique and its most profound expression in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation.

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The idea that God would humble himself, take on flesh, was a scandalous idea in Roman society.

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That was the biggest objection to Christianity among religious people in the Greco-Roman world.

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It didn't bug them that Jesus claimed to be a god.

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Well, even Caesar's a god. We're cool with that.

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But how could he be a man? How could God inhabit flesh?

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Well, that ingredient of Christian thought, it's not unique to Christianity.

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We also find that idea in Judaism, the idea that the body itself is holy.

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The body is God's temple, is a feature of Judaism.

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It just takes a daring new turn in Christianity.

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This idea in the Middle Ages we see gradually begin to undermine the tendency towards excessive rationalism.

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So you have in the Middle Ages a movement towards empiricism.

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Empiricism is typically the opposite of rationalism.

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Empiricism is the observing side of science.

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You have a movement towards balance.

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The mind is created by God and it has this tremendous power to speculate about nature,

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but the mind, like the rest of the human personality, is fallen, subject to deception and pride,

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and needs to be tempered by the humility of empiricism, of observation.

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Getting your hands on nature, looking at it, feeling it, listening to it, scrutinizing it with the flesh.

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So, an experimental tradition begins to evolve in medieval science. When did it begin?

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Not with Galileo, as Stephen Hawking alleges, it began in the 12th and 13th centuries.

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Robert Gross Test, Bishop of Lincoln, a high ranking clergyman in England,

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England began to develop experimental methodologies in the 13th century, in the 1200s. Roger Bacon, another British cleric, began to develop experimental methods.

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They began to write about experimentation to try to develop the science of method. And this very quickly began to spread and develop in Europe.

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What happens at this threshold moment when Galileo comes into the picture,

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and Copernicus comes into the picture, and Newton comes into the picture,

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is that these traditions of medieval science are beginning to reach maturity.

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When Newton says, if I've seen farther than others,

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It's because I stand on the shoulder of giants.

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He's not merely being humble.

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That's not mere rhetoric.

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It's a truthful expression of the evolutionary legacy of modern science.

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Newton understood, just as Galileo understood,

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that they were building upon a tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy

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that had been developing in Europe for centuries by this time.

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But there's another feature of modern science, of Baconian science, that I want to talk about.

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And this explains why I call it Baconian science.

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Francis Bacon was a 16th and 17th century British political figure, Lord Chancellor

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of England at one point, until he had his Watergate experience.

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He wound up in the Tower of London for a brief period.

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and then retired to write books about the philosophy of science.

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Bacon is a pivotal figure in the history of science and in the historical relationship

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between science and religion because Bacon, great rhetorician, one of the great figures

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in rhetoric in history, Bacon recognized something that no one else had recognized up until that

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time.

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He realized that the Protestant Reformation constituted an unprecedented opportunity for science.

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That if he could successfully align modern science, the new science, the new empirical science of Galileo

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with the Protestant Reformation that he could greatly increase science's capital in a Protestant country like England.

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So when I call the modern period of science Baconian science, I'm not talking really about the intellectual side of science at all.

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I'm talking about science as an investigation of nature.

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I'm talking about how people, in a particular time, integrate science into the world in which they live.

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The world in which Bacon lived was a world dominated by Christianity.

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And in particular, it was dominated by Protestant Christianity.

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The Protestants had come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church had made a very serious wrong turn at some point in their history, and their theology was on the rocks, and needed to make a fresh start, needed to go back to the primary sources, the Bible and the Church Fathers, and get the ship of Church back on course.

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Being a rhetorical genius, Bacon recognized that if he could get science on that ship, that science could go the way of the Protestant Reformation.

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And this is how he did it. Bacon did this by arguing that the emergence of modern science, science was already going gangbusters by the time Bacon came along.

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People were aware that they were in the midst of a scientific revolution, an intellectual revolution.

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Bacon argues that this is a dispensational event, that this is a new turn in God's plan of salvation.

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It's a traditional idea in Christianity that there are periods, and it's based in the Christian division between the Old Testament and the New Testament,

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The Old Testament is the dispensation of the law, the New Testament is the disposition of grace.

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But later Christian thinkers subdivided history into other kinds of categories.

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And this was a popular feature of Protestant thought at the time.

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Protestant theology resurrected millenarianism.

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The idea that there is a final stage to history which will reach its climax in the second coming

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and the restoration of creation after the fall, creation will be restored.

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Well, the part of the millennial, millenarian vision of Protestant Christianity

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that Bacon focused on was that part dealing with the restoration of creation.

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It isn't just that Christ is going to return.

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Christ is also going to restore nature from its fall, it's going to be restored.

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And that's why science has come on the scene.

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That's why this scientific revolution just happens to coincide with the Protestant Reformation.

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They're two dimensions of one process, the last age, the great millennium.

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Science then for Bacon becomes a priestly occupation.

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Scientists are a special category of priests for Bacon.

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They are the priests of nature.

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They are the ones through whom God is going to do his work of restoration.

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This is depicted iconographically on the frontispiece of Bacon's magnum opus, his great instauration.

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And this is the book in which Bacon thinks that he's reinventing science.

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Bacon really believes that he's the new Aristotle.

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That his importance in the history of science is comparable to that of Aristotle.

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Let me explain this image.

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We see ships, of course, sailing through these pillars and moving out into what appear to be the high seas.

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Before the time of Columbus, there was always a question as to whether you could sail on the high seas.

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The question wasn't whether the world was round. Medievalists knew the world was round.

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The question was, is it navigable? And is it inhospitable to human beings?

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That was the question, not whether the world was a globe or not.

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Only ignorant people in the Middle Ages thought that the world was flat.

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These pillars are a biblical image though. They represent the pillars of Solomon's Temple.

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And for Bacon, Solomon's Temple in the Bible is a metaphor for the creation. God's intention

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was to inhabit the creation. And because of the fall, human beings became estranged. They

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They Departed from Eden, and so the temple becomes then a symbol of the promise of the restoration of the creation.

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So the fact that we have ships moving through the temple, the doorway of the world,

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and out into the world, of course, is a millenarian symbol for Bacon.

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It says God's final stage of salvation has arrived.

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Circumnavigation of the globe is one of the signs of that turn in history.

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The other sign is science.

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Down here, which of course you can't read, nor can I, in Latin, is a quotation from the Bible.

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Daniel 12.4 says, and they shall go to and fro, that's the navigation part, they shall go to and fro,

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Daniel prophesies, and knowledge shall be increased.

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Well, Bacon says, there's your science. It's all there in the Bible.

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Well this may seem speculative to us and odd, but in the society in which Bacon lived, this energized science, transformed science in England in the 17th century.

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Why? Because before this time, science was something that a few isolated,

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profoundly intelligent individuals did in the cloister of universities.

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There's a continuous tradition of science in Europe dating to the 12th century,

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But it's small potatoes. It's only a very small number of people doing this.

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When most young, intelligent people make decisions about what they're going to be when they grow up,

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in those days, they say, well, I'll be maybe a lawyer, maybe a physician, maybe a theologian, maybe a priest.

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But nobody was saying, I'm going to be a scientist.

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How many of you, I'll take a poll here today, how many of you, when you were eight,

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said, I'm going to grow up, I'm going to be a rhetorician?

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I never did, because I didn't know what that was, and it wasn't something that would make my mother proud.

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That was the state of science for thousands of years.

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Science was obscure and remote, but suddenly it's very familiar to people,

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because it's linked to a very familiar story, it's linked to the saga of the Bible by Francis Bacon.

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And suddenly, science becomes something comparable in importance to the clergy offices.

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So young men that might have a generation before Bacon thought,

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well, I'll be a minister when I grow up.

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And that was a lot of the educated young men of Europe.

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Now they're saying, well, I'll be a scientist.

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That's just as godly and just as important in the greater scheme of things as anything else.

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So, we have a social revolution in science in the Baconian period.

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Scientists do the same thing that clergymen do for bacon. They read the book.

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There's two books, though, now. There's a book of Revelation, the Bible,

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and then there's the other book that God wrote, the book of nature.

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The scientist becomes the exegete of the book of nature.

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And this idea really was the foundation for the whole conception of science from the 17th century on in most of the world.

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But it's a conception of science that gradually begins to erode in the 18th century.

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And this is the last transition that I call the transition into positive science.

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Of course, we have the French Enlightenment, and I know I'm going a little bit over, so I'll be very brief about this.

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In the French Enlightenment, you have a different kind of dawning awareness.

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French intellectuals realize that science's capital has taken off.

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I mean, science is like the dot-coms of, you know, the 17th century.

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It's just, people can see that this is where the future is, that this is really going somewhere.

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The French intellectuals of the Enlightenment, who are profoundly anti-Catholic,

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France is predominantly a Catholic country, see science as the potential foundation for a new society.

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Society has to have a stable core of knowledge in law, custom, tradition, etc.

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Catholicism had always provided a big part of that for European societies.

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So the problem for the skeptics in the Enlightenment is how can we revolutionize society without religion?

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The simple answer is provided by Bacon. If science is the religion of nature, then why

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not make the religion of nature everything? All of the prominent advocates of this idea

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in the French Enlightenment, though they were profoundly hostile to faith, they were also

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consistently profound admirers of Francis Bacon.

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They recognized Francis Bacon's genius as the basis of the Enlightenment vision.

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That wasn't Bacon's vision, but they were able to exploit it and appropriate that vision

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in order to construct a secular view.

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So we see in the period of positive science, the view taking hold that science itself

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Roth can become the basis of a new social order, and eventually, of course, it's during this period that this Berlin wall of history, that I call the Great Ideological Divide, is being built brick by brick during the Enlightenment.

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But he reaches a critical point in the 19th century because of a crisis in the history of science, in the evolution of science.

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In the 19th century, the whole way in which science was done was beginning to change.

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Previously, science from the time of Galileo through Newton, through Boyle, French science of the early 18th century,

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Science was an occupation for the wealthy, the leisured classes of Europe,

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who had the monetary resources in the time to pursue these scientific interests.

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It never had a foundation in higher education, a firm foothold in higher education.

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But science by this time has become so demanding, so expensive,

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and so intellectually demanding that it has to be a collective affair.

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It has to be done in labs with a multitude of minds and hands working on it and it has to have large monetary kinds of patronage.

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The individual couldn't support himself as a scientist anymore. You needed something outside. You needed patrons.

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And so in the 19th century, we begin to see a campaign to transform higher education into a scientific enterprise.

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This is what I talked about at the very onset when I said that the theological nucleus is taken out of the university and it's replaced by a scientific nucleus.

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To support that venture, radical alteration of higher education in the Western world, you need a profound historical justification.

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And that is, of course, the warfare myth that we saw in that quotation from Stephen Hawking at the very onset.

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The idea that science has been opposed and resisted at every turn by religion throughout history and that's why we're not going to the stars yet.

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That's why it isn't making the kind of progress that it needs and that's why science needs to take charge of higher education.

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I just want to leave at least 10 minutes for discussion, so I will draw my talk to a close at this point and open up the floor.

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Aside from Voltaire, well a critical figure to the developments that I was describing is the lesser-known

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Philosoph, Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet was one of the younger members of that group

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of secularist intellectuals that we call the philosophs from the 18th century. Condorcet

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actually lived through the French Revolution. He was one of the later members of the Enlightenment

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movement.

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But it was Condorcet that at the very end of life, in fact as he's in hiding from the

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The Jacobins, who wanted to take him to the guillotine. He writes a book on the history

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of science while he's in hiding. And many of the stories in that book later on become

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the basis for this mythology of warfare. The idea that Galileo invented science on his

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in his own doesn't come from Condorcet. Condorcet does take a kind of evolutionary view of the

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development of science, but he also argues that religion did everything it could to stifle

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science. Religion hasn't contributed anything of positive value to human civilization. And

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that idea and its connection to science, the idea that science is the liberating force

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of Enlightenment in Human History is very much a part of Condorcet's writing. Turgot,

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another philosopher, had been a seminarian in the Catholic Church. He'd studied for the

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priesthood and then became one of the Enlightenment intellectuals. But he could never really separate

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himself from the Catholic Church in his personality. He still was enamored with Catholicism and

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really had a lot to do with this idea that science was the new Catholic Church that became

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very prominent in the positivist era.

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I was going to ask about Pascal and Mendel. Was it either Boehm or one of them was a priest?

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Mendel was an abbot in a monastery in Austria.

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When did they live in Austria?

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Mendel lived in the 19th century and of course he discovered the basic principles of genetics,

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experimenting with pea plants in the monastery, but lived in isolation from the scientific community.

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But of course at the time the majority of the time in which Mendel lived the majority of scientists were still believers

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Pascal of course had it had great potential as a scientist but abandoned

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Scientific inquiry at a very fairly early age and as well. He only lived into his 30s

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But but similarly he was not really a part of the the mainstream

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scientific community

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Yes

417
00:51:38.040 --> 00:51:59.040
It is important to maintain that the acidity of the Judeo-Christian worldview to science can be a hidden mortgage in the early passage in Genesis where God looks on creation and it is good.

418
00:51:59.040 --> 00:52:15.040
In other words, nature, as we see it, has been judged to be good by God, unlike the view of certain eastern religions, so that that already puts the idea of Christian civilization on the side of the examination of nature.

419
00:52:15.040 --> 00:52:16.040
Right.

420
00:52:16.040 --> 00:52:17.040
Can I add on that?

421
00:52:17.040 --> 00:52:24.040
Very important point in the history of science. This is another feature, of course, related to the issue of human nature.

422
00:52:24.040 --> 00:52:28.040
It's the physical side of human nature which Christians and Jews recognize as being good.

423
00:52:28.040 --> 00:52:40.040
And if the physical body is good, then sensory perception as a manifestation of the body is also good and has a role to play in science.

424
00:52:40.040 --> 00:52:44.040
But this is of course even more fundamental. What is nature?

425
00:52:44.040 --> 00:52:56.040
Typically in naturalistic religions, the naturalistic religions of antiquity, nature is, the material nature is profane.

426
00:52:56.040 --> 00:53:10.040
really has no importance. The nature that Plato and Aristotle are interested in is an invisible nature which can only be accessed by the mind, it can't be accessed through the body.

427
00:53:10.040 --> 00:53:21.040
Material nature is not significant. So there isn't much interest in biology, there isn't much interest in chemistry, there's a lot of interest in mathematics in antiquity

428
00:53:21.040 --> 00:53:31.040
because mathematics supposedly is most capable of penetrating the veil of profane materiality

429
00:53:31.040 --> 00:53:39.040
and enabling the intellect to see into the real world of sacred things.

430
00:53:39.040 --> 00:53:44.040
All of the great nations, cultures that embrace naturalism

431
00:53:44.040 --> 00:53:49.040
have typically made the most progress in the science of mathematics.

432
00:53:49.040 --> 00:53:56.960
Hindus, you made many, took many steps forward in mathematics. You were first, I believe.

433
00:53:56.960 --> 00:54:04.960
Of course, a lot of Aristotle's writings are biological, but people don't read very many of them, but that's just a side comment.

434
00:54:04.960 --> 00:54:13.360
If you read Richard Blackwell's book on Galileo, he talks about how even the very condemnation of Galileo was very much a counter-reformation political thing,

435
00:54:13.360 --> 00:54:33.160
The Catholic Church had a whole day of festivities held in Galileo's honor in 1611, right after he made his famous telescopic discoveries.

436
00:54:33.160 --> 00:54:36.000
He was their favorite son.

437
00:54:36.000 --> 00:54:43.760
I mean, he's the poster child for Catholicism's intellectual greatness and patronage of the sciences.

438
00:54:43.760 --> 00:54:48.360
There's no question about that, that the Catholic Church is totally for science.

439
00:54:48.360 --> 00:54:56.120
And that's precisely why they feel that they can do this risky thing of condemning him.

440
00:54:56.120 --> 00:55:01.240
They feel comfortable condemning Galileo because they're sure that it'll make them look good,

441
00:55:01.240 --> 00:55:02.680
because clearly the other guys are right.

442
00:55:02.680 --> 00:55:07.180
The other scientists are right. It's not Galileo against the Church.

443
00:55:07.180 --> 00:55:11.180
It's Galileo against the majority of scientists.

444
00:55:11.180 --> 00:55:18.680
The majority of scientists say Ptolemy, Erso, was right.

445
00:55:18.680 --> 00:55:25.680
So politically, it's safe for the Catholic Church to condemn Galileo because they think he's wrong.

446
00:55:25.680 --> 00:55:28.680
Galileo read Kepler's books.

447
00:55:28.680 --> 00:55:37.680
Kepler had read Copernicus, and when findings of Copernicus were fifty years gathered, thus the servant, the mother said, oh!

448
00:55:58.680 --> 00:56:13.480
But the linchpin that Galileo really needed to really have a proof, a scientific proof of the Copernican position was there in Kepler's books and Galileo didn't see it.

449
00:56:13.480 --> 00:56:24.840
When he wrote his book, the book that got him in all this hot water, his dialogue on the two systems, he was arguing as a rhetorician, not as a scientist.

450
00:56:24.840 --> 00:56:34.840
He's arguing a circumstantial case and making the best of it and adding all of these rhetorical flourishes to make it look good.

451
00:56:34.840 --> 00:56:43.840
But he didn't really have the goods. He didn't have the kind of evidence and the kind of explanation that would really have sold that position.

452
00:56:43.840 --> 00:56:51.840
And that weakened his position with the Church. He went in thinking that he'd made a stronger case than he had.

453
00:56:51.840 --> 00:56:57.360
I'm sure that the Catholic Church being as fair-minded as it was, as he perceived it,

454
00:56:57.360 --> 00:57:01.000
he was convinced that they would come down on his side.

455
00:57:01.000 --> 00:57:07.400
He was completely taken by surprise when he was condemned, because he really believed

456
00:57:07.400 --> 00:57:10.400
that the Catholic Church was his friend.

457
00:57:10.400 --> 00:57:12.400
And really they were.

458
00:57:12.400 --> 00:57:15.400
Really the Catholic Church was on his side for the most part.

459
00:57:15.400 --> 00:57:23.400
I just have one little footnote that really underlines how reluctant the Church was to, because of all the divisions among the Muslims,

460
00:57:23.400 --> 00:57:41.400
and the truth of these things, entering into a scientific argument per se, that this condemnation and discipline to house arrest was based on this violation of the knowledge not to publish his hyper-physiological work.

461
00:57:45.400 --> 00:57:56.400
The technical aspects of the Copernican argument were impenetrable to even the best intellectuals in the Vatican.

462
00:57:56.400 --> 00:58:08.400
Some of the most brilliant people of the age are in that inner circle, but they're educated in this scholastic tradition of natural philosophy

463
00:58:08.400 --> 00:58:13.480
that isn't mathematically based, as is Galileo's Copernican science.

464
00:58:13.480 --> 00:58:16.600
And so they really couldn't follow his arguments.

465
00:58:16.600 --> 00:58:18.320
That was a big problem for him.

466
00:58:18.320 --> 00:58:19.960
I guess I have to quit.

467
00:58:19.960 --> 00:58:21.720
I'm getting the hook.

468
00:58:22.240 --> 00:58:24.240
Thank you very much.