A new motive
Institutions gave free learning a home. But there is a harder question. Modern science grew for two or three hundred years before it paid off. Until the 1800s it made little difference to farming, industry, or war. So what kept it going? Why did gifted people give their lives to it, and why did societies support it?
Greek science had no answer to that, and needed none. It was a way of shaping free people, not a profession that promised anyone results. Modern science, this course argues, drew its drive from religious faith. Christianity took Greek learning in and reshaped it by changing three of its central ideas: freedom, the place of human beings, and nature. Each change pushed knowledge a little further from contemplation and toward power.
Freedom: from knowing to willing
For the Greeks, freedom meant living by reason. Know the truth, and you will act on it. Socrates is said to have held that no one does wrong willingly: people do wrong because they don’t know better. Later philosophers summed up this view as “freedom is the recognition of necessity.” On this view, knowledge and virtue are one thing, and learning is how a person becomes free.
The idea is charming but naive. Knowing and being good are plainly different. An old woman in a mountain village who has never heard of relativity may be the finest person you know, and a brilliant physicist can be a scoundrel. Still, the Greek idea explains Greek science. If the free person is the one who knows, then the highest science is pure knowing, and it needs no use.
Christianity introduced a different freedom: freedom of the will, the power to choose. It came out of an old puzzle that non-Christians still like to put to believers. If God is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful, why is the world full of disasters, cruelty, and crooks who live long lives? Christian thinkers, above all Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will (388–395), had an answer ready. Good and evil exist only where there is free choice. God is free, and he made human beings free, because freedom is good. The price of freedom is the possibility of evil.
“Humans are born free” became a basic Christian teaching, and, in this reading, it changed what knowledge was for. If freedom means knowing, science is contemplation. If freedom means willing, then knowledge serves the will: I want to do something. This course borrows a phrase from Nietzsche and calls the result a science of the “will to power.”
Humanity: humans move up
In most civilizations, human beings are not at the top of the order of things. The Chinese classics name three powers: Heaven, Earth, and Humanity, with humanity listed third. The Greeks set mortals below the immortal gods. Even the word philosophy is humble. It means “love of wisdom,” because, as Plato has a character explain in the Symposium, the gods are already wise and have no need to seek wisdom. Humans can only love it.
A few Greeks did put humans first. The teacher Protagoras is famous for one sentence:
πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος
Of all things the measure is man.
Protagoras, quoted in Plato’s Theaetetus
But in Plato’s dialogue, Socrates takes the claim apart. If each person is the measure of all things, then every opinion is as true as every other, and there is no truth at all. For the Greek mainstream, the measure is reason, not man.
Christianity, in this reading, did two things. First, it swept away the many gods and left one God above everything. Second, beneath that God, it lifted human beings above everything else. In Genesis, God creates humans last, in his own image, breathes life into them, and hands them the world:
Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1:28 (King James Version)
This, the argument runs, grounded a Christian humanism: every human being ranks above every other creature, and saving a single human life can justify great sacrifice. It also pointed toward a new kind of science, one that serves humanity. Greek science sought truth for its own sake. A science for human beings asks what truth can do for us.
Where do humans stand?
Choose a tradition to see where it places human beings in the order of things. The last view comes later in this lesson.
These are simplified pictures that follow this course’s reading, not full accounts of any tradition.
Another view
In 1967 the American historian Lynn White Jr. published “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” in the journal Science. He made an argument close to this lesson’s: by giving humans dominion over nature, Western Christianity licensed its exploitation. The essay became a founding text of environmental ethics. Many Christians have since read “dominion” as stewardship instead, a duty to care for creation. Pope Francis did so in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’.
The Christian view is often contrasted with a line credited to a Native American chief: humans belong to the earth, but the earth does not belong to humans. Words like these are often attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854. In fact, the best-known version was written in 1971 by the screenwriter Ted Perry. The idea is real and widely held, but that speech is not a historical source.
When God became unpredictable
If humans rank highest among creatures, you might expect science to serve God first. For most of the Middle Ages it did: theology was queen of the sciences. The new universities joined Greek reason to Christian faith in a body of thought called scholasticism. Thinkers like Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s logic to organize Christian doctrine. This course sees it as the most complete marriage of the two great sources of Western civilization, Greek and Hebrew.
The scholastics pictured a God who made the world rationally, so a rational mind could understand it. Then, in the 1300s, a movement known as nominalism broke that picture. Its best-known thinker, the English friar William of Ockham, insisted that God’s power is absolute. God is not bound by what human reason thinks is fitting. Whatever does not involve a contradiction, he can do.
Consider the consequence. The sun rises in the east every morning. Is that necessary? Could God make it rise in the west tomorrow? Of course he could. He could make it rise in the middle of the afternoon. He could let your vocal cords vibrate while making no sound at all. On this view, every regularity in the world holds only because God, for now, allows it. Even salvation became uncertain. A lifetime of good works guarantees nothing, because God’s idea of good need not match ours.
The church tried to push back, but nominalism was hard to refute. Its premises were orthodox: God is infinite and humans are finite. Yet it left the Greek world of pure reason in ruins, and it left a God no one could count on. When Nietzsche proclaimed in 1882 that “God is dead,” he was, in this reading, reporting a death that had begun much earlier. God had fallen ill with nominalism.
The self steps in
Humanism, this course argues, filled that gap. If God can’t be counted on, humans must take charge themselves. People began to take on powers that had belonged to God, above all the power to create. Today we praise innovation constantly. Yet for most of history it was an insult. In the classical world, nature and logic were what they were, and trying to change them was presumption. For centuries in Europe, calling someone an “innovator” was an accusation. Innovation became a virtue only when there was no longer any fixed standard, and humans had to set their own.
Je pense, donc je suis.
I think, therefore I am.
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637
Descartes gave the new starting point its famous form. He resolved to doubt everything he could, and found that the one thing he could not doubt was his own doubting. The foundation of certainty was the “I.” Call it the founding order of modern philosophy: first the self, then the world. The world had once been something humans lived in, much as Chinese thought imagines heaven and humanity as one. Now it became something the self looks at, a representation or picture before a thinking subject. Humans are the end, and the world is the picture. Lesson 4 follows where that leads.
Nature: nature comes down
For the Greeks, nature was what is “so of itself.” It had its own inner source of growth and change, and nothing could alter it. So the human task was to follow nature, not to conquer it. Physics was the study of nature. The name “metaphysics” began as a label for Aristotle’s books placed after his Physics; this course reads it as philosophy following nature’s lead. Even art, for the Greeks, could only imitate nature, which is one reason artists and craftsmen ranked low.
This, the argument goes, is why the Greeks didn’t build a science of experiment. It wasn’t for lack of skill. An experiment seemed both impossible and pointless. Impossible, because you can’t change what nature is. Pointless, because nature’s order could be grasped by contemplation. To trick nature into behaving unnaturally seemed a kind of dishonesty.
Christianity overturned this. Nature, it taught, is not self-made. It is a creation, made by God from outside. Created things lose what we might call their “inwardness”: whatever they are, they are because God made them so, not because of an inner source of their own. Christianity raised humans up and brought nature down.
Combine that with nominalism and something important follows. If God could have made nature any way he chose, you can’t work out how he did it by reasoning in an armchair. You have to go and look. Observation and experience became essential ways of knowing. Even modern laws of nature carry a trace of this. Scientists don’t claim to have found eternal necessities the way Greek philosophers did, only regularities that hold as far as we have checked.
Finally, if nature is God’s gift to humanity, humans may use it freely, and they should use it, to show the power of the human will. “Conquering nature” became a central theme of the modern age. This course notes that no one in ancient Greece spoke of conquering nature, and that in Chinese culture the idea was never mainstream either.
Put the three changes together and a new kind of science appears. Freedom of the will, humans raised above creation, and nature made into an object add up to one idea, as Francis Bacon wrote in 1597: knowledge is power. A science that seeks power was taking the place of a science that seeks truth.
In this lesson’s account, why does a created nature call for observation and experiment?
Closer to home
The Declaration of Independence rests on two of the ideas this lesson describes: that all men “are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with rights that include liberty. Human dignity and freedom are presented there as gifts of a creator, which is this lesson’s point about where the modern Western idea of freedom came from.
Innovation is the other inheritance. Silicon Valley celebrates disruption, and companies promise to “change the world.” By this lesson’s account, that attitude would have struck an ancient Greek, or a Confucian scholar, as reckless. It feels natural to us because we live after the change described here.
Another view
This lesson’s argument has a long pedigree in the West. In 1934 the Oxford philosopher Michael Foster argued that the Christian doctrine of creation made an empirical science of nature necessary. Hans Blumenberg (1966) and Michael Allen Gillespie (2008) traced modern self-assertion to the crisis that nominalism created. Peter Harrison has added that belief in the Fall, the idea that human reason was damaged by sin, made early scientists distrust pure reasoning and insist on testing.
Critics say the Greek side of the contrast is too neat. Greeks did experiment: Ptolemy measured how light bends in water, and Galen cut nerves in live animals to learn what they controlled. What was missing was a culture that made experiment the center of knowing, and that is closer to the real claim here.
What to keep
- Freedom changed from knowing the truth to choosing, and knowledge came to serve the will.
- Humans rose above the rest of creation. After nominalism made God unpredictable, the thinking self became the starting point and the world became a picture before it.
- Nature lost its inwardness. A created, contingent nature has to be observed and tested, and as God’s gift it may be used and conquered.
- Together these changes produced a science that seeks power as well as truth.
Think it over
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Sources and further reading
- Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, 388–395.
- Michael B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43, 1934.
- Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1966; English translation, MIT Press, 1983.
- Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, 1967.