Intelligible Design: A Realistic Approach To The Philosophy And History Of Science

A Realistic Approach to the Philosophy and History of Science

Julio A Gonzalo, Manuel M Carreira

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9789814447621
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book provides realistic answers to hotly debated scientific topics: Science is about quantitative aspects of natural realities (physical, chemical, biological) but it is the result of human intellectual inquiry and therefore not “per se” materialistic.

This book, with contributions from experts in physics, cosmology, mathematics, engineering, biology and genetics, covers timely and relevant topics such as the origin of the universe, the origin of life on Earth, the origin of man (intelligent life) and the origin of science.

Contents:

• Modern Science in Historical Perspective:
  • On the Origins of Modern Science (Julio A Gonzalo)
  • The Post-Renaissance Revolution: The New Science (Manuel M Carreira)
  • Frank Sherwood Taylor: The Man Who was Converted by Galileo (John Beaumont)
  • The Limits of Science (Manuel Alfonseca)
  • On the Intelligibility of Quantum Mechanics (Julio A Gonzalo)
  • Uncertainty, Incompleteness, Chance, and Design (Fernando Sols)
  • A Finite, Open and Contingent Universe (Julio A Gonzalo)
• On the Origin and Development of Life:
  • A Brief History of Evolutionary Thought (Thomas B Fowler and Daniel Kuebler)
  • Life's Intelligible Design (Manuel Alfonseca)
  • What are the Contributions of Genetics to the Understanding of Life? (Nicolas Jouve)
  • On the Human Genome in Contrast to the Great Apes Genome (Nicolás Jouve)
  • On the Evolution Controversy (Thomas B Fowler)
  • On the Riddle of Man's Origin (Manuel M Carreira)
  • On Science, History and Free Will (Lucía Guerra-Menéndez)

Readership: General public and undergraduates interested in philosophy and history of science.

Part I. Modern Science
in Historical Perspective

Notre Dame de Paris: Western Facade

1.On the Origins of Modern Science

Julio A. Gonzalo

Like the origins of many branches of learning, the origins of historiography can be traced to early Greek authors: Herodotus (487?–425?), Xenophon (430?–355?) and Polybius (203?–120?), all of them consummate analysts and narrators.

The question “What is the meaning of history?” may make sense for modern Western men, but not for Polybius , who better formulated the question. In telling the story of the Roman conquest of Greece, he put the future on the side of the Romans (who in his eyes were nothing but a nation of barbarians), though only for a while. According to Polybius, the Romans would ultimately go down and be defeated, because no dominant society at any time is above the most basic law of history. For Polybius, and for the ancient Greeks, this law was the law of the wheel: the inevitable sequence of events in which birth, progress, decay and death follow each other endlessly in human affairs.

In Sanskrit the word swastika is a compound of the words su and asti, which mean, respectively, well and being. It is curious that symbol (the swastika) was most popular with the Greeks (then decaying) and with the Romans (then on the rise) when Polybius wrote. When the Nazis adopted the swastika as their emblem, they were consistent in saying that the New Europe at which they arrived would not last for ever.

Many centuries later, the Chinese, who had to their credit the inventions of block-printing, gunpowder and magnetic needles (Francis Bacon wrongly saw them as the beginning of science) could have sailed East carrying small cannons to colonize the new world before the Spaniards arrived to Western Mexico and California.

This could have happened, as S. L. Jaki points out, if the Chinese had been truly scientific, in the sense of being able to develop their inventions in a systematic and consistent manner. History might have been very different in that case.

But history became global only in the sixteen and seventeen centuries when it became Western history, first with the ships of Spain and Portugal, then with those of England, Holland and France. History, for the last three hundred years has been on the side of the West, and, until recently, serious challenges to Western global domination, like those of Soviet Russia and Communist China, have been based mostly upon the availability of western technology. Only recently, with China catching up with Western science and technology is this beginning to seriously challenge Western superiority. At the same time the West, both America and Europe, have begun to suffer internal problems of their own that weaken their prospects of superiority in the future.

The development of a fully advanced science, however, has taken place only once in world history. When Aristotle’s work became known in full in the West, in the late thirteen century, Western Europe was deeply Christian. She was known as Christendom. Then, at the newly established universities, Dominican and Franciscan teachers, among others, thought everything knowable (“omnis res scibile”) from a truly Christian perspective. The Catholic Church was the driving force. The past history of the world was finite, in this perspective, and the world itself, rather than eternal and infinite, was finite, open and contingent. This was something inconceivable in the Greek perspective. The idea that everything in motion had to have an absolute starting point was then and there the natural starting point of science, a science in which one discovery generates another discovery, and science becomes a self-sustaining intellectual venture. As we will point out below, Jean Buridan, professor of natural philosophy at the Sorbonne of Paris around 1330, can be considered the first modern physicist. He introduced the concepts of inertial motion and momentum, which paved the way, through Copernicus , Galileo and Kepler , to the “Principia Mathematica” of Newton which, by setting forth a definitive text of Mechanics, opened the way to future developments in Optics, Electricity, Thermodynamics, and Modern Physics.

In his commentaries to Aristotle Buridan voiced a profound disagreement with the Philosopher. He rejected the notion of the eternity of the universe and of all motion in it, including the motion of the stars, as incompatible with the fundamental truths of Christian Revelation. He also offered a penetrating speculation about the motion of celestial bodies. Buridan formulated then and there Newton’s first Law of Motion, which is tantamount to making the first step, conceptually, but also historically, in modern science. His statement was copied in countless manuscripts, which Buridan’s students carried all over Europe, from Salamanca to Krakow. This statement, or its equivalent, according to Stanley L. Jaki, was well known to Galileo and Descartes, who are still credited with formulation of the first of Newton’s Law by many contemporary historians of science. The rediscovery of Buridan’s first step in modern science was made at the beginning of the 20th century by a relatively young French professor at Bordeaux, Pierre Duhem, then 45 years old and a widower, who already had an international reputation as expert in thermodynamics and continuous mechanics. Until then Duhem had taken for granted that there had been no “science” in the Middle Ages, and that the theological mentality at that time was hostile to creative scientific thought. This derived in part, from the hostility of the leaders of the French Enlightenment to anything Christian. But when he traced the concept of virtual velocity further and further back in history, beyond Galileo to his teachers, Benedetti and Stevin, and then to Cardan, while investigating the latter’s cryptic reference to a certain Jordanus, Duhem discovered the work of Jean Buridan and his disciple Nicole Oresme.

The simplistic popular notion that science is hostile to religion, fueled by not a few well written popular scientific books (those of Sagan, Asimov, etc) is simply not true. Exactly the contrary: modern science had its origin in medieval Christian Europe, as meticulously documented by Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) in his monumental work “Le systeme du monde” (A. Hermans et Fils: Paris, 1913…), and further expounded and developed in numerous books and publications by Stanley L. Jaki (1924–2009), one of the foremost historians of science of the twentieth century.

As Jaki recounts in detail in The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin, some enlightened European freethinkers who were contemporaries of Voltaire, after reading extensive reports on China by Jesuit missionaries, were impressed by Chinese achievements in ethics and moral philosophy, architecture, engineering, arts and crafts, but very little in science. The work of Fr. Louis Lecompte SJ, “Nouveaux Memoires sur l’état present de la Chine” (1696) was composed of fourteen long letters to various civil and ecclesiastic French dignitaries. It was soon translated into English, German and Dutch, and covered many topics on Chinese geography, politics, history, literature, arts and crafts, as well as science. The science that Fr. Lecompte had in mind to make a comparison with Chinese science was Euclid’s and Ptolemy’s science. However, at the time, European science had just achieved full maturity in the Principia Mathematica of Newton. This maturity had its roots in medieval Christendom, in the seminal work of Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme, whose pioneering ideas provided fertile ground for the decisive developments of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and, finally, Newton.

In view of the considerable talents abundantly demonstrated by the Chinese through their millenary history, their achievements in science were certainly meager, compared with those in Europe at the time.

Then the question: Why not in China?

But the proper question to be asked is not the one made by those European free thinkers: That question should have been: Why science, a self-sustaining science, worthy of that name, had developed only in one cultural matrix, the cultural matrix of Medieval Christendom?

Other great civilizations in world history could be justly proud of their stupendous achievements in architecture, public works, arts and crafts, drama, literature, even in philosophy and logic, but not in science proper, or at least in any degree comparable to the level achieved at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Europe — an achievement with roots in Medieval Christendom as shown by Duhem and Jaki.

In the period going from the early twelfth century to the time of Buridan and Oresme, during which the concept of “impetus” and the concomitant idea of “inertial motion” were introduced for the first time, one can see developments which lead directly to the formulation of the fundamental laws of motion (Newton’s laws), developments connecting in one stroke motion here on Earth and motion in the sidereal realm: the motion of the “planets” or “wanderers”.

Slowly at first, then at a fast pace, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, prepared the way for Newton.

Abelard of Bath (c. 1125) embarks on long and arduous journeys in the quest of learning, going as far as the Middle East, and brings to medieval Europe the elements of trigonometry, the art of making astrolabes and Euclid’s geometry. His contacts with Muslim learned men made him aware of the ongoing struggle in the Arab culture to reconcile faith and reason. Abelard is on record remarking to his nephew that many of his contemporaries, including Muslim and Jewish men of learning, identified God with Nature. There was, at this time and at any other time, a strong tendency to identify nature with the ultimate entity. This tendency can be overcome only if men are willing to recognize their dependence on a truly transcendent Creator. Abelard favors, whenever possible, natural explanations over miraculous ones, showing his healthy proclivity to a true scientific attitude when facing the physical world: “I do not detract from God… Whatever there is, it is from Him and through Him. But the realm of being is not a confused one… Only when reason totally fails should the explanation of the matter be referred (directly) to God”.

In other words, Abelard sees in Nature Nature’s God without any need to deny the world of the supernatural, which, if real, is also God’s. Medieval men were tempted too by the mirages of fatalism and astrological pantheism.

Thierry of Chartres (d.c. 1155) rises well above the Greek animism and pantheism, latent even in the best literary exponents (such as Plato’s Timeus) saying: Moses’ intention was to show that the creation of all things and the formation of men was made by the only one God to whom alone worship is due. The usefulness of [Moses’] works is the acquisition of knowledge about God through His handiwork”. For Thierry “there are four kinds of reasons that lead man to the recognition of his Creator: the proofs are taken from arithmetic, music [harmony], geometry and astronomy”. If the Creator has actually arranged everything “according to number, measure and weight”, as recorded in the Book of Wisdom, man’s intellectual understanding of the world has to have a mathematical, scientific character.

Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253), possibly the first chancellor of Oxford University, was even more explicit about the mathematical understanding of nature: “The usefulness of considering lines, angles and figures is the greatest, because it is impossible to understand natural philosophy without them. They are efficacious throughout the universe and its parts and the properties related (to them), such as rectilinear and linear motion”. Grosseteste’s investigation of the rainbow is a good example of his scientific methodology, which included seminal programs of induction, falsification and verification. He rightly attributes the rainbow to light’s refraction rather than to its reflection, as done before incorrectly by Aristotle and Seneca. Grosseteste’s methodology depends on the idea of the Creator as a wholly rational and personal Planner, Builder and Maintainer of the Universe.

William of Auvergne (d.c. 1249) in De Universo makes fragmentary references to magical and astrological aphorisms but he does not succumb to the irrational in his quest for understanding, and disputes continuously with “Manichaeism, fatalism, pantheism, star worship” and similar betrayals of man’s rationality, which he associa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halt Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors/Editors
• Foreword
• Part I. Modern Science in Historical Perspective
• Part II. On the Origin and Development of Life
• Concluding Remarks