Science and Beliefs

From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700–1900

Matthew D. Eddy, David M. Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351901932
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The years between 1700 and 1900 witnessed a fundamental transition in attitudes towards science, as earlier concepts of natural philosophy were replaced with a more modern conception of science. This process was by no means a simple progression, and the changing attitudes to science was marked by bitter arguments and fundamental differences of opinion, many of which are still not entirely resolved today. Approaching the subject from a number of cultural angles, the essays in this volume explore the fluid relationship between science and belief during this crucial period, and help to trace the development of science as an independent field of study that did not look to religion to provide answers to the workings of the universe. Taking a broadly chronological approach, each essay in this book addresses a theme that helps illuminate these concerns and highlights how beliefs - both religious and secular - have impinged and influenced the scientific world. By addressing such key issues such as the ongoing debate between Christian fundamentalists and followers of Darwin, and the rise of 'respectable atheism', fascinating insights are provided that help to chart the ever-shifting discourse of science and beliefs.

Chapter 1
Science and Beliefs

David M. Knight

Introduction

In the summer of 1960 I was at Oxford, just finishing my degree examinations in chemistry and wondering how to spend my fourth year – Oxford being then a pioneer in the system of requiring from science undergraduates a year’s work on a research project before graduation. My apprenticeship to science, involving boring corks, blowing glass, and watching, sucking, sniffing, touching and even occasionally tasting odd things,¹ had been character-building and sometimes enthralling: but I knew that for me it was time to stop, as it had been for Oliver Sacks much earlier in his life.² My sympathy and capacity for mathematics and logic were not such as to make a purely theoretical project possible. So I was sent along to have a word with Alistair Crombie, who taught History of Science, and had recently arranged for refugees from the laboratory to spend their year under his supervision. At that point, I had little feeling for history of chemistry: we had had some lectures on the discovery of the ‘rare earth’ (lanthanide) metals, but this confirmed the notion of most of us that such antiquarian activity should be left to the superannuated. But Alistair was sympathetic and listened: and when I said that I supposed I’d like to know what had made some great scientist tick, suggested that I should work on Humphry Davy’s electro-chemical researches.

Alistair was an expert on the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and by training (in Australia) a physiologist: so his supervision was to be by benign neglect, an excellent system when it works. He put me straight about primary and secondary sources, told me to keep notes on sheets of paper of the same size, and advised me when writing not to quote too much. He gave me an introduction to the distinguished retired engineer Sir Harold Hartley, who had grown up in the nineteenth century and was wonderfully helpful to me as to other young historians of science; and who was himself working on Davy, writing a biography,³ which was an excellent book when it came out. But Sir Harold was concerned lest I made science out to be an intellectual game (Alistair was sure that its history was a part of general intellectual history, after all); and confessed to me that he could make nothing of Davy’s posthumously published Consolations in Travel. To have a mentor who gave warnings like that, and who drew attention to what he wasn’t interested in, was a great and rare boon. Enthralled, I found myself one day in Green Park, walking like Prospero a turn or two to still my beating mind, after finding something in the Royal Institution’s library that confirmed a hunch about Davy’s beliefs concerning matter. I duly wrote an undergraduate dissertation, and was fortunate enough to be awarded a studentship for three years, to take a Diploma in History and Philosophy of Science and thus complete my basic education, and to write a doctoral thesis on chemical atomic theory in the first 70 years or so of the nineteenth century. I was hooked; and at the end of that time I was extraordinarily lucky again in getting a new lectureship at Durham.

What’s History of Science About, Then?

In 1960, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, about which Herbert Butterfield had rung the bell that called such wits as Alexandre Koyré, Bernard Cohen, Rupert Hall, Derek Whiteside and others together, was the central preoccupation of historians of science, then in close alliance very often with philosophers: history and philosophy of science at that time generally seemed one subject, with different aspects, rather than Siamese twins crying out to be separated (the enthusiastic Rom Harré in Oxford exemplified this). Alistair had indeed been engaged in pushing the start of the revolution back, all the way to the twelfth-century renaissance; and behind that was the science of the ancient Greeks, and the Babylonians whose theory-free mathematical devices were particularly appealing when logical positivism reigned, especially in Oxford, which was then the centre of things in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Astronomy was thus especially attractive: it seemed to have made the running, provided the model of what a science should be like, and it had certainly aroused the ambitions of bright young men like Davy, for example, to be the Newton of chemistry.

In fact, the history of chemistry like the history of medicine was still largely in the hands of retired practitioners, who had not been warned of the dangers of Whig history (that invention of the Scottish Enlightenment⁴), and whom we young Turks despised, with the confidence of youth and professionalism, as amateurs. Allen Debus was a lone voice pointing to the enormous importance of Paracelsus, not nearly so welcome in the pantheon as William Harvey or Robert Boyle (who was perceived, in the eighteenth-century manner, as a mechanical philosopher), and to medicine as the nursemaid of chemistry as well as other sciences. Important things, as we began to see, had no doubt got lost in the received view. But another feature of concentrating on the Scientific Revolution was that it seemed to indicate that the great men of that time, like the Fathers of the Church or the Founding Fathers of the USA, had laid down a pattern that would with minor amendment endure for ever. A scientific understanding of the world would follow from the proper application of method worked out by Isaac Newton and his predecessors: they left queries, but had sketched the picture which subsequent generations, petty men peeping about in their shadow, would fill in and colour. The nineteenth century would therefore be a bit dull, a bit of a come down; and yet those of us busy there knew it wasn’t.

Then, in July 1961 under Alistair’s auspices a great conference was held in Oxford under the title ‘Scientific Change’. There, Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions was written but not yet published, gave a talk which electrified us graduate students, there as dogbodies to carry briefcases, check on the magic lanterns, and shepherd the eminent professors into the dining hall or lecture theatre. He spoke about dogma, and its essential role in science: his ‘normal science’ was indeed closer than many wished to painting by numbers; but that was not the most important thing. Kuhn had a new way of looking at belief, bringing the church scientific into line with other churches. Science was not some disinterested and isolated search after truth, free of metaphysics and manifestly a good thing in a naughty world: it was one human activity among others, not an austere model of rationality. Moreover, there had not been just one Scientific Revolution: the history of science was like the history of France, prone to revolutions (there had been one there recently, after all, leading to the Fifth Republic). Each Scientific Revolution was associated with new beliefs about the world, and with new language – for what might have seemed positive knowledge was theory laden, and only made its way through rhetoric or other (maybe more sinister) means of persuasion as the scientific community (or its younger members) was converted to the new way of seeing and believing. Science and beliefs were inseparable. This was very promising for us of the new generation, moving forward in time from the epoch of Newton and finding a new world of specialists.

Moving Forward into the Nineteenth Century

A lot had been written about the science of the nineteenth century, especially with the centenary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1959; but much of this had been done from a twentieth-century perspective, looking back and finding precursors or prematurity⁵ rather than coming forward and therefore focusing on scientific change, and thus on a fuller context. Those of us coming from history and philosophy of science, much stimulated in Oxford by Rom, found with delight John Theodore Merz’s History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century. The first two volumes of this mighty work, freighted with footnotes which often dwarf the text, were concerned with science and had been written just as the nineteenth century was ending by a well-educated electrical engineer (whose splendid library is now in the University of Newcastle). Cutting across ordinary categories, mixing institutional history with intellectual and personal, this was an escape from history after the fashion of the scientific review-article, with its bloodless manner, passive voice, and mainstream, progressive focus. Merz, in his way, did history of science in the grand manner. Others must have rediscovered him also, because in 1965 he was reprinted in paperback. There are ways in which later writing like mine on nineteenth-century science is (further) footnotes to Merz.

I read Merz’s work in the library of the Oxford Union, in faded Victorian splendour where one could peruse crumbling books while seated in crumbling leather-covered chairs with brass bookrests, toasted by a brazen electric fire. And there also were William Whewell’s volumes on the History and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, with categories again cutting across the taxonomies that I had got used to, and powerfully underlining the connections of science with big ideas, and with beliefs about the world. There, too, I discovered the Bridgewater Treatises; but at that point I had also been reading some Karl Barth,⁶ and while I inwardly digested William Prout’s volume because it contained his notions about atoms (along with the function of digestion, and meteorology), the whole project of natural theology seemed Panglossian. It was hard at that time to enter into that context, although its importance was more and more clearly underlined⁷ as I read more science, especially that written for, or spoken to, a general audience. William Kirby’s curious Trinitarian natural history (like the Quinarian system of William Swainson, his fellow disciple of William Jones of Nayland) made his Bridgewater Treatise particularly odd; Charles Babbage’s unauthorised volume was odd in a different way; William Buckland’s fold-out frontispiece, over a metre long to indicate the extent of geological history, was striking; but mostly they were not, I felt, for me. Most people felt the same, and when belatedly I did feel like acquiring copies they could be picked up quite cheaply.

That interest in what made people tick led towards the region of what was then seen as mere biography, lending at best human interest and verisimilitude to what would otherwise have been a bald tale of experiment and inference as the truth gained ground upon the darkness. As an undergraduate, I got the chance to hold forth to engineers at the Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University. When (on leaving the Royal Artillery) I went up to Oxford in 1957, Sputnik had just been launched, and Charles Snow had delivered his famous lecture on ‘Two Cultures’: these things meant that there was lots of money for higher education, especially in science, and great concern that scientists and engineers should have a liberal element in their training. This one hour a week was what I was supposed to deliver: I found I enjoyed being on my hind legs, and discovered that the students (reluctant heroes, sleepy at the end of a long day) responded best to history with the people left in, and their hopes and beliefs as far as possible explored. Similarly, Durham University, stimulated by Stephen Toulmin down the road at Leeds, had decided to have a historian of science to go with their philosopher of science in the Philosophy department, but had very little idea of what such a person would actually do: it was wonderful to have such a free hand.

Teaching History of Science

For many years, all the history of science there was formed a part of courses in History and Philosophy of Science, shared with Barry Gower; and we worked out systems of lectures and tutorials, with students presenting essays, where the generality of philosophy and the particularity of history were (we hoped) kept in balance. We attracted a number of students from the science faculty, and when the university in the 1980s launched a Natural Sciences degree we got more students, and often very good ones indeed. For that degree we needed a further, new course – or module, as they came to be called as the ideas of le Corbusier entered the world of educational theory, that resting place of obsolete notions. I had taken over from a colleague a course of lectures delivered to students in classics and theology, who thus got history of science in place of history of philosophy: but as departmental boundaries hardened with new budgeting systems, such interdisciplinary activity became more difficult – other departments couldn’t be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• 1 Science and Beliefs
• PART I Beliefs Within Science
• PART II Beliefs Underlying Science
• Conclusion
• Index