Strange Gods by Susan Jacoby

Author:Susan Jacoby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

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*1 A group of twelve men, including Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, met and resolved to form an organization “for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning.” In the Royal Charter granted by King Charles II in 1663, the group is called “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.”

*2 His most famous equation, Boyle’s Law, states that for a given mass of gas, at a constant temperature, the pressure exerted on the gas times the volume is a constant (pV = C).

*3 It is understandable that Boyle’s research on gases would have led him to envisage the possibility of vacuum-packed foods, which depend on removing oxygen before packaging to impede the growth of bacteria. In Boyle’s time, the industrial tools and procedures needed to actually produce vacuum-packed products did not exist. The history of vacuum packaging is tangled, with inventors of various generations on at least two continents claiming to have invented the machines and processes enabling extended, sanitary food preservation. The nineteenth-century American inventor Amanda Jones, who was awarded two patents for canning procedures, is often credited with founding the vacuum-canning industry in the United States—though her own all-female company, established in the early 1890s, was a commercial failure. Jones attributed the failure of the venture to her unwillingness to give up ownership and executive authority to men, which meant that men were unwilling to invest in the company.

*4 This was so even though Leonardo’s observations were intended to prove the truth of a complete misconception—that the human organism is a microcosm of the macrocosm of earth. For a full and lively account of this episode in scientific history, see Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “The Upwardly Mobile Fossils,” in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (New York: Harmony Books, 1998).

*5 The strange use (to modern readers) of “schoolmen” in this context referred to both medieval and contemporary Aristotelians, who believed the universe had always existed—a position that Boyle, who believed there was no universe before God created it, could never accept. That the divine Creator had always existed was (and is), of course, a tenet of orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

*6 The orator Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–99), known as the Great Agnostic, summarized Paley’s argument in this fashion: “A man finds a watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must have had a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more wonderful than the watch that he says he must have had a maker. Then he finds God, the maker of the man, and he is so much more wonderful than the man that he could not have had a maker….According to Paley, there can be no design without a designer—but there can be a designer without design. The wonder of the watch suggested that the watchmaker suggested the creator, and the wonder of the creator demonstrated that he was not created—was uncaused and eternal.”

*7 At the Council of Basel in 1434, the church had attempted

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