This is quoted from a John Derbyshire dismissal of a creationist documentary film. That much is good. This much is great:
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.
And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.
If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It’s a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.
Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, dabbled myself) brings to us a feeling for what the scientific endeavor is like, and how painfully its triumphs are won, with what sweat and tears. Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.
Teri Lussier says:
This is terrific.
Nice reminder of the beauty and capacity of the human mind for creation, how that progress happens, and why it endures.
May 7, 2008 — 12:39 pm
Richard Riccelli says:
This well crafted riff is worth quoting from the article as well:
Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science” engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!
Thanks for pointing to the piece. Derbyshire is almost always a good read.
May 7, 2008 — 5:57 pm
Don Reedy says:
Greg and Richard,
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”
I “believe” in God, and cherish science. This movie is a travesty, no matter what thoughts of creationism or evolution permeate your mental landscape. But the issue, the issue of whether the THEORY of evolution will find itself fulfilled in sufficient fact to “evolve” into scientific LAW….well that remains a topic scientific thinkers can and should debate, explore, and reason to resolve. Stein missed (or sidestepped) this opportunity.
I, too, enjoyed Derbyshire, and as I always seem to do, the idea that Greg fetched this article and thought out of thin air, contemplated it, and then acted to share, likewise satiates.
May 7, 2008 — 6:17 pm
Jay says:
Perhaps the reason that the glorious scientific revolution occurred in Western Civilization was due to the Judeo-Christian Worldview upon which western society was founded. The fact that I can think abstractly tells me I’m much more than physical matter and therefore something profound is missing from evolution.
A little science takes man away from God. A lot of science brings him humbly back to God. It seems like incredible capacity for man to create is the biggest difference between man and “animals”–as if man was designed in a Creator’s image. For me “let their be light” goes very well with a Big Bang Theory….
May 9, 2008 — 6:49 pm