Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
To return to the question as to who was the first experimental scientist that we
know about, the answer is surprising. Most people think it was an Ancient Greek
philosopher, such as Aristotle, Plato or Archimedes. Ancient Greek philosophers
based their views in many cases on empirical observations of the world rather than
by appeals to authority, and thereby made many advances in understanding, but they
were not renowned for formulating hypotheses and then testing them by experiment
in the routine way that modern scientists do.
The first recorded scientist, defined as I have described, was an Arab called Ibn
al-Haytham, who carried out experiments on many aspects of vision and optics in
the tenth century (Fig. 2.6). This was the middle of a period when in the Arab
world there was a tremendous flowering in the arts, literature and sciences, called the
Arabic Golden Age. Some people call it the Islamic Golden Age but many people
of different faiths contributed to it, and they all wrote in Arabic. It is also surprising
to learn that many of the discoveries that we in the West associate with people like
Copernicus, Galileo and Newton in the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries were initiated in
the Arab world, at a time when free enquiry was not encouraged by the religious
authorities in Europe. Ibn al-Haytham was the first person to demonstrate that light
travels from objects into eyes and not from eyes onto objects, as had been suggested
by earlier Greek philosophers. He also showed by experiment that light travels in
straight lines.
Now Ibn al-Haytham was a devout Muslim - that is, he was a supernaturalist. He
studied science because he considered that by doing this he could better understand
the nature of the god that he believed in - he thought that a supernatural agent had
created the laws of nature. The same is true of virtually all the leading scientists in
the Western world, such as Galileo and Newton, who lived after al-Haytham, until
about the middle of the twentieth century. There were a few exceptions - Pierre
Laplace, Simeon Poisson, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac and Marie Curie were natu-
ralists for example. Charles Darwin experienced a decline in his Anglican belief in
a benevolent god as he grew older, and in a private letter written two years before
his death in 1882 said “I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the exis-
tence of God
...
I think that generally (and more and more so as I grow older), but
...
not always
that an agnostic would be a more correct description of my state of
mind”. The term “agnostic” was coined in 1869 by Darwin's friend and supporter,
Thomas Henry Huxley, who defined it as the position that “it is wrong for a man to
say that he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide
evidence which logically justifies that certainty”. In other words, Huxley was dis-
puting the statement by religious people that their knowledge of the supernatural is
certain.
Both agnosticism and atheism come in strong and weak versions. The strong
agnostic thinks that the supernatural is unknowable even in principle, while the
weak agnostic thinks that there is no empirical evidence to support the existence
of the supernatural, and that therefore one should not believe in the supernatural
unless, and until, such evidence is found. The strong form of atheism is defined as
the belief that the supernatural does not exist, while the weak form of atheism is
indistinguishable from the weak form of agnosticism. One way to remember the
