Cristian Tolsa, an Osnabrück postdoc fellow, wrote a brief review of my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire that inspires me to clarify some things that I wonder at their getting wrong, getting wrong what’s actually in the book and what it actually says. Particularly as these mistakes parallel commonplace misunderstandings in the history of science altogether, affording a useful opportunity to educate the public on persistent errors academics keep making in this field.

Oblivious to the Popularity of Christian Apologetics?

In “Richard Carrier, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire,” published in Isis 110.3 (September 2019), pp. 585-86, a journal that is predominately composed of brief reviews of books and articles in the field much like this, Cristian Tolsa does note what they liked about the book. Though even there they show some strange lack of awareness and inconsistency, as when they claim “few historians would have doubts about the general Christian hostility toward science” that I demonstrate in Scientist, then notes my apt refutation of a very well-known—and very widely cited—historian (David Lindberg) who has those very doubts, indeed who even argues for them with the usual tools of Christian apologetics.

In fact Lindberg’s camp is well populated with deniers of what Tolsa seems to think is rarely denied. I quote several, in my chapter in The Christian Delusion, on the whole trend toward arguing Christianity was never hostile but in fact even necessary for modern science. Admittedly many are only posing as historians (like Stark, Jaki, and D’Souza), and some are what we would otherwise call cranks but for their being “prestigious” scholars within a Christian echochamber (like Hutchinson and Schmidt), but many are bona fide historians (like White, Grant, Hannam, and Lindberg) and others popularize propaganda they claim comes from mainstream historians (like Pearcey, Thaxton, and Woods).

Thus Tolsa does not seem aware of the importance of my book in extensively laying this trend to rest; that in fact there is an entire faction of historians and popularizers pulling the Lindberg stunt, who are in fact more widely known and cited in the lay world, thus necessitating books like mine that expose the fallacies and factual errors that these (usually Christian) historians rely on to push their false, revisionist narrative. To an unwary public. And job one of historians is to combat that.

Nevertheless, Tolsa admits that “Carrier is to be praised for his analysis of the relevant passages from Clement, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Eusebius” that demonstrate this Christian hostility that is commonly denied. Tolsa likewise notes that Carrier “also challenges the position, defended by David C. Lindberg, that Christianity did not represent an impediment to science during the Middle Ages,” as indeed that’s the most overt part of the project undertaken throughout Scientist, every chapter of which debunks one or another myth promoted by the Lindgerg camp. Which camp has included false claims to the stagnation of ancient science, the marginalization of scientists or disinterest in science in antiquity, or the supposed lack of experimental or mathematical methodologies, to each of which Scientist devotes an entire section or chapter to refuting—with extensive evidence.

Oblivious to Distinguishing Fact from Explanation?

At this point Tolsa duly complains that “it remains unclear what circumstances changed in the early Renaissance to make the Scientific Revolution possible,” echoing the very point I make in Scientist (repeating the same point thoroughly made and demonstrated by H. Floris Cohen, whom I cite here), that all the attempts to explain this don’t survive analysis: all fail on either facts or logic—leaving the fact unexplained at this point in history. “Faced with this question,” Tolsa continues, “Carrier ends up admitting that the disparity of methods coexisting in ancient scientific inquiry could have been a major difference with early modern science,” but that is actually not an explanation; it’s a mere description of what needs to be explained. Even though I carefully explain this distinction in Scientist, Tolsa seems somehow to have missed that point.

For example, on pp. 10-11 of Scientist, where in the midst of a survey of attempts at explaining that fact, finding they all fail, I discuss the claim that the Scientific Revolution was caused by the rise of the “scientist” as a respected and distinct social category, noting that that, too, doesn’t work:

Certainly in antiquity there was no distinct social category of the ‘scientist’ per se, but neither had there been in the 16th or early 17th centuries—the creation of a distinct and recognized role for science and scientists was clearly a consequence and not a cause of the Scientific Revolution, for it seems only to have followed the conceptual separation of speculative from ‘experimental’ philosophy. Cohen recognizes that this is a serious problem with the theory.

And so on. The point throughout being, that to date all attempts to explain what caused the Scientific Revolution are really just descriptions of the Scientific Revolution (or its effects), and thus cannot causally explain it.

I similarly discuss the “toolbox” argument in my conclusion (pp. 551-52), the idea Tolsa is referring to, that what defined that Revolution was finally trimming the toolbox of methods down to the objectively reliable. But I explicitly point out this is just a description, not an explanation. Because:

The question that remains is why this trimming of the toolbox took place only when it did, and I suspect the answer has something to do with relative numbers (as suggested above), or recent earth-shattering discoveries (the ‘impact’ thesis explored earlier), or both.

Here you might wonder why Tolsa confused my description of what historians need to explain, with what I actually proposed might explain it. Which here I allude to, the two theories I settled on earlier in the book as the most promising to investigate (although I make very clear neither theory has been proved, and more research is needed to test them): that the Renaissance saw the production of a greater number of scientists (pp. 550-51, a premise, I note, that is actually not established, and even if true, may be just another consequence and not a cause), or experienced such a critical mass of largely accidental discoveries (like the compass, the cannon, the telescope, and the New World) and incubating developments (like the printing press, the fracturing of religious control by the Reformation, and a theatre of intensely competing naval empires) as to inspire concerted efforts to make progress in methodology—efforts I actually document were occurring already in the 2nd century, but were abandoned before coming to fruition, during the collapse of the 3rd century, never to be resumed again until the rediscovery of those efforts occurred…in the Renaissance!

Hence as I continue (on p 552), here the final words of my book:

Whatever the cause of the slow pace of ancient science, could such a pace ever have arrived at the same destination, eventually producing its own Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, Newton, or Lavoisier? Would there ever have been anything like an Imperial Society of Rome for Improving Natural Knowledge? We may never know. But it’s not unreasonable. By the 2nd century A.D. everything seemed to be heading in the required direction. Numerous lay and scientific authors were calling for something like that very transformation. Apart from the historically trivial, or the entirely accidental (like the preceding invention of the compass or cannon or telescope), there is nothing in the writings of Gilbert or Harvey or Galileo that would appear at all out of character had it been written in the early Roman empire. If many generations had continued to test and challenge Galen, Ptolemy, and Hero using the very methods they promoted, progress would seem inevitable, and there is no obvious barrier to how far that progress could go—unless rapidity of development is essential to the effect. For it may have taken longer, their scientific revolution spanning perhaps four centuries rather than two. But apart from time or disaster, what else could have stopped it?

In other words, it all seems more likely to be blind luck: the conjunction of a restored civilization with adequate wealth and education (the Renaissance finally returning to the state of the 2nd century academically and economically) with a rediscovery of lost treatises advocating for methodological reform in the pursuit of science, which inspired more personnel to take up that banner—possibly in conjunction with other happenstance inspiring events all accidentally converging around a mere few centuries, such as I just enumerated. An outcome that appears would have happened a thousand years earlier—but for the collapse of the civilization and ideology needed for it. Those two things had to be recovered, to continue the march. Which is why that march was only continued when those two things were recovered.

Tolsa seems oblivious to this being the actual thesis of Scientist, despite numerous pages explicitly devoted to explaining it.

Oblivious to What the Book Actually Said?

Tolsa complains that:

[It’s] puzzling to read in the first chapter of Richard Carrier’s book that what Greeks and Romans called natural philosophy was ‘essentially identical’ to our concept of science (p. 24), only to learn a few pages later that, in fact, ancient science would correspond to natural philosophy employing empiricist methods, a category that Carrier rightly admits was ‘not yet’ defined (p. 26). This reductionist view is not always maintained, but the book’s major flaw—namely, that it considers science as an activity essentially unaltered since Aristotle.

I never say any of this (in Scientist or anywhere whatever). So evidently, what Tolsa claims is “the book’s major flaw,” isn’t anywhere in the book. That’s a relief. But readers of this review will be misled by its false assertion that it is there.

Here is what I actually wrote on page 25 (not, as Tolsa erroneously claims, page 24) of Scientist (emphasis in bold now added):

[W]e now narrow the range of methods appropriately designated “science” to what is strictly and soundly empirical, and narrow the range of conclusions appropriately designated “scientific” to what has actually been demonstrated by those methods. Accordingly, a modern “scientist” is someone who employs those kinds of methods to demonstrate those kinds of conclusions. But apart from this narrowing of focus, the ancient words physika, as “natural philosophy,” and physikos, as “natural philosopher,” were essentially identical to our words “science” and “scientist,” at least in aims, interests, and subject matter.

Note how this paragraph explicitly demarcates the matter of methodological differences that Tolsa falsely claims I did not demarcate, and only says the words for science and scientist were identical (not “science was identical”), and only identical in respect to what they referred to as the subject of study, not identical in “methods.”

Moreover, I never say anything about modern science being “identical” to Aristotle’s. In fact, in Chapter 3 I extensively make clear Aristotle only started the formalization of the sciences, and was refuted, corrected, and improved on by subsequent scientists for centuries even in antiquity, much less modernity. Including in respect to methodologies. In fact, I show that it is Christian apologists (and Medievalists in general) who falsely claim ancient science was unchanged since Aristotle (as that is what Medieval scholars themselves mistakenly thought—until all those subsequent works were rediscovered in the Renaissance). See, just for example, pages 11, 100, 157, 246, and 264. In other words, The Scientist extensively argues the opposite of the conclusion that “science [is] an activity essentially unaltered since Aristotle.” How Tolsa screwed this one up I cannot fathom.

Oblivious to What We Are Trying to Explain?

I can only suppose Tolsa did not read the book carefully, and then confused these false claims about what the book says with a somewhat similar but different complaint, that of doing supposed “Whig history.” This was voiced by Michiel Meeusen of King’s College London in his review of my companion book, Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, in History of Education 47:4 (2018, pp. 578-580). Meeusen agrees Education “may have its use in light of the history of ancient education,” and that for “experts in ancient education and science the book may serve as a useful reference work,” since it’s “well documented and includes a bibliography that is up-to-date” and shows “a good grasp of the secondary literature” and “collects a large amount of useful evidence about the educational system of the Imperial period” and helpfully surveys numerous facts about ancient education necessary to understanding the subject (some of which Meeusen summarizes), but then he complains that “what will cause much dislike” in Education “is the whiggism employed in dealing with ancient science and scientists.” And this may be what Tolsa was inaccurately complaining about in Scientist.

Outsiders might not know what Meeusen means by “Whig history” (you can follow the link for Wikipedia’s apt summary). But basically, he is promoting cultural relativism, the view that all science is the same, whether right or wrong, sound or silly, and there is no such thing as progress, only what we happen to decide to call progress in any given historical era. Which is bullshit. There actually is a difference between real and fake science, reliable and unreliable methodologies, true and false conclusions in science—and our ability to make these distinctions is definitive of the Scientific Revolution, and a crucial explanatory factor in the entire rise of modern civilization. If you want to explain how that happened you have to focus on who was doing it right. Simply to explain how we got where we are. Which is the historian’s job.

In short, you cannot explain the modern world without explaining how we made progress in the sciences, both as to the factual truth of the conclusions promoted by the sciences and the effectiveness of the methods used to reach them. This is not Whiggish. It’s simply explaining a causal feature of reality. How did we land a man on the moon and harness the transistor and the power of the atom? How did we discover the real nature of the solar system? Or the actual laws of physics governing it? You can’t claim it’s all just random, a mixed bag, or anything would have done. Because that’s not true. Something changed in the way we demarcate true from false claims that became extremely successful in landing on the true. How did that happen?

That’s the very question Scientist explicitly identifies as what it is contributing to answering (just read Chapter 1). And so does Education, by the way—it says so, right on the first two pages (pp. 5-6). The only way to explain how we got modern science, an actually successful science, is to look for its roots and causes. It does not help to study failed and bogus science in antiquity because that did not lead to the Scientific Revolution and is therefore not the cause of it. You can, to be sure, study any of the failed science in antiquity (or in any era); that’s an interesting historical subject in its own right. But it’s not what we need to be doing if our goal is to explain the Scientific Revolution, to explain how humanity landed on a successful system of science.

This complaint from Meeusen (and from Tolsa, if such is what they meant) is thus completely malformed, ignoring the entire project and purpose of historical research aiming at explaining how modern science came about and why it changed the world. In writing about my book Science Education, Meeusen says its “author makes a good case, showing that there was no actual scientific decline in the early Imperial era,” but then complains that any reference to “progress” and “decline” is “Whiggish” (so, like Tolsa, contradicting himself in the very same sentence). Meeusen asks irrelevant questions like “how important is getting ‘facts right’” or “what is meant by ‘good scientific knowledge’” and “who are ‘actual scientists’” and claims “issues like these are proof of an ill-defined and outdated concept of ancient science and its history.” Wrong. We already know today what the difference is between actual and fake scientists, good and bad science, and the importance of getting “facts right.” That we as a civilization now know these things is what we are trying to explain.

As such, the likes of Meeusen and Tolsa just don’t understand the primary function and value of the history of science—particularly when framed as an exploration of how we came to be where we are today (and not as a collection of trivial antiquarian explorations of past events unconnected with that outcome; which studies are fine, but not what most of us are doing, and not what’s of the greatest interest and importance to the public). Any attempt to explain why science today works, and works so well—and why we value its doing so—must look at the past history of humanity doing that and valuing that. We must look at what it was that we eventually sorted out and valued, and why we did that. And that requires what Meeusen anachronistically calls “Whig history.” Because when the subject being explored and explained is our ability to discover the truth about the world, that’s simply correct history.

Oblivious to Living in the 21st Century?

Less momentously, Tolsa complains of Scientist that “the text contains innumerable colloquialisms,” even though that’s on purpose: I am of the camp that history should be written to be read by non-historians, otherwise we are wasting our time and not serving our social purpose as historians. We must speak the vernacular. Everything else is just a quaint elitism designed to make knowledge less accessible to the people. As just one example, note that as my Columbia University dissertation I was told Scientist would not be approved lest I remove every contraction. As I loathe such disdainful elitism, I promptly put them all back in for the Pitchstone edition. And Tolsa humorously complains about it.

Tolsa also claims there are “some serious anachronisms” and “mistakes” but they don’t identify a single example. And it’s not at all clear what they mean by there being “too many repetitions.” Again, not a single example is mentioned. They are also annoyed that Scientist “fails to acknowledge the authors of [its] borrowed translations” and “there is no index of cited passages,” but those are expensive and page-consuming tools of little use to lay readers—and not really of much use even to historians, as passage indexes are no longer needed in the 21st century (ever heard of searchable text?), and knowing who authored a translation is, honestly, useless (either you can vet the translation in the original language, or you cannot—and I did, as can anyone else able, going straight to the original language). Here I think Tolsa is simply stuck in the past, expecting things that traditionally we’ve done but that actually have little utility anymore.

Oblivious to Usefulness Being the Point?

Tolsa goes on to concede that Scientist “can, however, prove useful in many respects,” giving Chapter 3 as an example, which is “devoted to showing that progress occurred in Roman science,” which I should note means both scientifically and technologically (a distinction a reader might not note from Tolsa’s review), including “a long list of technological artifacts and techniques, accompanying a sound rebuttal of the technological stagnation thesis.” Tolsa also says “Carrier is particularly good at countering once-common opinions of this sort, such as those taking at face value Roman claims or anecdotes apparently implying decline,” which is actually an astute observation, as the need of this is usually overlooked—too many standard works on ancient science misinterpret passages from ancient literature (like mistaking a comedy as a history, or confusing exactly what Vespasian’s labor policy was), and no one has really corrected those errors, necessitating whole sections devoted to doing so in Scientist.

“Equally welcome,” Tolsa says, “is the evidence brought out in Chapter 4, where Carrier reviews a broad spectrum of Roman sources expressing praise for the scientist,” which was necessitated by modern Christian scholars claiming there was none. Which is, again, the whole point of the book. Every chapter serves this end, of debunking some still-oft-promulgated claim about ancient science that is simply false. Which means Tolsa’s praise here should apply to the entire work, as every chapter is “welcome” for the same reasons they list for Chapters 3 and 4, and 6 (the chapter on Christian evidence Tolsa praised earlier). Note Scientist only has six chapters—and two of those are simply the Introduction and the Conclusion. So that’s basically all the chapters. The one remaining chapter is merely linguistic, extensively surveying the meaning-in-use of the words for science and scientist in antiquity, which Tolsa never comments on, despite the fact that it is the only chapter like it in the literature on ancient science, and thus of substantial importance to anyone who wishes to continue writing on that subject.

In short, the whole book is useful, even by Tolsa’s own statements and standards. It’s thus strange to preface this declaration with a “however.” As if Tolsa overlooked the fact that the point of the whole book is its utility.

Conclusion

Tolsa concludes that “in general, Carrier demonstrates a superb knowledge of the ancient texts and of modern bibliography, and it seems unfortunate that he is one-sidedly focused on proving his initial assumption,” but “proving one’s initial assumption” is called a thesis. The whole book was written to defend a thesis. Complaining that the book “unfortunately” defends the thesis it was entirely written for is a strange complaint to make in a book review, and I honestly don’t get it. Particularly as the opening sections of the book make painstakingly clear that that is indeed the thesis and purpose of the book and all of its contents.

Nevertheless, hopefully you have a better idea now of what’s in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, its utility, its scholarly quality and erudition, and its usefulness even to lay readers as a reference and guide to debunking common Christian propaganda about the history of science today. All the while fascinating and educating every reader about a world and its thoughts and achievements that you likely won’t have been told or were even told the opposite of.

§

To comment use Add Comment field at bottom or click a Reply box next to a comment. See Comments & Moderation Policy.

Discover more from Richard Carrier Blogs

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading