Ok, I'm back now, I wanted to get this done earlier but we just had our congressional runoff election here in Louisiana Saturday and for at least a couple of days I was quite busy. I see we've had quite a bit of discussion on mathematics but I still want to comment on some questions raised in the original post and to elucidate further comments I made in my post #84.
On Science, Plato, and the Early Church
I want to focus attention on the intellectual ferment that existed in the Hellenistic world as Christianity grew in influence and its impact upon the form of intellectual, and by implication purely scientific, debate in western philosophy afterwards. I want to emphasize two important aspects of this ferment; the ever-present epistemological question "what is the source of knowledge?" and the real-world nature of intellectual debate as it may exist at any time, when contrasting the "speculative" versus the "experimental," by which I mean that speculation forces the quest for knowledge internally or inwardly and the experimental projects that focus outwardly into the material world. And I raise these two aspects because I believe that the major philosophical debates that were resolved as Christian doctrine coalesced into a unified, coherent, and dominant body of thought in the work of Augustine put in place a belief system that defined the context of the emergence of scientific thought in the modern era, even though the rules of science as we now know them were outside that belief system.
When we usually view the Graeco-Roman or Hellenistic philosophical tradition, the principal emphasis we make is the definition of the distinct world-views inherent in the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and especially in terms of their differing epistemological systems. Plato held that knowledge, of whatever kind, reflected an ideal formal reality which humanity could only represent in some imperfect fashion, since the "world of forms" was of a higher order of reality than the plane of human existence. Aristotle in contrast developed the empirical tradition that knowledge comes from experience. And beyond this restricted emphasis on the Platonic-Aristotelian conflict most who study the philosophy of the ancient world only very briefly touch upon all the rest, except for an examination of the rise of Christian thought. This focus should not be regarded as unexpected, since we study history to explain the present and it is only natural that we would want to trace the origins of modern thought when we examine the intellectual ideas of the past. But the Platonic-Aristotelian conflict was only the central focus of intellectual debate among the ancient Greeks for a very short time and by the dawn of the Christian era it had become subsumed within a larger and more splintered philosophical struggle that, aside from the rise of Christianity itself, is either mentioned in the briefest manner or overlooked altogether when studied as history.
At the dawn of the Christian era we can see a broad and diverse philosophical debate underway in the Hellenistic world. The Romans, by this time the dominant power in the region, had thoroughly absorbed Greek rationalist philosophy to the point where we can treat the varied philosophical movements as simulataneously occurring within a unified culture. And the lines of the Platonic-Aristotelian epistemological conflict that draws our attention when we look at the history of scientific thought is essentially external to the divisions we can identify between these groups, because their focus was primarily upon Ethics and Metaphysics or, to place this within the context of the "real-world nature" of intellectual debate I introduced earlier,
Hellenistic philosophical debate was of a speculative nature and only concerned itself with the physical world as a means of acquiring knowledge that either could inform ethical conduct or place metaphysical questions in sharper focus.. The Epicureans, who were the true materialists of this period and the one group who could have moved scientific inquiry forward but did not, developed a hedonistic ethical philosophy built around pleasure and pain, used the atomic theory of Democritus to explain the physical world and relied upon Aristotle's empiricism as necessary to understanding the physical sensations that revealed that which is good. The Stoics concentrated on the development of an individually-centered code of moral and ethical conduct but they adopted Aristotle's empirical reasoning and had their own primitive version of what we later recognize as Locke's
Tabula Rasa model for explaining the growth of knowledge, but they held knowledge of the external world to be secondary to knowledge of one's self. And the NeoPlatonists, who continued the Platonic tradition in metaphysical reasoning, seem to have borrowed from almost every other school of thought, though they generally doubted the value of empirical reasoning. And we can add other traditions of Greek rationalist thought that we may not necessarily define as "schools," such as Cynicism and Skepticism, that nonetheless informed many of problems in rational discourse. But the sum total of all of this is that the development of early Christian thought began within a rational debate that treated the natural sciences as a secondary pursuit.
This is the environment of Hellenistic rational thought into which Augustine finds himself immersed at the end of the fourth century as he continued in the tradition of St. Paul and attempted to reconcile the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans with that of a still fluid body of Christian thought, that had its own divisive internal controvesies. Chief among these were the competing "heresies," as we now call them, that addressed the central problem of the Trinity. Constantine's convening of th Council of Nicea in 325 attempted to put these conflicts to rest, but the mere official stamp of church doctrine did not silence debate effectively. In addition to the official church version of the Trinity emobodied in the Nicean Creed two major alternatives still held sway among many Christians, the Arian heresy, which held that Christ was was not divine and was quite popular, and the Sabellian heresy, which argued that the three distinctions within the Trinity were three modes of being of the one God rather than coexisting separately and eternally. You can add to that many minor heresies such as Donatism, which argued that personal piety trumped church authority, and Pelagianism, which held that original sin did not taint the rest of humanity after Adam and that men could earn salvation by their free will alone. Augustine's daunting task was that he had to make Christian doctrine understandable and acceptable as rational philosophy and authoritative in seeking to resolve doctrinal disputes within Christianity. What is truly remarkable, one is almost tempted to say "miraculous" were it not for the overtones the word creates in the present context, is that he succeeded.
In the
City of God Augustine proposed a Dualist philosophy that was part cosmology and part philosophy of history that separated the earthly from the divine and, in the process, gave himself what we might describe as "two playing fields" upon which to address matters of theological doctrine and earthly philosophy. According to Augustine there were two "histories" that ran simultaneously; the divine history,
Civitate Dei, and human history,
Civitate Homo, whose paths only crossed at a few points. The limited intersection of the two had an important epistemological meaning as addressed by rationalist philosophy, because Augustine postulated a third potential source of knowledge outside of formal ideas and experience, namely; that
Revelation was a source of knowledge made known to man in holy scripture, and that one could best approach truth through a meaningful search for knowledge within scripture. But Augustine also worked hard to limit man's ability to call upon Revelation in a willfull search for knowledge. While Augustine saw the entirety of scripture as the "revealed word of God," which meant that he had to recognize numerous instances of the divine history intersecting with human existence, especially in the Old Testament, he also argued that the Old Testament prophecies had been fulfilled and that there was one remaining event of the divine history yet to be written [in human terms], that of the Last Judgement. In a larger sense Augustine saw three great events in human history when the intersection of the divine and human history became clear; the Fall from Grace of Adam and Eve, the Incarnation of Christ, and the Last Judgement. The first two had already occured and the third was impending, though no one could know for certain when it might arrive, we could just say that we live in
Anno Domini, the "year of our lord." Yes, it is Augustine who is responsible for the very way we see time. And with the "sacred history" all but complete humanity should concern itself with secular matters, especially as they related to building morally-upright societies.
Augustine's confrontation with rational philosophy was equally important to the general acceptance of his intellectual worthiness within his own day and as a guideline to Christian attitudes thereafter. He recognized Christianity as a belief system in the tradition of Plato, and in doing so rejected both the empiricism and materialism of the Epicureans and the simple empiricism of the Stoics, but in his ideational philosophy he made a key revision to Plato's Theory of Reflection with his own
Theory of Illumination, in which Augustine held that since formal reality was divine, which was his Christian perspective on Platonic theory, that knowledge of things originated in the divine being. Illumination has been confused with Revelation by many Christian theologians who followed Augustine, but the two were quite different. Revelation was knowledge of truth gained through scripture, Illumination was knowledge of truth gained through ideas and incorporated Logic, which Augustine knew very well from his long service as a
Rhetor (one who teaches Logic and Rhetoric) as well as observation. But clearly Illumination was not a concept that encouraged investigation of the natural sciences, even though Augustine was quite interested in them earlier in his life. These were the terms of what may be called the "Augustinian Settlement." The sacred and secular were distinct and humanity was encouraged to dwell upon the secular life, but more in terms of Morals and Ethics than an examination of the physical world. The Augustinian emphasis, which went without any significant challenge until Thomas Aquinas over eight hundred years later, was upon a fixed body of knowledge from Revelation and a growing amount of human knowledge from Illumination, and the speculative controversies of the late Roman world, which had been ongoing since the rise of classical Greek philosophy some seven hundred years earlier, subsided. And inquiry into the natural sciences came to almost a complete end.
The Development of Modern Rationalism, Natural Law Philosophy, and Scientific Method
We can now roll the clock forward a little over twelve hundred years to the mid-seventeenth century to next important debate, the outcome of which framed the context within which we viewed its predecessor. Many of us understand that modern scientific thought began with the explosion of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment that followed Issac Newton's development of his Natural Law Philosophy, which was complete in that it had a clear epistemology, which is that knowledge is gained from experience; it had a fully-developed method of acquiring knowledge, which was inductive reasoning embodied in his scientific method; and, perhaps most importantly, it answered a pressing need of its time, which was that it gave everyone a means to apply rational thought to the development of technology which, coming on the heels of the reawakened interest in independent thinking that the Renaissance provided, was already proceeding to reshape the material lives of Europeans with advances on all fronts of human endeavor. Newton's triumph was so complete that it forced almost every other discipline of intellectual thought to adjust to determine what were the "natural laws" that applied to its particular area of interest. Enlightenment thinkers began to ask what were the laws of mathematics, physics, biology, botany, chemistry, social interaction, and even politics. No form of intellectual endeavor was left untouched. And the result of all of this was that it left empirically-validated "scientific thought" enthroned as the true antidote to superstitious and mystical reasoning to the point where most in the western world have come to equate empirical scientific reasoning with rationalism itself, which is a mistake. But nonetheless, science and rationalist thought are largely synonomous in the popular consciousness just the same.
The key period that bears remembering in my opinion, is the previous thirty to forty years that preceded Newton's publication of his
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, and perhaps continuing a short time thereafter, before the full effects of the Newtonian revolution had took root. During that period European thought already had begun to move towards a more fully-developed definition of "Rationalism," and not everyone took the same approach or operated under the same assumptions as did Newton and those who followed in his wake. This is something that is recognized in college level "History of Modern Philosophy" courses that usually begin with the "Rationalist - Empiricist" debate of the seventeenth century that primarily pitted the ideas of the French mathematician-logician René Descartes against those of the English intellectual John Locke. In this more useful distinction the "Rationalists," who include Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz; begin the attempt to restart modern philosophy and to focus its attention on reason itself. Their approach was speculative, Descartes even began his systematic reasoning by doubting his own existence. They proposed a hierarchy of knowledge that placed intuition at the top, which put them squarely within the tradition of Plato's formalistic philosophy, they relied upon a deductive method of reasoning that gave precedence to Logic and Mathematics, and they did not ignore observation of real-world phenomena but believed that the essence of observation was of little value until it was enhanced by logic through "demonstration," which placed it at the bottom rung of their epistimelogical ladder. The Rationalists also did not rule out metaphysical inquiry as a legitimate intellectual pursuit in fact, for Spinoza at least, it may have been at the core of his thought. Descartes spent a good deal of time working out logical proofs for the existence of God, Spinoza argued forcefully that God and Nature were one, and Leibniz's
Monadology attempted to provide a mathematical justification that God was "the necessary being which constitutes the explanation of contingent being, why the universe is this way rather than any other." But the overall approach of the "Rationalists" was largely rejected in favor of the "Empiricist" alternative when the Newtonian revolution moved scientific thought, inductive reasoning, and materialistic philosophy into the forefront of intellectual pursuit. I submit that the principal reason why this happened is that the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment was an "experimental age" in which Europeans were looking for answers that would help them reshape the material world around them and what Newton, scientific method, Empiricism, and the Aristotelian epistemological tradition had to offer much more directly suited their needs than the specualtive philosophy of the Cartesian Rationalists. But that does not deny that the "Rationalists" were still, ultimately, "rational."
A Final Thought on Rationalism and the "Purpose of Science"
As we sit and ponder the meaning of all of this for science and we ask ourselves to what purpose science can be put, we must remember that this is not a "scientific" question, but rather an ethical one and asking it requires that we think about Ethics in new ways, not science. As we discuss the "purpose of science" we must be careful that we do not surrender to science that which science never purported to take from us in the first place -- our souls. Rendering science a service to humanity is a question of Ethics, and a very important one at that, and it permits us to rationally discuss and speculate upon the need for religious meaning in our lives.