- 2 months ago
Professor Robert Bucholz explains how a new secular Europe came to be through the breaking of the Church where thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes could flourish.
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00:01In 1543, Copernicus publishes on the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.
00:07In this book, he made the radical suggestion that perhaps the Earth is not the center of the universe.
00:12He posited a sun-centered system, a solar system in which the Earth was third.
00:18This would explain why some planets appear to be going forwards and others in reverse.
00:23We were all racing around the sun at different rates.
00:26Now, in fact, this theory, too, had been known to the ancient Greeks.
00:30But it was, to early modern Europeans, a shocking suggestion.
00:35How could common sense and the naked eye be wrong?
00:39How could 2,000 years of received opinion, Aristotle and Ptolemy, be wrong?
00:44How could the Earth not be the center of the universe, not be the battleground of good and evil?
00:50Could the great chain of being be wrong? Why would humans be third?
00:54Is man just another creature?
00:57Was the Bible itself wrong?
01:00Almost no one in Europe wants to go there.
01:03There were other reasons for rejecting Copernicus, in fact.
01:07Scientists are not will-o'-the-wisps.
01:09They need to live with a new theory for a while before abandoning the old one.
01:13In fact, the math still didn't work out.
01:16It turned out that even Copernicus needed epicycles.
01:19Knowing nothing of gravity, he made the mistake of assuming that the planets orbit in perfect circles,
01:24at the same rate of speed.
01:26Only later, when Johannes Kepler would propose elliptical orbits,
01:30and Isaac Newton explained them with gravity, would Copernicus's system make sense.
01:36Fortunately for Copernicus, he didn't have to worry about these problems.
01:40He had the good sense to die the year after publication.
01:43The trouble he avoided was inherited by Galileo Galilei.
01:49Galileo was a professor at the University of Padua.
01:53He was a distinguished physicist.
01:55As a young professor, he took on an old Aristotelian theory
01:59by demonstrating that the rate of fall of a body is constant regardless of its weight.
02:04Aristotle thought that the heavier a body, the faster it would fall.
02:09Now, more importantly for our purposes,
02:12Galileo was the first major astronomer to turn the newly invented telescope to the heavens.
02:18Beginning in 1609, he discovered some alarming facts.
02:23Turns out, the surface of the moon is pitted and cratered and irregular.
02:28The surface of the sun is marked by spots.
02:31The planet Jupiter has moons of its own,
02:34implying that it was a model for a solar system.
02:37Venus has phases.
02:40There were many more stars than previously thought.
02:42In fact, Galileo discovered and mapped a great deal of the density,
02:46at least of the Milky Way.
02:48None of this fit the great chain of being.
02:51The bodies closest to God should be more perfect than the Earth.
02:54They shouldn't have phases or moons, craters.
02:58But this universe was messier, more complicated than that system imagined.
03:05Now, Galileo published his findings gradually in the 1610s and 20s.
03:10He was attacked by churchmen and other professors, and some of his work was banned.
03:15In 1614, Galileo responded with an open letter asserting the Bible's irrelevance for scientific knowledge,
03:24that it should be reinterpreted in the light of new discoveries.
03:28That was revolutionary.
03:30In 1616, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine of the Society of Jesus, the leading Catholic theologian of his day, told Galileo to shut up.
03:39He forbade Galileo from arguing that the Earth moved.
03:44In 1632, Galileo tried, at considerable risk, to get around the band by publishing his Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World.
03:54It's written in the form of a dialogue between two characters, one supporting Ptolemy's theory, the other supporting Copernicus.
04:01The idea behind dialogue form is that Galileo doesn't have to come out and say which one is right,
04:06but the data very clearly point in the direction of Copernicus.
04:11Now, the church originally licensed the book, but within a year, Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition on grave suspicion of heresy.
04:21He was threatened with excommunication and torture, and in 1633, he was forced to abjure his book, which was publicly burnt.
04:30He was sentenced to life in prison, soon commuted to house arrest, and the sentence was to be read publicly in every university.
04:38Still, there is a legend that as Galileo was being led away, he muttered under his breath,
04:43It still moves, referring to the Earth.
04:49The church could silence Galileo, and they could ban his books.
04:53But as with Luther a century earlier, thanks to the printing press, thanks to rising literacy, thanks to better communications and transportation,
05:01his ideas circulated among university scholars, especially in Protestant countries.
05:06One of them was a German astronomer in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, named Johannes Kepler.
05:15As a Protestant, Kepler was not bound by the church's prohibitions.
05:19Kepler could make everything fit, in fact, by proposing that the planets didn't circle the sun, but revolved elliptically.
05:26In 1618 through 21, he published the Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, encapsulating his findings.
05:33In 1625, he published the Rudolphine Tables, so you don't have to be a great scientist to get something splendid like that named after you.
05:41You just have to pay for it.
05:43Which provided precise mathematical tables, which could be used to predict the orbits of the heavenly bodies.
05:49The math now fit.
05:51But this was even more destructive of the great chain.
05:54Ellipses aren't perfect the way circles and spheres are.
05:58Even more important than what was discovered here, about the cosmos, was how it was discovered.
06:05Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not follow traditional scholastic methods in devising their new worldview.
06:12Medieval scholastics worked deductively.
06:15They assumed a first principle.
06:17Say that the cosmos must conform to the Bible.
06:20And then they worked out from there.
06:22Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not assume a first principle.
06:26They ignored, and then ignore or twist what didn't fit.
06:30Instead, they used inductive methods.
06:33They made no a priori assumption.
06:35They collected facts and gathered observations of nature.
06:39Remember that Renaissance humanistic interest in nature.
06:44They used the telescope.
06:45In fact, Aristotle would have liked this.
06:48Out of these thousands of facts, a portrait of nature emerged, and from that, a theory,
06:54which was capable of being translated into mathematics, as Kepler did in his tables.
06:59The implication is that nature is rational, regular, predictable.
07:04The result was then modified as new observations were made.
07:08It is never an article of faith, whatever the Church might say.
07:12These men were pioneering the scientific method.
07:16But they missed only one element.
07:19That element was to be supplied by an English government lawyer and official,
07:23who proposed the next step, Sir Francis Bacon, later Lord Verulam.
07:29In a series of speculative philosophical works, The Advancement of Learning of 1605,
07:35the Novum Organon, a takeoff on Aristotle's original Organon in 1620,
07:40and the New Atlantis in later years, Bacon argued for A, no priori assumptions.
07:46If a man will begin with certainties, he said, he shall end in doubts.
07:50But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
07:57Then B, he argued for the primacy of empirical observation, leading to C, a theory, always provisional, expressed D, in mathematics.
08:07This was, so far, the same method used by Copernicus and Galileo.
08:12Bacon added one last step, experimentation.
08:16You had to test the theory.
08:18The theory must always be falsifiable.
08:21This, by the way, is why creation science and intelligent design,
08:25however valid they might be in their own terms, can't be science,
08:29because you can't design an experiment to test them.
08:33Sir Francis had just articulated the scientific method,
08:37one of the most powerful tools for the achievement of truth in the arsenal of civilization.
08:43For the first time since perhaps the Greeks,
08:45it was no longer enough of an explanation to say, well, God willed it.
08:50Bacon argued that the method should be applied not just to study of the physical world,
08:54but to all human knowledge.
08:57And indeed, armed with the new method, 17th century Europeans produced a scientific revolution.
09:02An explosion of new knowledge.
09:06In France, Blaise Pascal invented the adding machine.
09:09Rene Descartes made advances in optics.
09:11And both most famously advanced mathematics.
09:14Pascal devised Pascal's theorem, and with Fermat, the theory of probability.
09:19Descartes systematized the study of curves,
09:22and devised that alphabetical system for unknown variables,
09:25you know, variable A, B, C, X, Y, Z, and the system of superscripts for powers.
09:30In the Netherlands, Anton van Leeuwenhoek perfected the microscope.
09:34Christian Huygens wrote a famous treatise on light.
09:37Dutch universities, not bound by Catholic taboos regarding the dissection of dead bodies,
09:42became famous for their medical training.
09:45In England, the physician William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood.
09:50The chemist Robert Boyle discovered the law of pressure and volume, PV equals NRT,
09:56and wrote it up in a work whose title sums up the attitude of the entire age,
10:01The Skeptical Chemist.
10:03Edmund Halley, an astronomer based at my old Oxford College, New College,
10:08coordinated his observations of the heavens with mathematical formulae
10:12to predict the orbits of heavenly bodies and the return of comets, hence Halley's Comet.
10:18But the greatest of them all, the man who epitomized and revealed the potential of the scientific revolution,
10:24was of course, Isaac Newton.
10:27Isaac Newton put it all together.
10:29As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he came to be influenced by the works of Galileo.
10:35It was here that he had perhaps his greatest achievement, the positing of the idea of gravity.
10:41If Galileo was correct that objects in motion stay in straight line motion unless restrained,
10:47why don't the planets fly off into space?
10:50Newton posited that there must be an attractive force between objects based on weight.
10:55That's gravity.
10:57That is, the same force that causes an apple to fall to Earth causes the planets to stay in their orbits.
11:03From this simple proposition came Newton's three laws of motion.
11:07Every body at rest or in movement remains so unless or until a force is applied to it.
11:13The change in motion is proportional to the force exerted.
11:17And every action produces an opposite reaction.
11:21To demonstrate how motion works and to explain and predict how the universe works,
11:25Newton developed the calculus simultaneously with Leibniz in Germany.
11:30In short, Newton used Bacon's method, observed phenomena, posited a theory, expressed it mathematically.
11:37But what was his experiment?
11:40I suppose the apple, except there's no evidence that the apple actually ever really happened or existed.
11:46The motions of the heavenly bodies themselves, that is, every time they ended up where Newton said they would be in a way that confirms his theory.
11:53Three centuries later the space program verifies Isaac Newton every time something lands or rendezvous with a heavenly body successfully.
12:01Newton published his findings in 1687 in The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia.
12:12This book and the work which lay behind it caught the imaginations of European contemporaries because it was a complete world system to replace Ptolemies.
12:21It explained how the universe worked to everyone's satisfaction.
12:25In the words of Alexander Pope,
12:27Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night.
12:30God said, let Newton be.
12:33And all was light.
12:36The implication of the Principia was that God's universe ran according to natural laws.
12:41They were unchanging, they were rational, they were mathematical, they were discoverable using the scientific method.
12:50This is a revolution.
12:53It implied that humans could discover nature's secrets, God's secrets.
12:57These were no longer mysterious.
12:59If humans could discover nature's laws, they could discover nature's remedies.
13:04They could perhaps cure disease, increase the food supply, divert mighty bodies of water, build ever greater buildings, perhaps one day, fly.
13:15Clearly, if humans could grasp these powers, then prayers and rituals were no longer your only recourse to change or avert your fate.
13:24God was, in fact, no longer necessary to explain the daily running of the universe.
13:31Perhaps he was not concerned at the fall of every sparrow.
13:34Perhaps God was more of a celestial watchmaker who designed the universe, wound it up, and set it going.
13:42This philosophy is known as deism and would be very popular in the 18th century.
13:47Now, please understand that neither Newton nor his contemporaries were atheists.
13:52The age saw a continual flood of religious treatises, devotional works, and arguments.
13:57Newton himself wrote many religious works, including a commentary on the Book of Revelation.
14:02But human beings now had a much more powerful tool for understanding their surroundings in the scientific method.
14:10Many 17th century philosophers would try to apply it to human beings themselves.
14:17After all, if the free, unhindered human mind can discover the laws of nature via the scientific method,
14:24why could it not also discover the truth in religion, philosophy, social relations, etc.?
14:31Why couldn't accepted truths about human nature and divine nature, for that matter,
14:35be subjected to the cold, hard light of observation, reason, and experimentation?
14:40Thus, Rene Descartes attempted to imply induction and reason to human philosophy.
14:45He rejected not only a priori assumptions, but anything for which there was no rational proof.
14:51The only certainty was that thought implied existence.
14:54I think, therefore, I am.
14:57Conservatives were appalled by this.
15:00Blaise Pascal, the great French mathematician, was deeply troubled by the inroads of science and mathematical reasoning
15:07into what he called the empty, cold spaces of the universe.
15:11In the Pensée, notes for a great religious work he never lived to write,
15:15he argued that man remained corruptible and imperfect.
15:19Therefore, his reason was unreliable.
15:22Man is merely a thinking reed.
15:25As Pascal wrote,
15:26the heart has reasons that reason knows not of.
15:31Pascal feared that the new science would lead to skepticism and atheism.
15:36Other conservatives, Bishop Bossuet in France,
15:39King James VI in Scotland, Robert Filmer in England,
15:43mostly retreated into reassertions of the great chain.
15:46According to King James,
15:48the state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,
15:52for kings are God's lieutenants upon earth,
15:55and sit upon God's throne.
15:57But this formula didn't seem to work anymore.
16:01Humanism, the Reformation, the wars of religion,
16:04and even the discovery of the New World
16:06raised disturbing questions as to where kings got their power,
16:10whether a bad king or one who worshiped God differently should be obeyed.
16:14During the wars of religion,
16:16both Catholic and Protestant theologians began to argue
16:20that a heretic king could be deposed.
16:23The Pope absolved Catholics of their allegiance to Elizabeth,
16:28and both sides used assassination as a weapon.
16:33So in the new scientific, secular, modern Europe,
16:37philosophers were increasingly called on
16:39to construct new justifications for the state.
16:42At least two sought to do so using the scientific method.
16:47Thomas Hobbes was arguably the most original thinker of the 17th century.
16:53His great work, written during a civil war in England
16:56when everyone was debating the origins of legitimate government,
16:59is Leviathan, published in 1651.
17:02He considered himself a scientist.
17:04Therefore, he rejected explanations for human behavior derived from the Bible,
17:09Greek philosophy, medieval scholasticism.
17:13Instead, like Galileo or a Newton surveying the heavens,
17:17he just observed people.
17:19And he came to the following conclusions.
17:21Man is a creature dominated by passions, appetites, and physical needs.
17:28Far more animal than angel.
17:31He will satisfy those passions and appetites and those needs
17:34at the expense of his fellow men and women.
17:37Therefore, men in the state of nature,
17:40prior to their enacting government or society,
17:42are in a constant state of war.
17:44They're like atoms crashing into each other,
17:46constantly fighting for food, shelter, power.
17:50.
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