Mixing Metaphors: Science and Religion or Natural Philosophy and Theology in Early Modern Europe

I presented earlier versions of this paper at the Conference on Jewish Responses to Early Modern Science, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, May 1995, and as the Stillman Drake Lecture at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Science, St Catharine's, Ontario, May 1996. Peter Barker, Pamela McCallum, J. J. MacIntosh, Barbara J. Shapiro, and Jan W. Wojcik all made useful suggestions for improving earlier versions of this paper. Margaret G. Cook critically read successive drafts and helped me rethink a number of issues in several lengthy discussions. Four anonymous readers for History of science made extremely helpful suggestions for improving this paper. I am grateful to them all. Fellowships from Calgary Institute for the Humanities and from the National Endowment for the Humanities each provided time for the pursuit of this research.

The following works include the most important studies and re-evaluations of the concept of the Scientific Revolution: Bernard Cohen I. , The Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Lindberg David C. and Westman Robert S. (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); Barker Peter and Ariew Roger (eds), Revolution and continuity: Essays in the history and philosophy of early modern science (Washington, D.C., 1991); Field J. V. and James Frank A. J. L. (eds), Renaissance and revolution: Humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural philosophers in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993); Floris Cohen H. , The Scientific Revolution: A historiographical inquiry (Chicago, 1994); and Dobbs B. J. T. , “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover”, Isis, lxxxv (1994), 633–43.

For incisive discussions of this and related assumptions in the traditional historiography, see Cunningham Andrew , “Getting the game right: Some plain words on the identity and invention of science”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xix (1988), 365–89; Cunningham Andrew , “How the Principia got its name: Or, Taking natural philosophy seriously”, History of science, xxix (1991), 377–92; and Cunningham Andrew and Williams Perry , “De-centring the ‘Big Picture’: The origins of modern science and the modern origins of science”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 407–32.

John Hedley Brooke discusses a number of other kinds of interaction between science and religion. See his article, “Religious belief and the natural sciences: Mapping the historical landscape”, in van der Meer Jitse (ed.), Facets of faith and science, i: Historiography and modes of interaction (Ancaster, Ontario and Lanham, Maryland, 1996), 1–26.

Ross Sydney , “Scientist: The story of a word”, Annals of science, xviii (1962), 65–85.

Shapiro Barbara J. , Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century England: A study of the relationships between natural science, religion, history, law, and literature (Princeton, N.J., 1983); McMullin Ernan , “Conceptions of science in the Scientific Revolution”, in Lindberg and Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (ref. 2), 27–92; Osler Margaret J. , “John Locke and the changing ideal of scientific knowledge”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxxi (1970), 3–16 (reprinted in Philosophy, religion and science in the 17th and 18th centuries , ed. by Yolton John W. (Rochester, 1990), 325–38); Osler Margaret J. , Divine Will and the mechanical philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on contingency and necessity in the created world (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 4; and Wojcik Jan W. , Robert Boyle and the limits of reason (Cambridge, 1996).

Locke John , An essay concerning human understanding, ed. by Nidditch Peter H. (Oxford, 1975), Book 4, chap. 12, §10, p. 645.

Aristotle , Metaphysics, 1026a14–15, in The complete works of Aristotle, ed. by Barnes Jonathan (2 vols, Princeton, 1984), ii, 1620.

Grant Edward , The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages: Their religious, institutional, and intellectual contexts (Cambridge, 1996), 136. See also French Roger and Cunningham Andrew , Before science: The invention of the friars' natural philosophy (Aldershot, 1996).

Grant , op. cit., 137.

Ibid., 153–4.

Aquinas Thomas , Summa theologica, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (3 vols, New York, 1947), Part I, qu. 75, art. 6, vol. i, p. 368.

Wallace William A. , “Traditional natural philosophy”, in Schmitt Charles B. Skinner Quentin , and Kessler Eckhard (eds), The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 202–6.

Ibid., 209–13.

See Des Chene Dennis , Physiologia: Natural philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian thought (Ithaca and London, 1996), and Brundell Barry , Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a new natural philosophy (Dordrecht, 1987).

Wallace , “Traditional natural philosophy” (ref. 13), 212–19. On the changing relationship between mixed mathematics and natural philosophy, see Dear Peter , Discipline and experience: The mathematical way in the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca and London, 1995).

Lindberg David C. and Numbers Ronald L. (eds), God and nature: Historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science (Berkeley, 1986), Introduction.

Separating science and religion and restricting each to its own proper domain is the aim of Barbour Ian G. , Issues in science and religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966). See also Dillenberger John , Protestant thought and natural science: A historical study (Nashville and New York, 1960). Galileo adopted this view in “The letter to the Grand Duchess”. See Galilei Galileo , “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina”, translated by Drake Stillman in Discoveries and opinions of Galileo (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 173–216. Wykstra Stephen J. introduced the term “segregationist” to describe this view in “Should worldviews shape science? Toward and integrationist account of scientific theorizing”, in van der Meer Jitse M. (ed.), Facets of faith and science, ii: The role of beliefs in mathematics and the natural sciences: An Augustinian perspective (Ancaster, Ontario and Lanham, Maryland, 1996), 124–71. While I am fully prepared to acknowledge his introduction of this term, note that I developed the terminology I use in this paper independently before I was acquainted with his work.

Hedley Brooke John , Science and religion: Some historical perspectives (Cambridge, 1991), 42.

Moore James R. , The post-Darwinian controversies: A study of the Protestant struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979).

Oakley Francis , Omnipotence, covenant, and order: An excursion in the history of ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca and London, 1984). See also, Oakley Francis , “Christian theology and Newtonian science: The rise of the concept of the laws of nature”, Church history, xxx (1961), 433–57.

Funkenstein Amos , Theology and the scientific imagination from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century (Princeton, N.J., 1986).

Cunningham , “How the Principia got its name” (ref. 3).

Moore , The post-Darwinian controversies (ref. 20), 326–40; Funkenstein , Theology and the scientific imagination (ref. 22), 14.

Peter Barker develops this point in detail in “Understanding change and continuity: Transmission and appropriation in sixteenth century natural philosophy”, in Jamil Ragep F. and Ragep Sally P. (eds), Tradition, transmission, transformation: Proceedings of two conferences on pre-modern science held at the University of Oklahoma (Leiden, New York, and Cologne, 1996), 527–50.

William Draper John , History of the conflict between religion and science , abridged by Sprading Charles T. (New York, 1926; first published 1874); Dickson White Andrew , A history of the warfare of science with theology in christendom (2 vols, New York, 1960; first published 1896). For a discursive account of these and other historiographical positions, see Brooke , Science and religion (ref. 19), Introduction and chap. 1.

Brooke , Science and religion (ref. 19), 33–36. See also Lindberg and Numbers (eds), God and nature (ref. 17), 1–3.

See William Draper John , History of the intellectual development of Europe, rev. edn (2 vols, New York, 1876).

Ibid., 86, 113, and 116.

White , Warfare (ref. 26), i, Introduction; and Brooke , Science and religion (ref. 19), 35.

White , Warfare (ref. 26), i, Introduction.

Ibid., i, p. viii. Original italicized.

de Santillana Giorgio , The crime of Galileo (Chicago, 1955) and Blackwell Richard J. , Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991).

Westfall Richard S. , “Bellarmine, Galileo, and the clash of two world views”, in Essays on the trial of Galileo (Vatican City State, 1989).

Duhem Pierre , To save the phenomena: An essay on the idea of physical theory from Plato to Galileo, translated by Doland Edmund and Maschler Chaninah (Chicago and London, 1969; first published 1908).

Westfall Richard S. , “Galileo and the Jesuits” and “Patronage and the publication of the Dialogue“, in Essays on the trial of Galileo (ref. 34), and Biagioli Mario , Galileo courtier: The practice of science in the culture of absolutism (Chicago and London, 1993).

Redondi Pietro , Galileo heretic, transl. by Rosenthal Raymond (Princeton, 1987).

Feldhay Rivka , Galileo and the Church: Political inquisition or critical dialogue? (Cambridge, 1995).

Brooke , Science and religion (ref. 19), 42–51.

The examples I am discussing are focused on biblical religion in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The harmony model, used for apologetic purposes, is not confined to that tradition, however. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for example, argues that a particular branch of Islam nurtured the development of science in the medieval Muslim world. See Science and civilization in Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), Introduction.

Merton Robert K. , Science, technology, and society in seventeenth-century England (New York, 1970; first published 1938), 81.

Ibid., chap. 5.

Ibid., 134–5.

“The sociologist is not a Defender of the Faith, religious or scientific. When he has uncovered the sentiments crystallized in religious values and the cultural orientation which governs their expression, when he has determined the extent to which this led men toward or away from scientific pursuits or perhaps influenced them not at all, then his task is, in its initial outlines, complete.” Ibid., 55–56.

Hill Christopher , “Puritanism, capitalism and the Scientific Revolution”, in Webster Charles (ed.), The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century (London, 1974), 243–53, p. 244 (first published in Past and present, xxix (1964), 88–97).

Ibid., 245.

Webster Charles , The Great Instauration: Science, medicine and reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975).

Hooykaas R. , “Science and Reformation”, in Bernard Cohen I. (ed.), Puritanism and the rise of modern science: The Merton Thesis (New Brunswick and London, 1990), 189–99, p. 190 (first published in Journal of world history, iii (1956), 109–39).

Ibid., 191.

Jacob Margaret C. , The cultural meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988), 73.

On Jesuit science, see Heilbron J. L. , Elements of early modern physics (Berkeley, 1982), 93–106; Feldhay Rivka , “Knowledge and salvation in Jesuit culture”, Science in context, i (1987), 195–213; and Dear , Discipline and experience (ref. 16), passim.

See Barker Peter , “The role of religion in the Lutheran response to Copernicus”, in Osler Margaret J. (ed.), The canonical imperative: Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (forthcoming). See also Kusukawa Sachiko , The transformation of natural philosophy: The case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1995).

The interconnectedness of the study of astronomy and the understanding of God's handiwork is a constant theme in Kepler's writings. See, for example, Kepler Johannes , Epitome of Copernican astronomy, transl. by Glenn Wallis Charles , in Great books of the Western World (Chicago, 1952), xvi, 841–1004.

Field J. V. , Kepler's geometrical cosmology (Chicago, 1988), 49.

Boyle Robert , The usefulness of experimental natural philosophy, The excellency of theology, A discourse of things above reason, Some considerations about the reconcileableness of reason and religion, A free inquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature, A disquisition about the final causes of natural things, and The Christian virtuoso, all in Boyle Robert , The works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. by Birch Thomas , rev. edn (6 vols, London, 1772).

Newton Isaac , Opticks, or a Treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections, and colours of light , 4th edn (London, 1730; reprinted New York, 1952), 369–70.

Dobbs B. J. T. , The Janus faces of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton's thought (Cambridge, 1991), 18.

Westfall Richard S. , Science and religion in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, 1958), 24.

Ibid., 219–20.

Duhem , To save the phenomena (ref. 35), 106.

Duhem Pierre , Essays in the history and philosophy of science, transl. and ed. by Ariew Roger and Barker Peter (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1996), p. x.

Ibid., p. xi.

See Duhem Pierre , The aim and structure of physical theory, transl. by Wiener Phillip (Princeton, 1954).

Galilei Galileo , “Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine Grand Duchess of Tuscany”, in Drake , Discoveries and opinions of Galileo (ref. 18), 175–216, p. 186.

Barbour , Issues (ref. 18), 3–4.

Ibid., 54.

Ibid., 50.

Gassendi Pierre , Disquisitio metaphysica seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa , ed. and into French by Rochot Bernard (Paris, 1962), 396–9, in Gassendi Pierre , Opera omnia (6 vols, Lyon, 1658; facsimile reprint, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1964), iii, 359.

In Boyle , Works (ref. 55), v, 392–444. On the role of final causes in early modern natural philosophy, see Osler Margaret J. , “From immanent natures to nature as artifice: The reinterpretation of final causes in seventeenth-century natural philosophy”, The monist, lxxix (1996), 388–407.

For a conceptual argument against the segregationist view, see Wykstra , “Should worldviews shape science?” (ref. 18).

See Wykstra , “Should worldviews shape science?” for a philosophical analysis of various kinds of interactions between theology and scientific theory.

Oakley , Omnipotence, covenant, and order (ref. 21), and Funkenstein , Theology and the scientific imagination (ref. 22).

Barker , “Understanding change and continuity” (ref. 25), 547.

Prime examples are the incorporation of Aristotelian natural philosophy into medieval theology and the development of the higher criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Neil W. , “The criticism and theological use of the Bible, 1700–1950”, in Greenslade S. L. (ed.), The Cambridge history of the Bible (3 vols, Cambridge, 1963), iii, 238–93.

Cunningham , “How the Principia got its name” (ref. 3), 388.

MacIntosh J. J. , “Robert Boyle on Epicurean atheism and atomism”, in Osler Margaret J. (ed.), Atoms, pneuma, and tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic themes in European thought (Cambridge, 1991), 197–219.

See Hutchison Keith , “Supernaturalism and the mechanical philosophy”, History of science, xxi (1983), 297–333.

See, for example, Henry John , “Henry More versus Robert Boyle: The spirit of nature and the nature of Providence”, in Hutton Sarah (ed.), Henry More (1624–1687): Tercentenary studies (Dordrecht, 1990), 55–76, and Osler Margaret J. , “Triangulating Divine Will: Henry More, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes on God's relationship to the Creation”, in Baldi Marialuisa (ed.), “Mind senior to the world”: Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica del Seicento inglese (Milan, 1996), 75–88.

Popkin Richard H. , The history of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , rev. and expanded edn (Berkeley, 1979; first published 1960); van Leeuwen Henry , The problem of certainty in English thought 1630–1680 (The Hague, 1963); and Shapiro , Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century England (ref. 6).

Cunningham , “How the Principia got its name” (ref. 3), 386–9.

Klaaren Eugene M. , Religious origins of modern science: Belief in creation in seventeenth-century thought (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1977), chaps. 4, 5, 6. “While it is a truism that the rise of modern natural science occurred within Christendom, I have sought to show in the broadest sense that belief in creation constituted a definitive context within which the basic questions of major figures in the advent of the new science were raised, pursued, and developed. Systematically, the principals who gave shape to the new science … took for granted an orientation to God as Creator, His relation to creation, structure in creation at large, and the human creature's special place in creation” (p. 186). See also Osler Margaret J. , “The intellectual sources of Robert Boyle's philosophy of nature: Gassendi's voluntarism and Boyle's physico-theological project”, in Kroll Richard Ashcraft Richard , and Zagorin Perez (eds), Philosophy, science, and religion in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), 178–98.

Wojcik , Robert Boyle and the limits of reason (ref. 6). See also Wojcik Jan W. , “The theological context of Boyle's Things above reason“, in Hunter Michael (ed.), Robert Boyle reconsidered (Cambridge, 1994), 139–55.

Osler , Divine Will and the mechanical philosophy (ref. 6).

Garber Daniel , Descartes' metaphysical physics (Chicago, 1992), 117–20.

Elzinga Aant , On a research program in early modern physics (New York, 1972), 73–80.

Westfall Richard S. , Force in Newton's physics: The science of dynamics in the seventeenth century (New York, 1971), chap. 4.

Elzinga , On a research program (ref. 85), 80.

Yoder Joella , Unrolling time: Christiaan Huygens and the mathematization of nature (Cambridge, 1988), 172–3.

Ibid. , 172, and Gabbey Alan , “Huygens and mechanics”, in Bos H. J. M. Rudwick M. J. S. Snelders H. A. M. , and Visser R. P. W. (eds), Studies on Christiaan Huygens: Invited papers from the Symposium on the Life and Work of Christiaan Huygens, Amsterdam, 22–25 August 1979 (Lisse, 1980), 166–99, p. 185.

Dobbs , Janus faces (ref. 57), chaps. 4–7.

Newton Isaac , Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World, transl. by Motte Andrew in 1729 and revised by Florian Cajori (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1934), 400.

See, for example, Newton to Oldenburg, 11 June 1672, in The correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. by Turnbull H. W. Scott J. P. Hall A. R. , and Tilling Laura (7 vols, Cambridge, 1959–77), i, 187.

See Osler , Divine Will and the mechanical philosophy (ref. 6), chap. 10.

See articles by Mason S. F. Kearney H. F. Hill Christopher , and Rabb Theodore in Webster (ed.), The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century (ref. 45).

Gasking Elizabeth , “Why was Mendel's work ignored?”, Journal of the history of ideas, xx (1959), 60–84.