Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription

Well this morning, I’d like to talk to you about the origin of science. And of course, if you want to understand something, it’s desirable to know something about its origin. And I emphasize that I’m talking about the origin of modern science because the word science is used in the very general sense. You speak of the science of the ancient peoples, and so on. But I’m specifically talking about modern science. That is, the science which has developed over the last three of four hundred years, first of all in Europe then spreading all over the world. And it has transformed our civilization that we now have means of communication of transport, we have numerous devices to help our daily lives that was not present in any other civilization. And what modern science essentially is, is a detailed knowledge and understanding of the properties of matter expressed in differential equations and I’m speaking mainly of course of physics, which is the most basic of all the sciences and afterwards of course it just spreads out; this knowledge into the other sciences. And this first came into the world in its maturity, although as we shall see it, it had roots earlier in the past. The work of Newton in the 17th century, when he wrote down his three laws of motion and his theory of gravitation, and used those, solved those equations to show the motion of projectiles on the earth and the motions of the moon and the planets. And that was something which was quite new in human history. Detailed mathematical calculations, which enabled you to calculate very exactly the motions of the planets and the moons, and this could be tested to a high degree of numerical accuracy. And then in the subsequent centuries, this work was extended, and in the 19th century, Maxwell wrote down his equations and I was following John yesterday speak of them as beautiful equations, and they are very beautiful equations. Just 4 equations will describe all of electromagnetic phenomena. And then in the 20th century, the discoveries of the atomic world and the nuclear world were brought into the big scheme with the work of Schrodinger and others. And that is quite unique in human history. You look back over the great civilizations of the past, and you find achievements, great achievements in every other area of human endeavor. You find great skills in building magnificent monuments of the past. You find skills in ceramics, in woodwork, in metal work. You have developments of it in the mental world of the historians of ancient Greece, you have playwrights, you have artists. But you have nothing at all comparable to our modern science. And so that is a very remarkable thing which is often not sufficiently appreciated. Why, among all civilizations, do we have modern science? And that is what I want to talk about today. Now if we think about a civilization, I want to begin by asking “Now what characteristics of that civilization are necessary in order for science to begin? In order for science to be born? What must be the features of that civilization?” Well I think, first of all, it is necessary to certainly have a well-developed social structure so that the various activities are divided among different groups of people. So that means that not everybody has to worry day-to-day or hour-to-hour where the next meal is coming from. So there are people who are able to spend their time just thinking about things. And most of us are in that very happy situation. It’s a very great privilege looked over the whole of history to be able to spend our lives just studying and thinking and writing. Then, we need to have, for science to develop, some system of writing, some mathematics because that’s necessary, and some means of communication from one person to another. Now those are what I would call the material conditions of science. And I think that we can see that those are present in all the ancient civilizations, so that’s not going to answer why science arose in our present civilization. I want to suggest, and I would emphasize that of course in this talk, I’m ranging over a wide range of historical and theological and philosophical issues, and I can just suggest a few lines of thought which you might like to follow up yourselves afterwards. And I want to suggest that the reason why

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription science develops or not develops in a particular civilization depends on the beliefs that we have about the material world. That is, we can believe certain things about the material world, and what those beliefs are determined whether science is at all likely to develop or not. Now, I just invite you to think along with me about what sort of beliefs that you have to have in order for science to have a chance at even beginning. First of all, I think we must believe that in some sense, the world is good. That if matter is good. Because if we thought that matter was somehow discreditable or not interesting, not worth our attention, then we would never become scientists. Then I think it’s also important that we should believe, and believe very strongly, that matter is rational and behaves in an ordinary way. So that if I find out anything today, it’s still going to be true tomorrow, it’s still going to be true in other places because science is a knowledge which is independent of place and time. So we have to believe that things behave in an orderly way. If we believe that things were chaotic, as other civilizations, they believe that matter was controlled by various demons who could do this and that, then you could never have any chance of developing science. Then we have to believe that somehow, the aim to understand the material work is a practicable one. That somehow the material work is open to our minds. Because if from, many of you of course have tried to do experiments, and you know unauthorable law of science is that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. So it’s a very discouraging business, and you’ve got to be strongly convinced that in the end, you are going to win through and get somewhere. So a conviction to the world is open to the human mind. And then another belief which I think is necessary is if you discover anything about the material world, then this is not your own secret to cherish but it is something which you’ve got to share with other people. Because science, as we know it now, has been built up over the centuries of the labors of thousands of men and women who have freely shared their knowledge with each other. So those are some of the beliefs which I think are necessary and I think we can see just by introspection. Now, just one important belief that concerns the rationality of the world, the orderliness of the world, and that is we must, I think, believe in a particular type of order. There are 2 types of possibilities there. First of all, the order could be a necessary order. That is, that the order in the world cannot be other than it is. And if we believe that, then we are likely to say well since it’s the only possible, it’s rather like mathematics, all I need to do is sit in my study and think and I will be able to develop [physics just in the same way as I can develop mathematics. What we must believe is that the order in nature is another type which is called a contingent order. That is, it could be otherwise. There are various possible orders of nature. Various ways in which the world could be arranged and designed, but we don’t know that in advance and the only way to do that and to find out about it is to make experiments. So that is a special type of belief in the order of nature. That it is certainly orderly, but a contingent it could be otherwise. So, those, I think, are some of the beliefs which we must have in order for science to begin. And they must, of course, be spread throughout the whole of the civilization. And what I want to ask here is how do these beliefs come to be so firmly built into the European mind and not into the minds of the people in other civilizations. If you look at those other civilizations, which is a vast task, of course, you find that those beliefs are not present. Some are present, others are not present, and so you can understand why science didn’t develop in those ancient civilizations. One of the most brilliant of the ancient civilizations was that of Greece. And they certainly made a very important start in many respects. Particularly in mathematics. As you know, Euclid and several other Greek mathematicians developed these ideas of mathematics. And one of the great contributions of the Greeks was that they showed how to ask the right questions and that’s a very important first step is to

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription ask the right question. Afterwards, then, you can try to find the right answer but if you never ask the right question, of course you’re not going to get anywhere. And they asked questions like “if I start with a piece of matter and cut it into two and cut it again and again and again, can I go on forever?” That is, is matter continuous? Or do I come in the end to a little piece which is such that I cannot cut it? And that means that what we call atom, the Greek for “what cannot be cut.” They had, however, no idea of how to answer that question but at least they posed the question. Now one of the greatest of the Greek Philosophers of nature was Aristotle, and he created a vast scheme of knowledge which reigned over every field of knowledge including the humanities and also the sciences. He was a brilliant biologist and made very accurate observations which were not superseded in many cases until the invention of the microscope many centuries later. But for the material world, he wanted to make a theory of the material world that was logical and followed from fundamental principles and he used a lot of observation and he developed a scheme which is still has many features that are in accord with our common sense. That is, that the earth is in the center and the sun goes round the earth and we still, of course, talk about the sun rising and not about the earth rotating. And he thought that he could intuit these fundamental principles. That is, he knew that if you had the idea of a triangle, for example, then from that clear idea you can deduce many of the properties of triangles. And he thought he could do the same for matter, and that of course is a mistake because matter is not open to the human mind in that particular way. He also undervalued the importance of precise measurements and mathematics and his sort of argument that he had was well, there are obviously two typed of matter. The terrestrial matter around us that is always changing and is corruptible, and there is another type of matter which we see in the heavens; the celestial matter in which the planets and stars are made. This is perfect matter and is always incorruptible and unchangeable. Well that’s a first guess; it turned out to be not correct. But he thought that well since the celestial matter is the most perfect form of matter, therefore it must move in the most perfect way and the most perfect way is a circle. So he then said that the paths of the planets must be circles. That was a sort of reasoning that he had. And he also believed that the world was eternal. Now, these beliefs about matter were such as to prevent the development of physics for about 2,000 years and they had to be broken before modern physics could begin. So he was a very great biologist, but he was a disaster as a physicist. And all my friends in the humanities get very angry when I say this, but I emphasize that he was a very great man in so many fields of knowledge. So now, that meant that Greek science, although it was a brilliant beginning, it was a still birth of failure and in the end it petered out and didn’t develop into modern science. So where did the imputers come? And it came from a very unlikely quarter. It came from a group of nomads in the Fertile Crescent, and it was dominated at that time by the mighty empires of Egypt, and Babylon, and Syria whose monuments still amaze us today to look at the pyramids or some of the sculptures of the Syrians. And squashed between these mighty empires was a small group, the Israelites, who were again and again conquered and carried off into captivity, but they held firm to their belief in one God, one all-powerful God and that was in stark contrast at these polytheistic and complicated myths of the Assyrians and the Egyptians. And they had this firm view that everything was created by this one God and was given as properties by that one God. And they stuck to that belief throughout their history, and so we can then see in the writings of the Israelites, the Old Testament, and I would emphasize that the title of this lecture should be more accurately stated as the Judeo Christian origin of science. And if you look into the Old Testament, you find in the first chapter of Genesis that God looked upon all that he had made and he saw that it was

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription good. So that was the first belief that is necessary for science. That was affirmed and reaffirmed throughout the Old Testament. And then all matter was created by God. That is again a very firm Judeo- Christian belief. Everything is made is made by God and given its properties by God. And since he was a rational and orderly being, then the matter also has the order and rationality of God himself. And it’s interesting to see what sort of order and rationality because we believe that God is rational so the world is rational, but we also believe that God is free. And this means that he could have created the world in this was or that way, or he could have decided he didn’t want to create it at all. He is self sufficient. In fact, that is rather a mystery why he bothered to create us all, but anyway he did and so we’re here now. But the importance there is in holding these two beliefs about God. That is that he is rational and also he is free, in a sort of dynamic tension. And I think it’s a very good illustration of the fact that subtle issues in Theology are of vital importance. Because some people say well because theology is all write theologians and theologians can spend their time writing fat books, but what is important is to be good.’ Well I’m not saying that it’s not important to be good, but it’s also important to get your theology right. And in this case, it’s vital for science because if you tip the balance one way or the other, you destroy science. If you emphasize the rationality of God and forget about his freedom, then you have a necessary world and therefore no science. If on the other hand, you emphasize the freedom of God and forget about his rationality, then you have a chaotic world. A world that is just dependent on the will of God from instant to instant, and therefore again you have no science. It’s only when you keep these two beliefs about the freedom and rationality of God in a creative tension that you can have science. And then again, in the first chapter of Genesis, we are commanded to have dominion over the Earth and to have dominion over the land and the sea and the creatures therein. And dominion of course, as you know, doesn’t mean a dictatorship but a loving careful stewardship. And if we are commanded to have dominion over it, we can do that only by understanding it. And so this tells us that the world is open to our human mind. That science is a practical endeavor. And then again, the other belief that I mentioned that the knowledge that we have, that we gain must be freely shared, you can find that in the book of wisdom. That she is a treasure above gold and silver and her riches I hide not. So that is a direct command that we should share our knowledge and not just keep it to ourselves. And so we find, then, in the Old Testament, and you find the same beliefs reiterated in the New Testament, you find all these beliefs which we saw by just thinking about things are essential for the development of science. You’ll find them all in the Judeo-Christian revelation. Now the incarnation of Christ was of decisive importance for this development. First of all, because by taking flesh and becoming man Christ still further ennobled matter. That matter already declared to be good was not ennobled by the incarnation. And so this showed the nobility of matter, and in that sense Christianity is a very materialistic religion in the sense that it values matter highly. Of course, it doesn’t go on to say, as materialists do, that there is nothing else but matter. That is, of course, a gross error. And the spiritual realm is much more important than the material realm, but the material realm is itself of great importance. And the other important consequence for science of the incarnation was its effect on the concept of time. Now the ancient civilizations all had a cyclic view of time, which is very strange to us. But if you read about the civilizations in China and India, even Ancient Greece, even old Aristotle believed in cyclic time. And that that means is that after a very long time, ages and ages and ages, everything comes back to the same point as before and so that time just goes round and round and round. And to us this is an extraordinarily strange idea but it was present in all ancient civilizations, and of course it’s a very

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription debilitating idea. Because if you think, ‘well everything’s happened before and everything is going to happen again, why do I bother?’ And that cyclic view of time was decisively broken by the incarnation of Christ, which of course can only happen once. And so at one stroke, those dreary cycles were broken and so we have a new idea of time. A linear view of time. An alpha omega. An idea of progress. And that of course, again, is essential to the scientific attitude. And so, with the incarnation of Christ, we had a reinforcement of these views of the material world which are necessary for the development of science. Now science didn’t immediately spring into existence because the early Christians, as you know, were a rather hunted minority living in catacombs and expecting the imminent coming of Christ. And so that things didn’t really get going for quite a time, but in those early Christian centuries the intense discussions of the nature of Christ and whether he was man and God or man but not God and so on, Various heresies came along and now and again, the church thought things were getting a bit out of hand, and so we must have a council and the bishops got together and decided authoritatively what the true Christian faith was. And one of the most famous of those councils was Nicaea in 325. And they drew up the Nicene Creed which we still recite today. It is a summary of the Christian faith. Now that Nicene Creed has many beliefs in it which are essential for the development of science. First of all, the creed begins by saying “I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth.” So that means creator of everything. So first of all, there is this idea that God created everything. And this, then, goes on to say “And his son Jesus Christ, who was the only begotten son of the father” and that again is very important because only Christ is begotten. That is, shares in the substance of the father whereas everything else is made. And so that means that the material world is made, is created by God and is separate and different from God. And the early views that are found very frequently in the ancient world that says that in some way the world is part of God, and that is inimical to science. And then there is another collection of views, which you find in the ancient world, that the world is somehow a battle ground between good and evil. And that again is rather inimical to science because it means that matter is rather unpredictable and chaotic. And that also is ruled out by the Nicene Creed when it says that everything was created through Christ, and therefore everything must be good and is not divided between the good and evil elements. Everything is created through Christ. So that those early councils were emphasizing, of course, truths about Christ and creation but came with it were ideas which were essential to science. Now as the time went on, the Roman Empire fell and there was the dark ages when things went into barbarism. And nothing very much could get going. It was only in the middle ages, particularly the high middle ages, that is between about 1200 and 1500. There was a stable Christian society, that is a society which was impregnated through and through by Christian beliefs. And so this was the first time in human history when you had a society which had all those views and beliefs about matter on which science is based. And so we can then see that the Christian revelation had a great deal to do with the development of modern science. I mentioned some of the ideas of ancient Greece were essential but the Christian revelation gave the extra beliefs which were essential. Now what about the ancient Greeks and their beliefs? Those beliefs were enshrined in various manuscripts. They came into the hands of the Arabic civilization, later the Muslims, and they were translated into Arabic and the Muslims developed a very high civilization and in the several 9th centuries they were by far the most advanced in pre-scientific work. They had developed mathematics, they had developed various parts of medicine, and they developed astronomy to a very high degree. They had astronomical observatories right across their empire, from Caudiper to Baghdad. But somehow, the impetus of the Muslim

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription civilization, again was not continued. And it’s an interesting historical reflection. That the Muslim civilization had a 500 year start on us, and just think what would happen if that had continued. It’s an interesting question to which we can come back later as to why that civilization didn’t develop modern science. What actually happened was that in Spain, where the Muslim and Christian civilizations tended to interact, many of the writings of the ancient Greece were translated from the Arabic into Latin by people like Isidore of Seville and Maimonides and were eagerly collected by the universities which the church was just founding in Europe. Were thinking now around about the 13th century where the universities, the first one, was founded was in Bologna in Italy and there was Prodiver and Paris was one of the earliest universities; Prague and after that Oxford. And much of the early work and discussions took place in the University of Paris and they were all very excited to find these writings of the ancient Greek philosophers of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. It opened up a new wealth of philosophical reflection, new terms, new ideas, and so there were many great theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus who labored to rethink the Christian revelation in the light of using the new ideas and concepts that the ancient Greeks had first of all formulated and so it was a time of great intellectual ferment and excitement at that time. And the prestige of Aristotle at that time was enormous, and the way that the philosophers generally taught their classes was first of all to read out of passes of Aristotle and then say well what now does it mean and what can we learn from it and can we improve on it and so on. So the classes in philosophy were devoted to the study and elaboration of Aristotle. But they weren’t slaves of Aristotle. If Aristotle said anything that was contrary to Christian revelation, then they unhesitatingly departed from Aristotle. One example of that was that Aristotle believed that the world was eternal. And the Christian philosophers thought about this and said that it’s not actually possible to prove whether the world is eternal or not, but we know by revelation that the world is created. God created a heaven and earth. This means that it was created at a particular time in human history, and in that way they departed from Aristotle. And many other ways, for example, if God created everything then why should there be two types of matter; the celestial and the terrestrial. And it doesn’t prove it completely but it gives the idea that perhaps they are of the same character since they both come from God. So gradually over the years, the ideas of Aristotle that had prevented the development of physics were removed and the way was open to the development of modern science. And if one would try to pinpoint a particular time when science developed, and by that I mean the first step to physics, this was in the work of a philosopher in Paris called Jean Buridan and he was very interested in the problem of motion. And that is the most fundamental of all physical phenomena. Physics starts with a study of motion and if you don’t get that right, then you can’t make any progress. And Aristotle had written about motion and they had a big problem about that because he had a, well what he thought was a fairly obvious philosophical statement, that whatever is moved is moved by a mover. That is, if you see something move, then something is moving it. And that sounds like it’s pretty obvious. But you get into difficulties if then you say, now look, when you throw a stone, of course there’s moving moved by a mover when it’s in your hand. But then when you let go of it, where is the mover. Where has the mover gone to? Why doesn’t the stone just drop to the ground? And they puzzled over that for ages. They thought it was a very big problem, and they had some very ingenious suggestions that it somehow to do with the medium. That you impart some sort of motion to the air and as the stone goes forward, it pushes the air aside and the air comes running around to the back and pushes it on… and things like that. Well I don’t think to do injustice that Aristotle really believed that sort of thing, but that was the

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription best they could think of. But Jean Buridan was thinking about that in the context of the Christian belief in creation and he said well perhaps, when God created the world, he gave every particle of matter an impetus whereby it goes on moving and so this gives, then, some way of beginning to understand why the stone goes flying on after it leaves your hand because you’ve given that stone something which was called impetus. And he even went so far as to say that the amount of impetus depends on the matter in the stone, the mass of the stone, and also obviously it depends on the velocity. That is, the more matter in has, the more velocity, the greater the impetus. And so he had, essentially, what we now know as momentum and all physics students know that this is the product of the mass and the velocity. He made that first important step in the understanding of motion. And that was later on taken up and refined and became Newton’s first law of motion. And so we can, I think, see that the beginning of physics, if you are going to try and find one point which is the beginning of physics, then that is the moment when Buridan developed his concept of impetus. And then the motion of bodies through the air was subsequently studied by other philosophers. There was the pupil of Jean Buridan, Nicholas Arem, wrote huge books on all these things; motion in the earth and in the sun and the celestial motion. And then the person who made a great breakthrough for that was Galileo and he was the first to try and put numbers to it. That’s what all must have to do all the time in physics is to make measurements and put numbers. And he said, well I am going to just see the relationship between the distance and the time when I drop something. You know if you drop something, it falls to the ground. And then he was asking himself now, in a certain time, how far does it fall? What is the relationship between the distance fallen and the time. And he made some very ingenious experiments and he was able to show that the distance falling is proportional to the square of the time. And this was the first time that some definite law of motion was formulated. There were other laws of motion which were formulated actually in a school of natural philosophers in Merton College, in Oxford a little bit earlier. And then, later on Kepler, an astronomer, he was thinking about the motions of the planets and one of the questions he wanted to study well was what is the motion and what is the orbit of the planets, and can we determine it? Unfortunately, there had been a previous astronomer called Tycho Brahe in Denmark, and he was one of these extremely useful scientists who spend all their life patiently measuring things. He measured and measured and measured for 30 years. He measured the positions of the planets and the stars, and he was able in some way to get the support of the king of Denmark who built him a very large observatory. Now this was the time before the telescopes, so he had enormous wooden contraptions which rotated and he cited along these wooden things in order to find out the positions of the planets and the stars. And he probably made the most accurate measurements that could be made before the development of the telescope. And he had all this massive writings but he didn’t do anything with it. He just said ‘I’ve made all of these measurements.’ But Kepler came along and said well this is a great treasure. It holds all sorts of secrets about the motions of the planets, and I’m going to try and unlock those secrets. And so he said, I’m going to start off and try to find the orbit of the planet Mars. And so he got all these measurements like Tycho Brahe and he of course, firmly following Aristotle, that the orbit of the planet mars was a circle, so he tried to determine the circle which represents the order and orbit of the planet mars. And of course, in these days you didn’t have any computers, you didn’t have any visual displays of electronic computation, he had to do it all with…. I don’t even know whether they had pencils… so quill pens…. And anyway, it was all terribly laborious business. And he labored on and on and on in tremendous persistence and he spent 20 years laboring on and he still couldn’t succeed in fitting the orbit of mars to

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Seattle Pacific University – iTunes U Transcription a circle. Now if you draw out the orbit of mars on a piece of paper, it looks very close to a circle. It’s only if you lay a ruler across it in 2 different directions that you find that it’s actually not quite a circle. But he managed to fit a circle to it within ten minutes of arc, which is quite accurate. But Tycho’s measurements were accurate to two or three minutes of arc. And many people will say, what that’s good enough let’s publish the paper! Now let’s go on and do something else. But Kepler wasn’t like that, and he believed that he was, in his work, he was finding out about the work of the creator and if the creator made everything to behave exactly in a certain way. That is, the creator gave everything definite properties in accordance in which they go on behaving definitely and exactly in accordance with the will of the creator. And so if you have a theory of the world, it’s got to fit the measurements exactly. Of course, allowing for the slight uncertainties of the measurements. And so it just wasn’t good enough to fit it within 10 minutes of arc if the measurements were accurate within 2 minutes of arc. And so he was in despair and he suddenly thought, well the psychological pressure of the great Aristotle was still strong at that time. But he had the courage to say that it wasn’t a circle, so let’s try something else. And he tried an ellipse, which is a sort of squashed circle. And that fitted perfectly. So he had his first law of planetary motion that the planets move around the sun in elliptical orbits. And he also discovered other things about the motion of the planets around the sun. First of all, that the radius factor, that is the line from the sun to the planet traces out equal areas in equal time so that if it’s a little bit closer, it goes faster, and if it’s a bit further away it goes slower. And he also found the relationship between the average radius of the orbit and the time it takes for it to go around. And you know the outer planets like Saturn and Jupiter take a very long time. They’ve got periods of many, many years whereas the interior planets go around much faster. And he showed that the time and the period of the radius are the cube of one is proportional to the square of the other. So those Keplerstry laws, they were imperical laws but they were very important of course, and he had found them out by persistence. And when he wrote all of this up, you know most of the time scientists are pretty quiet and objective about these things. But he did permit himself a little bit of emotion and when he finished writing up the first work, and he said “Oh the glory of the day that these mysteries have now been revealed to be after 22 years of scribbling away” and with his… whatever he used to scribble with. So he was very persistent, but he like most scientists, was human as well. So that is how, you see, once again, it was a Christian belief that God had made everything exactly. That was the driving force. I mean it needs a tremendous psychological force to drive you to work on one problem for 22 years and also, to overcome the psychological barriers of the Aristotle’s dictum that the orbits were circular. And, of course you know, the rest of the story that Newton put forward his theories of gravitation and then his three laws of motion. And now it’s an exercise for students to prove from those laws of motion of Newton that Kepler’s laws hold that there is the moving in ellipses, and that there are these relationships between the times and the distances and the areas and so on. So you can deduce logically from by-by mathematics. From the differential equations which represent Newton’s laws, you can deduce the empirical laws of Kepler. And that shows, for the first time as I had mentioned in the beginning, that science then had come to maturity at that point.

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