Newton and Leibniz
Mar. 22nd, 2013 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormsewerSo I've been reading A System of the World by Neal Stephenson lately. Near the end there's a scene where fictional Newton and fictional Leibniz finally get into it and argue about their relative ideas for reconciling the growing evidence for materialist science as a way of explaining the world with the traditional religious views that both still have strong attachments to.
Newton seems to want to divide the universe into "mechanical" and "vegetative" (which seem more or less analogous to "physical" and "spiritual") parts and allow God to work through the latter, though these "vegetative parts" were and remain undiscovered. Leibniz postulates that the fundamental unit of reality is something called a "monad," and that God somehow works through these. On the one hand, Newton's vision seems more consistent with the actual evidence, but on the other it's not so much a hypothesis as a god-of-the-gaps hope that evidence to support prejudice will be found beyond the bounds of current knowledge. Similar arguments remain popular today, but they don't have much place in actual science. Monadism seems to bear little relation to reality as science now understands it, and certainly very few would put it forward as a reasonable theory now, but at least it seems like it is a legitimately falsifiable hypothesis and in that respect is more scientific.
An interesting question is that of why brilliant people like Newton and Leibniz would cling so tightly to ideas that they must have known on some level weren't consistent with reality. Theists like to trot out that fact as an argument against atheism, which of course is a logical fallacy. Just because you're recognized a genius in certain areas doesn't mean all your opinions are correct. (The all-or-nothing approach to authority of any kind is fairly typical of theistic thinking, though.) But it's still an interesting and even important question to consider.
I think it comes down to the environment in which they lived. Religious thinking suffused everything at the time; it was impossible to escape from. If you lived in Western Europe, Christian thinking suffused everything, and there would be very little exposure to anything else. The truth of the Bible was simply assumed by everyone, and publicly doubting that would result in ostracism at best, and a messy death at worst. Certainly the response of the authorities to Copernicus, Galileo, et al. would be a strong inducement not to push too far in questioning certain of the things that everyone seemed to know as well as they knew the sky was blue.
Another related point is that, given the state of knowledge at the time, I don't think God was an unreasonable hypothesis. I think most of the "natural philosophers" of the day got into the act because of religious zeal (albeit of an idiosyncratic type), not because of a lack of it. Certainly that seems to have been the case for Newton and Leibniz. They wanted to find real, solid evidence for God, and to do it they invented powerful methods that taught us more about reality in a shorter time period than pretty much anyone else in the history of the world. Unfortunately, the clear-cut evidence for God remained elusive. That sort of enthusiasm for science kept up for a while but gradually faded. Science keeps looking in new places, and God keeps not being there. Today no one goes into science expecting to find incontrovertible objective evidence for God, and in faithful circles a desire for such things is frowned upon, at best. But in the seventeenth century? It wasn't that simple.
Newton seems to want to divide the universe into "mechanical" and "vegetative" (which seem more or less analogous to "physical" and "spiritual") parts and allow God to work through the latter, though these "vegetative parts" were and remain undiscovered. Leibniz postulates that the fundamental unit of reality is something called a "monad," and that God somehow works through these. On the one hand, Newton's vision seems more consistent with the actual evidence, but on the other it's not so much a hypothesis as a god-of-the-gaps hope that evidence to support prejudice will be found beyond the bounds of current knowledge. Similar arguments remain popular today, but they don't have much place in actual science. Monadism seems to bear little relation to reality as science now understands it, and certainly very few would put it forward as a reasonable theory now, but at least it seems like it is a legitimately falsifiable hypothesis and in that respect is more scientific.
An interesting question is that of why brilliant people like Newton and Leibniz would cling so tightly to ideas that they must have known on some level weren't consistent with reality. Theists like to trot out that fact as an argument against atheism, which of course is a logical fallacy. Just because you're recognized a genius in certain areas doesn't mean all your opinions are correct. (The all-or-nothing approach to authority of any kind is fairly typical of theistic thinking, though.) But it's still an interesting and even important question to consider.
I think it comes down to the environment in which they lived. Religious thinking suffused everything at the time; it was impossible to escape from. If you lived in Western Europe, Christian thinking suffused everything, and there would be very little exposure to anything else. The truth of the Bible was simply assumed by everyone, and publicly doubting that would result in ostracism at best, and a messy death at worst. Certainly the response of the authorities to Copernicus, Galileo, et al. would be a strong inducement not to push too far in questioning certain of the things that everyone seemed to know as well as they knew the sky was blue.
Another related point is that, given the state of knowledge at the time, I don't think God was an unreasonable hypothesis. I think most of the "natural philosophers" of the day got into the act because of religious zeal (albeit of an idiosyncratic type), not because of a lack of it. Certainly that seems to have been the case for Newton and Leibniz. They wanted to find real, solid evidence for God, and to do it they invented powerful methods that taught us more about reality in a shorter time period than pretty much anyone else in the history of the world. Unfortunately, the clear-cut evidence for God remained elusive. That sort of enthusiasm for science kept up for a while but gradually faded. Science keeps looking in new places, and God keeps not being there. Today no one goes into science expecting to find incontrovertible objective evidence for God, and in faithful circles a desire for such things is frowned upon, at best. But in the seventeenth century? It wasn't that simple.
