Inventing science

Bill Cavanaugh has argued that the early modern “wars of religion” were not really conflicts about religion but rather conflicts that created the modern notion of religion. Something similar can be said about the war between Scripture and science in the early modern period. In fact, these were both the same war, a war to corral religion and keep it safe. Arguing with Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty offers this account:

“The crucial consideration is whether we know how to draw a line between science and theology such that getting the heavens right is a ‘scientific’ value, and preserving the church, and the general cultural structure of Europe, is an ‘unscientific’ value. The argument that we do not centers around the claim that the lines between disciplines, subject matters, parts of culture, are themselves endangered by novel substantive suggestions . . . .

“This argument can be put in terms of the scope of the criterion of ‘scope’ . . . Bellarmine thought the scope of Copernicus’s theory was smaller than might be thought. WHen he suggested that perhaps Copernican theory was really just an ingenious heuristic device for, say, navigational purposes and other sorts of practically oriented celestial reckoning, he was admitting that the theory was, within its proper limits, accurate, consistent, simple, and perhaps even fruitful. When he said that it should not be thought of as having wider scope than this he defended his view by saying that we had excellent independent (scriptural) evidence for believing that the heavens were roughly Ptolemaic. Was his evidence brought in from another sphere, and was his proposed restriction of scope thus ‘unscientific’? What determines that Scripture is not an excellent source of evidence for the way the heavens are set up? Lots of things, notably the Enlightenment’s decision that Christianity was mostly just priestcraft.” Citing liberal theologians’ concessions to Darwinism in their interpretation of Genesis, Rorty points out that “they were all attempts to limit, so to speak, the scope of Scripture (and thus of the church) - the opposite reaction to Bellarmine’s own attempt to limit the scope of Copernicus.” In short, “the ‘grid’ which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not there to be appealed to in the early seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial. No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of human knowledge, could have ‘discovered’ it before it was hammered out. The notion of what it was to be ‘scientific’ was in the process of being formed” - and formed, as Rorty shows, by a successful effort to claim squatters’ rights for “science” in territory once claimed by theology.