HONORS 224G

PORTRAIT GALLERY

Containing portraits of some key figures in the history
of the relations between religion and science


Rene Descartes
(1596-1610)

Descartes was born near Tours.  His education at a Jesuit college was firmly grounded in Scholasticism. In 1629 he moved to Holland where he lived for 20 years and produced most of his scientific and philosophical writings. In 1649, he moved to Stockholm at the request of Queen Christina, who employed him as a philosophy tutor.

Descartes' philosophy developed in the context of Renaissance and early modern thought. Like the humanists, he rejected religious authority in the quest for scientific and philosophical knowledge. For Descartes, reason was
the foundation and guide for pursuing truth. Although he was a devout Catholic, he was influenced by the Reformation's challenge to Church authority and the entrenched Aristotelianism of Roman Catholic theology. He was an active
participant in the Scientific Revolution and reacted strongly against the Renaissance resurgence of ancient Greek skepticism.
 

 
 
 
Johannes Kepler
(1571-1630)

Johannes Kepler was born in Weil in Swabia, in southwest Germany.  In was educated at the Protestant university of Tübingen, where his teacher in the mathematical subjects was Michael Maestlin, one of the earliest astronomers to subscribe to Copernicus's heliocentric theory. Kepler stated later that at this time he became a Copernican for "physical or, if you prefer, metaphysical reasons." In 1597 he published his first important work, The Cosmographic Mystery, in which he argued that the distances of the planets from the Sun in the Copernican system were determined by the five regular solids. Because of his talent as a mathematician, he was invited by Tycho Brahe to Prague to become his assistant and calculate new orbits for the planets from Tycho's observations.

Kepler served as Tycho Brahe's assistant until the latter's death in 1601 and was then appointed Tycho's successor as Imperial Mathematician, the most prestigious appointment in mathematics in Europe. In 1609 he published his Astronomia Nova ("New Astronomy"), which contained his first two laws of planetary motion. In 1610 Kepler read about Galileo's discoveries with the telescope. He quickly composed a long letter of support which he published as "Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger" and later that year published his observations of Jupiter's satellites. The tracts were an important support to Galileo, whose discoveries were doubted or denied by many. 

 
 

Isaac Newton
(1642-1727)

Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Although Cambridge's curriculum focused primarily on classical Aristotelian philosophy, on his own initiative Newton became acquainted with the Descartes' mechanistic philosophy. In 1687 he published his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Mechanical Philosophy). 

 Newton was intensely interested in the Bible and tried to link the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation to historical events. Although he was not an orthodox Christian (he subscribed, in private, to a form of the Arian heresy, which denied the Trinity and held that Jesus Christ, while the Son of God, was not equal with the Father), his beliefs did not prevent him from making endless speculations on scripture: he wrote commentaries on Revelation, linking the antichrist to the Roman Catholic Pope, and encouraged a friend to write a book that made an attempt at proving, mathematically, the date of the Second Coming. 

 
 
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
(1646-1716)

Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Germany. His father was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig. He studied philosophy at the University of Leipzig and then went to Jena, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. In 1671 he published Hypothesis Physica Nova (New Physical Hypothesis). In this work he claimed that movement depends on the action of a spirit. He communicated with Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society of London, and dedicated some of his scientific works to the Royal Society and the Paris Academy. In 1672 Leibniz went to Paris and studied mathematics and physics under Christiaan Huygens. It was during this period that he developed the basic features of his version of the calculus. This precipitated a famous dispute with Newton over which of the two could claim priority of discovery of the calculus.  In 1715, Leibniz became embroiled in another famous dispute with Newton.  In an exchange of letters with Newton's advocate, Samuel Clarke, he refuted Newton's version of natural theology, which he argued diminished God's sovereign power over the universe.

Leibniz's Philosophy

 
 
Robert Boyle
(1627-1691)

 Boyle was born into an aristocratic Irish family and received a conventional gentleman's education. He became interested in medicine and the new science of Galileo and studied chemistry.  He was a founder and an influential fellow of the Royal Society of London, was continuously active in scientific affairs, and wrote prolifically on science, philosophy, and theology.

Boyle was hostile to views of nature that he saw as detracting from a proper appreciation of God's sovereing power over his creation. His principal target was Aristotelianism, and he believed that experimental data provided the best means of undermining it.  Scholastic views that reified nature formed his principal target in his Free Enquiry intio the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (1686). Boyle was equally hostile to the materialism associated with Hobbes, which contemporaries frequently saw as indistinguishable from atheism. 

Biography

 
Mary Baker Eddy
(1821-1910)

The founder of Christian Science was born Mary Morse Baker in Bow, New Hampshire. The child of a stern, pro-slavery farmer, she was subject to "fits" -- brief epileptic-type seizures that she exploited to avoid farm chores, housework and education. Having heard of the success in mental healing of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, she went in 1862 to Portland, Maine to receive his  treatment. She became his pupil but broke away from him because of Quimby's concept of mind as spiritual matter and his hostility to religion. The year 1866 marks the actual beginning of Christian Science. In the ensuing years, she refined the doctrine and plans for her new church. In 1875, she published the textbook of Christian Science,  Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Thomas Henry Huxley
(1825-1895)

Born the son of a schoolmaster, Huxley had little formal education but read voraciously in science, history, and philosophy. He fought his way to the top of the scientific profession, at that time dominated by men of independent means, "gentlemen scientists".  A passionate defender of Darwin's theory, he earned the sobriquet "Darwin's Bulldog". In a celebrated exchange at the British Association in 1860, Huxley clashed with the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and famously declared that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop. 

 
 
Alfred Russel Wallace
(1823-1913)

Wallace was born in Wales, the son of middle-class English parents. 
About 1835 his family fell on hard times and Wallace was forced to move to London to work in the trades.  The experience was critical to his intellectual development, as there he first came into contact with supporters of the utopian socialist Robert Owen. Over the next several years he learned drafting and map-making, geometry and trigonometry, building design and construction, mechanics, and agricultural chemistry. In 1844 he became acquainted the amateur naturalist Henry Walter Bates and decided to make his living as a natural history collector.

Wallace's collecting activities took him to the Amazon and Malay Archipelago.  On his return to England, he published three books and, in 1858, an essay entitled  'On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species'.  This important essay established him as the co-discover (with Darwin) of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

In the mid-1860s Wallace converted to spiritualism and developed a new evolutionary synthesis, one in which a material process (natural selection) was understood to rule at the biological level, while a spiritual one (as described through spiritualism) operated at the level of consciousness. He remained a spiritualist for the rest of his life and published some one hundred writings on the subject. 

 
 
Albert Einstein
(1879-1955)

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, and spent his youth in Munich, where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He graduated from the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich but his professors disliked him and wouldn't recommend him for a position in the University.  in 1902 he secured a position as an examiner in a Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1905 he received his doctorate from the University of Zürich and published three theoretical papers important to the development of 20th-century physics. The first was on Brownian motion. The second, on the photoelectric effect, presented a hypothesis on the nature of light, postulating that under certain circumstances light can be considered as consisting of particles.  The third paper, " On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, " contained what became known as the special theory of relativity. 

Einstein did not believe in a personal God, but in a God who orders the cosmos. He wrote, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

Web site on Einstein's religious views

 
 
John Scopes
(1900-1970)

Scopes was born in Paducah, Kentucky, and graduated from the University of Kentucky. He becane a high school teacher and basketball coach in Dayton, Tennessee.  He taught evolution to his biology class, violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The trial that followed is the best-known trial in American history. Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer of his day defended Scopes. William Jennings Bryan, three time presidential hopeful, led the prosecution team. The trial began on July 10, 1925 and was soon dubbed the "Monkey Trial." Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but the Tenessee Supreme Court reversed the decision an a technicality. Scopes left teaching and entered the oil business as a geologist. The play, Inherit the Wind, was based on the Scopes trial.