Ghent
University organizes all these interesting events. Just now, I have returned
from a conference on Leonhard Euler, the 18th-century mathematician
and physicist. Enlightenment philosophy and the early history of science are
not my field, but I was intrigued by Euler’s combining the scientific outlook
with a serious commitment to the Christian religion. He polemicized a lot with
the encyclopédistes and other deists
and atheists in defence of his old-time religion.
My suspicion, fostered by the sight of
contemporary polemic between the “new atheists” and the diehard Christians, is
that the exact sciences don’t foster critical thinking about human topics such
as religion. The humanities, starting with philological criticism of the Bible,
then psychology (Sigmund Freud: Religion,
the Future of an Illusion) and sociology, reduce religion to a human
artifact. They really deconstruct actually practiced religion. By contrast, till
today, the faculties of science comprise numerous professors who have
compartmentalized their thinking: critical when doing science, naïve when doing
religion. All the time, you see Evangelical polemicists bring up the names of
scientists who were also, after hours, believing Christians. Thus, Isaac Newton
was a great aficionado of Biblical chronology, predicting the time of the
Second Coming (he reassured his contemporaries that they would not live to see
it; if anything, it was only for the 21st century). Among
contemporary scientists, we hear of neo-Darwinian atheists like Richard
Dawkins, but many more of his colleagues line up on the side of his Christian
opponents.
In his time, Leonhard Euler defended
religion against a rising tide of skepticism and was derided by icons of the
Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Frederick the Great. These incidents in his
admittedly weird biography gave me the impression that, in spite of his
sophistication in science, he was very rustic in matters of religion. At the
same time, his Briefe an eine deutsche
Prinzessin (“Letters to a German Princess”) show that he was also an
anti-fundamentalist: the only way to do science after Copernicus was to
interpret the Biblical passages about nature symbolically, e.g. about the sun
moving and the earth standing still. No special pleading to save the letter of
the Bible from the challenge of science. His Protestant outlook on the Bible also
made him less respectful of the elements of Greek philosophy that had entered
Catholic theology. Thus, a rare case of that overrated influence of theology on
physics is how he could criticize the notion of “emanation” (stemming from
Neoplatonic philosophy, which greatly influenced Christian thought) when
encountering it as a proposed explanation of the phenomenon of light.
Euler set the precedent of how modern
believers could reconcile their religion with the findings of science. Till
today, Christian apologetic works keep on reproducing his approach: sacrifice
the elements from the Bible that cannot be saved, but stand fully by the core
of the Christian religion and declare it off limits to science. Some Christians go all the way and try to
defend a literal reading of the Bible (with the world created in six days), but
they don’t follow Euler’s approach. He, at any rate, did not see science as a
real challenge to the truth of the Bible, moderately interpreted.
It had
seemed to me, until this conference, that Euler was a prototype of the
believing scientist. However, the debates he waged against the ideas he
encountered were far better informed than the naïve religious discourse you
hear from the token Christian scientists today. Whereas nowadays you can build
an academic career as a scientist without ever having to deal with the great
questions of metaphysics and religion, back then it was the done thing for
fledgling science to address these fundamental questions. The basic concepts of
science still had a theological component. Thus, Newton brought God into His
creation by understanding space as an emanation of God.
It
is said that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ca. 1700 (or Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
ca. 1800), was “the last man who knew everything”, i.e. who had a command of
the state of the art in all sciences of his day. Today, this has become
impossible. In this age of specialization, it is even frowned upon if you speak
out on a matter outside your competence. That is another reason for the naïveté
of today’s scientists: a physicist is not supposed to “meddle” in a
metaphysical debate. Back then, it was still possible to be at the forefront of
natural science and be competent on the ultimate questions of being as well.
There
is also a simple fact that helps explain the religious naïveté of most contemporary
scientists as well as the sophistication of the scientists in Euler’s day. Now,
scientists are immediately thrown into a bath of nothing but science, in which
they can develop and show their proficiency. They have to master Euler’s
theorems but also the findings of Albert Einstein, of the quantum physicists
and so much else that has been developed since. By contrast, in Euler’s day,
science was far more limited and left more leisure for other pursuits.
Moreover, students of science first had to study philosophy, typically for two
years, often after they had had a religious upbringing far more thorough than anything
we are used to now. So, they were far more aware of the extra dimensions of
their scientific discoveries.
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