It’s very fashionable these days to witter about the “Islamic Golden Age” and ‘indigenous’ science. No doubt the type of people who bandy such nostrums about fondly imagine that they’re being terribly cosmopolitan and graciously ‘anti-racist’, or some such nonsense. What they’re really being is ignorant and fashionably stupid.
Their arguments about ‘Western’ science are stupid and uninformed, for two reasons. Firstly, science is universalist: that is, race, sex or tribe are irrelevant to scientific truth. It’s either science, or it ain’t. Secondly, in a very real sense, all science is ‘Western’ science, because science itself is a Western invention. If it isn’t Western science, it’s not science.
Such heresy against the MultiCult will, of course, be met with indignant screeching of, ‘But the Islamic Golden Age! What about Aboriginal astronomy!’
Well, what about them? Aboriginal ‘astronomy’ is a myth. What they’re talking about is Aboriginal astrology: the same mish-mash of random, half-understood observations and mythological claptrap as the Babylonian astrology that still appears in the ‘Your Stars’ columns of the daily papers.
The “Islamic Golden Age” is also mostly a myth. Most of the stuff attributed to “Islam” was either imperially stolen from colonised peoples (such as Indian mathematics), or the same random collection of isolated technological developments and disconnected bits and pieces of observation scattered over centuries as in China, or even pre-scientific Europe.
The fact remains that science – real science, following the scientific method – was developed in Western Europe, and nowhere else. And it was very much a lucky collision of a serendipitous melange of cultural and intellectual influences that was fortunate to have ever occurred at all. As physicist and philosopher Paul Davies has said, if a large meteorite had struck Western Europe in the 13th century, it is very likely that science would never have been developed at all.
Because it was then and there that one of the most profoundly important thinkers in the history of science lived, whom you’ve quite likely never heard of: Roger Bacon.
Like most educated men of his time and place, Bacon was a clergyman – a Franciscan friar – and a philosopher. Like even later giants of science, such as Isaac Newton, Bacon was apt to pursue what we now regard as nutty superstitions, like alchemy (Newton was a firm believer).
But he also did something astonishing: he laid the groundwork for the philosophy of experimental analysis that we now call the scientific method.
Bacon earned his degree from Oxford, where he became an expert on the works of Aristotle.
He began carrying out chemistry experiments based on Aristotle’s writings, but the tests weren’t turning out as expected. He found that Aristotle, the time-honored great thinker, was actually wrong about many things. Bacon had to discard years of work because of this discovery.
The incorrect parts of Aristotle’s writings made Bacon hesitant to trust anything. Annoyed, he struggled to find a way to make knowledge trustworthy – a way to logically prove the truth.
At that time, one did not question the classical thinkers any more than the Bible. All knowledge was derived from authority (a trap too many supposed scientists today are falling back into). Scholarship was also committed to theory over practical experience (another trap we’ve fallen back into). While Aristotle’s arguments were impeccably valid (that is, their premises led to their conclusions), they were often unsound (that is, one or more premises were simply untrue, meaning that the conclusion was, too).
Bacon concluded that there were four stumbling blocks to the truth: reliance on faulty authority, popular opinions, personal bias or vanity and reliance on rational arguments.
In a then (and, too often, now) radical departure, Bacon decided to trust his lyin’ eyes.
While Bacon believed that what he saw in his laboratory was correct, he also knew that he needed to find a way to be absolutely sure. Other people needed to conduct the exact same experiments. This would eliminate any personal bias on his part.
What was duplicated in the lab could then be considered truth. Hence, the birth of the scientific method.
It cannot be overstated what a gigantic intellectual step this was. Although Bacon’s prodigious corpus of work was well-received by Pope Clement, the changing political climate meant that he fell out of favour again. It took another three centuries before his work was revived – and the Scientific Revolution was back in earnest.
By the 19th century, William Whewell stated in his History of the Inductive Sciences: “Roger Bacon’s works are not only so far beyond his age in the knowledge which they contain, but so different from the temper of the times… that it is difficult to conceive how such a character could then exist”.
All That’s Interesting
And if he never had… neither, almost certainly, would science.
We forget the lessons that Roger Bacon’s genius taught posterity at our peril. Perilously, too many people who should know better already have.
