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PROBLEMS rN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, volume 3 Edited by IMRE LAKATOS Reader in Logic, University of London ALAN MUSGRAVE Lecturer in Logic and Scientific Method, University of London NORTH-HOLLAND P U B L I S H I N G C O M P A N Y AMSTERDAM 0 NORTH-HOLLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY - AMSTERDAM - 1968 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without written permission from the publisher Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-28649 PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS PREFACE This book constitutes the third volume of the Proceedings of the 1965 International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science held at Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, from July 11th to 17th 1965. The Colloquium was organised jointly by the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and the London School of Economics and Political Science, under the auspices of the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science of the Inter- national Union of History and Philosophy of Science. The Colloquium and the Proceedings were generously subsidised by the sponsoring institutions, and by the Leverhulme Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The members of the Organising Committee were: W. C. Kneale (Chairman), I. Lakatos (Honorary Secretary), J. W. N. Watkins (Honorary Joint Secretary), S. Korner, Sir Karl R. Popper, H. R. Post and J. 0. Wisdom. The Colloquium was divided into three main sections : Problems in the Philosophy of Mathematics, The Problem of Inductive Logic, and Problems in the Philosophy of Science. The full programme of the Colloquium is printed in the first volume of the Proceedings. This third volume of the Proceedings, Problems in the Philosophy of Science, contains revised, and at times considerably expanded, versions of fourteen of the eighteen papers presented in this field at the Colloquium. Some members of the Colloquium, in most cases participants in the debates, were invited to submit comments based on the revised versions of the papers, to which the authors of the papers replied. The Editors wish to thank all the contributors for their kind co-operation. They are also grateful to Miss Phyllis Parker for her conscientious secretarial and organisational help. THE EDITORS London, August 1967 V SCEPTICISM, THEOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY RICHARD H. POPKIN University of California, San Diego It has now become so much a part of our Weltanschauung that religion impeded the rise of modern science, and that modern science liberated the world from the clutches of a monolithic, superstitious, intolerant, anti-scientific, all controlling Church. The battle was joined in the years between Copernicus and Galileo; Galileo was the heroic martyr, and as Galileo died, Newton was born, and ‘God said, Let Newton be! and All was light’l. From Condillac and Condorcet to Lecky, Lange, Andrew White and Bertrand Russell we have been regaled with horror tales concerning the warfare of theology and science, with stories of Galileo and the Inquisition, Servetus burned by Calvin, Uriel da Costa forced to commit suicide, Spinoza excommunicated from the Synagogue, down to poor Mi. Scopes in Tennessee, arrested for trying to teach evolution 2. By now, I think it is time to reexamine this part of our mythology and to try to delineate what kind of war between religion and science did, or might have taken place in the seventeenth century, who won, and what the victory signified then and means to us now. Alexander Pope’s epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton. a Cf. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Cours d’ktudes pour l’instruction du Prince ds Parme, livre xx, ch. IV; Antoine-Nioolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. by June Barraolough, New York, 1955, esp. 8th, 9th and 10th stage; William E. H. Leoky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, New York, 1955; Frederick A. Lttnge, The H&.qtory of Materialism, London, 1957, esp. Book I, sec. 2-4; John M. Robertson, A Short History of Preethought Ancient and Modern, rr, 3rd ed., London, 1915; Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science, London, 1947; and Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, New York, 1960. 1 2 RICHARD H. POPKIN The tone of my introduction indicates that I am somewhat dubious of the official account. White, Russell and others have joined together a potpourri of cases, miscellaneous data, and lop- sided interpretations of some events to make a shocking picture of religious bigotry versus the noble spirit of free scientific inquiry. Descartes’ departure for Holland in 1618 is attributed to his need to escape the Church in order to pursue his mathematical and physical investigations. The 1624 ban on teaching non-Aristotelian physics in Paris (actually directed against alchemists) is assumed to have been strictly enforced against the new scientists. The condemnation of Galileo is assumed to have represented a view accepted and held by all Churchmen everywhere. The pro-religious views stated and published by Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Pierre Bayle and others are assumed to be necessary camouflage to avoid persecution and censorship. The rigid censorship conditions that existed in France around 1750 are assumed to be the normal state of affairs throughout the seventeenth century. The Spanish Inqui- sition is assumed to be the norm for religious institutions everywhere at the time. Spinoza’s excommunication is assumed to repre- sent the usual reaction of organized religion to new ideas1. Well, obviously the situation was more complex. Local conditions varied greatly, and at various periods Church support or Church opposition occurred. The Copernican theory was taught at Salamanca before Galileo started arguing for it in Italy. The new physics was promulgated in France by Mersenne, Gassendi and Pascal while the ban on non-Aristotelian physics was on the books. Galileo’s mechanics was published by Mersenne right after the former’s condemnation. Church groups, especially the Oratorians and the Jansenists taught Cartesian physics even through the period in the 1670’s when Descartes’ views were condemned. The Index, French government censorship, etc. accomplished little in impeding the publication and diffusion of the new science, and very often Church authorities and institutions promoted the new science and the new scientists. Galileo, up to 1632, was a good friend of the 1 See, for instance, the accounts in the works of Lange, Lecky, Russell, and White mentioned in n. 2, p. 1. SCEPTICISM, THEOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION 3 Pope and of other leading Churchmen. Descartes’ career was launched by Cardinal Bhrulle. The Royal Society was started and led by a group of Anglican bishops. I submit that if one wanted to make the effort, one could assemble at least as impressive a case that religious institutions fostered, encouraged and developed the new science in the seventeenth century, as that they opposed and hindered it. Part of the problem involved is the ambiguity of what constitutes the religious side and what the scientific one. Are the professors of mathematics and physics the latter, and the professors of theology the former? Who gets to count Father Mersenne, Father Gassendi, Father Torricelli, and the scientific genius and religious fanatic, Blaise Pascal? Which side has to count the physics professor who, when asked by Descartes why he didn’t teach Cartesian physics instead of that Aristotelian drivel, replied, that if we taught your physics, we’d need new textbooks? What it meant in 1600, or 1650 to be scientific and what it meant to be religious is very hard to define precisely, and I think the attempt to do so would show the classifications overlapping to a large extent. One solution, which I think is also part of our mythology, is to count on the scientific side those people who regardless of occupation or affiliation actually held modern scientific and irre- ligious views, and who saw the new science as the opponent of religious orthodoxy. But who are these people! Well, it is assumed that Father Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, etc. must have seen what we see, and hence that they must have been secret atheists no matter how much religious cant they uttered and wrote to please the authorities. If we could read between the lines (as all good scholars do anyway) and read their unwritten works, we would find a multitude of secret atheists, conducting a war of science against religion, liberating mankind and overthrowing Christianity. All sorts of people are supposed to have been secret atheists - Machiavelli, Bodin, Arentino, Pomponazzi, Montaigne, Charron, Gassendi, Pope Leo X . . -1. But how does one ascertain 1 All of these cases are discussed at length in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionmire historipe et cm’tipue. In his article on Leo X, Bayle seriously examines the evidence about whether that Pope was an atheist. See Dictionmire, art. ‘Leon X’, remarks ‘O’, ‘P’ and ‘Q’. 4 RICHARD H. POPKIN what someone believed 300 or 400 years ago, beyond what that person said he believed? The data about who was accused of atheism in the seventeenth century is interesting but inconclusive. As Kristeller, D. C. Allen and Popkin have argued 1, ‘atheist’ was a pejorative term, used with as much accuracy as ‘communist’ is in Southern California today. The nastiest thing one could say about an opponent was that he was an atheist. Father Garasse, in his enormous McCarthy-like attacks on the freethinkers of the early seventeenth century, claimed that Luther and Calvin were atheists 2. Father Hardouin, in his work, The Atheists Detected, detected that Descartes, Malebranche and Arnauld were atheists 3. Arnauld, another one with a nose for secret atheism, saw right away that Bishop Huet was an atheist 4. Mersenne made the impressive claim that in 1625 there were 60 000 atheists in the city of Paris alone (the then estimated population of Paris was 50-60 000) 5. Mersenne did not indicate if he was counting his friends Hobbes, Gassendi, Grotius, Herbert of Cherbury, etc. Pierre Bayle, who was fascinated with the possibility of secret atheists (and was accused of being one himself) looked into all the reputed cases, and came to the conclusion Kristeller and I have, that, in the modern sense of atheist - that is, someone who denies that there is any super-natural being or force that guides or controls 1 Paul 0. Kristeller, ‘El mito del ateism0 renaeentista y la, tradici6n francesa del librepensctmiento’, Notas y Estudios de Filosofm 4, (1953), pp. 1-14; Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea, Baltimore, 1964, esp. oh. 1 ; and R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Assen and New York, 1964, esp. chs. v and VI. a Father Franpois Garasse, La Somme Theologique des veritez capitales de la Religion Chrktienne, Livre I, Paris, 1625. 9 Father Jean Hardouin, Athei detecta, and Reflexions importantes qui doivent se rnettre d la fin du Traitk intituld Athei detecti, in Opera varia, Amsterdam, 1733. 4 Antoine Arnauld, Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld, 1x1, Lausanne, 1775-1783, Lettres 830, 833, 834, and 847. 5 Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones in Genesirn, Paris, 1623, col. 671. The background of Mersenne’s estimate is discussed in Robert Lenoble, Memenne ou la naissnnce du micanisme, Paris, 1943, pp. 171-175; and C m m m w e de Marin Mersenne, I, ed. by De Waard, Pintard, Rochot, Paris, 1945, pp. 133-134. SCEPTICISM, TKEOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION 5 the universe, or who denies any special spiritual status to the Judeo-Christian tradition - there were no atheists before the 1650’s. When Bayle wrote a history of modern atheism in his article on Spinoza, he could find no identifiable atheistic individuals between David of Dinant (thirteenth century) and Spinoza 1. (Recently I have become a little dubious of my own view, since there is some evidence that secret atheism may have developed among some of the Spanish Jews forced to embrace Catholicism. But, if so, these possible secret atheists had little influence on modern science until the mid-seventeenth century.) 2 Rather than trying today to pick apart the strains of the alleged history of the warfare of science and theology, and to question the facts and interpretations on which White, Lecky, Russell and others base their case, I should like to offer an alternative picture of what may have happened. By-and-large, my suspicion is that the period from Copernicus to Newton is dominated by a war amongst the theologians, with the scientists only occasionally entering in, or being caught in the struggle. The riskiest occupation from 1500 onward was that of a theology professor. It really mattered what one said. The death rate from burning, torture, incarceration, etc. among theologians far exceeds that among scientists. (In fact it is hard to find many scientists before the twentieth century who really got killed for theirescientific views, and not for either religious or political ones.) The great Servetus, whose scientific contribution was enormous, was burned solely for a fine point in theology, his denial of the doctrine of the Trinity. As has been said, Calvin killed him for a misplaced adjective, when Servetus prayed to the son of the Eternal Father, and not to the Eternal Son of the Fathers. The heresy hunters of the Inquisition were primarily concerned with catching secret Jews, secret Muslims and 1 Bayle, Dictionmire, art. ‘Spinosa, Benoit’, Rem. A. 2 At least it seems plausible that some of those forcibly converted in the fift.eenth and sixteenth centuries may have come to the conclusion that their new unwanted religion was false, and may have generalized from that to denying all religions. 3 On Servetus’ case, see Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: the Life and Death of Michael Servetus 1511-1553, Boston, 1960. 6 RICHARD H. POPKIN Lutherans, but not scientists per se1. (In Spain and Portugal a good many scientists were persecuted, but far fewer than the number of theologians, and almost always the scientists were persecuted as Judaizers, as Lutherans, or as mystics.) In a world in which priests were boiled in oil in Holland, or jailed in England, Protestants slaughtered in France, religious views obviously mattered in a way that scientific ones did not. In a world full of radical religious innovators, much in the style of Southern California today, one could speak of the hunted heretic, but hardly of the hunted scientist. Most scientists died of old age or medical mal- practice, unless they combined their scientific work with religious interpretations as did Agrippa von Nettesheim and Giordano Bruno. Archbishop Carranza, the primate of Spain, spent thirteen years in solitary confinement awaiting trial for the most picayune theological deviations 2, while Galileo’s case was handled with dispatch and simple abjuration. I say ‘simple abjuration’ since all he had to do was say that he recanted, whereas in normal Spanish Inquisition cases people would rot in dungeons for years, then be asked to recant without being told what the crime was, then be tortured to see if they really had recanted, then be forced to name all the heretics they knew and to give evidence against them, and then the inquisitional authorities would decide the proper punish- ment before the individual could be reconciled with the Church. The punishments ranged from banishment, economic ruin, massive scourging and prison terms, to death by garrotting for their sincere repentance. (A negativo, i.e. an unrepentant heretic, was burned alive) 3. In a world so dominated by theological controversies and the vicious and violent suppression of alleged unorthodoxy (though 1 See the types of heretics persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition in Henry C. Lea, A History of the Irquistion in Spain, New York, 1907. Vols. 111 and IV contain Book VIII on ‘Spheres of Action’, in which the main classes of victims are Jews, Moriscos (Moslems), Protestants, Mystics, Sorcerers. a On Archbishop Carranza’s case see Lea, 11, pp. 45-87; and Marcelino Menhdez Pelayo, Historia de 10s Heterodoxos, 11, Madrid. 1946, Lib. IV, cap. vnI, pp. 1-59. See Lea, 11, Book VI, ‘Practice’, pp. 457-586. SCEPTICISM, THEOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION 7 unorthodoxy was rampant in both the Catholic and Protestant worlds, especially where the civil authorities were not easily excited about minor religious differences), the scientists, that is, those studying nature, only, I believe, get involved in the religious wars when their efforts directly relate to some theological point, or when they inadvertently or deliberately antagonize some theologians. There is an age-old tension between man’s natural curiosity about his world and the acceptance of the religious traditions of his society. Intellectuals have, as far back as we have written records, caused difficulties in the easy acceptance of mythologies or religions by confronting these traditional views with information or reasona- ble beliefs that do not seem to fit. A major dynamic force in Western intellectual history has been the continuing effort to harmonize religious belief with new conditions, new data, and new theories. Hillel’s Academy and the Talmudic schools that followed from it, developed a powerful technique for adaptation of the Jewish heritage through unending re-interpretation of a fixed revealed text. Geniuses from the days of Rabbi Akiba and Johannan ben Zakkai to Raschi, Maimonides and the Gaon of Vilna managed to harmonize almost all relevant findings with the Divine Message, and succeeded in channelizing the most creative intellectual en- deavors into this crucial stabilizing effort. In the Christian world a similar type of exegesis and interpretation developed, and became a major preoccupation of the Church Fathers and of the medieval universities. After all, the Sentences of Peter Lomabard are a way of listing the problems to be reckoned with in making the Bible, the tradition, the rational, and the observable world fit together. The endless number of commentaries on the Sentences testify to the highly developed technique, and its continuing success. It was only when Maimonides and the Latin Averroists touched the raw nerve of the process of reconciling reason and faith that a shock wave ran through the intellectual world. Maimonides pointed out that no matter how much reconciling one did, one might still have to choose between reason and religion. The rabbis who opposed him, like Rabad of Posquihres 1, saw that Maimonides had exposed 1 On him see Isadore Twersky, Rabad of Posquikes. A twelfth century Talmudist, Cambridge Mess., 1962.