Why democracy and Christianity need science

John Locke (1632-1704)

Mari, following on your posts In Defense of Science and And Better Yet, It's Free!, I just wanted to mention that Skeptical Inquirer magazine has been fighting the good fight for science against superstition and pseudoscience for a long time. And continues to do so, with articles like Debating Creationists (May/June 2007) and Fighting the Fundamentalists (Mar/Apr 2007). Their articles are written in a "popular" style, meaning you don't have to have a Ph.D. in biology or physics to understand them. (I read not long ago that Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb, used to complain that the articles in Scientific American were often too technical for him to follow.)

I've lately been reading a book with the New Agey-sounding title, The Meeting of East and West. It's written by F.S.C. Northrop, who was a Professor of Philosophy and Law at the Yale Law School. It was published in 1946, during that brief period after the Second World War when there was still an immediate possibility for a more cooperative international environment than the Cold War turned out to be. His not-modest goal in the book was to suggest ways in which the major assumptions of Eastern and Western civilizations could be drawn upon to produce a new philosophical foundation for a more free and peaceful world. Like I said, not a modest goal.

This kind of history of ideas has its limits, but this is one of the better examples I've encountered. One of the things he stresses about Western civilization (I'm just getting to the Eastern part) is that the notions of democratic political liberty and human rights which the rising capitalist orders in European countries brought to some degree of realization - aka, "classical liberalism" - were philosophically based on the implications of physical science. The Jeffersonian notions of freedom of speech and religion and the need for rule by a democratic majority were heavily based on the ideas of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who derived his basic understanding of human equality from working out the implications of the physics of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

I won't go into the more excruciating details here. But basically, Locke's philosophy addressed the nature of the observer in the theoretical scheme of the physics of his day, in which "the sensed qualities in sensed space and time" are not considered direct qualities of the object being observed, but qualities perceived "indirectly by way of the observer".

There are obviously quite a few intermediate steps to get from there to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Continental Congress. Freedom in practice had to be obtained through a political and military revolution against the British, not by arguments over the philosophy of science. But Northrup's point is valid and important. Our democratic notions of freedom stem from a scientific understanding of the world, as well as from moral and religious notions of the dignity of the individual human. Science is an integral part of democracy, not a luxury that can be treated as a fad or partisan preference without undercutting the basis of democracy.

Northrup also argues that sound Christian theology requires sound science. This one takes me more words even to summarize the argument than the one about Locke and physics. But here goes.

Northrup has a chapter on "Roman Catholic Culture and Greek Science" in which he essentially polemicizes in favor of Catholic religious tradition which, despite its well-known conflicts with some scientific ideas like Galileo's, based Christian theology on scientific philosophical foundations. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25-1274) founded his theology on Aristotle's philosophy, an approach adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, replacing the previous Platonic conception of Christian theology.

This Aristotelian doctrine later had a reactionary effect when Church leaders refused initially to accept important developments in physics like those associated with Galileo. But in the 13th century, it was a process of assimilating the most advanced findings of the most modern science, which of course came to Christian Europe from the Arab world, largely through Al-Andalus (Spain). Ibn Rushd of Al-Andalus (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroës (or Averrhoës), was the leading commentator on Aristotle of his time. And Ibn Rushd's exposition of Aristotle's ideas and his use of Aristotle's ideas in his Islamic theology, were very influential on St. Thomas.

Northrup argues that Thomistic/Aristotelian theology gave Catholic Christianity a theoretical grounding in the material world that is lacking in Protestant Christianity in general. Aristotle understood the human soul (Greek: πνευμα, pneuma) as being intimately bound with the physical body though not identical to it. The heart was the seat of the soul, in his view, because it was where blood mixed with breath. The blood flowing through the body binds the various parts of the body to the soul. He identified spirit as a part of the soul, though in English we tend to use the terms as synonyms. (The Greek pneuma means "breath" as well as "spirit" and "soul", suggesting that for the Greeks the concepts were closely connected.)

In Thomistic theology, the soul also functions as what is called the "final cause" in Aristotle's philosophy, i.e., it defines what the whole human being becomes. As Northrup summarizes it, "Thus the final cause or rational principle in Aristotelian science defines not merely the content of human reason and the nature of the human soul and the divine perfection, but also even that divine perfection as it is known by revelation."

In other words, Catholic Christianity does not draw the radical, existential difference between the material and spiritual worlds that traditional Protestant thought does. Where Aristotle argued that "the soul must fall within the science of Nature", Catholic Thomist theology considers a person to be one substance, the human being's "body and soul [as] being merely the material and the formal components of this one substance". By contrast, Protestant theology makes a different assumption. He writes:

Instead, according to the modern Protestant theory, the individual human being is an interacting aggregate of a tremendous number of substances, one of which, the mental substance, is his soul, the remaining substances being the many material atoms making up his body. Thus it must be emphasized that when both Catholic and Protestant Christians talk about a human being as having both a body and soul they mean quite different things. It is to be emphasized also that the Catholic or Church of England conception of the human being is very much closer to the Marxian conception [!!!] than is that of the traditional Protestants. The reason for this is that for the Roman Catholics following Aristotle, the soul is the form and organization and final cause of the body as actually determined by scientific observation and inquiry conducted by means of the senses. There is nothing esoteric about it. Thus a human being for the Roman Catholics, as well as for the Marxians, is a person who, by his very nature, has material, physical needs of a definite, formal, material kind. Nor is an inquiry by scientists which shows human beings as well as other individual substances to be material in character quite the bugaboo and moral horror for the Roman Catholics that it tends to be for the Protestants. For to be a concrete substance on earth is to be composed of a material as well as a formal principle. The soul is the form of the material body. It is not a completely independent mental substance of a purely immaterial kind having nothing to do in its own nature either with the atoms of the body or with the form and organization of the body. (my emphasis)

Because of these different conceptions of the person as a spiritual being, Catholics have more of a sense of continuity between the divine and human realms, which makes intermediate entities acting between God and humanity (angels, saints) more acceptable for Catholics than Protestants. Protestant Christianity tends to minimize the significance of angels and saints and to dismiss Catholic reverence for figures like Mary as the Mother of God as being idolatrous.

Buried in academic philosophical language though it is, Northrup brings out an important point that may explain a good deal about why many Protestant fundamentalists are science-phobic. Scientific findings elaborating the natural state of human beings are more of a threat to their conception of the individual human soul and its relationship to God than they would be to someone holding the kind of Catholic viewpoint Northrup describes.

He argues that a Christian philosophy "must be adequate to the totality of present empirical evidence, and do for our time what the Aristotelian science and philosophy of the Thomistic theology did for the final stage of Greek science and the later Middle Ages."

Or, in other words, sound Christian theology requires sound science.

Tags: christian theology, christianity, christian fundamentalism, john locke, thomas aquinas, f.s.c. northrop, meeting of east and west