The “Scientific Revolution” is often mentioned and discussed as a crucial development in human civilization that fundamentally changed the entire course of history. World society after and before that event looks consistently yet radically different. For thousands of years before the Scientific Revolution, Earth was essentially a world of clashing empires fighting with sword and stone, driven by horse and ox, powered by water and wood, all right out of a fantasy novel (sans magic and elves). Then, suddenly, it’s a world of guns, rubber, and steel, driven by steam, powered by oil and coal, and rather soon, literally electrified. Even in the domain of pure knowledge, for thousands of years you have “scholars” mostly (though only mostly) just arm-chairing their ideas about the world, then suddenly you have state-funded labs and societies dedicated to experimental sciences, and PhDs in physics and geology and the like, and boom: we go from “four elements” to The Periodic Table; from “four humors” to cellular physiology; from geocentrism to a universally agreed, and fully explained, heliocentrism. What happened?
Scholars have struggled to even describe what happened, much less explain it. Many debates abound. There is a “standard narrative,” but almost every element of it is in some important way false (you’ll find both points articulated in Wikipedia’s article now on The Scientific Revolution). But most of the “alternative” narratives are even less credible. For example, the “continuity thesis,” that there was no Scientific Revolution, is obviously false: the world was radically changed, and in less than two centuries, after thousands of years of just cruising along in the same prior fashion. Something revolutionary most definitelly did occur. The “Christianity saved the West” thesis is likewise false, and not just because the purported cause—Christianity—had been in place for literally a thousand years to no such effect (and was actually a fierce cause of opposition to the ensuing changes). So it clearly can’t be what caused everything to change suddenly (“suddenly,” in the timescale of human empires) between 1500 and 1700 A.D. (see No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West and my chapter on the entire bogus “Christianity as savior” hypothesis in The Christian Delusion).
The Industrial Revolution?
Sometimes it is wondered, then, if we are confusing two different things. Guns, rubber, steel, steam, oil and coal, electricity; this was all the output of a different, parallel development in Western civilization called the Industrial Revolution. It could be that it was just a coincidence, or co-correlation (two separate products of a common cause), that the Scientific Revolution (all the developments in science, rather than technology) took place around the same time. This other revolution defines most of what looks radically different between eras of human history, before and after. But it looks like this other revolution could be a product of the Scientific Revolution, since it begins almost immediately as that ended, and its precipitating cause took place right around the same time as the culmination of that prior world change.
But some could say that examination of the Industrial Revolution’s causal development might rule that out. The steam engine was not invented by scientists, and it incorporated no components that didn’t already exist, in use, in the ancient world. Its only significant difference was immediate access to coal as a power source, which was an accidental happenstance of history; indeed, even the need of the device was caused by over-mining coal to below the water table necessitating pump technology to continue, which makes it even more of a coincidence that that specific need arose just as the Scientific Revolution was coming to a head. These two events were simply not connected in any way. They just happened to occur at the same time. The first steam pump was developed in 1606, perfected into field use by Savery in 1698, and advanced in efficiency and power by Newcomen in 1712; while Isaac Newton’s scientific synthesis, and the foundation of royal societies for experimental science, both representing the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, all took place in or just before the 1690s.
Still, there is arguably a connection. The “scientific mindset” that set the West aflame during the 16th and 17th centuries, characterizing the driving force behind the Scientific Revolution, could have been responsible for the Industrial Revolution to follow. The experimental turn toward developing coal-based steam power would fit as an example of the overall zeitgeist. Although it seems certain that the ancient Romans would have done this, too, had they been at the zenith of the same circumstance: dependent on coal for so long (to heat homes, forges, and kilns) that they had to start pumping vast volumes of water to get to more of it. But as it happens–again, by chance—the Romans only just discovered substantial sources of coal in the 2nd century (and their society began its rapid collapse just a hundred years later), and only in England, which then was far from the centers of scientific experimentation and innovation, and never needed pumps to access it (that need would only follow centuries of subsequent mining). Still, Heron of Alexandria, who developed the first known steam-powered machines in the 1st century, was based in Alexandria, Egypt—thousands of miles away; and all other centers of science, from Marseilles to Rhodes to Rome, all sat on the Mediterranean sea, equally far away (see my discussion of the history of steam in Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus). So coal-to-steam power wasn’t going to occur to anyone.
However the Industrial Revolution was not only characterized by steam power and developments dependent on it. Electricity was a separate scientific discovery that most definitely was caused by the Scientific Revolution; advanced chemical industry was driven by advances in the underlying science, likewise; and so on down the line. So there is certainly a significant component of the Industrial Revolution that is a product of the Scientific Revolution. It can correctly be described as an effect of it, and indeed an inevitable one at that, even if it could have taken longer to arrive. But once humans started intensively exploring the information-space of science (an activity definitive of what the Scientific Revolution changed about society), locating the tools to launch a corresponding Industrial Revolution was just a matter of time. This brings the Scientific Revolution back to the forefront in need of explanation.
You can think of it in contrafactual fashion. Had the Romans been at the apex of needing steam pumps to access enormous coal reserves, a steampunk Roman Empire would certainly have arisen. Despite many scholars trying to claim otherwise (though every such claim is easily debunked), there was no discernible cultural, intellectual, economic, technological or any other reason that that would not have as rapidly occurred as it eventually did in the British Empire. The Roman Empire already experienced its own industrial revolution, a miniature version of ours: a sweeping conversion of a significant segment of industrial power from animals to water (see Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology), and a concomittant rise in all manner of industrial innovations, from press-mold, assembly-line, and interchangeable-component manufacturing to gargantuan kiln operations, and beyond (see my discussions and examples in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). And this was in part driven by its own prior Scientific Revolution, produced by the Greeks just before (ibid.).
The differences between the Roman industrial revolution and “the” Industrial Revolution were twofold. First, while water power has an even better Energy Return on Investment than fossil fuels (see The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear), it isn’t scalable. The sources of water power are limited, both in number and in capacity, and not mobile—so you can’t get, for example, trains and steamships out of it. Whereas fossil power allowed a vast “power up” of the entirety of global society, all the way to its transportation networks (shipping and rail). The effect was most definitely revolutionary. And second, the rapidity of innovative developments in chemistry and electricity and other areas, which also defined the modern Industrial Revolution, required the completion of the modern Scientific Revolution—which one could argue the Roman Empire was heading towards, but collapsed before it could get there (see The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece and Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference?). Even if its pace of development would have taken longer, again, all indications are it would have also inevitably gotten there, too. Instead, we got The Dark Ages (see Yes, the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing).
So we really do just need to explain the Scientific Revolution.
Cause vs. Effect
Explaining the Scientific Revolution requires keeping distinct three separate things: what it was; what caused it; and its effects. Most failed attempts to explain it confuse one or more of these things. For example, some will say its cause was a sweeping societal and political shift in attitudes toward and support for scientists and their research; but that was actually its effect. This therefore cannot explain it. As I explain in my book (The Scientist) and some of my articles cited above, the rise of royal institutes dedicated to experimental science—principally The Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences (the Vatican having destroyed any hope of a comparable development in Italy; Germany only barely catching up; and Spain, its imperial fortunes already in decline, couldn’t get its shit together)—represent the completion of the Scientific Revolution. Those are the most visible examples of that revolution having successfully shifted societal and political perception of the value and importance of scientific research and knowledge. What we want to explain is how and why that shift in perception occurred. And you can’t just circularly appeal to that shift in perception to explain that shift in perception. That’s conspicuously a non-explanation.
Still, this does mean that part of what the Scientific Revolution “was” was a growing push for that shift in perception, by a small number of scholars arguing for it (who, yes, did happen to be Christian, because being Christian then was compulsory), against a lot of intellectual opposition—all of it, also, Christian. Which necessitated contriving “Christian” reasons to support the shift, but that in no way means Christian ideas caused that shift. To the contrary, finding “Christian reasons” for it was an ad hoc, post hoc strategy. The actual reasons causing a resort to that strategy were something altogether else. That’s why it didn’t happen at any prior time in a thousand years of Christian tenure. It clearly wasn’t anything Christianity had any tendency to inspire; and the fact that all push-back against it came from Christianity indicates that it was actually ideologically hostile to the development, not inspiring of it.
In The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire I outline what this Christian opposition actually consisted of and how it came from the very core structure of its ideology; and that by contrast, pagan ideology was entirely supportive and nurturing of the scientific mindset, undergirding the three most essential scientific values, without which scientific advancement will never occur, and in the presence of which it always occurs, at whatever pace, fast or slow: a commitment to empiricism (elevating evidence above all authority); a commitment to curiosity (not only being actively interested in understanding the secrets of the universe, but perceiving this interest as a positive good to be nurtured and encouraged); and a commitment to progress (seeing scientific advancement as not only achievable, but as also a positive good to be sought after).
Christianity was always against all of these things from its very origination (I have a whole chapter in Scientist thoroughly documenting this; but see also A Primer on Christian Anti-Intellectualism for a start). And during the Scientific Revolution it was a Herculean effort to try and persuade everyone that Christianity should change—indeed outright reverse itself—on all three values. There was actually an easier time of it under the Roman Empire, when just such things were also being argued (including calls for more imperial investment in research), and the only opposition was circumstantial disinterest rather than fear and disgust. The emperors were too busy trying to hold their empire together to be distracted by academic arguments for speculative research programs. They weren’t actively hostile to the project.
But one thing had finally made the transition easier in the later Christian period (compared to, say, the Dark Ages): the collapse of the Vatican’s monopoly over Christendom in the West in the 15th century Reformation made it easier to argue for changes in Christian values and attitudes. There is a reason the Scientific Revolution occurred precisely after that event, and why it nevertheless failed in Italy (where the example set by the punishment of Galileo ended all scientific advancement there for over a hundred years) but was an astounding success in England—where the political class flipped the finger at the Pope and started their own Christian religion—and France—where the Vatican’s hold on power was slipping, and the political class was eying a similar move to England’s, compelling Catholicism to eventually give-in and adapt. But all this development really did was finally weaken Christian opposition, allowing pockets of receptiveness that Vatican traditionalists could not crush. It didn’t exactly create an entirely friendly environment. It remained a struggle. But the idea eventually won on the merits of its demonstrated results, and the pragmatic recognition of its value to imperial ambitions and competition. Science was finally recognized by the wealthy and powerful as useful, and not just “interesting.”
Getting at the Causes
Once we recognize that the Scientific Revolution simply was an eventually successful drive to change public and elite perception of the value and importance of experimental science, and was driven by demonstrations of this in practice, we can get to asking what caused this new drive, and the determination to see it through, in enough scholars to succeed. Why did it arise in the 16th century and not, say, the 10th or the 6th—or the 2nd?
As to the where—why it happened in Europe and not, say, China or the Muslim world—I have covered that question already in Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? The short of it is, all the tools to effect the Scientific Revolution were invented by the Greeks and developed by their enthusiastic successors, the Romans, and then abandoned by everyone after the collapse of the Roman Empire—for religious reasons. When the Muslim world started its own push for a Scientific Revolution (in the 9th to 10th centuries), the imams successfully crushed it. Whereas pre-modern China never came into significant contact with the cause (Greco-Roman scientific ideology). Western Europe had the latter (thanks to the Renaissance, ascending from the 13th to the 15th centuries), and was in a place to avoid the former—precisely because of the Reformation having shattered the power of the religious class a generation before. This was science’s moment. It struck when the iron was hot; and survived all attempts to cool it down. But really that just resumed a causal arc Rome was already in, the 2nd century corresponding in all measures (economic and scientific) to the 15th century. The only reason the 16th century didn’t happen in the 3rd century was that in the 3rd century civilization took a nose dive, from which it didn’t recover until the 15th century, whereas in the 16th century it was in the ascendant, and thus the causes in place could finally have their effect.
So that also gets us to the when—why it happened in Europe then and not earlier (or later). Recognizing this requires knowing that every single thing typically claimed to be innovative about the Scientific Revolution, wasn’t. Wikipedia correctly says that “by the end of the Scientific Revolution the qualitative world of book-reading philosophers had been changed into a mechanical, mathematical world to be known through experimental research.” But all of that stuff was already the norm in the Roman Empire, when science was just as empirical, just as mathematical, and just as based on physical-mechanical worldviews, and employed every component of the modern scientific method. There were some, but actually relatively few new ideas in the Scientific Revolution. Inertia, universal gravitation, heliocentrism, nascent understandings of the physics of gases and the physiology of human organs, evolving ideas about classical relativity and laws of motion, experimental optics, acoustics, hydrostatics, and physiology, a particle theory of light, controled experiments, cumulative and converging experimentation, trigonometry and algebra, mathematical laws of physics, the use of scientific instruments of all varieties, even a germ theory of disease; these were all well-known and discussed by Roman scientists, and even science enthusiasts, who loved their books, and having them over for dinner (I document all of this in Scientist; but see, for a start, Ancient Theories of Gravity: What Was Lost? and The Sociology of Ancient Scientists Cannot Be Based on Medieval Source Selection as a couple of examples).
So the only actual difference between the 16th-17th century and the 2nd-3rd century was that the latter saw civilization waning; while the former, waxing. Otherwise, all the same causes were in place. Rome was poised to reach the culmination of Newton and the Royal Society in one or two, maybe three centuries at most. But world affairs went the other way. Society collapsed, and in virulent reaction to that was thoroughly infected with a rabidly anti-scientific worldview granted near absolute political power across the entirety of the Western world. The effect was much the same as the Medieval imamate, and post-Han isolationism in China (see Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense). The world would have to await another bite at the apple, a second chance to pull the effect through. The right conditions for that at long last converged in the 15th century, setting the stage for the developments of the 16th century, which drove through the developments of the 17th century. We are only fortunate that civilization didn’t again fall apart in either of those two centuries. This time it stuck.
Conclusion
What was the Scientific Revolution? The persuasion of society and principally the wealthy power-elite to invest in empirical scientific research on a significant scale. Everything else is merely an inevitable effect of that development. And this meant persuasion to endorse and support, as well, the required values for any such thing as “empirical scientific research” to exist in any substantial way: curiosity, empiricism, and progressivism; as well as, of course, the methodology of science: mathematical description, controled experimentation, and a recourse to physical-mechanical explanatory models. These then became, in contrast to the Middle Ages, the defining epistemic values of modern Western society. Everything else is history. That alone radically changed the entire world.
Why did the Scientific Revolution happen when and where it did? Random happenstance had a lot to do with it. The Greek miracle was key—its memo just didn’t reach China, and while the Muslim world eventually turned its back on it, the Romans reacted in an entirely opposite fashion and thus were poised to get there, but for the collapse of their empire, which was due to yet more unrelated random happenstances (mainly, the lack of an effective constitutional government ensuring a continuous peaceful succession of power, and a poor understanding of how to productively manage a global fiduciary economy). This opened the door for Christendom to take over, which brought with it a persistent hostility to all the values needed to resume scientific progress. The power of Christian ideology had to be broken before those values could ever have a chance to reign again, and that finally came with the 15th century Reformation. And society also had to hold together, and remain in a state of economic growth and relative political stability, long enough for the “bread to bake,” as it were, this time around.
This in turn is all why there was, by the end of the 17th century and in all ensuing centuries to date, a sudden jump in the number and scale of scientific and technological advances that made the results of the Scientific Revolution so visible as a powerhouse of progress. And this in turn was because of a massive—easily an order of magnitude or more—jump in imperial and elite investment in science—and, of course, scientific engineering; which, despite jokes to the contrary, is just another science. So one might still ask, why was there such a massive jump in imperial investment in science? And the answer is, quite simply, because the agents of change in this event—the scientists who saw the merit of their enterprise and its undergirding values and methods, after having rediscovered all that from the ancient world, after its once being all but lost and forgotten—managed to succeed in convincing those in power that their enterprise was valuable to their imperial ambitions, and would allow them to out-compete rivals for global power. Which of course required there to be such empires, with a rising surplus of wealth to invest in the project.
Attempts to claim the story was somehow different from this suffer from one of two flaws, or both: a lack of evidence for their premises; or an abundance of evidence against their premises. The only story that fits all the actual facts as they actually are, is the one I’m telling you today. But if you want to dive into any aspect of that debate, feel free to ask questions and pose alternatives in comments, so we can explore them. Much of what you might come up with is probably already covered in my other writings (as linked above); but I can still zero you in on where, and précis it here.
Richard you are likely familiar with this source already, but James Burke gets into the weeds re the Scientific Revolution with his work “Connections” also made into a popular TV series a while ago.
Also, your piece reminds me of Stephan Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibria” regarding biological evolution. As in human societal evolution, in biology too there is a pent-up potential that under the right conditions explodes into realization. As such one does not get a smooth trajectory in evolution but a long period when nothing occurs, or even retreats, then all of a sudden develops like never before.
I think the analogy has some merit; it is memetic evolution after all. Punctuated equilibrium follows necessarily from the statistical facts of random mutation (straight flushes happen more rarely than twos of a kind, but have an outsized impact and thus spread very quickly to dominate the field); and there is an aspect of that here, too (the right combination of factors had to be, by chance, in the right place, which is far less frequent an occurrence than ordinary progress or causal development).
I don’t know Burke’s theory of the Scientific Revolution though, so I can’t comment on that. If you have a link or something I can explore, do post it here.
“The Greek miracle is key…” There are no miracles and no explanation relying on miracles is a correct explanation.
The role of Confucianism in China may be misread by people who don’t believe Confucianism is a religion.
What is typical of a universal empire, a single political authority that effectively dominates the world within its reach is perhaps not typical of a world of multiple authorities riven by permanent conflict. Armies and navies that use highly skilled labor foster communities of craftsmen that make empirical discoveries.
When an emerging culture encounters the knowledge of a technologically advanced culture (like the Greeks encountering the Egyptians and Phoenicians and Lydians and assorted Mesopotamian cultures) there is a need to generalize, organize, rationalize the new ideas. For one thing, the newly ascendant culture will emphasize the best of the old, like the Muslims elevating Aristotle to the highest ranks. So far as I can tell, while Aristotle was usually respected and his school did survive, it was never dominant in the Greek ecumene the way Stoicism or mystery cults were.
In the event, the slow accumulation of knowledge about the elements and compounds and the development of instruments and geographical, botanical, zoological, mineralogical knowledge were an indispensable part of the scientific revolution. See J.D. Bernal for additional insight.
“The Greek Miracle” is not a reference to a literal miracle. It’s a coinage. In this field of study, it simply refers to another important Revolution in human thinking that occurred there at that time. The choice of phrase was meant to reflect its rarity and difficulty of explanation, not its being supernatural or without cause.
But it is precisely that the Greeks did something radically different and globally unprecedented with the knowledge they inherited that called for it being given a name and needing a special explanation; this same thing was never done with any of that same information (or conditions, like the concentration of armies and craft knowledge) by the Egyptians or Mesopotamians—or Chinese or anyone else. That requires explanation. And as I noted, I already discussed this elsewhere (see Rome vs. China: What Made the Differenc?).
Meanwhile, everything you credit as “slowly accumulated,” already was. It was then all lost. This is the point about the Dark ages interrupting a process that was already causally underway. We had to “try again,” and we rarely got a chance to, and when we did, we usually failed (the Muslims, for example, tanked their Scientific Revolution; whereas ours pushed through—despite the very same kind of resistance; that requires explanation).
There is hardly anything about the 15th century that was “different” between ancient Rome and early modern Europe vis-a-vis available scientific knowledge and hypotheses. So that won’t have been “the cause,” just a recapture of a cause once already in place, which alone wasn’t sufficient.
I explore the possibility of convergence coincidences, however, in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, for example the coincidence of the accidental discoveries of the telescope, the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and the New World, all roughly around the same time (speaking in centuries rather than devades, but still). It is worth looking at, but in the end does not carry sufficient causal weight to be distinctively impressing.
The Chinese already had all those those things—except the telescope, and the Romans were already close to that (they were scientifically studying the magnifying properties of mirrors and concave and convex lenses just before the collapse). They didn’t discover the New World, of course, but they were encountering the same circumstance of it: as empires they were coming into contact with enormous amounts of new information about geography and species and other phenomena. So insofar as that had any relevant causal role, that cause was already in place. So it cannot explain the where-and-when of the actual Scientific Revolution.
Most people who talk about the Greek Miracle do seem to mean that it was a miracle, if not a supernatural violation of material laws of nature, a miracle of thought. It is a bad coinage in my opinion. The usual version seems to be Socrates and Plato and Athens. But aside from not giving credit to even other Athenians like Solon and Cleisthenes, it doesn’t even notice other Greeks. Perhaps the real Greek Miracle took place in the head of Thales, in Miletus, not Athens? There are dark rumors of Thales and Egyptian priests.* But what of Hippocrates and his school?
It is this notion that the philosophical discovery of scientific method that was the essence of the Scientific Revolution needs some justification. The Greeks rejected atomism, by and large. The modern prejudice is that it was unscientific speculation. But it seems to me that the real problem, aside from altogether much greater ignorance of materials in nature, was the absence of accurate enough balances to do useful experiments. The contempt for craft knowledge seems to blend seamlessly into philosophical prejudices about the inferiority of mere matter and the superior insight of wisdom, philosophy, the triumph of mind and reasons, which are equated. Again, see Bernal for a start.
*The confidence that despite lost languages and lost literatures it is certain that there was only craft knowledge and crude empiricism at work in Egypt and Phoenicia and so forth is not entirely convincing. But then it is only grudgingly admitted that Pythagoras likely didn’t conceive the Pythagorean theorem. Heron’s expose of the secrets of Egyptian priestcraft suggests to me that intellectual secrecy was a major problem in ancient times. (Yes, I know interpreting Heron as exposing the tricks meant to impress the faithful is not the usual understanding.)
You must not have read any of the actual scholarship on this. You appear to be listening to someoe who doesn’t know what they are talking about and is spreading bogus propaganda. I advise you stop trusting them.
First:
In actual scholarship the Greek Miracle never refers to anything beyond explanation, and encompasses (quite crucially) the Alexandrian and other developments (e.g. scientists like Thales, and the atomists, originate before Socrates and Plato and were not based in Athens, yet are a crucial part of the story, as is the science and engineering of Rhodes, the democratic rights-based confederacies of the Eastern Greek city states, and so on).
It is not just a secondary school paean to Plato and Aristotle.
And it ecompasses more than science: the development of logic, formalized mathematics, a science of rhetoric, democracy, and the principle that policy and life conduct, and the truth of the world, is to be decided by logic and evidence, and thus persuasion, rather than happenstance authority or tradition.
The whole point of studying it is the need to explain why no one else on Earth ever did this. That is exactly the opposite of claiming it can’t be explained.
Second:
Greek scientists actually embraced atomism by incorporating it into their eclectic worldviews (in the Roman era, eclecticism was the most common school of thought among working scientists like Hero and Ptolemy and Galen), based on where evidence rather than dogma took them.
Many did not go “full atomist,” but mixed atomist principles with qualitative principles to seek unified theories of phenomena (e.g. Galen’s theory of renal function, which was closer to the truth than his scientific atomist competitors at the time), and those are the ones we have the books from now because Medieval Christians liked them.
Full atomist scientists were condemned as evil even by Origen, and more so by Christians even less fond of the accomplishments of ancient science; so we don’t get to read them. But we see their presence and activity in the polemics still being directed against them (Galen against the Erasistrateans; Ptolemy against the heliocentrists and physicists defending atomist theories of light; etc.).
I explain and show all this in Scientist.
Third:
There was no contempt for craft knowledge. That is a modern myth (largely generated by Christian apologists). I very, very thoroughly prove this in Scientist. Exactly the opposite was the case. Contempt for craft knowledge was a Medieval Christian development so typifying the upper classes even of the British and other modern Empires as to almost define their ethos. America was actually weird for elevating inventors and makers to upper class status. And yet even the American elite looked down on them as posers and sought to keep “blue collar” tradesmen in their less privileged place in society. And yet society as a whole offered them prestige, rewards, and advancement.
This is exactly how it worked among the Greeks and Romans. And all ancient scientists were consummate craftsmen and insisted no one could be a scientist who wasn’t; and this was essential to their elevation and patronage.
Fourth:
The Pythagorean Theorem is not just a rough equation for right triangle solutions (that would be, at best, the Pythagoream equation). It was a formal proof that a certain specific equation was true and why. This was a uniquely Greek development (whether the specific person involved was Pythagoras is irrelevant; no such development occurred in Egypt or anywhere else, other than, almost, in Medieval China, where only a partial proof was developed).
You need to learn the difference. Because approaching problems this new way, rather than the old way, is the very thing that changed, and chanbed the world.
Fifth:
Secrecy was condemned by ancient scientists (as even your own example would illustrate, but we also have express condemnations and demonstrations of its folly). You are thus confusing the less educated nonscientists practicing the old ways of the world, with the new thinkers embracing the principles of the Greek Miracle. This very difference in attitude is a major part of what changed. And thus, what needs to be explained.
First, the question is not necessarily why no one else on Earth ever did this, but why is the Greek Miracle the first one we have record of?
Second, the assumption that eclecticism, where bits and pieces of an empirical, rational view of the world mixed in with mysticism (what you call “qualitative” here) is good enough forgets that such eclecticism is typical of most civilizations that have an advanced science, including our own. This eclecticism is why we cannot simply assume that, for example, ibn al-Haytham was just a trivial footnote from a Muslim failure of civilization, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon notwithstanding.
Third, if the Scientific Revolution had occurred in the ancient Roman empire or even in the American colonies, this objection there was no Hellenistic or Roman contempt for craft knowledge would carry more weight. It was despite the contempt for craft knowledge, generally collective knowledge of the material world we should say, there would have been no Scientific Revolution so far as I can tell. But the cultural tradition you correctly I think attribute to the English ruling class, for instance, has powerfully affected the scholarship on the history of science so far as I can tell.
Fourth, the role of mathematical proof in science is not so straightforward as presented here. The calculus was not rigorously treated until long after it was essential to major advances. The role of math in astronomy is undeniable. But it’s not even clear that mathematical rigor is an essential part of even Galileo’s mechanics. Math is part of measurement, to be sure, but is that rigor? Philosophical rigor a la Russell and Whitehead? Again, the certainty that the absence of evidence of modern rigor and abstraction in the surviving workbooks for students in ancient Egyptian, for example, is evidence of absence for centuries still needs justification.
Fifth, secrecy before printing affects the survival of records, few copies being less likely to survive than many. The necessary preliminary to deciding on what adequately explains the Greek Miracle is showing how much of a problem the Greek Miracle truly is.
In general, you have doubled down on the misleading phrase “Greek Miracle.” I don’t think there’s anyway to translate this from the sophisticated scholarship you mention into popular language without automatically incorporating all the negative consequences, such as the implied conclusion that “white people” as ancient Greeks are imagined to be, by their pure genius created the modern world, in contrast to the inferior races.
And indeed the notion of Scientific Revolution has some of the same functions. When and where did this take place? Astronomy, with Copernicus? Or Galileo decades later and hundreds of miles away? (And would Galileo have been Galileo without the telescope?) Or decades later, with Newton’s Principia? Pneumatic chemistry and van Helmont? Or John Dalton’s atomism? What was chemistry until Berzelius and Davy? The Scientific Revolution, was it in the seventeenth century, or the eighteenth even? All those decades across different countries, even cultures.
And what of the philosophy and politics? Is it the Greek Miracle or the rejection of Greek philosophy by Francis Bacon and Montaigne and Descartes or the ignorance of figures like Leonardo that mattered? Did the breakdown of the feudal order or the Reformation play a role? Tracing it to the Greek Miracle needs more justification.
The empirical attitude was discovered over and over by physicians, to name one group. No one time miracle need to explain that I think.
Most of all, again, science is an inherently collective enterprise engaged with the material world. An understanding of it as some sort of intellectual event discovered by pure reason as given to us by the Greeks seems to me to be an essential part of the thesis of the Greek Miracle, but one I do not find convincing.
That’s the same thing.
Once that happened, it disseminated. No one independently came up with it. They only learned it from them. To explain this, entails identifying the causes that, had they obtained somewhere else (past or future), then those people would have independently struck upon the same development. So we are left having to explain why the Greeks got there first—and why never anyone else independently achieved again for thousands of years.
That isn’t ancient eclecticism. You really need to stop making shit up from the armchair and taking responsibility to find out the facts and actually studying this stuff before pontificating about it. I have a whole section and bibliography on ancient eclecticism in Scientist. Start there. Get informed.
Also, you need to look at yourself and stop “moving the goal posts” to avoid being caught making false statemens. You made a false statement about atomism. I caught you. You avoided admitting this (and how it destroys your entire argument) by quickly changing the subject and saying some unrelated thing (also false) about eclecticism. This is an irrational behavior typical of the delusional. You should be worried about that. See to it.
This sentence is unintelligible. I have no idea what it is saying or what it has to do with what I said.
You made a false claim about the ancient world: that they shunned craft knowledge and the moderns didn’t. I proved that false. There was no significant difference. And yet, instead of admitting you made a false statement and changing your conclusions accordingly, you come back with this bizarre non sequitur. This does not bode well. Your delusionality is showing here. Fix that.
I don’t even know what you think you are saying here or what it has to do with anything.
The rest of us are simply talking about formal mathematics (proofs, not equations) and mathematical laws of physics (like Archimedes’ laws of buouancy and the lever, Ptolemy’s laws of reflection and refraction). Newton and Leibnitz both produced formal proofs of the calculus, not mere equations (and their proofs resemble those we now know Archimedes was alreaady working on). And they applied to it mathematical laws of physics (instant of acceleration in Newton’s laws of motion).
Whatever you are talking about has nothing to do with anything we are talking about.
No one said it was. It’s an essential part of science. But not all science has to employ it. The thing to be explained is the development of this as a tool, e.g. why Archimedes could think to mathematize laws of physics at all, not the adoption of mathematization for every scientific endeavor (that has literally never happened, and thus requires no explanation).
I’m not sure what you are proposing here. But having no evidence of a thing does not permit declaring its existence. Evidence works the other way around.
Indeed. That’s why it didn’t exist in ancient science and engineering, only in religion and non-intellectual craft knowledge. That this difference came to exist is what there is to explain. This is a key component of The Greek Miracle: the abandonment of secrecy as a principle and the adoption and promotion of exactly the opposite principle, that the free dissemination of knowledge was essential to progress and human welfare.
I’m just telling you what the term means in the field. And I am basing that on the actual facts and literature of the field. You making up dozens of false statements from the arm chair is not winning your case here. I’m telling you the truth. You seem disinterested in the truth. There is nothing more I can do for you.
Only racists reach that conclusion. That the Greeks “were white” is a fact. If you draw some sort of genetic conclusion from that, you are no longer doing history, but pseudoscience.
The solution to people engaging in racist pseudoscience is to denounce racist pseudoscience; not to pretend that facts don’t exist. The Greeks were white. Get over it. Denying it or pretending it isn’t true is irrational. Explaining why it does not entail racist conclusions is rational. Get with rational conduct here. Please.
I don’t comprehend your point here. That it was a century long process is already discussed in my article. Why it was is self-evident; if you don’t understand that, wow, then you are really far from comprehending this subject at all.
Likewise the matter of happenstance causes (e.g. the telescope inspired Galileo; the compass inspired Gilbert; etc.). I’ve already discussed this several times. You seem uninterested in engaging with anything I said about that. Why?
The rest of your questions have no intelligible relevance to our discussion.
And your last statement, about science being “some sort of intellectual event discovered by pure reason” has nothing whatever to do here. I never said any such thing, but exactly the opposite. So you have gone totally off the rails of reality here, and aren’t even comprehending basic sentences now.
This is a bad sign. You have a problem you need to fix in yourself. Stat. Until you do, you will be incapable of making intelligible, productive, or accurate statements about this subject.
It is significant that many of the ground breaking scientists of the Early Modern Period were also astrologers, alchemists and Hermetists, meaning that they practiced Pagan spirituality. So they were bad Christians but great people. And since being a Christian wasn’t always a matter of faith but sometimes it was about survival, some of them might not have been Christian at all.
I have to say that I disagree with the credit you give the Reformation. As far as I know it was an attack against the Pagan values of the Renaissance (at least in Germany) which Catholicism accepted them to a certain degree. The Reformation also brought many wars and disasters.
I didn’t read much about it so correct me if I’m wrong.
Also I want to know your opinion about the claim that Copernicus plagiarized Aristarchus, since I have read a few differing takes on it.
Astrology wasn’t then pagan, nor was hermeticism; in that time they were built on pre-Christian Jewish versions of these that substituted angelology and demonology and Yahwist natural magic (whereby the language of God functions as a creative power), and Catholic doctrines of esotericism (e.g. the Trinity, Transubstantiation, etc.) that was all in line with Christianity.
Alchemy was indeed also popular—being, essentially, what they had in the way of chemistry—but also not distinctly pagan (any more than the entirety of Christianity already was), and what changed was it became less hermetic and more empirical. Which is what the SR consisted of as an event, and thus which requires explanation (as that shift hadn’t happened in a thousand years of still practicing all these things).
But yes, one can’t make much of their pledges to Christianity; it was simply a cultural necessity. But many were nevertheless believers; Newton for example, spent more time trying to discern secret codes in the Bible to predict the Second Coming than he actually did on any of his sciences. All those guys had a mix of productive and bonkers beliefs and pursuits. What there is to explain is how the productive side somehow won out, when it never had before.
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On Copernicus: we don’t actually have the relevant work of Aristarchus so we can’t make claims like “plagiarism.” That he got the idea from surviving stories about Aristarchus’s theories is not plagiarism but inspiration; and Copernicus gave him full credit for that. So there is no doubt of that fact. He outright admits it.
Also note, Aristarchus was not the only heliocentrist. We have evidence that in ensuing centuries his theory was built-out with ideas of universal gravitation, parabolic trajectories, and centripetal forces maintaining orbits; in other words, a lot closer to Kepler than Copernicus. But again, nothing survives to confirm this by. Only hints.
What we know more firmly is that it wasn’t the only game in town. People often overlook it, but Ptolemy’s first section of the Almagest actually argues against two separate opponents: heliocentrists and dynamic geocentrists (the view that the Earth is in the center—but spins, explaining all diurnal motion with a single central motion). There is more evidence than that of these being the three competing camps at the time. It wasn’t just the two. (I also cover this in The Scientist.)
I don’t think those were not Pagan just because they were used by some Christians, just like heliocentrism is not Christian. These are spiritual traditions that come from Pagan cultures so unless they come from explicitly Jewish ones I think it’s fair to call them Pagan even if practiced by Christians. Of course they stop being Pagan once made to fit into Christian doctrine.
But also because some esoterically minded people at the time were not Christians, for example Giordano Bruno and the Emperor Rudolf II. I also think Queen Elizabeth I wasn’t Christian either considering symbolism in her paintings.
That was my point though. All hermeticism by then was thoroughly Christianized, and came mostly from Judaism in the first place. So it had long ceased to be pagan.
As for whether the people you name were “not” Christians, I am skeptical, but I have to leave that to historians of the period to suss out. By my understanding they were most definitely Christians, just not in line with dominant orthodoxy.
Daniel chapter 12 predicted those in the end times will greatly increase in knowledge and world travel. Probably just a lucky mythology guess. Besides, if I used the same logic used to bash the contributions of Christianity to science I might be inclined to say its done evil to us from splitting the atom, dropping a bomb and killing millions of people to cutting our genitals off to become the opposite sex. But that would be of course ridiculous to take a portion of history and hype it into a over all thesis. Some of our greatest discoveries were founded from those who saw a God greater than ourselves and some ideas sprouted from the great mythology of biblical lore. Matthew Maury for example was inspired from scripture which describes the oceans and from that he mapped the pathways of the seas. Yes Galileo argued with the Catholic church but scripture says the earth is round. Catholics are quite infamous for ignoring biblical standing. We should be more cognizant when discussing such things.
1) The text of Daniel 12 is referring to knowledge of the end of the world, not just “knowledge.” Christians have a weird tendency to never read their own Bible correctly, ignoring the entire context of verses, and even their original language. This is an example of the poor epistemology Christianity has always endorsed.
2) Christians dropped that bomb. So, you can’t get very far with this argument. The article you are commenting on here is a discussion of epistemology (evidence-based vs. faith-based), and which side Christianity was predominately on in that debate. This article is not about morality.
Science by itself is a tool, not a worldview, and thus does not entail a morality the way Christianity does. To look for scientific moralities, you have to compare apples to apples: Secular Humanism would not endorse immoral uses of science; whereas Christianity often has.
3) No one changes their sex. They change their gender. Learn the difference.
Also, reassignment surgery is not the most common way this is done. And sometimes it is even forced on people without their consent—usually by Christians, who make “assumptions” about what gender someone is “supposed” to have, based on bogus Biblical reasoning rather than science.
And freaking out about all that is strange, as it’s not in principle different from having the tip of your penis chopped off. Which describes what we do to most boys even in America. Or having your womb removed. Which countless women even have to do for their own survival. Women also mutilate their breasts to make them bigger. Or smaller. And countless other “mutilations,” a.k.a. plastic surgeries, are commonplace (some even necessary; some useful, like corrective eye surgery; but many just at one’s pleasure). As are tattooes and body piercing.
None of this bespeaks the end of the world. If it’s not your thing, don’t do it. Leave everyone else alone. Endeavor to judge less. As your own Lord taught you.
4) As to how an un-Christian theology can inspire science, read my whole section on how the paganism of Galen did exactly that, in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. By contrast, Christianity was openly and viciously hostile to all those values (as I also prove, Ibid.)—until a few people finally pushed back and exploited the Church’s moment of weakness to return Christendom to the pagan values of Galen. Those did not come from the Bible or any extant Church, or anything particular about Christianity. They came against those things. They came from pagan scientists of yore.
And that is why Christendom failed to bring us the Scientific Revolution for a thousand years. And why it fought and opposed that revolution even when it did come. These are facts. They cannot be hidden, but by the deluded.
Jesus our Lord as you stated said do not judge? You pick out parts that suit your bias. Read the rest. Do you not judge the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the log in yours?” This is about hypocritical judgement. I am not pointing a finger at society and doing those same things. Playing semantics with sex or gender words doesn’t produce a fruitful conversation either. Perhaps you are not circumcised which could explain why you think it means cutting off an entire penis? The strawman argument that somewhere out there are Christians beating the drum that their team brought in the scientific revolution is bogus. You refuted this early in your essay, so I simply addressed it. Science as you know derives from a Latin word for knowledge. Reassignment surgery is forced on people usually by Christians? I hope everyone reading your responses can see how ridiculous that sounds. By your logic, if I know a serial killer that says he is a Christian then it is guilt by association? As far as your claim on early science from Rome vs Christianity you have severe discernment issues. The Catholic Church was and is a political organization. They didn’t then and they don’t today follow many of the biblical principles making the entire Christian theology an easy target from those like yourself. Many Catholics today will tell you to your face they are not Christians. they are Catholic. Is there a difference between scientific theories? Maybe we lower thinkers should not discern any science from the other. Is there a difference in philosophy? Maybe we should just pile it up all together and conclude atheist and philosophy killed more people in the last 100 years than all other wars combined thanks to communism? But I choose to discern the differences and do my best to relegate the good from it. If that is judgmental then so be it. It is science today which tells the lie we are gender fluid and some even make the claim a baby in the womb is not a life. Science isn’t always cracked up to be what some scientists like to worship. Science itself.
As is typical for a Christian, you never actually read your Bible and thus don’t know what is actually in it. Here are the words of your Lord:
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”
“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
“Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High.”
“Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it.
There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you–who are you to judge your neighbor?”
This is not about endorsing judging others if you merely avoid being a hypocrite. This is condemning judging others, full stop. Only God is fit to judge. Not you. If you missed that message, you have ignored the words and teachings of your own God. You are worshipping then the anti-Christ, which is literally “the opposite” (anti-) of what Christ taught. You make excuses to judge others. This is the opposite if what Christ taught. You therefore follow the antichrist.
It’s not semantics. Sex is literally, physically different from gender. And at this point in history, only an ignorant bigot does not know that.
Actually, by my logic, if you followed a religion that pervasively taught serial killing as righteous, then yes, you are guilty of endorsing that as soon as you, too, endorse that religion.
Your religion endorses barbaric, judgmental, scientifically false doctrines about sex and gender that leads to widespread murder, oppression, misery, and abuse.
You choose to endorse that. That’s on you. And as an atheist, I get to judge you for that. Until you stop, and repent of your sin.
Most Protestants also opposed the values of progress, empiricism, and curiosity. This has been abundantly documented. It is true that some could, by rebelling against the Vatican, change their mind about the Christian values they inherited from the Bible and the ancient Fathers, and replace them with pagan values; but so could some Catholics do that.
So this has nothing to do with Catholic vs. Protestant. Christians of all sects have denounced scientific values from the very first century of the religion’s existence. That only changed fifteen hundred years later, and only when some Christians (nominal or actual) pushed to replace Christian values with pagan, and had the luck to succeed. That’s what happened.
Atheism isn’t a worldview. Nor is science. Science is a method. Atheism is a conclusion on a single question of fact. To compare worldviews, you have to choose actual worldviews. And when you do that, you won’t find many deaths on the hands of Secular Humanists, nor oppressions or miseries. But Christians? Hoo boy. Arguing that Christianity is as evil as Stalinism is no defense of Christianity. It’s an indictment of it.
Nope, Science has extensivelty confirmed the opposite.
That you have learned to lie about what science has discovered to defend your faith demonstrates how conclusively your religion has lost. Even you admit science has the truth and your religion does not. That’s why you have to falsely claim science agrees with your religion when it doesn’t. And this is the greatest indictment of all: that only lies can preserve your faith.
Thanks for this enlightening article. I ordered the Scientist books.
Perhaps you have commented elsewhere on the relation of “civilization” to progress in knowledge. The word pops up at varying points in the article and seems to underpin the development of both science and religious persecution.
I wonder if there was a society in human history or pre-history in which people had sufficient free time and resources to pursue knowledge under the three pagan rubrics mentioned, but where specialization and patronage of an elite wasnt required. Is concentration of wealth necessary or just an accelerant of change (both bad and good)?
There has never been such a society, no.
But some caveats are warranted:
1) Concentration of wealth does not require large individual disparities in wealth. Wealth accumulated can in principle be directed communally in various ways. That the former has always occurred instead has simply been a happenstance of history: it’s the fastest and easiest route to wealth accumulation, and once oligarchs have that first-mover advantage, it’s almost impossible to reverse it, because they control all the resources needed to oppose any change to the system that would divest them of their position (this is a principle called “elite capture”).
So, when one says wealth accumulation is necessary, this is not saying income disparity is necessary. It isn’t. It’s just hard to avoid.
2) The reason wealth accumulation is necessary is not so that patrons can fund scholars, per se, but simply so that enough people can be devoted to “intellectual endeavors” (as opposed to subsistance labors) as to accumulate the basis of advances over generations needed to make things like philosophy (and mathematics and science) a running operation.
And as I note in Scientist, density of occupation matters to pace and thus awareness of the value of progress, i.e. if you only have an idle few intellectuals, you may see no visible progress for centurues, which is effectively “invisible” to their societies (and thus isn’t known to even occur, and thus doesn’t inspire more investment in it); but if you have thousands (or, as now, millions), then the pace of progress becomes visible and thus can become a target of conscious societal investment.
3) The closest thing that low-subsistence societies have to “an idle intellectual class” are priests and shamans, but they always have their time absorbed in their business (spells, healing, advising); they are not actually idle thinkers with time to make advances in abstract (as opposed to craft) knowledge. This is why there needs to be high-subsistence society, with a lot of surplus to have lots of “idle” thinkers doing intellectual work (I know they aren’t actually idle; but the term signals that it can be hard to see the value of their work, which is why most societies are predisposed not to fund it).
That requires large surpluses in community production, which requires substantial increases in labor productivity, which requires technological and technique innovations that require systemic maintenance, which requires a civilization: division of labor, hierarchical administration, and dedication of properties to purposes (the accumulation of fixed material resources like farms, factories, aqueducts, roads).