F. M. McMurry - "How To Study and Teaching How To Study"

Aubrey de Vere - "The Legends of Saint Patrick"

Charlotte M. Yonge - "The Long Vacation"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1579 80"

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Books: History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

J >> John William Draper >> History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science




What then? shall we give up these books? Does not the admission
that the narrative of the fall in Eden is legendary carry with it
the surrender of that most solemn and sacred of Christian
doctrines, the atonement?

Let us reflect on this! Christianity, in its earliest days, when
it was converting and conquering the world, knew little or
nothing about that doctrine. We have seen that, in his "Apology,"
Tertullian did not think it worth his while to mention it. It
originated among the Gnostic heretics. It was not admitted by the
Alexandrian theological school. It was never prominently advanced
by the Fathers. It was not brought into its present commanding
position until the time of Anselm Philo Judaeus speaks of the
story of the fall as symbolical; Origen regarded it as an
allegory. Perhaps some of the Protestant churches may, with
reason, be accused of inconsistency, since in part they consider
it as mythical, in part real. But, if, with them, we admit that
the serpent is symbolical of Satan, does not that cast an air of
allegory over the whole narrative?

It is to be regretted that the Christian Church has burdened
itself with the defense of these books, and voluntarily made
itself answerable for their manifest contradictions and errors.
Their vindication, if it were possible, should have been resigned
to the Jews, among whom they originated, and by whom they have
been transmitted to us. Still more, it is to be deeply regretted
that the Pentateuch, a production so imperfect as to be unable to
stand the touch of modern criticism, should be put forth as the
arbiter of science. Let it be remembered that the exposure of the
true character of these books has been made, not by captious
enemies, but by pious and learned churchmen, some of them of the
highest dignity.

While thus the Protestant churches have insisted on the
acknowledgment of the Scriptures as the criterion of truth, the
Catholic has, in our own times, declared the infallibility of the
pope. It may be said that this infallibility applies only to
moral or religious things; but where shall the line of separation
be drawn? Onmiscience cannot be limited to a restricted group of
questions; in its very nature it implies the knowledge of all,
and infallibility means omniscience.

Doubtless, if the fundamental principles of Italian Christianity
be admitted, their logical issue is an infallible pope. There is
no need to dwell on the unphilosophical nature of this
conception; it is destroyed by an examination of the political
history of the papacy, and the biography of the popes. The former
exhibits all the errors and mistakes to which institutions of a
confessedly human character have been found liable; the latter is
only ton frequently a story of sin and shame.

It was not possible that the authoritative promulgation of the
dogma of papal infallibility should meet among enlightened
Catholics universal acceptance. Serious and wide-spread dissent
has been produced. A doctrine so revolting to common-sense could
not find any other result. There are many who affirm that, if
infallibility exists anywhere, it is in oecumenical councils, and
yet such councils have not always agreed with each other. There
are also many who remember that councils have deposed popes, and
have passed judgment on their clamors and contentions. Not
without reason do Protestants demand, What proof can be given
that infallibility exists in the Church at all? what proof is
there that the Church has ever been fairly or justly represented
in any council? and why should the truth be ascertained by the
vote of a majority rather than by that of a minority? How often
it has happened that one man, standing at the right point of
view, has descried the truth, and, after having been denounced
and persecuted by all others, they have eventually been
constrained to adopt his declarations! Of many great discoveries,
has not this been the history?

It is not for Science to compose these contesting claims; it is
not for her to determine whether the criterion of truth for the
religious man shall be found in the Bible, or in the oecumenical
council, or in the pope. She only asks the right, which she so
willingly accords to others, of adopting a criterion of her own.
If she regards unhistorical legends with disdain; if she
considers the vote of a majority in the ascertainment of truth
with supreme indifference; if she leaves the claim of
infallibility in any human being to be vindicated by the stern
logic of coming events--the cold impassiveness which in these
matters she maintains is what she displays toward her own
doctrines. Without hesitation she would give up the theories of
gravitation or undulations, if she found that they were
irreconcilable with facts. For her the volume of inspiration is
the book of Nature, of which the open scroll is ever spread forth
before the eyes of every man. Confronting all, it needs no
societies for its dissemination. Infinite in extent, eternal in
duration, human ambition and human fanaticism have never been
able to tamper with it. On the earth it is illustrated by all
that is magnificent and beautiful, on the heavens its letters are
suns and worlds.



CHAPTER IX.

CONTROVERSY RESPECTING THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNIVERSE.

There are two conceptions of the government of the world: 1. By
Providence; 2. By Law.--The former maintained by the
priesthood.--Sketch of the introduction of the latter.

Kepler discovers the laws that preside over the solar
system.--His works are denounced by papal authority.--The
foundations of mechanical philosophy are laid by Da
Vinci.--Galileo discovers the fundamental laws of
Dynamics.--Newton applies them to the movements of the celestial
bodies, and shows that the solar system is governed by
mathematical necessity.--Herschel extends that conclusion to the
universe.--The nebular hypothesis.--Theological exceptions to it.

Evidences of the control of law in the construction of the earth,
and in the development of the animal and plant series.--They
arose by Evolution, not by Creation.

The reign of law is exhibited by the historic career of human
societies, and in the case of individual man.

Partial adoption of this view by some of the Reformed Churches.


Two interpretations may be given of the mode of government of the
world. It may be by incessant divine interventions, or by the
operation of unvarying law.

To the adoption of the former a priesthood will always incline,
since it must desire to be considered as standing between the
prayer of the votary and the providential act. Its importance is
magnified by the power it claims of determining what that act
shall be. In the pre Christian (Roman) religion, the grand office
of the priesthood was the discovery of future events by oracles,
omens, or an inspection of the entrails of animals, and by the
offering of sacrifices to propitiate the gods. In the later, the
Christian times, a higher power was claimed; the clergy asserting
that, by their intercessions, they could regulate the course of
affairs, avert dangers, secure benefits, work miracles, and even
change the order of Nature.

Not without reason, therefore, did they look upon the doctrine of
government by unvarying law with disfavor. It seemed to
depreciate their dignity, to lessen their importance. To them
there was something shocking in a God who cannot be swayed by
human entreaty, a cold, passionless divinity--something frightful
in fatalism, destiny.

But the orderly movement of the heavens could not fail in all
ages to make a deep impression on thoughtful observers--the
rising and setting of the sun; the increasing or diminishing
light of the day; the waxing and waning of the moon; the return
of the seasons in their proper courses; the measured march of the
wandering planets in the sky--what are all these, and a thousand
such, but manifestations of an orderly and unchanging procession
of events? The faith of early observers in this interpretation
may perhaps have been shaken by the occurrence of such a
phenomenon as an eclipse, a sudden and mysterious breach of the
ordinary course of natural events; but it would be resumed in
tenfold strength as soon as the discovery was made that eclipses
themselves recur, and may be predicted.

Astronomical predictions of all kinds depend upon the admission
of this fact--that there never has been and never will be any
intervention in the operation of natural laws. The scientific
philosopher affirms that the condition of the world at any given
moment is the direct result of its condition in the preceding
moment, and the direct cause of its condition in the subsequent
moment. Law and chance are only different names for mechanical
necessity.

About fifty years after the death of Copernicus, John Kepler, a
native of Wurtemberg, who had adopted the heliocentric theory,
and who was deeply impressed with the belief that relationships
exist in the revolutions of the planetary bodies round the sun,
and that these if correctly examined would reveal the laws under
which those movements take place, devoted himself to the study of
the distances, times, and velocities of the planets, and the form
of their orbits. His method was, to submit the observations to
which he had access, such as those of Tycho Brahe, to
computations based first on one and then on another hypothesis,
rejecting the hypothesis if he found that the calculations did
not accord with the observations. The incredible labor he had
undergone (he says, "I considered, and I computed, until I almost
went mad") was at length rewarded, and in 1609 he published his
book, "On the Motions of the Planet Mars." In this he had
attempted to reconcile the movements of that planet to the
hypothesis of eccentrics and epicycles, but eventually discovered
that the orbit of a planet is not a circle but an ellipse, the
sun being in one of the foci, and that the areas swept over by a
line drawn from the planet to the sun are proportional to the
times. These constitute what are now known as the first and
second laws of Kepler. Eight years subsequently, he was rewarded
by the discovery of a third law, defining the relation between
the mean distances of the planets from the sun and the times of
their revolutions; "the squares of the periodic times are
proportional to the cubes of the distances." In "An Epitome of
the Copernican System," published in 1618, he announced this law,
and showed that it holds good for the satellites of Jupiter as
regards their primary. Hence it was inferred that the laws which
preside over the grand movements of the solar system preside also
over the less movements of its constituent parts.

The conception of law which is unmistakably conveyed by Kepler's
discoveries, and the evidence they gave in support of the
heliocentric as against the geocentric theory, could not fail to
incur the reprehension of the Roman authorities. The congregation
of the Index, therefore, when they denounced the Copernican
system as utterly contrary to the Holy Scriptures, prohibited
Kepler's "Epitome" of that system. It was on this occasion that
Kepler submitted his celebrated remonstrance: "Eighty years have
elapsed during which the doctrines of Copernicus regarding the
movement of the earth and the immobility of the sun have been
promulgated without hinderance, because it was deemed allowable
to dispute concerning natural things, and to elucidate the works
of God, and now that new testimony is discovered in proof of the
truth of those doctrines--testimony which was not known to the
spiritual judges--ye would prohibit the promulgation of the true
system of the structure of the universe."

None of Kepler's contemporaries believed the law of the areas,
nor was it accepted until the publication of the "Principia" of
Newton. In fact, no one in those times understood the
philosophical meaning of Kepler's laws. He himself did not
foresee what they must inevitably lead to. His mistakes showed
how far he was from perceiving their result. Thus he thought that
each planet is the seat of an intelligent principle, and that
there is a relation between the magnitudes of the orbits of the
five principal planets and the five regular solids of geometry.
At first he inclined to believe that the orbit of Mars is oval,
nor was it until after a wearisome study that he detected the
grand truth, its elliptical form. An idea of the incorruptibility
of the celestial objects had led to the adoption of the
Aristotelian doctrine of the perfection of circular motions, and
to the belief that there were none but circular motions in the
heavens. He bitterly complains of this as having been a fatal
"thief of his time." His philosophical daring is illustrated in
his breaking through this time-honored tradition.

In some most important particulars Kepler anticipated Newton. He
was the first to give clear ideas respecting gravity. He says
every particle of matter will rest until it is disturbed by some
other particle--that the earth attracts a stone more than the
stone attracts the earth, and that bodies move to each other in
proportion to their masses; that the earth would ascend to the
moon one-fifty-fourth of the distance, and the moon would move
toward the earth the other fifty-three. He affirms that the
moon's attraction causes the tides, and that the planets must
impress irregularities on the moon's motions.

The progress of astronomy is obviously divisible into three
periods:

1. The period of observation of the apparent motions of the
heavenly bodies.

2. The period of discovery of their real motions, and
particularly of the laws of the planetary revolutions; this was
signally illustrated by Copernicus and Kepler.

3. The period of the ascertainment of the causes of those laws.
It was the epoch of Newton.

The passage of the second into the third period depended on the
development of the Dynamical branch of mechanics, which had been
in a stagnant condition from the time of Archimedes or the
Alexandrian School.

In Christian Europe there had not been a cultivator of mechanical
philosophy until Leonardo da Vinci, who was born A.D. 1452. To
him, and not to Lord Bacon, must be attributed the renaissance of
science. Bacon was not only ignorant of mathematics, but
depreciated its application to physical inquiries. He
contemptuously rejected the Copernican system, alleging absurd
objections to it. While Galileo was on the brink of his great
telescopic discoveries, Bacon was publishing doubts as to the
utility of instruments in scientific investigations. To ascribe
the inductive method to him is to ignore history. His fanciful
philosophical suggestions have never been of the slightest
practical use. No one has ever thought of employing them. Except
among English readers, his name is almost unknown.

To Da Vinci I shall have occasion to allude more particularly on
a subsequent page. Of his works still remaining in manuscript,
two volumes are at Milan, and one in Paris, carried there by
Napoleon. After an interval of about seventy years, Da Vinci was
followed by the Dutch engineer, Stevinus, whose work on the
principles of equilibrium was published in 1586. Six years
afterward appeared Galileo's treatise on mechanics.

To this great Italian is due the establishment of the three
fundamental laws of dynamics, known as the Laws of Motion.

The consequences of the establishment of these laws were very
important.

It had been supposed that continuous movements, such, for
instance, as those of the celestial bodies, could only be
maintained by a perpetual consumption and perpetual application
of force, but the first of Galileo's laws declared that every
body will persevere in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in
a right line, until it is compelled to change that state by
disturbing forces. A clear perception of this fundamental
principle is essential to a comprehension of the elementary facts
of physical astronomy. Since all the motions that we witness
taking place on the surface of the earth soon come to an end, we
are led to infer that rest is the natural condition of things. We
have made, then, a very great advance when we have become
satisfied that a body is equally indifferent to rest as to
motion, and that it equally perseveres in either state until
disturbing forces are applied. Such disturbing forces in the case
of common movements are friction and the resistance of the air.
When no such resistances exist, movement must be perpetual, as is
the case with the heavenly bodies, which are moving in a void.

Forces, no matter what their difference of magnitude may be, will
exert their full influence conjointly, each as though the other
did not exist. Thus, when a ball is suffered to drop from the
mouth of a cannon, it falls to the ground in a certain interval
of time through the influence of gravity upon it. If, then, it be
fired from the cannon, though now it may be projected some
thousands of feet in a second, the effect of gravity upon it will
be precisely the same as before. In the intermingling of forces
there is no deterioration; each produces its own specific effect.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, through the works
of Borelli, Hooke, and Huyghens, it had become plain that
circular motions could be accounted for by the laws of Galileo.
Borelli, treating of the motions of Jupiter's satellites, shows
how a circular movement may arise under the influence of a
central force. Hooke exhibited the inflection of a direct motion
into a circular by a supervening central attraction.

The year 1687 presents, not only an epoch in European science,
but also in the intellectual development of man. It is marked by
the publication of the "Principia" of Newton, an incomparable, an
immortal work.

On the principle that all bodies attract each other with forces
directly as their masses, and inversely as the squares of their
distances, Newton showed that all the movements of the celestial
bodies may be accounted for, and that Kepler's laws might all
have been predicted-- the elliptic motions--the described areas
the relation of the times and distances. As we have seen,
Newton's contemporaries had perceived how circular motions could
be explained; that was a special case, but Newton furnished the
solution of the general problem, containing all special cases of
motion in circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas--that is, in
all the conic sections.

The Alexandrian mathematicians had shown that the direction of
movement of falling bodies is toward the centre of the earth.
Newton proved that this must necessarily be the case, the general
effect of the attraction of all the particles of a sphere being
the same as if they were all concentrated in its centre. To this
central force, thus determining the fall of bodies, the
designation of gravity was given. Up to this time, no one, except
Kepler, had considered how far its influence reached. It seemed
to Newton possible that it might extend as far as the moon, and
be the force that deflects her from a rectilinear path, and makes
her revolve in her orbit round the earth. It was easy to compute,
on the principle of the law of inverse squares, whether the
earth's attraction was sufficient to produce the observed effect.
Employing the measures of the size of the earth accessible at the
time, Newton found that the moon's deflection was only thirteen
feet in a minute; whereas, if his hypothesis of gravitation were
true, it should be fifteen feet. But in 1669 Picard, as we have
seen, executed the measurement of a degree more carefully than
had previously been done; this changed the estimate of the
magnitude of the earth, and, therefore, of the distance of the
moon; and, Newton's attention having been directed to it by some
discussions that took place at the Royal Society in 1679, he
obtained Picard's results, went home, took out his old papers,
and resumed his calculations. As they drew to a close, he became
so much agitated that he was obliged to desire a friend to finish
them. The expected coincidence was established. It was proved
that the moon is retained in her orbit and made to revolve round
the earth by the force of terrestrial gravity. The genii of
Kepler had given place to the vortices of Descartes, and these in
their turn to the central force of Newton.

In like manner the earth, and each of the planets, are made to
move in an elliptic orbit round the sun by his attractive force,
and perturbations arise by reason of the disturbing action of the
planetary masses on one another. Knowing the masses and the
distances, these disturbances may be computed. Later astronomers
have even succeeded with the inverse problem, that is, knowing
the perturbations or disturbances, to find the place and the mass
of the disturbing body. Thus, from the deviations of Uranus from
his theoretical position, the discovery of Neptune was
accomplished.

Newton's merit consisted in this, that he applied the laws of
dynamics to the movements of the celestial bodies, and insisted
that scientific theories must be substantiated by the agreement
of observations with calculations.

When Kepler announced his three laws, they were received with
condemnation by the spiritual authorities, not because of any
error they were supposed to present or to contain, but partly
because they gave support to the Copernican system, and partly
because it was judged inexpedient to admit the prevalence of law
of any kind as opposed to providential intervention. The world
was regarded as the theatre in which the divine will was daily
displayed; it was considered derogatory to the majesty of God
that that will should be fettered in any way. The power of the
clergy was chiefly manifested in the influence the were alleged
to possess in changing his arbitrary determinations. It was thus
that they could abate the baleful action of comets, secure fine
weather or rain, prevent eclipses, and, arresting the course of
Nature, work all manner of miracles; it was thus that the shadow
had been made to go back on the dial, and the sun and the moon
stopped in mid-career.

In the century preceding the epoch of Newton, a great religious
and political revolution had taken place --the Reformation.
Though its effect had not been the securing of complete liberty
for thought, it bad weakened many of the old ecclesiastical
bonds. In the reformed countries there was no power to express a
condemnation of Newton's works, and among the clergy there was no
disposition to give themselves any concern about the matter. At
first the attention of the Protestant was engrossed by the
movements of his great enemy the Catholic, and when that source
of disquietude ceased, and the inevitable partitions of the
Reformation arose, that attention was fastened upon the rival and
antagonistic Churches. The Lutheran, the Calvinist, the
Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, had something more urgent on hand
than Newton's mathematical demonstrations.

So, uncondemned, and indeed unobserved, in this clamor of
fighting sects, Newton's grand theory solidly established itself.
Its philosophical significance was infinitely more momentous than
the dogmas that these persons were quarreling about. It not only
accepted the heliocentric theory and the laws discovered by
Kepler, but it proved that, no matter what might be the weight of
opposing ecclesiastical authority, the sun MUST be the centre of
our system, and that Kepler's laws are the result of a
mathematical necessity. It is impossible that they should be
other than they are.

But what is the meaning of all this? Plainly that the solar
system is not interrupted by providential interventions, but is
under the government of irreversible law--law that is itself the
issue of mathematical necessity.

The telescopic observations of Herschel I. satisfied him that
there are very many double stars--double not merely because they
are accidentally in the same line of view, but because they are
connected physically, revolving round each other. These
observations were continued and greatly extended by Herschel II.
The elements of the elliptic orbit of the double star zeta of the
Great Bear were determined by Savary, its period being
fifty-eight and one-quarter years; those of another, sigma
Coronae, were determined by Hind, its period being more than
seven hundred and thirty-six years. The orbital movement of these
double suns in ellipses compels us to admit that the law of
gravitation holds good far beyond the boundaries of the solar
system; indeed, as far as the telescope can reach, it
demonstrates the reign of law. D'Alembert, in the Introduction to
the Encyclopaedia, says: "The universe is but a single fact; it
is only one great truth."

Shall we, then, conclude that the solar and the starry systems
have been called into existence by God, and that he has then
imposed upon them by his arbitrary will laws under the control of
which it was his pleasure that their movements should be made?

Or are there reasons for believing that these several systems
came into existence not by such an arbitrary fiat, but through
the operation of law?