Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
a horrific conflict triggered by the break-up of the Church at the time of the Reforma-
tion in the 15th century. Plagues and famines had swept through Europe killing millions
of people, and the war itself had generated massive destruction of property and loss of
human life—one-third of the population of central Europe had been killed in it. The
old, comfortable certainties that had held society together throughout the Middle Ages
had broken down, and as the old world order collapsed under the pressures brought to
bear on it by the new Protestantism, people felt intensely vulnerable and insecure. The
old Church had christianised the ancient pagan religions, and still tolerated the animist-
ic views of the majority of its congregation, but the Protestant revolution denied even
this, and declared that God was detached from his physical creation, which was noth-
ing more than a sinful, fallen realm that could be escaped upon death if one had worked
hard enough to deserve a place in heaven. It was into this context that modern science
was born. Its earliest practitioners and proponents, amongst them Bacon, Descartes and
Galileo, were convinced that a new basis for certainty must be founded on reason rather
than on a simple faith in established religious dogmas and what were seen as the super-
stitious beliefs of the common people.
Galileo (1564-1642) taught that one must ignore subjective sensory experiences if
one wanted to learn anything useful about the world. Such experiences, such as empathy
with a small deer chewing its cud, or awe at the diverse and elemental beauty of a forest
in which one is wandering, were for Galileo unreliable and downright misleading. The
English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) gave the name 'secondary qualities' to
such felt experiences, in order to emphasise their inferior, ostensibly derivative status re-
lative to the primary qualities of size, shape and weight. Primary qualities—those which
were rightly attributed to the objective, real world—were those aspects of things, and
only those, that were amenable to quantitative measurement. Galileo believed that reli-
able knowledge resided in quantities, so nature had to be reduced to numbers if she was
to yield her secrets and submit to the controlling influence of the human mind. For sci-
entists, mathematics became the language for understanding and controlling nature. The
justification for this was straightforward enough. After all, as philosopher Henri Bortoft
points out, all right-minded, rational people agree on the correctness of mathematical
propositions—no one disputes that all the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
The new mathematical way of thinking was compelling precisely because it seemed to
provide an indisputable, solid foundation on which science would build a new era of so-
cial stability based on the application of pure reason to every aspect of life.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), like Galileo, was one of most important progenitors of
the scientific revolution. He called for scientific researchers to “bind” and constrain
nature using mechanical inventions so that she “could be forced out of her natural state
and squeezed and moulded”, and thereby “tortured” into revealing her secrets. Accord-
