“As for persecution, I do not want to make too much of it. The notion that there was a sustained Christian assault on science is not true. But I do not want to make too little of it, either.”
I would like to know more. Galileo and Schopenhauer are famous examples and I had assumed that there were many non-famous examples too. Is that not the case? I’m also confused given the inquisition. How is that not a sustained assault?
That seems like a weird distinction to draw to me. Even if they aren’t persecuting scientists specifically wouldn’t it have a huge chilling effect?
I guess another interesting question would be whether the Christian persecution was more/less other places and how much those places flourished scientifically compared to the Christian world.
I’m a little tired of writing this, so to summarize: your essay contains very few clear arguments, a lot of sloppy reasoning, quite a bit of outright myth-making, and reveals that you are not aware of classical philosophical positions, genealogy of ideas and even the most standard surface-level objections to your claims. The most important test case (Bacon) shows that virtually all new ideas introduced by him, were a huge break from antiquity and were strongly shaped by the Christian culture. You repeatedly emphasize that Christianity undermined the West’s conviction in reason, despite the fact that for virtually all thinkers from Bacon to Kant, the fallibility of reason was transformed into its power. The most revealing part of the essay is the end, where you start to advertise your philosophy of “earthly idealism”. By all means, it’s great that you have your own framework of values which helps you live a happy life, but don’t ascribe your views to the fathers of scientific revolution. They didn’t share them, and if they did, they wouldn’t be the fathers of scientific revolution in the first place.
Let me clarify that I don’t need help. I addressed a number of specific claims you made, and showed that they are false. You might help yourself by taking at least one of them and defending what you say. Or otherwise your “you have misunderstood everything” is better read as “I don’t understand your critique”.
By the way, I suggested you to debate it in another comment thread. Perhaps, we’d understand each other better in speech.
You’re attacking claims Don never made. He never said Bacon was reviving the Greeks or operating outside Christian culture. In fact, he explicitly acknowledges that the pioneers of modern science were Christians who often framed their work in religious terms. The point is not that Bacon was an atheist or a closet pagan. The point is that the intellectual project he launched was new.
Bacon rejected both the Greek view that knowledge is primarily contemplative and the Christian view that knowledge is subordinate to revelation and salvation. His insistence that we “conquer nature by obeying her” marks a break with both traditions. Knowledge becomes something to be won through observation, experiment, and induction—and won for the sake of improving human life in this world. That combination of (1) prioritising nature, (2) for man’s practical benefit, (3) through empirical method, is not an extension of Christian epistemology. It is a departure from it.
Your treatment of reason in the Enlightenment—especially Kant—is also off the mark. Kant did not “transform fallibility into power.” He redefined reason so radically that it could no longer know reality as it is. On his view, reason structures appearances but cannot reach the noumenal world. That is not a celebration of reason’s power; it is a restriction of its scope. And Kant himself makes his motive explicit in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: he “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” This is not the stance of someone trying to secure the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason; it is the stance of someone trying to protect Christian faith from reason’s reach.
So the issue is not whether Bacon or Kant lived in Christian cultures. The issue is the direction of their ideas. Bacon’s method and purpose break with Christian intellectual priorities. Kant’s epistemology, far from strengthening reason, limits it to preserve faith. These distinctions matter if we want to understand how the modern scientific and philosophical revolutions actually unfolded.
I literally took apart his explicit claims and show that they don’t hold. Now his broader point was that Christian ideas was a block to science. I’m taking the example of Bacon to show that certain Christian ideas, undoubtedly interpreted in a new way, played a significant role in the genesis of the mindset of scientific revolution.
“He never said Bacon was reviving the Greeks or operating outside Christian culture.”
Yes, but his prior point was that science was invented by Ancient Greeks, and only by the West returning to its classical sources made scientific revolution possible. What I’m claiming here is that in certain decisive ways scientific revolution turned 180 degrees from the Ancient Greek mindset, and Christianity was important to this transformation. That’s it. Genealogy of ideas.
“In fact, he explicitly acknowledges that the pioneers of modern science were Christians who often framed their work in religious terms.”
Yes but he’s also saying that they only succeeded to extent that they rejected Christian ideas, and I’m showing that it’s not true. Quite the opposite, they internalised Christian ideas and transformed them into new Philosophical ideas which didn’t exist before.
“The point is not that Bacon was an atheist or a closet pagan. The point is that the intellectual project he launched was new.”
Yes, and that’s also my point. But Watkins is sweeping under the carpet the genealogy of this novelty and the influence of Christian ideas.
“Bacon rejected both the Greek view that knowledge is primarily contemplative and the Christian view that knowledge is subordinate to revelation and salvation.”
This is false in two ways. First, there’s no uniform Christian view that “knowledge is subordinate to revelation and salvation”. Second, whatever the doctrine of the relation between reason & faith existed in Christianity back then, Bacon did NOT reject it. He held the view that reason and faith are complimentary and apply to different area: science and religion, emphasised the limitations of reason in divine matters and that it must indeed be subordinate to faith, as far as theology is concerned.
“His insistence that we “conquer nature by obeying her” marks a break with both traditions. Knowledge becomes something to be won through observation, experiment, and induction—and won for the sake of improving human life in this world. That combination of (1) prioritising nature, (2) for man’s practical benefit, (3) through empirical method, is not an extension of Christian epistemology. It is a departure from it.”
I don’t know what “Christian epistemology” is. Christianity is a religion, not an epistemology. There’s Christian mythology, and as I said, Bacon’s project was explicitly framed in terms of Biblical myth. So the correct claim is that his philosophical project was continuous with Christian mythology.
“Your treatment of reason in the Enlightenment—especially Kant—is also off the mark. Kant did not “transform fallibility into power.” He redefined reason so radically that it could no longer know reality as it is. “
This is mistaken, but it’s also a bit aside. Im happy to address this separately though.
“On his view, reason structures appearances but cannot reach the noumenal world. That is not a celebration of reason’s power; it is a restriction of its scope.”
I was well aware of what I was saying. According to Kant, putting restriction on the scope of reason is precisely its power. For example, when pure reason tries to think about things which are beyond possible experience, such as the totality of phenomena, it generates illusions. It’s a power and not a weakness to recognize such illusions and say “I must stop here and examine under what pre-conditions this reasoning becomes illegitimate”. Alternatively, reflecting on the transcendental pre-conditions of possible experience gives us access to a-priori knowledge, such as mathematics and fundamental physics. So again, the limits of reasons are turned into a a strength.
“And Kant himself makes his motive explicit in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: he “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” This is not the stance of someone trying to secure the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason;“
There was no such thing as “Enlightenment confidence in reason”, in the way you are retroactively ascribe to it. Virtually all Enlightenment and Reneissance thinkers emphasised the limitations of reasons, its fallibility, the duty to recognize and improve mistakes etc. Kant was in many ways a culmination of this mindset.
“it is the stance of someone trying to protect Christian faith from reason’s reach.”
“Make room for faith” is not about Christianit, but primarily about ethics. Kant understood that we can’t prove or disprove free will from pure reason, so we restrict its legitimacy to make room for the belief that free will exists. Indeed, if we don’t assume free will, then according to Kant, morality dies and this was his greatest fear.
“So the issue is not whether Bacon or Kant lived in Christian cultures. The issue is the direction of their ideas. Bacon’s method and purpose break with Christian intellectual priorities.”
I have already explained that Bacon’s philosophy was continuous with Christian myth/theology and certainly didn’t present a break from it.
“Kant’s epistemology, far from strengthening reason, limits it to preserve faith. These distinctions matter if we want to understand how the modern scientific and philosophical revolutions actually unfolded.”
Ok, so far you haven’t engaged with how scientific revolution unfolded. I explained why your counter-arguments don’t hold.
If you do want to discuss it and further, I’d start with one question on which a lot depends:
Is philosophy and science always entirely discontinuous from myth and religion, or sometimes partially shaped by them?
“But I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that, while all of the ingredients were present in latent form in pagan science,”
You haven’t argued this point at all, and it’s a very controversial statement.
“It was only a self-conscious conviction that new knowledge could be discovered through active experimentation that could give rise to modern science.”
Finally, a reasonable sentence! But let’s see how you unravel it.
“The most important figure here was Francis Bacon, who formulated the idea of “conquering nature by obeying her.” For Bacon, knowledge is not something to be passively contemplated or deduced from first principles, but something to be actively won—by systematically interrogating nature through observation, controlled experiment, and inductive reasoning. “
Indeed, knowledge is not something to be passively contemplated, but something that must be “actively won”. And “interrogation of nature” is a particularly important line. But you’re still making a number of very sloppy claims without realizing it, and as it seems, totally miss the whole point altogether.
First, “The most important figure here was Francis Bacon”: the most important based on what standards of “importance”? Was he more or less important than actual scientists like Galileo (who lived in the same time) or Newton (who lived slightly later)? Was he more important than Descartes who agreed with Bacon on some ideas and sharply disagreed on others? Fine. Let’s say Bacon was important and was somewhat expressive of the general spirit of the era.
So are you willing to defend the idea that Bacon’s concepts of reason, nature and human place in the universe were continuous with Ancient Greek ones? And if not, then what role did Christianity play on his thought? Well, an enormous one. Let’s talk about it.
His concept of reason (“knowledge is power”) wasn’t secular, but rather shaped by the Fall myth, which he saw as humankind losing knowledge of dominion over nature. “Dominion over nature” is an explicitly biblical concept deeply woven into theology, and Greeks who saw nature as divine, would totally hate it. For Bacon, man is to be the master over the natural world, and he equates this mastery with knowledge. It’s a highly sophisticated and integrated position synthesizing theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and methodology. Let’s unravel this more:
- Reason is an inherently fallible faculty, and knowledge consists of eliminating mistakes rather than achieving any certainty (deeply Christian, not Greek and certainly not you) -> an early form of what we call today “fallibism”.
- The laws of nature are willed by God who is above logic and necessity, which means they can’t be deduced from logic alone and must be actively found by experiment (Biblical origins again) -> the metaphysical concept of contingency.
- Nature is separate from the divine, and has lower value than the mankind, hence man can conduct experiments on it (deeply theological roots) -> experimental method.
- Finally, and most importantly: the shift from Hellenistic position that reason grasps objective truths of “what is” to the position that epistemology is an active subject-initiated process in which knowledge is gained via constructive action rather than contemplation -> a form of “proto-subjectivity”, where the subject becomes responsible for the determination of truth in an active rather than passive process. This is ubiquitous in Reneissance thought since De Cusa, and culminated in Kant’s epistemology.
I’ll not address your sloppy phrasing of him proposing “inductive reasoning”, because the idea that he was an inductivist is only expressed by people who don’t understand much epistemology. Also, Bacon distrusted mathematics and didn’t create mathematical physics. This was more of a contribution of Galileo and Newton, whose philosophical views were also deeply influenced by Christian theology.
“If belief in a single creator God is what leads to science, then why was there no Scientific Revolution in the Christian East or the Islamic world?”
Interesting logic. There was good science in the Islamic world during the golden age, but it wasn’t revolutionary. There was good science in Christian Europe during medieval times. What about Christian East? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. By the same logic, I can as well suggest that there was “no science” in India or China. The fact of the matter is that Scientific Revolution was a very specific and unique event, and it happened in Christian Europe. Not ancient Egypt, not Babylonia, and yes: not in Ancient Greece. The only legitimate historical-philosophical question is what new ideas came alongside the Scientific Revolution, and whether Christianity played any role in emergence and articulation of these ideas.
Secondly, there are others flaws in this question. Who says that “belief in a single creator God leads to science”? Do you seriously think that any beliefs “lead” to anything as a necessary causal factor? Finally, are there any civilizations that “don’t believe” in God(s) at all (give one example), and if not, then on what basis can we even answer such a question?
Regarding the Wooton’s quote:
“and, as for the religious convictions of the first scientists, the only safe conclusion is that generalization is impossible.”
It’s interesting that you brought it here. Generalization is indeed “impossible” regardless of your religious convictions, in the sense that we cannot gain stable knowledge from sensory experience alone. This is an epistemological point that has nothing to do with religion. Moreover, the credit for this point is not to religion, but to Ancient Greeks, particularly, Plato.
“Mangalwadi claims that whereas the Greeks practiced deductive science, it was Christianity that taught the West the importance of induction”
Does he really say it? God, people shouldn’t do history of science if they don’t understand any epistemology. Greeks practiced both deductive science (mathematics), and inductive science (Aristotle in biology). What they didn’t have was active experimentation and most importantly, the synthesis of mathematics and experimental science. Also the idea that there are any inductive sciences, is just as wrong as it can possibly be.
“Since God’s creative acts are subject to no eternal truths, knowledge of the world could not be derived deductively from philosophy but must come through actual observation”
This is better and more defensible. Indeed, in modern philosophical terms, this is the distinction between “necessary” and “contingent” facts. Christian reasoning could go like this: “all actual laws of nature are contingent because they are willed by God, and he could have willed them otherwise”. But it’s important to clarify that this observation must be not passive, but active and subject-initiated: we come up with experiments, decide what to measure, determine the pre-conditions under which the test justifies or falsifies our theories etc.
“But this came at a price: far from laying the groundwork for the discovery of laws of nature it implied that there are no laws of nature.”
That’s boring. I can give you compelling arguments that from what I understand about your philosophical positions, you must be committed to the conclusion that there are indeed no laws of nature, and if you think differently, then you learnt the concept of such laws somewhere else and just live with a contradiction. Laws of nature is a deep philosophical question, and any sweeping statements here reveal unseriousness.
“The essence of the Christian approach was to prioritize the supernatural over the natural, and authority above argument.”
should be dismissed by any student of philosophy and history as propagandistic myth-making.
“Western science virtually vanished for the first five hundred years of Christianity’s rule”
First, it’s false, there was plenty of interesting science, even though it wasn’t revolutionary. Scientific achievements in the first five hundred years of “Christianity’s rule” (whatever this word means) were certainly comparable to those 500 years before Roman adoption of Christianity, so it would seem that even in your model of history, Christianity didn’t change much. So if we do go there, you have to address the question of why Hellenistic civilization stalled in scientific achievements for 500 years after the golden age. Looks much more like a “sorry record” for your claims. If anything, Christianity revitalized the classical civilization.
“then the thousand year failure to produce a Scientific Revolution gives us even stronger reason to discount Christianity as an explanation.”
“Failure” to produce revolution? Is revolutions something that you civilization can “fail” to do? And then what should we make of the fact that Hellenistic civilization “never produced”the Scientific Revolution?
“It was only when the West rediscovered the ancients that genuine interest in science reemerged”
The West didn’t merely “rediscover” the ancients. Christian philosophers have always engaged with ancients, especially Plato, and Aristotle after Thomas Aquinas (even though it led to scholastics). Of course, Reneissance witnessed a renewed interest in Ancient Greek and Roman texts, primarily the literature. But this renewed interest applied to a bunch of other things, such as new interpretations of the Bible, the study of Kabbalah and mysticism and what’s not. So when you say that:
“… and allowed Europeans to start raising the questions and developing the skillsets necessary for the Scientific Revolution.”
you’re getting it backwards: Europeans were already interested in new ways of thinking and started to raise new questions which provoked their interest in ancient texts. It’s also fascinating how you make the leap from the renewed interest in the study of Roman poetry in early Reneissance to “developing skillsets necessary for the Scientific Revolution”. So much for the tidy “transformation from myth to reason” story.
“More striking is how the Scientific Revolution itself could have easily been strangled in its infancy, thanks to the Church’s opposition to heliocentrism, which led to Galileo’s Inquisition sentence in 1633 and to Descartes burying his own work on heliocentrism.”
It’s a well-known discussion, but you’re making too much of what the evidence clearly establishes. Galileo and Descartes did have problems with the Church, but framing them as an opposition of religion and science is a modern interpretation projected backwards.
“To the extent Mangalwadi’s claims are true, they are anachronistic. He is criticizing the ancients for not operating according to the methods of modern science.”
The word “methods” is doing too much work here. The modern framework of science is altogether different from the Ancient Greek one. What they counted as “science” is not at all what we count nowadays as science. So strictly speaking, your whole attribution of “science” to Ancient Greeks is more anachronistic than want Mangalwadi says (and he’s not even wrong in this precise claim).
When you talk about Aristotle, you say:
“observation was always the final court of appeal.”
Let me say it very clearly: “observation” and “empirical verification” are worlds apart. They are completely different ways of doing science and approaching the world altogether. The mindset of scientific revolution decisively (and absolutely explicitly in the works of Galileo, for example) rejects Aristotelian “observation” as “the court of appeal”, but does proclaim empirical testing as the “tribunal” to which the nature is “summoned to answer” (see Descartes, Bacon and later Kant for specific judicial metaphors). Notice “tribunal”, not “appeal”. That mindset of course was impossible in Ancient Greece.
Some examples you list later are not particularly relevant, because the distinction between observation and experiment has already been blurred, but I appreciate that the quote by Aristotle illustrates this perfectly, and it was interesting to learn about experiments by Pythagoreans.
“From the first stirrings of rational inquiry in the sixth century BCE to the flourishing of Hellenistic scholarship, the Greeks transformed humanity’s approach to nature from myth and tradition to observation, reason, and systematic explanation.”
This is a very nice and tidy story, and while this is not outright false, it’s not true for the level of claims you’re making here. The biggest objection you face is that there was no clean “myth -> reason” break. Myth and reason were (and in many ways, still are) mutually coexisting in a feedback loop. Karl Popper in all seriousness, calls Parmenides the creator of Western science. And yet, Parmenides was a deeply mythic thinker. The same goes (+ religious cult with dietary law and mystic practices) for Pythagoreans. What was born in Ancient Greece is two things:
1. The specific view of perceptual reality as something not “really true”, and the strife to seek what’s real beyond sensory experience.
2. The emergence of opposition between elite philosophical rationalism and laymen religious tradition (strongly correlated with the previous point.)
Science existed in ancient Babylonia, Egypt and other civilizations. In some ways, their science was even more advanced than Ancient Greek. But it was continuous with religious practice and less systematic because there was never an attempt to deduce everything from first principles. But the very decision to deduce things from mind’s first principles did not come from the rejection of myth, but rather emerged within a specific mythic framework in the first place.
“Given the scale of these pagan achievements, it would seem hard to defend the claim that “The West’s passion for science began” with the Bible.”
I’ve said in my previous comments that it’s a silly way of looking at things, and such statements are almost always doomed to fail.
“In his view, they “made no effort to empirically verify their explanations” of natural phenomena.”
This is a very well-known observation, and it’s basically true. For example, when he says
“When ancients tried to explain the world, they used intuition, logic, mythmaking, mysticism, or rationalism—detached from empirical observation,”
it’s a good characterization, but we can make it more precise: unlike the moderns, Greeks didn’t connect abstract mathematical system building and empirical observation. More on this later.
Well done. Thank you.
“As for persecution, I do not want to make too much of it. The notion that there was a sustained Christian assault on science is not true. But I do not want to make too little of it, either.”
I would like to know more. Galileo and Schopenhauer are famous examples and I had assumed that there were many non-famous examples too. Is that not the case? I’m also confused given the inquisition. How is that not a sustained assault?
Oh, there was sustained and abundant persecution by Christians, it was just not generally directed at the practice of natural science.
That seems like a weird distinction to draw to me. Even if they aren’t persecuting scientists specifically wouldn’t it have a huge chilling effect?
I guess another interesting question would be whether the Christian persecution was more/less other places and how much those places flourished scientifically compared to the Christian world.
I’m a little tired of writing this, so to summarize: your essay contains very few clear arguments, a lot of sloppy reasoning, quite a bit of outright myth-making, and reveals that you are not aware of classical philosophical positions, genealogy of ideas and even the most standard surface-level objections to your claims. The most important test case (Bacon) shows that virtually all new ideas introduced by him, were a huge break from antiquity and were strongly shaped by the Christian culture. You repeatedly emphasize that Christianity undermined the West’s conviction in reason, despite the fact that for virtually all thinkers from Bacon to Kant, the fallibility of reason was transformed into its power. The most revealing part of the essay is the end, where you start to advertise your philosophy of “earthly idealism”. By all means, it’s great that you have your own framework of values which helps you live a happy life, but don’t ascribe your views to the fathers of scientific revolution. They didn’t share them, and if they did, they wouldn’t be the fathers of scientific revolution in the first place.
You have misunderstood everything. I can't help you.
Let me clarify that I don’t need help. I addressed a number of specific claims you made, and showed that they are false. You might help yourself by taking at least one of them and defending what you say. Or otherwise your “you have misunderstood everything” is better read as “I don’t understand your critique”.
By the way, I suggested you to debate it in another comment thread. Perhaps, we’d understand each other better in speech.
You’re attacking claims Don never made. He never said Bacon was reviving the Greeks or operating outside Christian culture. In fact, he explicitly acknowledges that the pioneers of modern science were Christians who often framed their work in religious terms. The point is not that Bacon was an atheist or a closet pagan. The point is that the intellectual project he launched was new.
Bacon rejected both the Greek view that knowledge is primarily contemplative and the Christian view that knowledge is subordinate to revelation and salvation. His insistence that we “conquer nature by obeying her” marks a break with both traditions. Knowledge becomes something to be won through observation, experiment, and induction—and won for the sake of improving human life in this world. That combination of (1) prioritising nature, (2) for man’s practical benefit, (3) through empirical method, is not an extension of Christian epistemology. It is a departure from it.
Your treatment of reason in the Enlightenment—especially Kant—is also off the mark. Kant did not “transform fallibility into power.” He redefined reason so radically that it could no longer know reality as it is. On his view, reason structures appearances but cannot reach the noumenal world. That is not a celebration of reason’s power; it is a restriction of its scope. And Kant himself makes his motive explicit in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: he “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” This is not the stance of someone trying to secure the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason; it is the stance of someone trying to protect Christian faith from reason’s reach.
So the issue is not whether Bacon or Kant lived in Christian cultures. The issue is the direction of their ideas. Bacon’s method and purpose break with Christian intellectual priorities. Kant’s epistemology, far from strengthening reason, limits it to preserve faith. These distinctions matter if we want to understand how the modern scientific and philosophical revolutions actually unfolded.
“You are attacking claims Don never made.”
I literally took apart his explicit claims and show that they don’t hold. Now his broader point was that Christian ideas was a block to science. I’m taking the example of Bacon to show that certain Christian ideas, undoubtedly interpreted in a new way, played a significant role in the genesis of the mindset of scientific revolution.
“He never said Bacon was reviving the Greeks or operating outside Christian culture.”
Yes, but his prior point was that science was invented by Ancient Greeks, and only by the West returning to its classical sources made scientific revolution possible. What I’m claiming here is that in certain decisive ways scientific revolution turned 180 degrees from the Ancient Greek mindset, and Christianity was important to this transformation. That’s it. Genealogy of ideas.
“In fact, he explicitly acknowledges that the pioneers of modern science were Christians who often framed their work in religious terms.”
Yes but he’s also saying that they only succeeded to extent that they rejected Christian ideas, and I’m showing that it’s not true. Quite the opposite, they internalised Christian ideas and transformed them into new Philosophical ideas which didn’t exist before.
“The point is not that Bacon was an atheist or a closet pagan. The point is that the intellectual project he launched was new.”
Yes, and that’s also my point. But Watkins is sweeping under the carpet the genealogy of this novelty and the influence of Christian ideas.
“Bacon rejected both the Greek view that knowledge is primarily contemplative and the Christian view that knowledge is subordinate to revelation and salvation.”
This is false in two ways. First, there’s no uniform Christian view that “knowledge is subordinate to revelation and salvation”. Second, whatever the doctrine of the relation between reason & faith existed in Christianity back then, Bacon did NOT reject it. He held the view that reason and faith are complimentary and apply to different area: science and religion, emphasised the limitations of reason in divine matters and that it must indeed be subordinate to faith, as far as theology is concerned.
“His insistence that we “conquer nature by obeying her” marks a break with both traditions. Knowledge becomes something to be won through observation, experiment, and induction—and won for the sake of improving human life in this world. That combination of (1) prioritising nature, (2) for man’s practical benefit, (3) through empirical method, is not an extension of Christian epistemology. It is a departure from it.”
I don’t know what “Christian epistemology” is. Christianity is a religion, not an epistemology. There’s Christian mythology, and as I said, Bacon’s project was explicitly framed in terms of Biblical myth. So the correct claim is that his philosophical project was continuous with Christian mythology.
“Your treatment of reason in the Enlightenment—especially Kant—is also off the mark. Kant did not “transform fallibility into power.” He redefined reason so radically that it could no longer know reality as it is. “
This is mistaken, but it’s also a bit aside. Im happy to address this separately though.
“On his view, reason structures appearances but cannot reach the noumenal world. That is not a celebration of reason’s power; it is a restriction of its scope.”
I was well aware of what I was saying. According to Kant, putting restriction on the scope of reason is precisely its power. For example, when pure reason tries to think about things which are beyond possible experience, such as the totality of phenomena, it generates illusions. It’s a power and not a weakness to recognize such illusions and say “I must stop here and examine under what pre-conditions this reasoning becomes illegitimate”. Alternatively, reflecting on the transcendental pre-conditions of possible experience gives us access to a-priori knowledge, such as mathematics and fundamental physics. So again, the limits of reasons are turned into a a strength.
“And Kant himself makes his motive explicit in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: he “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” This is not the stance of someone trying to secure the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason;“
There was no such thing as “Enlightenment confidence in reason”, in the way you are retroactively ascribe to it. Virtually all Enlightenment and Reneissance thinkers emphasised the limitations of reasons, its fallibility, the duty to recognize and improve mistakes etc. Kant was in many ways a culmination of this mindset.
“it is the stance of someone trying to protect Christian faith from reason’s reach.”
“Make room for faith” is not about Christianit, but primarily about ethics. Kant understood that we can’t prove or disprove free will from pure reason, so we restrict its legitimacy to make room for the belief that free will exists. Indeed, if we don’t assume free will, then according to Kant, morality dies and this was his greatest fear.
“So the issue is not whether Bacon or Kant lived in Christian cultures. The issue is the direction of their ideas. Bacon’s method and purpose break with Christian intellectual priorities.”
I have already explained that Bacon’s philosophy was continuous with Christian myth/theology and certainly didn’t present a break from it.
“Kant’s epistemology, far from strengthening reason, limits it to preserve faith. These distinctions matter if we want to understand how the modern scientific and philosophical revolutions actually unfolded.”
Ok, so far you haven’t engaged with how scientific revolution unfolded. I explained why your counter-arguments don’t hold.
If you do want to discuss it and further, I’d start with one question on which a lot depends:
Is philosophy and science always entirely discontinuous from myth and religion, or sometimes partially shaped by them?
“But I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that, while all of the ingredients were present in latent form in pagan science,”
You haven’t argued this point at all, and it’s a very controversial statement.
“It was only a self-conscious conviction that new knowledge could be discovered through active experimentation that could give rise to modern science.”
Finally, a reasonable sentence! But let’s see how you unravel it.
“The most important figure here was Francis Bacon, who formulated the idea of “conquering nature by obeying her.” For Bacon, knowledge is not something to be passively contemplated or deduced from first principles, but something to be actively won—by systematically interrogating nature through observation, controlled experiment, and inductive reasoning. “
Indeed, knowledge is not something to be passively contemplated, but something that must be “actively won”. And “interrogation of nature” is a particularly important line. But you’re still making a number of very sloppy claims without realizing it, and as it seems, totally miss the whole point altogether.
First, “The most important figure here was Francis Bacon”: the most important based on what standards of “importance”? Was he more or less important than actual scientists like Galileo (who lived in the same time) or Newton (who lived slightly later)? Was he more important than Descartes who agreed with Bacon on some ideas and sharply disagreed on others? Fine. Let’s say Bacon was important and was somewhat expressive of the general spirit of the era.
So are you willing to defend the idea that Bacon’s concepts of reason, nature and human place in the universe were continuous with Ancient Greek ones? And if not, then what role did Christianity play on his thought? Well, an enormous one. Let’s talk about it.
His concept of reason (“knowledge is power”) wasn’t secular, but rather shaped by the Fall myth, which he saw as humankind losing knowledge of dominion over nature. “Dominion over nature” is an explicitly biblical concept deeply woven into theology, and Greeks who saw nature as divine, would totally hate it. For Bacon, man is to be the master over the natural world, and he equates this mastery with knowledge. It’s a highly sophisticated and integrated position synthesizing theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and methodology. Let’s unravel this more:
- Reason is an inherently fallible faculty, and knowledge consists of eliminating mistakes rather than achieving any certainty (deeply Christian, not Greek and certainly not you) -> an early form of what we call today “fallibism”.
- The laws of nature are willed by God who is above logic and necessity, which means they can’t be deduced from logic alone and must be actively found by experiment (Biblical origins again) -> the metaphysical concept of contingency.
- Nature is separate from the divine, and has lower value than the mankind, hence man can conduct experiments on it (deeply theological roots) -> experimental method.
- Finally, and most importantly: the shift from Hellenistic position that reason grasps objective truths of “what is” to the position that epistemology is an active subject-initiated process in which knowledge is gained via constructive action rather than contemplation -> a form of “proto-subjectivity”, where the subject becomes responsible for the determination of truth in an active rather than passive process. This is ubiquitous in Reneissance thought since De Cusa, and culminated in Kant’s epistemology.
I’ll not address your sloppy phrasing of him proposing “inductive reasoning”, because the idea that he was an inductivist is only expressed by people who don’t understand much epistemology. Also, Bacon distrusted mathematics and didn’t create mathematical physics. This was more of a contribution of Galileo and Newton, whose philosophical views were also deeply influenced by Christian theology.
“If belief in a single creator God is what leads to science, then why was there no Scientific Revolution in the Christian East or the Islamic world?”
Interesting logic. There was good science in the Islamic world during the golden age, but it wasn’t revolutionary. There was good science in Christian Europe during medieval times. What about Christian East? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. By the same logic, I can as well suggest that there was “no science” in India or China. The fact of the matter is that Scientific Revolution was a very specific and unique event, and it happened in Christian Europe. Not ancient Egypt, not Babylonia, and yes: not in Ancient Greece. The only legitimate historical-philosophical question is what new ideas came alongside the Scientific Revolution, and whether Christianity played any role in emergence and articulation of these ideas.
Secondly, there are others flaws in this question. Who says that “belief in a single creator God leads to science”? Do you seriously think that any beliefs “lead” to anything as a necessary causal factor? Finally, are there any civilizations that “don’t believe” in God(s) at all (give one example), and if not, then on what basis can we even answer such a question?
Regarding the Wooton’s quote:
“and, as for the religious convictions of the first scientists, the only safe conclusion is that generalization is impossible.”
It’s interesting that you brought it here. Generalization is indeed “impossible” regardless of your religious convictions, in the sense that we cannot gain stable knowledge from sensory experience alone. This is an epistemological point that has nothing to do with religion. Moreover, the credit for this point is not to religion, but to Ancient Greeks, particularly, Plato.
“Mangalwadi claims that whereas the Greeks practiced deductive science, it was Christianity that taught the West the importance of induction”
Does he really say it? God, people shouldn’t do history of science if they don’t understand any epistemology. Greeks practiced both deductive science (mathematics), and inductive science (Aristotle in biology). What they didn’t have was active experimentation and most importantly, the synthesis of mathematics and experimental science. Also the idea that there are any inductive sciences, is just as wrong as it can possibly be.
“Since God’s creative acts are subject to no eternal truths, knowledge of the world could not be derived deductively from philosophy but must come through actual observation”
This is better and more defensible. Indeed, in modern philosophical terms, this is the distinction between “necessary” and “contingent” facts. Christian reasoning could go like this: “all actual laws of nature are contingent because they are willed by God, and he could have willed them otherwise”. But it’s important to clarify that this observation must be not passive, but active and subject-initiated: we come up with experiments, decide what to measure, determine the pre-conditions under which the test justifies or falsifies our theories etc.
“But this came at a price: far from laying the groundwork for the discovery of laws of nature it implied that there are no laws of nature.”
That’s boring. I can give you compelling arguments that from what I understand about your philosophical positions, you must be committed to the conclusion that there are indeed no laws of nature, and if you think differently, then you learnt the concept of such laws somewhere else and just live with a contradiction. Laws of nature is a deep philosophical question, and any sweeping statements here reveal unseriousness.
Let’s go further.
The line:
“The essence of the Christian approach was to prioritize the supernatural over the natural, and authority above argument.”
should be dismissed by any student of philosophy and history as propagandistic myth-making.
“Western science virtually vanished for the first five hundred years of Christianity’s rule”
First, it’s false, there was plenty of interesting science, even though it wasn’t revolutionary. Scientific achievements in the first five hundred years of “Christianity’s rule” (whatever this word means) were certainly comparable to those 500 years before Roman adoption of Christianity, so it would seem that even in your model of history, Christianity didn’t change much. So if we do go there, you have to address the question of why Hellenistic civilization stalled in scientific achievements for 500 years after the golden age. Looks much more like a “sorry record” for your claims. If anything, Christianity revitalized the classical civilization.
“then the thousand year failure to produce a Scientific Revolution gives us even stronger reason to discount Christianity as an explanation.”
“Failure” to produce revolution? Is revolutions something that you civilization can “fail” to do? And then what should we make of the fact that Hellenistic civilization “never produced”the Scientific Revolution?
“It was only when the West rediscovered the ancients that genuine interest in science reemerged”
The West didn’t merely “rediscover” the ancients. Christian philosophers have always engaged with ancients, especially Plato, and Aristotle after Thomas Aquinas (even though it led to scholastics). Of course, Reneissance witnessed a renewed interest in Ancient Greek and Roman texts, primarily the literature. But this renewed interest applied to a bunch of other things, such as new interpretations of the Bible, the study of Kabbalah and mysticism and what’s not. So when you say that:
“… and allowed Europeans to start raising the questions and developing the skillsets necessary for the Scientific Revolution.”
you’re getting it backwards: Europeans were already interested in new ways of thinking and started to raise new questions which provoked their interest in ancient texts. It’s also fascinating how you make the leap from the renewed interest in the study of Roman poetry in early Reneissance to “developing skillsets necessary for the Scientific Revolution”. So much for the tidy “transformation from myth to reason” story.
“More striking is how the Scientific Revolution itself could have easily been strangled in its infancy, thanks to the Church’s opposition to heliocentrism, which led to Galileo’s Inquisition sentence in 1633 and to Descartes burying his own work on heliocentrism.”
It’s a well-known discussion, but you’re making too much of what the evidence clearly establishes. Galileo and Descartes did have problems with the Church, but framing them as an opposition of religion and science is a modern interpretation projected backwards.
Continuing.
“To the extent Mangalwadi’s claims are true, they are anachronistic. He is criticizing the ancients for not operating according to the methods of modern science.”
The word “methods” is doing too much work here. The modern framework of science is altogether different from the Ancient Greek one. What they counted as “science” is not at all what we count nowadays as science. So strictly speaking, your whole attribution of “science” to Ancient Greeks is more anachronistic than want Mangalwadi says (and he’s not even wrong in this precise claim).
When you talk about Aristotle, you say:
“observation was always the final court of appeal.”
Let me say it very clearly: “observation” and “empirical verification” are worlds apart. They are completely different ways of doing science and approaching the world altogether. The mindset of scientific revolution decisively (and absolutely explicitly in the works of Galileo, for example) rejects Aristotelian “observation” as “the court of appeal”, but does proclaim empirical testing as the “tribunal” to which the nature is “summoned to answer” (see Descartes, Bacon and later Kant for specific judicial metaphors). Notice “tribunal”, not “appeal”. That mindset of course was impossible in Ancient Greece.
Some examples you list later are not particularly relevant, because the distinction between observation and experiment has already been blurred, but I appreciate that the quote by Aristotle illustrates this perfectly, and it was interesting to learn about experiments by Pythagoreans.
“From the first stirrings of rational inquiry in the sixth century BCE to the flourishing of Hellenistic scholarship, the Greeks transformed humanity’s approach to nature from myth and tradition to observation, reason, and systematic explanation.”
This is a very nice and tidy story, and while this is not outright false, it’s not true for the level of claims you’re making here. The biggest objection you face is that there was no clean “myth -> reason” break. Myth and reason were (and in many ways, still are) mutually coexisting in a feedback loop. Karl Popper in all seriousness, calls Parmenides the creator of Western science. And yet, Parmenides was a deeply mythic thinker. The same goes (+ religious cult with dietary law and mystic practices) for Pythagoreans. What was born in Ancient Greece is two things:
1. The specific view of perceptual reality as something not “really true”, and the strife to seek what’s real beyond sensory experience.
2. The emergence of opposition between elite philosophical rationalism and laymen religious tradition (strongly correlated with the previous point.)
Science existed in ancient Babylonia, Egypt and other civilizations. In some ways, their science was even more advanced than Ancient Greek. But it was continuous with religious practice and less systematic because there was never an attempt to deduce everything from first principles. But the very decision to deduce things from mind’s first principles did not come from the rejection of myth, but rather emerged within a specific mythic framework in the first place.
“Given the scale of these pagan achievements, it would seem hard to defend the claim that “The West’s passion for science began” with the Bible.”
I’ve said in my previous comments that it’s a silly way of looking at things, and such statements are almost always doomed to fail.
“In his view, they “made no effort to empirically verify their explanations” of natural phenomena.”
This is a very well-known observation, and it’s basically true. For example, when he says
“When ancients tried to explain the world, they used intuition, logic, mythmaking, mysticism, or rationalism—detached from empirical observation,”
it’s a good characterization, but we can make it more precise: unlike the moderns, Greeks didn’t connect abstract mathematical system building and empirical observation. More on this later.