Of Revolutions and Reductionists

It has been argued that one of the great insights of the Renaissance, and later the Reformation, is that it spawned what we might call the mechanistic universe. The theory is that before the middle of the 16th century, anything we today would recognise as ‘science’ was essentially non-existent, at least in the West. At best, observational science was considered unnecessary. Recall the furore Galileo caused when he did what had apparently occurred to nobody else in pointing a telescope at the heavens and recording and then publishing what he saw. Before then, we thought we knew what the universe was like because classical philosophers like Plato and then Christian philosophers had theorised about it. The earth was at the centre and all other celestial bodies orbited it in perfectly circular orbits. Why question it? Sure, this model was not entirely without its problems – the planets did not always appear in the night sky where they should – but the general theory of geo-centrism and Platonic spheres remained invincible. It just needed a little tinkering around the edges. At worst, observational science was considered all but blasphemous. Who are we to delve into the mysteries of God’s creation by peering into them with a telescope !

It has been further alleged that the reluctance to investigate the material world directly was compounded by pervasive superstitious beliefs about the nature of the material world itself. Not only was God thought to be transcendent, he was also present in inanimate objects (panentheism) to the extent that the objects themselves were sometimes thought of being in some sense ‘alive’. People thought they knew why it is that after you plough a field and pick out the stones, they seem to reappear. It is because the earth is ‘alive’ and effectively lays eggs. Seriously! Nowadays, we attribute the phenomenon to solifluction and the differing heating properties of stones and soil. In the Middle Ages, however, it was thought that the supposedly living soil effectively continuously gives birth to stones that then appear appear on the surface, much to the irritation of the farmer.

How did change come about?

If, like me, you’re an honest Calvinist (!), you will have been taught that change came about as follows. First, the Renaissance discovered, or rediscovered, the scientific and philosophical writings of the Greeks, some of whom had championed observational science. Think Eureka! And it was not just Archimedes, but also Hippocrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, who made the first known attempt to classify rocks and minerals, and many others. The legacy of Greek science in this era included substantial advances in factual knowledge due to empirical research across multiple disciplines; research that at the time had been largely forgotten by the Christian West. Additionally, the Renaissance rediscovered the science of the Mediaeval Islamic world during its Golden Age between the 8th and 13th Centuries CE. This is a fascinating period of history in its own right that is described in Jim al-Khalili’s excellent book Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science (2010). The West has largely forgotten, and in some cases flat denies, the contributions to astronomy, medicine, chemistry, botany, geography, cartography, physics, zoology and more the Mediaeval Arab world gave us. Dutch Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper did not forget, however. He asserts that “under the dominion of Islam, better cosmic science flourished than in the cathedral- and monastic schools of Europe” (Lectures on Calvinism, 1898).

The second driver for change, it is argued, was a move away from a fear on the part of church authorities that to investigate the natural world might be in some sense blasphemous to a recognition that the natural world was made by God for his glory and our pleasure; and that the pursuit of empirical science is not only legitimate but to be encouraged. As scripture says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1) and “Great are your works, O LORD. They are studied by all who delight in them” (Psalm 111:2). The pursuit of science could now be seen as devotion to God. This, it is supposed, was a direct consequence of the Reformation. Calvinists like Kuyper go further: “Calvinism alone,” he wrote, “threw open again science the vast field of the cosmos, now illumined by the Sun of Righteousness, of whom the scriptures testify that in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”.

The idea that there may be a connection between the Reformation and modern science is not confined to the rather bombastic Abraham Kuyper. Probably the most famous exposition is Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, written by Dutch historian Reijer Hooykaas and first published in 1972 by Scottish Academic Press. It is probably correct to say that Hooykaas oversimplifies. I think we should note, for instance, that empirical science was being pursued in Western Europe before the Reformation, albeit sporadically, and even that a doctrine of methodological materialism had been put forward as early as the fourteenth century by Nicole Oresme (1320 – 1382). Methodological materialism, the doctrine that we limit our scientific endeavour only to what is directly observable and repeatable without recourse to divine intervention, is the basis the for all modern science. Oresme, who was to become a Roman Catholic bishop of Lisieux, wrote “there is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God as if He would produce these effects directly, more so than those effects whose causes we believe are well known to us”. There is no need, in other words, to look for supernatural causes in the ordinary course of nature. There is no need for a god of the gaps. (There is no need for so-called intelligent design!) And as I have already said, we should also acknowledge the role of Islamic science in the development of Western European science. But oversimplified or not, what these kinds of studies do is put the lie to the notion that science and Abrahamic religion are necessarily at loggerheads. For the most part, the relationship was one of fertilisation rather than conflict.

Seeds of Destruction

Speaking of over simplifying, the next great movement in the history of Western European thought after the Reformation was the Enlightenment. And just as it has been argued, naively no doubt, that the Renaissance was the great precursor of the Reformation, it has also been argued that the Reformation was the precursor of the Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, or even the “Great Age of Reason”, began in the latter half of the 17th century. Among other things, its focus was on reason and the evidence of the senses. Above, I suggested that in part at least, the Reformation and preceding Renaissance set the ground rules for modern empirical science. These ground rules, which include empirical observation and methodological materialism, were perhaps made no more explicit than in the thought of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.

Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) has been called the father of empiricism. He argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon careful observation and inductive reasoning. He gave us the common idea that scientists simply observe, come up with a hypothesis, make predictions based on the hypothesis, and observe again to determine whether their hypothesis is valid. If a hypothesis makes accurate predictions, it is confirmed; if not, it is binned and we go back to the drawing board. This inductive approach to science became known as the Baconian method. In a moment, I’m going to challenge Bacon. For now, however, I want to consider where it might leave God. At its most fundamental, it appears to leave little or no room for God. Bacon was interested only in repeatable observation. So, for example, when Issac Newton postulated his Laws of Motion, the only question was whether his laws and the mathematical equations associated with them make testable predictions that can be shown to hold up in reality. To date, we have found that momentum, the product of mass and velocity, is always conserved and that for macroscopic systems as least, force always equals mass times acceleration. F = ma. The important point here is the predictability. There is no suggestion of an outside agent, God perhaps, meddling in an unpredictable way. The upshot is that God does not really play an obvious role in physics, or in any kind of science. So when Laplace published his Celestial Mechanics in 1749, and Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly asked where is God in his work, he truthfully answers, “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis”. God has been pushed out. This is in keeping with the Renaissance and Reformation emphasis on methodological materialism but has the consequence that God is all but pushed aside in all science. In my view, the great scientific revolutions of the last 500 years have only exacerbated the issue. So prior to the Renaissance, God was present in creation in so intimate a sense that it was almost animate. Subsequently, God’s role is diminished as scientists uncover natural laws that predict exactly how the universe behaves. And if God is no longer present in nature, why believe in him at all. Atheism becomes an attractive prospect. This is what I mean when I suggest that the Reformation’s approach to science somehow contained the seeds of its own destruction.

The problem here is the so-called ‘god of the gaps’ theory, which assumes that gaps in scientific knowledge can be taken as evidence of god’s existence. The argument is, of course, self-defeating in that the gaps have the unpreventable habit of shrinking. And so, some thought, as science advanced during the Enlightenment and subsequently, God became ever more marginalised. I’m not going to pursue this further here, other than to quote mathematician Charles Alfred Coulson (1910 – 1974) who said “either God is in the whole of nature, with no gaps, or He is not there at all”. This is, in fact, a distinctly Calvinist perspective.

Perception is Subjective

One of the boasts of the scientific method is its objectivity. It deals, it is said, with data and only with data. In principle, any two scientists coming to the same data should come to the same conclusion. In the minds of some, science is unassailable. Not only does it set God aside, making him unnecessary, science alone provides access to what is ultimately true. This is a rather common view amongst those that have not given the matter a great deal of thought. I want to suggest that while the scientific method is very powerful within its own sphere, it is not everything. I have two reasons for saying this. They are the basis for the title of my blog.

The first is that the pursuit of science is more subjective than people may imagine. We owe this important insight to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922 – 1996) and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which introduced the term ‘paradigm shift’. The Baconian idea I referred to above is that the history of science reveals a trajectory of ever increasing knowledge and that there might even be a day when we understand our universe exhaustively. It is a process of hypothesis, experiment and completed theory. Kuhn suggested something rather different. He took his cue from Copernicus (1473 – 1543).

As you will know, Copernicus’s insight was to realise that the earth is not the centre of the universe but a planet that orbits the sun just like the other planets that were then known. Before then, it was thought that the sun and the other planets orbited the earth. This was not such a daft idea, not least because the sun could be seen to rise and set and the model could be used to make predictions that were relatively accurate. Indeed, by Copernicus’s time, the model devised by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century CE had served people well for well over 1,000 years.

One of the difficulties Ptolemy faced was how to explain the apparently retrograde motion of the planets by which they seem to sometimes double back on themselves as they move through the night sky. Ptolemy’s solution was to impose additional layers of circular rotation (epicycles) on the overall circular orbits of the planets around the earth as shown below; effectively, orbits upon orbits.

While the model was relatively accurate, it was not that accurate. Moreover it was cumbersome. Copernicus, who was an observer as well as a brilliant mathematician, wondered whether a radical change of perspective might help. It did. When Copernicus placed the sun at the centre, with the planets orbiting the sun, the size of the epicycles was greatly reduced.

Copernicus’s heliocentric theory was of course nothing short of revolutionary although in practice, it did not receive the attention Galileo did almost 100 years later. Still, Protestant reformer Martin Luther was unimpressed: “People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon … This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth”. In fairness, John Calvin was not impressed either. He maintained that those that say “that the sun does not move, and that it is the earth which shifts and turns” are “deranged”.

It took a long time for Copernicus’s model to become widely accepted by astronomers and certainly not until the beginning of the 18th century, by which time we also had the highly detailed observations of Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) as well as Galileo’s observations, Kepler’s (1609) laws of planetary motion (the planets orbit on ellipses, not circles) and Newton’s universal law of gravitation (1687). There had also been significant social changes, not least the Reformation itself, that led to a reduction in the authority and influence of the church. Thomas Kuhn’s idea is that it was only when all these things came together that Copernicus’s model came to be more widely accepted, resulting in a scientific revolution, or what he calls a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts of a scientific discipline, a whole new way of looking at data and investigative methodology. So instead of simply abandoning the Ptolemaic universe when Copernicus proposed his clearly more successful alternative, scientists were rather slow to abandon what they had always accepted. To that extent, a degree of subjectivity enters science. As a professional scientist myself, I can attest to a degree of subjectivity in my own approach to data in that one can be rather reluctant at times to abandon what one thinks one already knows. Kuhn believed that the normal developmental pattern of science is by such paradigm shifts; that it does not develop along a straight trajectory of unrelenting progress. He cited as examples not only the Copernican revolution but also the abandonment of phlogiston theory in chemistry, the adoption of uniformitarianism in geology, the discovery of hyperbolic geometry in mathematics, the development of the germ theory of disease in medicine, Darwinian evolution, the transition between the world view of Newtonian gravity and general relativity, the development of quantum mechanics, which replaced classical Newtonian mechanics, and more. Indeed, against the background of how the progress of science was viewed at the time, Kuhn’s own approach itself represented something of a paradigm shift. Nowadays, it is generally thought that Kuhn overstated his case. We have not abandoned classical mechanics, for example; rather we recognise that while it breaks down at the atomic scale, it remains extremely productive at the every day scale, right up to the the scale of planets and beyond. But Kuhn is right to question whether the pursuit of science is as objective as had formerly been maintained. That need not imply that the pursuit of science and its methodologies have failed.

The limitations of science

The question of the limitations of science is an extremely important one because a popular complaint amongst the general public is that science is “arrogant”. This has tended to breed a suspicion of science that in recent times has sometimes led to a rejection of science, often in favour of pseudoscientific ideas garnered from the internet. In some cases, the suggestion is made that scientists are basically ‘at it’. A Free Church of Scotland minister (guess who) once told me that my rejection of creationism was essentially because as a geologist I ‘have my nose in the trough’. Other areas where pseudoscience has replaced mainstream science include climate change denial and opposition to vaccination as we saw during the covid epidemic. How are we to respond?

First, I think we should acknowledge that scientists are not infallible and that subjectivity, and even personal interest as well as other external factors, may well play a part in the pursuit of science, as Kuhn shows us. This theme is developed in Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science (2008) and more so in his Bad Pharma (2012), where he is extremely critical of a lack of objectivity in the the pharmaceutical industry and the biomedical science that supports it. We should also acknowledge not only that scientists get it wrong – after all, the geocentric universe is wrong (notwithstanding the claims of modern day geocentrists) – and that they sometimes get it disastrously wrong, but also that occasionally fraud is involved. The damage this does not only to the reputations of the scientists concerned but also to the reputation of honest scientists can be significant. When fraud is found in the medical sciences, the result can be devastating. Perhaps one of the most infamous cases is that of Andrew Wakefield who was banned from practising medicine after dishonestly claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. There are other examples not only in medicine but in also in other scientific disciplines. We should also acknowledge that individual scientists sometimes stretch the limitations of science. This is a factor in the atheism/theism debate that has bred suspicion amongst the religious in particular.

Scientism is he belief that not only can science address every question we might ask but that metaphysical, philosophical and religious claims are invalid because they cannot be apprehended by the scientific method. Often, Francis Bacon, who as we have seen formulated the inductive method, is held to be the father of scientism. This view is easily debunked because Bacon was a devout Anglican. In 1625, he wrote: “A little philosophy inlineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” One feels Bacon could have been writing about Richard Dawkins, whose rants against theism rarely contain anything more than “a little philosophy”, much of it rather naive.

What is the problem with scientism? First, and most devastatingly, it fails to recognise that science itself is undergirded by philosophy. It fails to recognise that science operates within a philosophical framework that cannot be proven empirically. For example, in addition to explanatory power, it is said that “good” scientific theories should be parsimonious; that is, they should be as “economical” in their explanations as possible. The advantage of Copernicus’s model over Ptolemy’s is that it is simpler in that it does not require unnecessary epicycles to account for the observed motions of the planets. But why should we assume that simpler theories are closer to reality than more complex ones? As long as a theory “works”, simple or complex, it serves us in making predictions that can be tested. In Copernicus’s case, direct observation confirms that his model rather than Ptolemy’s is correct. But what about where direct observation is not possible, such as in the world of quantum mechanics where there are opposing ideas about whether its equations and concepts describe an underlying reality or are merely an albeit incredibly powerful construct? Why assume that a theory that makes accurate predictions is closer to a more complex theory that also makes accurate predictions? Perhaps more devastating still, why assume that our theories of matter are universally applicable? In geology we adopt the principle of uniformitarism, i.e. that the present is the key to the past; that the same processes that operate now are the same throughout time and space. This may be a reasonable assumption that works well in practice but ultimately we cannot “prove” it. The principle of uniformitarianism underlies all scientific investigation, not just geology. We assume that the laws of science are the same throughout time and space.

Secondly, it is important to appreciate that you can never prove any scientific theory, only validate it or falsify it. We know that Newton’s Laws work because we have tested them again and again. Their power is more than evident. But that’s not proof in a rigorous sense. Is it possible that a situation might arise where Newton’s Laws, which are descriptive rather than prescriptive, do not apply? Where force is not equal to mass times acceleration? Why not mass times acceleration squared? What about elsewhere in the multiverse? This may be unlikely but we cannot, as a matter of principle, rule it out. And even if a contrary observation arose, i.e., an instance when Newton’s Laws appear falsified, would be necessarily immediately abandon the paradigm in any case?

On the face of it, the situation in mathematics is different in that mathematical proofs seem robust. Quod erat demonstrandum. QED! Except that underlying the proofs there are a number of axioms – the fundamental axioms of mathematics – that cannot be proven. It may be intuitively obvious that 2 x 3 = 3 x 2 or that a x (b + c) = (a x b) + (a x c), but intuition is not proof. Famously, this observation in described in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. So again we find that there are aspects of the search for truth that lie beyond the investigative power of empirical science. As you might expect, I would extend these observations to religious claims. I am not necessarily rejecting religious claims, just pointing out that the question of the the existence (or non-existence) of God falls within the realm of philosophy and is not amenable to scientific investigation as usually understood. That is not to say that I do not think religious claims cannot, or should not, be tested. When I discussed my reasons for believing in God, I quoted atheist philosopher JL Mackie with approval:

“It is my view that the question of whether there is or is not a god can and should be discussed rationally and reasonably, and that such discussion can be rewarding, in that it can yield definite results. This is a genuine, meaningful, question and an important one – too important for us to take sides about it casually or arbitrarily. Neither the affirmative nor the negative answer is obviously right, but the issue is not so obscure that relevant considerations of argument and evidence cannot be brought to bear upon it” (JL Mackie The Miracle of Theism).

Nothing Buttery.

Reductionism can be defined in several ways. Scientific or methodological reductionism, for example, is simply the practice of reducing complex interactions and entities to the sum of their constituent parts, in order to make them easier to study. This seems an eminently sensible strategy. At this point, however, I am more interested in reductionism as a world view; essentially ontological reductionism, or the belief that whole of reality consists only of those parts amenable to empirical investigation. Physicist Donald M Mackay popularised the term “nothing buttery” for this outlook. Nothing buttery is thus the idea that the universe can be explained entirely in terms of the atoms it contains, nothing more.

I have already argued that this view of reality does not stack up since science and mathematics rely on propositions and axioms that cannot be proven empirically. Indeed it should be apparent that the reductionism of nothing buttery is itself a philosophical proposition that cannot be verified empirically. Moreover, very few people view life in that way. We attribute great significance to experiences of love and beauty, say, that goes beyond the view that such existential concepts are ultimately nothing but interactions between chemicals in our brains. Few would argue that a great piece of music with the power to move or inspire is nothing but a sequence of vibrations in air that we experience as sound. That is not to say that we cannot investigate whether these aspects of being human that may be unique to us might have a basis in evolutionary biology although even then one wonders what survival advantage the human ability to produce the music of a Bach or the painting of a Leonardo might confer.

This brings me back to the mechanistic universe and the extent to which we can know reality exhaustively. Do we agree with Laplace, when he wrote:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the vast movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes” (Pierre-Simon Laplace Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 1814).

I want to suggest not for two reasons. Firstly, while we might be able to predict the trajectory of a football when we kick it, or when a solar eclipse might occur, there are some physical systems that do not obviously obey the law of cause and effect. I mentioned chaotic and quantum systems. Secondly, science itself reveals that there are aspects of reality that are predictable in the way Laplace envisaged. There are no certainties at the quantum level, for example, only probabilities. We cannot precisely where an electron might be at a given time. Worse, it seems that the very act of observing at this level changes the outcome. There is also so-called chaos theory where, according to the butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos describes how a very small change in one state of a deterministic non-linear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning that the system extremely sensitive to minor changes in its initial conditions). A commonly cited metaphor for this kind of behaviour is that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. Such systems are therefore very difficult to predict, as is seen in the difficulty of producing weather forecasts that are accurate over more than a few days.

Human consciousness is often thought of as an emergent property of the human brain. Like the ants that make up a colony, no single neuron holds complex information like self-awareness, hope or pride. Nonetheless, the sum of all neurons in the nervous system generates complex human emotions like fear and joy, none of which can be attributed to a single neuron. We do not fully understand why this should be although most neurologists consider that the mind reveals how incredibly complex systems composed of many parts can work together to create something that is more than the sum of the parts, in this case enabling us to speak, learn and reflect.

Although the human brain is not yet understood enough to identify the mechanism by which emergence functions, most neurobiologists agree that complex interconnections among the parts give rise to qualities that belong only to the whole. This incredible biological system demonstrates the concept of emergence as many individual parts (the neurons) work together to create an incredibly complex whole that runs organ systems, speaks, and learns. It is of course more than likely that an evolutionary basis for human consciousness exists, especially given what we are learning about the amazingly complex behaviours of other animals, but its existence suggests at least that the naïve reductionism of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harries and Dan Dennett may not be as based in science as they maintain and that ontological reductionism – the belief that we can ultimately explain the universe by breaking it down into ever smaller parts – is a philosophical rather than a scientific position. I also maintain that the empiricism of Dawkins et al. is also self-defeating.

As will be clear from my other blogs, I am writing as a Christian theist. I have explained elsewhere why I believe in God. My claims are relatively modest and many will remain unconvinced. I certainly do not believe that I can prove God’s existence empirically. But neither is there an empirical method by which falsify God’s existence. Following Karl Popper, that tells us only that my faith does not fit within the remit of scientific exploration; but neither does it invalidate it. Moreover, if we are to defend empirical science as a valid and useful approach to studying reality within its limitations, we cannot simply poopoo the philosophy that not only lies beyond the limitations of empirical science, but actually undergirds empirical science. To the extent that this fact legitimises philosophy as a valid and important academic discipline, it also legitimises questions about the meaning of life and even the existence of God, even if it does not answer them.

God of the gaps

The very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my faith in God results merely from a lack of knowledge. I do not believe in God because of the unpredictability of chaotic systems or quantum mechanics, or because of emergent properties such as human consciousness . As I said above, quoting Coulson, either God is in the whole of nature, with no gaps, or He is not there at all. I want merely to suggest that the philosophical empiricism of nothing buttery fails when its principles are applied to itself and that we should be open to the philosophical and even religious thought in our pursuit of science. Albert Einstein famously said that  “science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” I believe I agree.