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Under The Microscope

Religion in the cause of science?

A critical review of

THE ROOTS OF SCIENCE: AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS by Harold Turner; The DeepSight Trust (A New Zealand Initiative for Religion and Cultures), 1998; 204 pages; $29.95.

Philip Catton

According to Turner, polytheistic "tribal" peoples cannot aspire to create science. Before such aspirations could develop anywhere on earth, a great change in religion was needed. Eventually some peoples transcended their former "tribal" identities and foreswore polytheism typically in favour of monotheism. This marked the advent of "universalising" religions. After this change the peoples in question had some aspiration to do science. However, only one such people -- those in the Judeo-Christian tradition -- enjoyed intellectual conditions under which inquirers could successfully fulfil the aspirations for science. This is because the "Hebraic" cosmology of Judeo-Christianity both "de-sacralizes" space, time and matter yet views them as orderly. In Turner's view, the eventual rise of science was encouraged by Christian religion and could not have happened outside its sphere. It is on the basis of these contentions that Turner insists that science is importantly rooted in religion.

The case that Turner presents is neither as novel as it claims to be, nor as cogent as it needs to be. That A and B were historical correlates is poor evidence that the principal connection causally is that A caused B. It may instead be that, in the main, A and B were concomitant effects of some third alteration C. Moreover, because history is causally complex, the claim that A caused B could be partially true (and thus have something to be said for it) even if, in the main, A and B were concomitant effects of some third alteration C (and it would therefore be seriously misleading to assert simply that A caused B).

Turner attempts to establish boldly some historical claims of the form "A caused B" without beginning to acknowledge adequately the actual difficulty of doing so. Moreover, his particular claims have been advanced, in roughly the same forms, before, and telling criticisms against them are well known.

For example, consider the advent of scientific aspirations (B). It is true that, antecedent to B, newly "universalistic" forms of religious life had eventuated (A). Turner urges that A caused B. But he has totally left out of account an important literature (by historians of science, anthropologists, and linguists) which identifies instead a common cause C. According to this literature, C was the rise of literacy. The rise of literacy caused a host of cultural changes which included both A and B. I will address this view in a moment, and in so doing I will criticise Turner's A-caused-B analysis quite sharply.

First however I will comment on a second causal claim of Turner's. Turner boldy contends that science is rooted specifically in Judeo-Christianity. This claim, if true, would naturally tell us why it was that when at last science truly ignited this event was in a Christian part of the world. Many historians place this ignition-point in 16th- to 17th-century Europe. Turner prefers to look in part to earlier times, but still within historical Christendom.

The causal claim has two parts: that Judeo-Christianity was causally necessary for the ignition of science, and that it was sufficient for it. Because contributions from Arab, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and other still more ancient geniuses were indisputably key for the eventual ignition of science, it is a radical thing to suggest that Judeo-Christianity was causally sufficient for science. Take away the Arab, Greek, Indian, etc. philosophers, mathematicians, metallurgists, astronomers, and so on. Would Christians inevitably have started science, without the support of any such contributions? Apparently Turner insists that they would have.

The converse, necessity claim is no less remarkable but in some ways is more difficult to assess. The ignition of science as a going concern is so wondrous it is amazing that it ever happened anywhere. Even relatively weak supporting conditions might therefore have been causally necessary, so unlikely was the ignition to occur at all.

But such a case if it could be made at all would establish only a contextualised necessity. Similarly Turner could argue for a contextualised sufficiency -- Judeo-Christianity was sufficient for the rise of science given that the Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Arabs etc. had already done their work. Turner boldly asserts however a stronger causal thesis than this. Turner implies (apparently) that science would have come about for Christians whether or not the Greek, Indian etc. philosophers, mathematicians etc. had existed at all. Moreover, he insists (explicitly) that science was bound not to ignite for the Greeks, Indians, Chinese and other non-Judeo-Christian peoples. Science could not ignite for these peoples because of the religions to which those peoples held.

One problem for assessing this contention is that there were many differences besides religious differences between late renaissance Europe and ancient Greece, India, China etc. The other differences are also clearly material to the prospect that there would have been for an ignition of science. Historians of science have examined the role of economic systems and conditions, institutions, political forms, political stability and instability, extent of trade, technologies of communication, rates of communication, sizes of research communities, protocols of publication, disease, warfare, geographical exploration, advent of a public sphere (between state and religion), religious turmoil, and novelties in the way ancient Greek intellectual accomplishments re-presented themselves (out of Arab hands, with the benefit of Indian and Chinese influences) in the European context. Each of these considerations brings to view contrasts between late renaissance Europe and ancient peoples that are arguably no less pertinent to why science ignited where and when it did than the religious contrast that Turner explores. The alternative contrasts beg to be examined if Turner is adequately to support his claims. However, Turner's book does not consider them.

The claims about Judeo-Christianity that Turner does advance overlap those of the well known historian of science Pierre Duhem (whom Turner extensively cites). Like Duhem, Turner proposes that the ignition of science derives from work by much earlier Christians than Galileo. Like Duhem, Turner believes that when (in the 13th century) the Church challenged Aristotelianism, it significantly aided the eventual ignition of science. Thus Turner like Duhem attempts to treat science and Christianity as not opposed historically (in a way that the Galileo debacle epitomises) but rather importantly synergistic. (Of course, because history is causally complex, it is possible that there is some truth in the idea of conflict and opposition, and some truth in the idea of synergy. But Turner boldly urges us to dismiss this possibility. He wishes us to repudiate the one view and fulsomely embrace the other.) Duhem's position was still fresh half a century ago and despite its unseemly polemical character it was a welcome challenge to then orthodox historiography of science. Without any doubt, Duhem has taught the history of science some important lessons. Yet in the many decades since he wrote, much critical work has been done. It has been roundly shown that Duhem seriously underestimated not only Galileo's originality and importance but also the great distance conceptually and methodologically between medieval physicists and Descartes (let alone Newton). Moreover, during those many decades historians have connected their understanding of the ignition of science ever more to reaches of inquiry that Duhem, a physicist, scarcely addressed at all -- to biology, alchemy, anatomy and physiology, geology and so on. Duhem's position is by now largely passé, because it is understood to be limited, one-sided, and distorted by its polemical intent. Turner has, however, grasped it very fulsomely and uncritically in this book.

Let me now return to Turner's first A-caused-B claim. A in this case is the replacement of tribe-specific polytheistic thoughtforms by the "universalising" typically monotheistic religions that followed. B is in this case the rise of human aspiration for rationally fathoming the world. I have mentioned that some historians see A and B as concomitant effects of C, the rise of literacy. I want to explore some strengths of this conception and then criticise Turner's claim that A caused B.

The advent of a technology of writing could be expected to have sweeping effects culturally and intellectually. The thought structures of non-literate peoples must serve the art of memory, whereas those of literate peoples are freed of this requirement. Before the invention of writing, art-of-memory requirements seriously limited both the extent of the articulation of thought and the development of social diversity. Prior to the advent of agriculture, general culture was by and large universally shared in a society, because the means of preserving and propagating it was mostly by using the public memory store. Thus the ambient culture of a people as a whole could not become much richer than what could be held (by the arts of memory) in any one individual's mind. Each new member of a society was ultimately inheritor to virtually the entire culture. A skill might not be as fully developed in one member of the society as in the next, but everyone would have known intimately what anyone else in the society could do. The ways of working and being were in this sense universally shared. After the advent of agriculture, specialisms developed, and thus the diversity of society increased. But without any technology of writing the extent of this growth in diversity was severely limited. By the time that writing was invented, societies were pressing the upper limits of the diversity that a non-literate myth-making art-of-memory form for general culture can sustain.

Language prior to literacy needed first and foremost to serve the art of memory, and could not grow in size or complexity beyond limits imposed by this desideratum. Without writing, memory must be employed in order to track the intricacies of language itself. The greater the articulation of language, the greater the demands will be on human memory to track this very intricacy, and the less language will serve to enhance the power and reach of memory. Thus the total vocabulary of a non-literate people typically weighs in at a mere 10,000 words. Yet with a mere 10,000 words a people cannot aim for univocality or specificity. They can afford neither specialist vocabularies nor precision in thought.

Mnemonics cultivate playfulness rather than systematicity of thought. Each of the non-literate people's 10,000 words will be used in many ways, and these ways will be the more helpful to memory the more they playfully create intriguing new connections in thought. No wherewithal will exist for identifying whether a word is being used "standardly" or not. (Literate peoples would use a dictionary; non-literate peoples have no such recourse.) Thus the very distinction between "literal" and "non-literal" uses of words cannot exist without writing. For non-literate peoples, language use has the playfulness of poetry rather than the seriousness of science. The thought forms that are sustained in this circumstance are less an early attempt at science, than its cognitive antithesis.

After the invention of writing, substantially new possibilities of social and intellectual organisation begin to be realised. Technical vocabularies become intellectually affordable. The total number of words in the language grows. Precision becomes possible. Thought structures adapt themselves to new demands of specificity and rational orderliness. Once writing catches on, a people will be challenged to codify in (written) law how in general it wants its social world to be. Legal systems are the more important because of the yawning social diversity that now exists. A tradition will spring up of rationally interpreting the law, i.e. of determining the laws' significance for particular cases. People will thus learn to conceive of order in terms of laws and their application to specific cases. Their society itself will seem to them a somewhat mysterious unity in a diversity. Projecting this idea outward they will form for the first time the idea of nature or cosmos or world, i.e. of the overall unity of the diversity of things. They will be able to conceive of order in the cosmos in terms of the idea of law. Additionally, the rise of writing will affect people's understanding of historical time. A literal record of human history can now be kept. Anecdotes about ancestors need no longer primarily serve a role in the art of memory, whereby skills of contemporary significance are encouraged to survive. With literacy, people can concern themselves with what was the literal truth about history.

A concern about the literal truth links directly to a new and vaulting concern for rational systematicity. What is the literal truth? A belief is literally true if someone would still hold it, in the ideal situation of their having considered every last thing, and systematised their thinking rationally as well as it might be. People personify the ideal of literal truth when they call the all-things-considered, rationally-best-systematised way of thinking "God". Literate peoples can afford to be rationalistic. They can aspire to believe the literal truth. Monotheism is an intellectual symptom that this is their cultural condition.

Thus the rise of literacy can explain a lot both about new religious forms of life and the advent of the cognitive ideals of science. And this explanation cuts across Turner's in many ways. It is questionable whether the new religious forms of life replaced forms of life that could be called "religious" in an identical sense. Turner roundly insists that "tribal" thought-structures are genuine religions (and cosmologies!) but he does not actually justify this point of view. And when Turner calls the tribal thought-structures "faiths", he betrays what is tendentious in his point of view. Faith entails conviction, and a conviction concerns what is literally the case. Just as the thought-structures of non-literate peoples are cognitively very different from science, they are arguably cognitively very different from "faiths". We misunderstand the very purpose of those thought structures if we regard them as attempts to fathom "the world" or "the cosmos". Non-literate peoples typically lack these very concepts. Yet to fathom the world or cosmos is importantly what religions and science aim to do.

Turner suggests that it represents a kind of religious progress for a people to move from tribe-specific polytheistic thought forms to a "universalising" monotheistic religion. Clearly this is tendentious. It depends on the tendentious supposition, criticised above, that the non-literate people's thoughtforms comprise a religion. But it also ignores the obvious point that a "universalising" monotheistic religion would be neither possible nor desirable in a non-literate condition. A people that depended for their very survival and well-being on the public art of memory would not be well served by cognitive aspirations for universal truth, or for systematic ways of thinking about nature, world or cosmos. These aspirations are affordable only to a literate people. Thus, pace Turner, it is not the "progress" of religion that moves a people from the one intellectual circumstance to the other, but a far more pervasive and radical alteration of their overall cultural condition.

Turner of course identifies as further "progress" in religion both the development of "Hebraic cosmology" and its subsequent adjustments by Christians to include, among other things, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Turner's points in this connection about "desacralization" are interesting. He does develop a coherent view of why the cosmology in question -- if it registered with people -- could actually help them to think in ways that would be amenable to science. He also explores some reasons why the cosmologies of the various non-Hebraic "Axial Religions" would be different in this regard. Over against Turner, however, we can question whether the cosmological conceptions of the actual progenitors of science (the likes of, say, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton) were all that "Hebraic" or indeed trinitarian. For what it is worth, Kepler passionately endorsed the doctrine of the Trinity, but Newton passionately rejected it. Galileo seems not to have been exercised about it much at all. Moreover, all these important figures were far more significantly influenced in their personal worldconception by Greek thinkers than by the ambient religion. Alexandre Koyre made an excellent case that Plato stands behind each of the thinkers mentioned in a particularly important way. Can Turner make sense of his assertions psychologically, in the cases of the actual progenitors of science? It is doubtful whether he can and notable that he doesn't try.

For what it is worth, I have always thought of Christianity (with its Trinity, its angels, and even its Satan or beyond him the demons which are ever popular amongst the vulgar) as just about the most polytheistic religion possible that could officially wear the label "monotheistic". I have also wondered whether this helps explain the ill fortune of rational inquiry in the early centuries of the advancement of Christianity. When I think of the preservation and cultivation of ancient learning in the hands of Islamic Arab thinkers during the Christian dark-ages, I hear in my head the way that Islamic people express so forcefully their religious monotheism. Was this what explains why they were interested in rational inquiry into this world, when the Christians to the north and west of them had for the most part descended into comparative darkness? I wonder this, but not with much hope that I could answer my question. I know that it would be enormously difficult to justify the causal claim involved.

Philip Catton lectures in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Canterbury.