They don't need to have owed their scientific endeavors to being religious, nor does anyone have to argue that their innovations would have had to have been impossible without religion. That's too strong. One can still argue that religious ideas influenced the direction of their thinking.
I don't think it is too strong at all. Merely requiring influence is weak and, I think, unprovable that the end result would not otherwise have been achieved.
I don't see the issue as whether or not the appearance and subsequent elaboration of science could have happened without any substantive positive input from anything that might be termed 'religious'. I don't know whether it could have happened without any religious inputs or not. That's all speculation, and as you say unprovable.
The point that I want to make is that it didn't happen that way in our world. The scientific revolution took place in a distinct intellectual and conceptual context that contributed to how it unfolded.
If the end result would have been achieved without religion, of what benefit the influence of religion?
I think that it's almost certain that special relativity would have been thought of by somebody had Albert Einstein not existed, The seed of special relativity was in the air after the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment and many thinkers were thinking along the same lines. But that observation doesn't constitute an argument that the work of Einstein wasn't of benefit to the development of special relativity in our world.
yazata said:
Doesn't the whole idea of scientific law ultimately derive from the idea of divine law? (An idea that in turn seems to derive from bronze-age kings who could just speak facts (their kingdom's laws) into existence with their word.)
Sarkus said:
No, scientific law does not ultimately derive from that idea. The divinity of any divine law, by its very nature, is unprovable, whereas scientific law is observable every single time it is invoked, and behaves exactly as the law describes (or at least it does until it doesn't, and then the "law" would be overturned etc, as per the scientific method).
yazata said:
Science's assumption that the universe is necessarily logical and hence intelligible by the human intellect may derive historically from the religious idea that it originated from an intelligent source. (Einstein spoke of "reading the mind of God", and I'm sure that 17th century figures like Newton took that idea far more literally than Einstein did.)
Sarkus said:
No, the assumption that is necessarily logical is inherent within the repetitive nature of the observations of the scientific laws in practice. Further, science does not assume that the universe is necessarily intelligible by the human intellect. We're struggling with QM, for example. But we give it a good try, but we do not assume that we can always have an answer. Can we ever know what caused our universe, for example?
My example here is from Leibniz, and more specifically from an as-yet unpublished paper about Leibniz's views on laws and powers by Donald Rutherford to appear in
God, Man and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
It can be found in pdf format here:
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/papers/LawsandPowers.pdf
Rutherford writes (p.3):
Leibniz takes for granted that nature is orderly, or lawful, and that it owes its order to God. In the Discourse on Metaphysics, he asserts that "in whatever manner God might have created the world, it would always have been regular and in accordance with a certain general order" because "God does nothing which is not orderly" (DM 6; A VI.4, 1537-8/AG 39. There is, most fundamentally, a law that governs creation as a whole, and this "most general of God's laws, the one that governs the whole course of the universe, is without exception" (DM 7; A VI.4, 1539/AG40).
Leibniz argues that the laws of nature aren't absolutely necessary in the sense that their not being true would imply a logical contradiction. And he argues that they aren't totally arbitrary. Leibniz writes in the
Theodicy (T 349; GP VI 321/H334):
"These considerations make it plain that the laws of Nature regulating movements are neither entirely necessary nor entirely arbitrary. The middle course to be taken is that they are a choice of the most perfect wisdom."
Some historians of science argue that this line of 17th century thinking (which wasn't restricted to Leibniz) was very important to the history of science since it moved thinkers away from the ideal of science as a Euclidean-style deductive system deducing theorems from necessary first-principles, towards greater empiricism. If the mathematical forms of the laws of nature aren't logically determined but rather are the result of God's free choice, then scientific investigators will have to observe nature to discover what they are.
Rutherford writes (p.5):
Leibniz's deepest reason for thinking of the laws of nature in this way is his conception of God as a perfectly "intelligent and free being", who acts for the sake of the best. For Leibniz, the laws of nature "do not arise entirely from the principle of necessity, but rather from the principle of perfection and order, because "they are an effect of the choice and the wisdom of God" (Theodicy 345; GP VI 319/H332).
The presumptive fitness of the laws of nature, expressed in rules such as the equality of cause and effect and the "most determined path principle" in optics, supplies a heuristic for scientific discovery. We are directed to search for rules with these sort of formal characteristics, because they are most likely to represent fundamental laws of nature. More important than this, however, laws that can be explicated in terms of the "principle of perfection and order" support a conception of the world as one that has been created by God as the best of all possible worlds.
yazata said:
Science's assumption that the universe is necessarily logical and hence intelligible by the human intellect may derive historically from the religious idea that it originated from an intelligent source. (Einstein spoke of "reading the mind of God", and I'm sure that 17th century figures like Newton took that idea far more literally than Einstein did.)
Sarkus said:
No, the assumption that is necessarily logical is inherent within the repetitive nature of the observations of the scientific laws in practice. Further, science does not assume that the universe is necessarily intelligible by the human intellect. We're struggling with QM, for example. But we give it a good try, but we do not assume that we can always have an answer. Can we ever know what caused our universe, for example?
The fact remains that there's the assumption that if our reasoning about nature results in a logical contradiction, then it can't possibly be true, because reality doesn't admit of contradictions. We assume that physical law holds true universally and necessarily in the physical realm. We believe that mathematics somehow captures the essence of physics. The problem of induction suggests that these convictions aren't derived deductively from observation. These kind of ideas built into modern science are presuppositions and they have a history.
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