The Religious Foundations of Modern Science

An Embarrassment to Moderns

The following piece is found in Stephen Prickett's volume, Narrative, Religion and Science.

That Newton . . . was actually a platonic mystic who had spent as much time working on such posthumously published works as The Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) or Observations on the Book of Daniel and St John (1733) as he had on his scientific experiments, was largely unknown to the eighteenth-century public, and would have been almost inconceivable to many of his later admirers. . . .

We are so familiar with what Lyotard would call the "vulgar" myth of Newton's "discovery" of gravity--the story of the apple falling, etc.--that we somehow accept as obvious the sheer mystery of the phenomenon described. It takes works like Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers or Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law, to defamiliarize gravity, and to make us realize afresh the sheer peculiarity of the fact that mass should attract mass, and that bodies should exert a pull on one another, not just in East Anglian apple orchards, but stretching invisible and undetectable tentacles across millions, even billions of miles in inter-stellar space. It happens without physical contact, without emissions, rays or any other know or hypothetical links.

We believe in it not because it is even remotely credible to our imaginations, but because it is mathematically calculable and predictable to the highest degree of accuracy that our instruments permit. Small wonder that Newton himself was so cautious about his own findings, constantly using phrases such as "it is as if . . . " in his private letters to his friend Bentley.

As we sometimes need reminding, the foundations of modern science lie not in . . . Aristotelian empiricism . . . but in the ironic sense of a hidden reality behind Platonic and even Hebrew mysticism. The importance of these Greek and Hebrew assumptions behind the growth of Western science can scarcely be over-estimated. Comparison with what was, until recently, a much more technically advanced civilization illustrates the difference. China's failure to develop a theoretical science to match its advanced technology has long intrigued historians. Joseph Needham, the greatest Western interpreter of Chinese science find the explanation in the comparative metaphysics of the two societies. In China,

the highest spiritual being known and worshipped was not a Creator in the sense of the Hebrews and the Greeks. It was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no guarantee that other rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their own earthly languages the pre-existing divine code of laws which he had previously formulated. There was no confidence that the code of Nature's laws could be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read.

. . . . Some historians of science have been baffled by the fact that the great Sir Isaac Newton, the apparent epitome of Enlightenment rationality, should actually have spent at least half his working life in trying to interpret biblical and other ancient prophecies. Yet to make sense of Newton at all, we have to accept that these researches into biblical prophecy were not, as it were, an endearing eccentricity, the private "hobby" of an otherwise eminent scientist and mathematician, but, for him, as much a valid part of his work in discovering the true nature of things, as the Principia and the Opticks.

Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony 1700--1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 58--60.