Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
ing the existence of God) via hubris (comparing oneself with God): “Am
I not God like God - more God than God since I can retake and give
back life, cause death to be born, and destroy death?” This idea makes
him disdain to take the antidote, because “If I believed in something
beyond this world, I should have drunk [the antidote] and I would be
saved - I believe in nothing and that convinced me to die!” With his
dying breath, when it is much too late to take the antidote, the spiritual
experiment takes a sharp turn. For the spiritual betterment of science,
Dumas let the dying chemist shout: “My God! Lord - pardon me!”
The historical parallel of the 'Chemical Revolution' and the 'French
Revolution' at the heyday of the Enlightenment let many conservative
writers, particularly of the French Restoration, lump both together.
Emerging as the first and for some time dominating experimental disci-
pline from the received natural philosophy, chemistry became, for many
writers, the embodiment of the Enlightenment idea of science and thus
the target of severe metaphysical and religious criticism. They consid-
ered chemistry's focus on the analysis and synthesis of materials and the
investigation of material change, which was a necessary confinement in
the course of discipline formation, a metaphysical commitment to mate-
rialism. It is probably due to the legacy of eighteenth-century French ma-
terialism that nineteenth-century writers associated with nineteenth-
century chemistry a series of metaphysical positions, such as atheism and
the denial of all sorts of spiritual, mental and moral realms, including
morality, free will, and an immortal soul, which all came to be known as
nihilism. The antimetaphysical attitude of the new chemistry, through its
basis in operationally defined elements, the lack of any reference to natu-
ral theology, unlike mechanics, and the establishment of (organic) chem-
ical analysis as the basis of experimental research, all contributed to the
metaphysical bias and the religious indignation by Christian authors. In
sum, chemistry was not only alien to these writers, but became the em-
bodiment of everything they opposed.
6.
Chemists against God, II: Hubris and the 'Mad Scientist'
Hubris or presumption, in the sense of comparing one's own capacities
with those of the divine creator, is an issue deeply rooted in the pecu-
