Pine, Ch. 6 - Stress Points

We should be aware of the instrumentalist character of "gravity" - both today, in light of Einstein, and during Newton's time as well.

While there is a clear movement in this phase of early modern science to eject God from the center of the universe to its margins - we will see that religious beliefs in general and conceptions about God in particular play important roles in the shaping of the new science, beginning with Galileo.

At the same time, the new science will powerfully re-shape earlier ideas of God. This occurs first of all at the hands of Descartes, whose epistemology and metaphysics provide the conceptual foundations of the new science for at least two centuries.

In addition, Descartes is the first to articulate the law of inertia - an important conceptual development for Newton's subsequent formulation of a notion of "gravity."

While this conception of gravity represents an enormous mathematical / philosophical / scientific accomplishment - it is also "the introduction of occult forces" into what had been a strict materialism and mechanical science. (The peculiarity of this notion - even if we take it for granted - will be laid bare in another couple of centuries by Einstein.)

This forces Newton into both an instrumentalism and a positivism - the latter defined as an effort to do away with all "metaphysical" notions in one's theory. On Pine's showing, however, it is impossible to have a scientific theory without an underlying metaphysics - and he describes Newton's conception of a framework of absolute time and space, which functions in part as "God's sensorium," as a primary example of how Newton retains a metaphysics: such a framework, as Newton's contemporaries and Einstein later pointed out, cannot be confirmed by experience, and so a strict empiricist must discard it (as Einstein will do). While such a framework might be objected to on empirical grounds, then, it is retained precisely on metaphysical and religious grounds in Newton's conception of God's new role in the mechanical/mathematical universe revealed in the new science - a conception which thus retains and dramatically reshapes the prevailing religious conception of God.

Descartes' metaphysical and epistemological dualism seeks to solve some of the problems Newton and other atomists faced: most dramatically, perhaps, atomism in the hands of Thomas Hobbes leads to a relativism not only in religion and philosophy (all values are relative), but also in science itself, so that an authoritarian regime is needed to "define the truth." Descartes seeks, on Pine's reading, to sustain a more democratic conception of human beings (as each is equally capable of reason, wonder, and knowledge - at least with sufficient education) - but this further requires a different metaphysics and epistemology than Hobbes' strict materialism/atomism.

Indeed, as the Cartesian compromise - a version of the two-fold truth which seeks to hold together the old religion and philosophy with the new science - falters, new alternatives to Descartes (most notably, Spinoza) bring God back to the center of the new science. But this is to make the new science a religion in its own right, according to Pine - one endorsed by Einstein, but, even in this contemporary form, recognizably Pythagorean in its roots and character.

Pine makes the point that while we (as moderns) tend to look back upon earlier folk as less enlightened about "Reality" because they knew less science - we are prone to precisely the same errors should we accept our own science too glibly:

• ...the greatest irony of the success of the Voyager flights is that just as the ancient navigators of the Earth's oceans used the mistaken Aristotelian-Ptolemaic conception of the planets as a navigation guide to travel successfully from port to port, so we believe today that the Newtonian system of universal gravitation, although convenient for navigating between the planets, is in a sense "false."

This needs explanation:

• To say that theory is false assumes that one is a realist. Even if one is an instrumentalist, it must at least be said that Newton's theory of gravitation has a limited realm of applicability, that it cannot accurately represent all the facts of observation. (169f.)

From Four Causes to One: the Rejection of Teleology and the "Marginalization" of God in the New Science

One of the great dividing lines between Medieval science and Modern science is the gradual expulsion of God from the system. Medieval science followed Aristotle in requiring four kinds of causes as part of a complete explanation or account of something - including the teleological or final cause. As Pine points out, final causes are rather peculiar - they were "from the future" in order to affect the present (171). In any case, it is God's divine teleology which provides the causal glue sustaining the universe:

• ...in spite of His otherness, God is in this universe in an intimate way. The "thoughts" of God are in the universe in a sense. His "purpose" is the continual, sustaining cause of all motion. Remove God and purpose from this universe and everything would fall apart in chaos. (171)

In fact, this ethereal final causality is a Christianized version of an older view from Aristotle and Plato: it is eros - desire - which is the fundamental cause of motion in the universe. All things are drawn to God as the summit of perfection and completion -

a motive we can further see as an echo of the still earlier Pythagorean impulse towards the Divine via mathematics.

Also note that Galileo argued "that biblical Scripture should be interpreted in light of scientific discoveries, rather than the other way around...." But even so, and even though he had

• stressed the importance of observation, quantitative measurement, and experiment in the pursuit of understanding God's creation, rather than relying on traditional, authoritative ideas, traces of ancient explanations persisted nevertheless in his thought as well as that of Kepler. Galileo could not shake the hold of the idea of circular motion, and Kepler, because of his Neoplatonism, was not comfortable with the idea of an infinite universe in which the importance of the Sun would be nullified. Thus, further conceptual help was needed, and the notion of a greater God contributed greatly to the preservation and discussion of radically new ideas necessary to complete the Copernican revolution. (172)

What this means is that religious and scientific ideas are inextricably intermixed and influencing one another's development.

With the discernment of the universe as infinite, and no place more special than another, a second fundamental shift from the Medieval/Aristotelian conception of the universe occurs - namely, the development of the idea of inertia:

• a physical body at rest would remain at rest and one moving in space would continue to move in a straight line until a "force" acted upon these bodies to alter their motion. (172)

This overturns the ancient - and "common-sense" - view that rest is the "natural" state of a body (thus presenting motion as the phenomenon to be explained). But notice what this does: since motion no longer requires explanation - we have eliminated a central phenomenon explained by the presumption of God as author of the divine telos towards which all change and motion are directed.

God, in short, is on the way out of our new science.

Descartes:

Descartes (1596-1650) was the first scientist-philosopher to take these strains of thought and organize them into a comprehensive, influential world view. (172)

The point is that the new Cartesian philosophy is worth attending to in some detail because it both synthesizes the various developments of the Copernican revolution and, in doing so, provides the philosophical foundations - including our accounts of epistemology and metaphysics - presumed by the new science for at least two centuries.

This foundation includes the incorporation of atomism, which presumes that all phenomena are the result of mechanical interactions between material atoms.

In philosophical terms, this is our ontology or metaphysics: what is most real is matter (in the form of atoms) and its motion.

On the basis of this metaphysics, Descartes then articulates the law of inertia:

• A physical body that was at rest would remain at rest, and one that was moving in a straight line would maintain a constant speed in the same direction until deflected by a "force" caused by a collision with another physical body. (Today, this is known as Newton's first law of motion.)

This leads to both the elimination of Aristotelian/Medieval teleology - and a "new" (by comparison, stripped down) definition of the goals of science:

• Thus, motion and change of motion were explained not by reference to natural places as in the Aristotelian cosmology but by forces caused by collisions between material things. The goal of natural science was now clear: to find the mathematical laws that govern the motions, interactions, and combinations of material particles. (173)

Pine further points out the role played by Kepler's Third Law in helping Newton to formulate his theory of gravity. Pine comments as well that

• The idea of an attracting or emanating force of some sort was not new. What was revolutionary was a precise mathematical treatment of this force that explained why Kepler's laws worked in accounting for the motions of the planets and why physical projectiles fall back to Earth. It was exactly what these inheritors of Copernicanism, who denied a special difference between the Earth and the celestial motions of the planets, and the mathematically based philosophies of the past demanded - a simple mathematical law that unified celestial and terrestrial motions. (173)

"Gravity, Action at a Distance, Absolute Space and Time"

For us who take "gravity" for granted (because we haven't read Einstein yet?), the bizarre nature of Newton's proposal is hard to grasp. Pine tries to get at it this way:

• But what was gravity? Unlike Descartes's theory that involved contact forces, the gravity of Newton mysteriously "acted at a distance." How could the Moon and the Earth attract each other when there was no physical connection or contact? It was either an "occult" quality or a special inherent force possessed by all physcial objects. What was gained scientifically by replacing mysterious special forces with a mysterious special force? (174)

Rather strikingly, for those of us who might be scientific realists - Newton answers this question by stressing the instrumentalist character of his theory:

• Newton tried very hard to persuade his contemporaries that nothing was gained and attempted to maintain a positivist, or instrumentalist, interpretation of the concept of gravity. It is not the job of scientists, he argued, to assert "hypotheses" about the ultimate nature of things. The job of a scientist is to capture what we see in a precise mathematical web of relations; it is to explain the "how" of experience, not the "why": how one set of observations at a particular time will result in a new set of observations at a future time. (174)

This means, moreover, that Newton is further a positivist:

• ...he recognized the necessity of banning all metaphysical speculation from science and proceeding only with a strict empirical methodology. Only that which can be verified by reference to our experience of the world is admissible into science. Gravity cannot be seen or touched; it is just a name we give to the results of what physical bodies do. It is an instrument that practical scientists use to "save the phenomena." What is important is what physical bodies do. Only the physical results matter; scientists need not speculate about what gravity "really is." (174)

Such a view - i.e., attempting to eliminate all philosophical assumptions from science - , as Pine goes on to observe, is neither possible nor desirable. In particular, while we might take the resulting view that "Everything knowable is assumed to be reducible to mathematical-mechanical relationships of moving physical matter," to describe reality - this, like the Aristotelian/Medieval frame before it, remains a metaphysics nonetheless.

Indeed, Newton himself still requires God as the metaphysical underpinnings of his system - underpinnings which Einstein will remove (though Einstein will not conclude that God is unnecessary or "disproved" by natural science).

Pine focuses on the (apparent) need for an absolute framework of time and space as his primary example. Here we are (mostly) still Newtonians...

It is easy enough to see that motion is relative in an infinite universe - but "common sense," coupled with the prevailing religious/metaphysical beliefs about space - have us ask, once we acknowledge the relativity of motion (e.g., Pine's example of a satellite in synchronous orbit with the Moon), what is an object's "real" direction and speed of its motion?

This seems an even more pressing question with regard to time:

• At stake was a world view that preserved common sense and the notion of a God-initiated universe of absolute space with an infinite amount of room for material things to move around with a machinelike precision. Started by God, and ticking away at precise mathematical intervals ever since, time flowed in this universe from past, present, to the future. Each point in time constituted a definite allocated tick of a universal clock-time.

For better or worse, however, this "common-sense" view of an absolute space and time fails precisely on empirical grounds:

• The problem for Newton and his contemporaries was that experience did not support absolute time. Every measurement of experienced space and time was and is a relative measurement, necessarily relative to some reference point. The proposal of an absolute space and time was thus a metaphysical assumption that went beyond experience. What we experience is an Earth-centered time and an Earth-centered space, time and space measurable from the point of view of a stable Earth. In Newton's day, even though scientists were well aware that the Earth moved, there were no experiences or measurements from a perspective beyond the Earth, so it was easy to believe that there was but one time and one space. As we will soon see, Newton and most of his contemporaries were fooled once again by the appearance of the Earth as a stable, central platform. (177)

If it fails on empirical grounds - what supports the belief in an absolute space/time?

• It was important, however, for Newton to preserve the notions of an absolute space and time not only for the world view and common sense, but also to give God something to do in this machinelike universe! If the universe was a perfect physical self-sustaining machine, what role did God play? God must become the divine reference point, the absolute vantage point we seek to keep time and space stable and avoid paradox. (ibid).

Galileo, Pine points out, had retained for God the (Aristotelian) role of First Cause, "the creator of all the atoms, the supreme mechanical inventor."

• But compared to God's previous intimate role, this was a minor involvement, almost an embarrassing heretical afterthought. What was to be done with all the important nonmaterial concerns of the human race? What were to become of values, of moral laws, of all the spiritual considerations of humankind's ultimate concern that the Church had always affirmed a direct understanding? (ibid)

Indeed, given the metaphysics of materialism, not only do such ethereal entities as values, moral laws, souls, even God, hold questionable metaphysical credentials (i.e., how can such - by definition, non-material things, be "real" if our metaphysics asserts that only matter and its motion is real?) --

even knowledge itself, including scientific knowledge, threatens to disappear as a mere "epiphenomenon" riding on the back of material/mechanical motion: see. 177f.

Descartes once again enters the fray to "save" the new science from its destruction at the hands of its own metaphysics: his radical dualism (inherited and developed from Augustine) establishes the modern version of the Medieval/Muslim doctrine of the two-fold truth - first of all by establishing a metaphysical alternative to strict materialism.

Descartes argues that there are two kinds of "stuff" or substances -

• matter: extended, unthinking things
  mind: unextended, thinking things

This issues in a conception of "parallel universes" - a material and a spiritual one. Over against the material one - known by the scientist via mathematical, deterministic law - the spiritual/mental universe retains ideas, feelings, willing, imagining, etc.: it is in this universe "where the ultimate concerns of God and humankind communicate and play out the traditional religious drama of moral striving and salvation." (179).

This dualism, moreover, is rooted for Pine in Descartes' democratic (because Christian) intentions.

• Thomas Hobbes had drawn first the epistemological and then the political consequences of his metaphysics - his own strict materialism/atomism in the late 1500's.
  Metaphysics: Given the primary reality of atoms -
  (epistemology) all our thoughts, whether of values (philosophy and religion) or of nature itself (i.e., the theories we develop in mathematics and science) are "secondary qualities" or "phantasms" resulting from the motion of atoms.
  All philosophical and religious beliefs are therefore "valid" only relative to a given culture/time - but so is science as "perspective."
  
  • Thus, Hobbes adopted an instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theories: We cannot say that the new science is true,y that it works. Could perspectives other than that of the new science work? Yes, said Hobbes. We cannot be sure that the universe has been constructed on the basis of the mathematics that we "make up." That our mathematics works is probably a "coincidence." Hobbes saw that this implied relativism, and the only way he saw out of the problem was to suggest that every society have a supreme ruler who would command a particular perspective. (180).
    
• Over against epistemological relativism - and the authoritarian regime which it entails - Descartes' dualism is intented to "save" the natural sciences and mathematics, and with them, the democratic conclusions of his Christian affirmation that all human beings, as equal in the eyes of God, share an equal potential to know and wonder (179).

This dualism, moreover, provides a solution to one of the problems vexing philosophy/natural science since Anaxamander - namely, why does mathematics "work"?

• ...with a spiritual universe (or a universe of "mind") parallel to a physical universe, the problems of finding a place for religion and value, as well as establishing a secure foundation for scientific knowledge, are solved. The reason mathematical ideas found in human minds work so well in mapping the physical world of atoms is that there is a preestablished parallelism and harmony between the structure of the physical universe and the human mind. Mathematical ideas are "innate," planted by God in our minds, as it were, in the beginning. How do we know this? If God is good, thought Descartes, he would not deceive us! (180)

But this dualism, and Descartes' other ideas regarding God's involvement in the universe, are by no means unproblematic: on the contrary, this dualism will soon collapse in the face of several significant objections (e.g., if mind and body are separate - how does the mind "known" anything through the body? how can the mind "tell" the body what to do, without getting caught up in the web of deterministic causal relationships that define the material world, and thereby lose its [presumed} freedom, etc.?). It also faced immediate criticism in its own day, as Pine documents regarding Leibniz. (181).

Newton appears to run between Leibniz and Descartes, especially with his understanding of absolute space and time as "God's sensorium" (Pine, 181-3).

When Descartes' dualism fails - one effort to replace it is represented in the philosophical/scientific thread demarcated by Spinoza (and, apparently, Einstein). Rather than push God to the margins of the universe (as a First Cause, as holder of the Divine Sensorium of an absolute space and time, etc.) - dualism may be overcome by monism, by making God immanent in the universe as known by science.

This is powerfully articulated by Spinoza - whose God, apparently, Einstein also believed in (see Pine, 184-186).

This leads to Einstein's observation: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" (quoted in Pine, 164). But it further shows that science, having been shaped by religious beliefs from the beginning, is also capable of becoming its own religion.