Western Atheism: A Short History by James Thrower

Author:James Thrower [Thrower, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2009-07-20T13:32:00+00:00

The Rise of Science and the Mechanico-Materialistic Philosophy

It will be noticed that one often supposed cause of unbelief during this period-the rise of empirical science-has not so far been mentioned. The fact is that while, as was soon to become all too evident, the newly discovered scientific way of understanding the world contained within it the possibility of atheism and unbelief, this conclusion was not explicitly drawn until the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Gabriel Harvey, writing to Edmund Spencer towards the end of the sixteenth century, evinced his annoyance at the tendency of the new science to assign more and more events to natural causes, and many other writers showed themselves more or less aware that science was appropriating to itself an understanding of the workings of the world which had hitherto been within the province of Faith. But Buckley claims that acquaintance with the literature of the sixteenth century yields little if any evidence that agnostics and atheists used arguments drawn from science in support of their case.

He writes, `One of the most surprising things to a student beginning a study of sixteenth century England is the fact that general writers and the population at large seem to have been unconscious of or not much interested in the revolutionary and era marking discoveries of such pioneers as Magellan and Copernicus. It is not hard to go through the period and pick out quotations from this or that person showing that they knew pretty well what was going on, and certainly the prompt action of the Holy See against Galileo and Bruno shows beyond doubt that those whose interests were most closely concerned were keeping well abreast of the scientific thought of the day. Yet it is none the less true that the new ideas did not rapidly become current and that they did not become subjects for popular controversy until a much later day. There has been much speculation on this point, usually by men who have not burdened their minds with much reading from original sources and it does seem as if the new science should have been an important factor in religious unbelief at least by 1575. But I do not find it to have been so from my readings in the general literature of the period and consequently.... I do not regard the scientific discoveries as a major source for religious incredulity in England prior to 16oo.' 20 The early scientists themselves certainly drew no such anti-religious conclusions from their work. Francis Bacon, however, in his essay `On Atheism', written in 1597, lists three types of atheist; the light scoffing type, the atheistical statesman and lastly, the scientific atheist. Unfortunately he says very little about this last class, but that it was in existence by the end of the sixteenth century and continued to increase in the subsequent one until it became a force to be reckoned with in the eighteenth is something of which we should now take note.

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