118 cosmos
tween science and religion, is vastly more complex and nuanced than usually
believed. The problem for Galileo’s opponents was not supplanting Aristotle
and Ptolemy’s views of the physical universe with the Copernican heliocentric
system, but rather Galileo’s view that natural reason applied through mathe-
matics to observation of phenomena could provide a truth independent of that
of theology. Galileo was implicitly proposing the creation of a natural philos-
ophy independent of theological philosophy.
The implications of the views of Galileo and his contemporaries became
manifest in the eighteenth century, especially the shift from looking at natural
phenomena as an overlay on the universe to seeing the phenomena as being
the universe itself. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries occurred
a slow passing of the cloak of certainty from religion to science. As sides
formed, neither side understood that their language was metaphorical; both
claimed to have the true, overt access to “objective reality.” Both sides used
power to impress: theologians used the authority of the Bible enforced by the
churches; scientists used practical technology funded by corporations and gov-
ernments.^14 Both sides set aside deep knowledge and asserted the overt, the
literal, the reduced, the defined.
Science is at present seen as an effort to understand the universe through
theory, mathematics, and especially rigorous experimentation. The first citation
of the English word “science” occurs in 1340, at which time it meant learning
or knowledge in general, as did its Latin rootscientia, fromscire, “to know.”
Not before 1725 did “science” mean an orderly, systematic system based on
observation and mathematics. The history of the language is not just a curi-
osity; it is a strong clue to concepts—the way we look at things. The human
mind is constructed in such a fashion that once we have a concept, a word for
it very quickly follows. The lack of a word may mean that there is as yet no
concept to express. The concept of science as distinct from other knowledge
could not have much predated the appearance of theword“science” in that
sense. But were Galileo and Newton not scientists? In an important way they
were not. The word “scientist” does not occur before 1834. Although there were
people doing things that look like what is usually called science today, they did
not think of themselves as being in the category of “scientist.” They thought
of their subject as “natural philosophy” instead.
The distinction is important, because they thought of “natural philosophy”
as an integral part of philosophy, a system for understanding the whole, in
other words, a cosmos. The title of Newton’s key work isThe Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy(1686–1687). When the term “physics” first
appears in 1589, it meant all knowledge of nature; not before 1715 did it mean
knowledge specifically of matter and energy. No one called himself a “physicist”
before 1840. In some senses there were physicists before then but in other,
equally important, senses there were not. There is no divine, Platonic, or im-