Ancient and Modern Science: Some Observations

Editorial note. This abridgement preserves Ian Johnston’s wording in the passages retained. The long opening dictionary entry, repeated examples, and some extended historical illustrations have been omitted or shortened. The central progression—from early Greek natural philosophy through the medieval Great Chain of Being to the methods and purposes of modern science—has been retained, as have Johnston’s concluding reflections on science, power, and wonder. The original document was released into the public domain in June 1999 and last revised on August 9, 1999.

As the historical definitions of the word science suggest, the term has undergone a significant shift in meaning over the many centuries it has been in use. In general, we can characterize that change as a tendency for the term to become increasingly specific and limited.

Hence, what the term meant for the ancient Greeks or medieval Christians, that is, any knowledge acquired by study or any department of systematic knowledge, has largely disappeared, and what we now mean by the term science tends to be a very specific method of learning about certain parts of the world.

If we look back on the history of science (understood in the modern sense as the disciplined study of nature) we can see other important changes which concern the understanding of the purposes and methods of a disciplined inquiry into nature.

It may well be the case that many of the most important concepts which underpin the modern activity we call science originated in the work of the Classical Greek philosophers, so that we can talk usefully about Classical Greek science and establish links between what went on twenty-five hundred years ago and the modern research laboratory.

But we need to be careful about overemphasizing these similarities, for in many ways the science practiced by the Classical Greeks and by the Medieval Christians had a purpose fundamentally different from what we might call modern science.

The purpose of this essay is to explore, in a very basic and inevitably cursory way, some of these similarities and differences.

We can trace what we now call science to a way of thinking which originated in ancient Greece at some point in the seventh and sixth century BC.

One of the new questions clearly was something like this: What is the single material stuff out of which everything in the world is made?

This question was a revolutionary one because it broke decisively with the existing tradition of explaining things through mythology.

The ancient Greek myths carried out this explanatory function with reference to a huge interconnected family of gods and goddesses whose irrational purposes, quarrels, and interactions with human beings gave rise to those things people wished to understand.

The question first posed by a group of Greek thinkers living in the city-state of Miletus ignores the mythological explanation and sets out to find a materialistic answer. Instead of seeking for causes in the old stories of divine will and power, the Milesian thinkers decided that the appropriate place to seek for an understanding of the world was in the nature of matter itself.

Hence, they have come to be called materialists—those who seek to explain natural phenomena with exclusive reference to material stuff, rather than to divine action or other non-material spiritual processes. This decisive step, in effect, banishes traditional supernatural powers from explanations of natural events.

This first materialist approach soon foundered on an obvious paradox: how could a single undifferentiated substance differentiate itself into all the various natural things familiar to us? Given their materialistic doctrine, these thinkers could not appeal to divine intervention.

A way beyond this materialist paradox opened when attention shifted from the material stuff itself to its form and arrangement. The causative factor in a natural event might lie not in the material substance but in the mathematical structure of that substance.

The proper approach to understanding natural phenomena, on this view, should not seek out some essential original stuff, but must concentrate on a mathematical understanding of the arrangement of stuff. Mathematics thus becomes the key element in understanding nature.

A line of thinking similar to this point linked the inquiries of later Greek thinkers about the world to the language of mathematics, particularly to geometry. A key thinker here is the mysterious figure of Pythagoras.

This interest in mathematics inevitably encouraged a study of astronomy, because the motions of so many celestial phenomena apparently follow geometric patterns which can be established with some accuracy by careful observation, calculation, and mathematical modeling.

Whereas the ancient myths accounted for the positions and motions of the stars with old narratives, the mathematical explanations substituted in their place spheres, lines, orbits, and equations.

Whatever the reason for this innovation, these Greek philosophers established the basis for the activity we now call science, the study of the world by rational principles as established in the deductive principles of mathematics.

We should not, however, too quickly claim to see the start of everything in the modern enterprise we call science in the activity of these ancient Greek thinkers. There were important differences between the old philosophers and the modern scientific researcher.

The primary aim of the Greek thinkers was to arrive at a better contemplative understanding of the nature of things. They had no notion of using their speculations as a means of gaining control of nature or of altering the natural conditions of life.

This point is crucial. At its heart, the Greek philosophical interest in mathematical investigations of the natural world was moral and religious. It was motivated above all by the desire to arrive at a higher knowledge of the divine, the permanent ordering principles by which the world was arranged.

Since the ancient Greeks saw nature as divine, as having a mysteriously vital soul of its own, there could be no question of changing nature or seeking to alter the given facts of life. Nature was a divinely alive mystery which might be intellectually apprehended and contemplated.

For that reason, Greek scientists showed no great interest in experimentation and no desire to develop their scientific thinking into practical applications.

Nature was there to be wondered at, contemplated, even worshipped, not to be tampered with or altered.

Hence, the pursuit of what we might call science was primarily an inquiry into questions of value. A properly disciplined inquiry into nature could lead to a fuller understanding of the moral issues on which questions of justice in the community depended.

This major emphasis on value becomes most apparent in Aristotle’s famous explanation of the different causes for all phenomena. According to Aristotle, there were four possible ways of accounting for cause: the Material Cause, the Efficient Cause, the Formal Cause, and the Final Cause.

The material cause explains the phenomenon in terms of the material out of which it is made; the efficient cause explains it in terms of the process which puts the materials together; the formal cause explains it in terms of the plan or design or arrangement of the materials; and the final cause explains it in terms of its purpose.

The explanations sought by classical science were concerned above all with the final cause, that is, with an account which placed the object in the overall moral scheme of the universe, linking it with a sense of moral purposiveness and hence with the divine structure of the universe.

Knowledge about the world only mattered if it helped people to understand how they ought to behave, that is, if it gave them insight into the ultimate standards of morality and justice.

Such thinking is called teleological, from the Greek word telos meaning goal, because it seeks explanations for things in terms of their final purposes.

Once the Greek influence began gradually to reassert itself, Christian thinkers started to make a synthesis of the Greek rational understanding of nature, especially as manifested in the works of Aristotle, with Christian doctrine.

What is important for our purposes is the major image of the world which this tradition produced and which became a fundamental organizing principle for rational inquiry into the natural world: the Great Chain of Being.

The Great Chain of Being derived from two Greek ideas. The first, the Principle of Plenitude, states that since God is perfectly good, He must have created all possible forms of life. The second, Aristotle’s Ladder of Life, places natural phenomena on a hierarchical scale rising from inanimate matter through increasingly complex forms of life.

As later developed by Christian thinkers, the hierarchy extended through human beings, the planets and fixed stars, the various orders of angels, and finally to God Himself. Thus every natural and spiritual phenomenon had its own ranked place in the comprehensive scheme of God’s creation.

The Great Chain of Being was an organizing metaphor, a classification system, into which one could fit each individual element of God’s creation. The hierarchy was essentially a moral scheme, too. Everything participated in a single unified creation, with a clear sense of its place.

It is important to stress that the Great Chain of Being was a complete and closed and static system. It was not subject to change. The natural world, like the entire cosmos, was a beautifully ordered static arrangement ordained by God.

For the person with an interest in the natural world, the Great Chain of Being provided a means of fitting observed phenomena into a preordained scheme in which the central point was the clear linkage between everything and God Himself. The metaphor reinforced a sense of the Final Cause in every natural event.

In such a world the main purpose of science was to confirm the truth of this great vision. Explanations for natural phenomena tended to be linked to God’s purposes in creating such a harmonious structure.

What we call modern science began in the sixteenth and seventeenth century as a challenge to the traditional Christian and Greek views sketched out above. The origin of this challenge is commonly associated with Copernicus, who speculated that one way of understanding the universe might be to put the sun at the centre with the planets revolving around it.

The decisive challenge came from those who insisted that the very nature of science must change, that it must work from a different purpose and by different methods. It must rely upon observations and shape the understanding of the universe on the basis of those observations, rather than fitting all observations into the traditional framework of Christian belief. Here the work of Galileo is centrally important.

The new scientists insisted on privileging sense experience, on shaping theories to fit that sense experience, and on subjecting such speculations to test by experimental observation.

It was no longer the case that the basic working model of the universe was known and invoked to explain phenomena; scientists had to construct new models which might answer to a new demand: the desire for power over nature.

Francis Bacon, like his French colleague Descartes, wanted above all a practical science, an understanding of nature that would give human beings more power over nature and lead to what Descartes called 'the relief of man’s estate,' especially in medicine.

Hence, the new scientists called for an end to a preoccupation with final causes. Scientists should focus instead on efficient causes, often called secondary causes.

The new science called for mechanical models of the stuff of nature, experiments to understand their mathematical properties, and constant adjustment or readjustment of the shaping theory in order to fit the mechanical model. The basic metaphor now was that nature was something like a clock.

To approach the natural world as if it were a clock mechanism required nature to be imagined as essentially a machine with complex inner workings and required the scientist to place a distance between himself and nature.

Nature became, in effect, an object to be studied and manipulated by the subjective mind of the scientist. The test of the validity of a particular view of the world was the extent to which it brought a natural process under human control through experiments.

Once the new science began to demonstrate the rapidity with which it could generate new knowledge and new powers over nature, it acquired increasing momentum until it became the central driving imperative of our western culture.

At first glance, the rejection of final causes and the privileging of efficient causes seems to emancipate science from any moral concerns. However, the rejection of final cause as the principal concern of the natural scientist did not at once lead people to conclude that science had nothing to do with morality.

Descartes and Bacon saw the relief of human misery as an important moral imperative. Many thinkers were also spurred on by the hope that a better understanding of secondary causes would reinforce a religious understanding.

It is very wrong to see modern science as arising simply in opposition to religion. Many of the most prominent early natural scientists, men like Boyle and Newton, were devoutly religious.

The faith that attention to efficient causes might finally lead to a better understanding of final causes has come to be called the Design Argument, a vitally important way of attempting to reconcile the new science and religion.

Briefly stated, the Design Argument claims that we can conclude the existence of God by the analogy between a wonderfully complex work and a creator. The extraordinarily complex design and mathematical precision of natural phenomena offered, to many thinkers, proof for the existence of a divine creator.

The most powerful evidence for this design argument was the work of Newton, who seemed to have demonstrated that the entire cosmos was arranged and moved according to eternally fixed mathematical principles.

The sanguine hopes contained in the Design Argument proved over-optimistic. As scientists increasingly focused upon efficient causes and turned their attention to the Earth itself, it became clear that the Earth was undergoing a process of constant change. There was no fixed and static design.

Some animal species had become extinct, new animals had appeared, some organs appeared to have no function at all, and the surface of the Earth was quite different from what it had been. How could one talk of a divine creative design when change increasingly seemed to be the way in which the world worked?

In addition, philosophers of science like David Hume and Immanuel Kant pointed out that the Design Argument rested on a logical problem: there was no way one could logically conclude the existence of divine attributes from non-divine material stuff.

The Design Argument, however, has never disappeared. It resurfaces periodically in various guises and remains a common way of linking modern science and religious awareness.

The importance of the Design Argument helps to explain why so much hostility to science focuses on Darwin’s theories, because at the heart of natural selection lies an insistence on the absence of design: terrestrial life, including human beings, is the result of a process which did not have us in mind.

The spectacular successes of the new science in the last three hundred years are a tribute to the effectiveness of the process set in motion by Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientists.

The 'relief of man’s estate' which they so desired has, in many ways, been fostered enormously by their insistence on a new way of knowing the world. The fact that we live longer, safer lives with less fear of natural disasters is a good thing, and we owe that change to what the new science has brought us.

But that knowledge has, as most of us realize, come at a price. For we have lost what was central to the old science of the Greeks and medieval thinkers: the sense of an activity guided by shared moral principles and a desire to satisfy our sense of religious wonder.

Science now, for the most part, moves under a new imperative: the desire for power. We do not pause, as we should, to think about whether that power is something we ought to have.

When people express a certain anxiety about science, about what it is doing or may do to how we live our lives, they are frequently lamenting the loss of that shared sense of the moral purposiveness of all human activity.

Of course, there are still scientists drawn to the activity by the old curiosity and wonder at the amazing richness of nature. Many great scientists have been profoundly spiritual and have seen their work through the eyes of a contemplative.

But the driving force behind scientific research now tends to be intensely practical, often seeking short-term power over nature rather than anything else. And that drive for power acknowledges no limits, least of all some sense of a final cause.

For better or worse, modern science in western culture and the rest of the world now runs by its own momentum, and it would take a rash prophet to wager where it will take us in the next century or two.

Ian Johnston, “Ancient and Modern Science: Some Observations.” Prepared for students in English and Liberal Studies classes at Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island University). Released into the public domain in June 1999; last revised August 9, 1999.