The Influence of Science upon Religious Conceptions

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta on 13^th April 1957

Continued from part 1

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme, the soul of man is identified with the rational form of the living body, and God with the rational form of the universe. For Aristotle, “soul” meant the final form of the organism conceived as a causal principle determining its growth, development and characteristics. And for him, as it is also for the Thomistic Catholics today, the individual person was one substance, body and soul being its material and formal components. Aristotelian science shows also that the formal and final causes of all individual things fit together organically into a hierarchic unity and pattern. Goad conduct, “practical wisdom” as Aristotle called it, occurs only when man acts upon the basis of the scientifically verified hierarchical conception of his own nature. Since man, being limited, has only partly verified this conception, St. Thomas and his followers were able to express the distinction between reason and revelation in completely Aristotelian scientific terms. It is the function of revelation to make us continuously aware of the existence in perfection of the whole rational system or final cause of nature, which human beings, through science with its reason, know only in part.

We can now appreciate how the rational principle rises to dominance, in such a manner and to such an extent, that theology and philosophy and physical science, and the ordering of man’s everyday life come under its sway. To depart from the rule of Reason would almost be tantamount to treason against God. In Christendom, reason is exalted as man’s highest faculty, as the spiritual part of him, reflecting in some measure or other the Divine Mind. This contrasts with Indian teaching which postulates Spirit as something quite beyond the deep levels of the mind, something altogether over and beyond reason.

Modern science dethrones Aristotle. Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and above all Newton found the new science. An atomic theory is once again propounded and Aristotle repudiated. According to the new science, sensed qualities like heat, colour and sound are the interpretations by the observer of different rates of vibration and do not reside in the external abject. So the question arises, what is the nature of the observer who projects back sensed qualities upon material objects, which in reality are devoid of these qualities? John Locke answered that the observer is an entity such that when the material objects in Newton’s mathematically defined space and time act upon it, it is conscious of colours, sounds, pains, pleasures and so on, in sensed space and time as appearances. This is precisely what Locke meant by a mental substance. It is a substance capable of consciousness which, when material substances affect it, is aware of qualities in sensed space and time as appearances. Thus reason in science and the philosophy of science provided Locke with “a new state of nature” and a new content for “the law of reason.” This prescribed a new idea of the good in religion and politics: namely, toleration rather than the theocratic rule of a Presbyterian magistrate or the divine right of the King’s Church of England, and popular democracy rather than Calvinistic theocracy or the divine right of kings defended by Filmer. As a consequence of the Lockean philosophical formulation of Newton’s mathematical science, the soul of man and the political person were identified with a single mental substance. The person’s body was, on the other hand, an aggregate of material substances or atoms moving in accordance with the mechanistic laws of Newton’s science. The person in his moral, religious and political aspects, and as the observer of nature, was the single mental substance. His body was his “property”, just as a house, similarly composed of material atoms, was his property.

Locke postulated each individual mental substance as being completely self-sufficient and independent. Hence each man, consulting his own soul introspectively, was the only judge of the correctness of his religion, and could not be shown to be incorrect by appeal to another man’s doctrine. Thereby Locke laid the philosophical foundation for the doctrine of complete religious toleration as a positive good, now taken so much for granted in several democratic societies.

Modem American democracy stems largely from John Locke. The celebrated author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, had scant respect for Aristotle’s political writings. J.C. Miller, in his Origins of the American Revolution, wrote, “If any one man can be said to have dominated the philosophy of the American Revolution, it is John Locke.” But Lockean philosophy also had its inadequacies, such as the impossibility of prescribing social. action for the good of the community, since each soul was a lonely mental atom quite unrelated to any other mental atom. Moreover, the philosophy had several other weak points. Locke and his successors — Hume, Berkeley, and the physiocrats Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Mill and Jevons — all influenced the shape and trend of Anglo-American culture in the direction of believing, and acting upon the belief, that good conduct, both for the individual and for the political and economic order, was free and independent individual activity, governed by the law of free competition. The ideas of Malthus and Darwin supported this view. Thus eighteenth and nineteenth century Christendom saw laissez-faire as perhaps never before or since in world history. America had no counter-influence derived from an ancient past. The only tradition governing the United States almost up to our own day is non-conformist Protestantism, and the Lockean and Humean laissez-faire assumptions of modern political and economic theory.

The contrast with Britain is stark. Graeco-Roman, Celtic and Teutonic influences, and both Augustinian-Platonic and Thomistic-Aristotelian Christian doctrine together with the rigidly authoritarian and hierarchic influence of the Church of Rome, went into moulding medieval “Merrie England.” Aristocratic socially, regal politically, and Roman Catholic in religion was English culture, like medieval culture generally. Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1535 was intended to make the English people identify their religious loyalty with England; and with the inception of a Church of England with the sovereign as the Defender of the Faith, the severance from the Pope and the Church of Rome was sharply defined. But the attitude to religion as a whole — and this is the important point — was that a middle course should be steered between extreme Catholicism and extreme Protestantism. Edward VI’s reign exemplified the evils of extreme Protestantism, and that of his successor, Mary, of extreme Catholicism. But from the time of the great Elizabeth I, something like a tolerant, impartial attitude has prevailed, with a few exceptions here and there, during the last four centuries. And in Elizabeth’s reign, what was previously done for Catholicism by St. Thomas Aquinas with his Summa Theologica was done for Anglicanism by Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. This polity was anti-laissez-faire, and was organic and hierarchical; and though based on Aristotle, it also drew freely upon Greek and Roman classics, and Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Thus Hooker’s formulation was less rigid and more latitudinarian than St. Thomas’s, thereby marking the main difference between Catholicism and Anglicanism. The original ancestor in England of a Conservative was the Englishman who was a good patriot and a good Anglican, and who had a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of all those who came under his wing. In fact, he contrasted somewhat with the Tory of later days.

Here we can appreciate the contrast between British democracy and American democracy. The culture of the United States, based so broadly on the Lockean idea of the equality of all men, tends to accentuate individual conformity and equality, and to regard government as a necessary evil. In Britain, partly due to Mill’s protagonism of individual uniqueness as being good, English culture fosters individual independence and differences, and regards government as a positive good, for it is the instrument for peacefully introducing and firmly establishing changes for the benefit of society.

Despite the changes affected by the advance of science upon political and economic conceptions, and upon social relations, hardly any change was made in religious beliefs in so far as belief in the Bible was concerned. Of course there had been changes in belief accompanying the theological changes marking the history of the Christian Churches. But it was not till the mid-nineteenth century that Darwin’s Origin of Species seriously shook belief in the literal truth of such matters as the Creation of the world as stated in Genesis. The materialist scientific attitude steadily gained ground, together with an ill-founded optimism that the mysteries of life would be unravelled in no long time, and the triumph of human reason would be absolute. Also, men’s confidence grew in what they called progress, a progress which would soon establish the millennium of happiness and peace and well-being.

The end of the nineteenth century gave man his first peepinto the new world of the atom, though alas! folding up the sky of this new world has been tantamount in some respects to lifting the lid of Pandora’s box. In the twentieth century there is Einstein’s Relativity Theory and his faith in the principle of causality, and there is Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy. Thus it appears that, whilst causality and predictability hold in the sphere of molar or macroscopic physics, indeterminacy and unpredictability hold in the sphere of microscopic physics. This does not mean that the world of the atom is a lawless world — it has its own mathematics, and mathematics lies under the sway of reason — but it does mean that the strict mechanical causality which we associate with the realm of molar physics cannot be associated in the same way with the atomic world.

Continued in part 3 and part 4

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