The internationally-renowned Shakespeare scholar, Father Peter Milward, has sent me a thoughtful and thought-provoking response to the latest issue of StAR, addressing its theme of “Science versus Scientism”. I’m posting his comments in extenso:

On Science versus Scientism

SJ House, Tokyo

To Joseph Pearce

January 15 2011

Editor, StAR

I have just finished perusing the issue of StAR on “Science versus Scientism”, and I have found it both convincing and readable. I cannot but agree with the principle enunciated in the Editorial, “Science is, and has always been, a noble art. It is good, whereas scientism is evil.” Only, while I agree, I feel it necessary to qualify my agreement. Science isn’t always good, nor is scientism always evil. Or rather, it isn’t always easy to separate the “science” from the “scientism”. After all, scientists are human beings, and as human beings they can’t help going beyond the professed limits of their science. Thus Philip Campbell, in his essay on “Great Scientist-Clerics of the Past”, speaks of “modern scientists from every field of study”, who “decry the Church as an institution that for centuries kept true scientific knowledge hampered in a prison of Christian dogmatism”. Then they are, of course, speaking not as true scientists but as human beings ignorant of their own profession in its wider historical context.

In speaking of “Science versus Scientism”, it is precisely that historical context we have to take into account – from the time when what is commonly called “science” today was called “the new philosophy” or “the new science” in the early seventeenth century. As John Donne complained, with reference both to Galileo’s astronomy and to Bacon’s proposal for “the advancement of learning”, “New philosophy calls all in doubt,/ The element of fire is quite put out,” or as Hamlet complains in his doggerel verse to Ophelia, “Doubt thou the stars are fire,/ Doubt that the sun doth move.” It is an age of doubt, from the doubting essays of Montaigne to the methodical doubt of Descartes, and out of it all men came to believe that the only certainty was to be found in Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics. And then it was Alexander Pope who drew the lamenting conclusion in his Dunciad, “Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before,/ Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more./ Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,/ And Metaphysic calls for aid on sense!” Here it isn’t just the philosophers who are to blame for a kind of primitive scientism, but the scientists themselves are to blame, together with the impact their successes have had on the minds of people at large, not least of journalists and politicians. Such is the “enlightenment” for which the way has been prepared not just by theorists like Descartes and Spinoza, Hume and Voltaire, but by the Whig politicians in England and the expansion of the British Empire, by the Puritans and the Puritan rebellion under Oliver Cromwell, to say nothing (as nothing is said in this whole issue) of the wholly disastrous rule of the Tudors in the sixteenth century.

Looking back again to Bacon, I have always been impressed by his ingenuous words of admission in The Advancement of Learning, “It is an assured truth, and a conclusion of experience, that a little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a further proceeding therein does bring the mind back again to religion.” This may have been true of Bacon’s age, which was still – for all the process of secularization introduced by Henry VIII – a deeply religious age. But from the Restoration period onwards, with the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, the modern age is characterized above all by secularism, in which the above-mentioned scientists – even professing Christians, and even (I say it to my shame) Jesuits among them – tend towards at least a practical atheism. And it is within this milieu, which is anything but a “divine milieu”, that the aggressive atheism of men like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hutchens has made an extraordinary impact. Not a few scientists have expressed feelings of awkwardness in face of their statements, but few of them come out against them, since they echo what the scientists have come to believe in their heart of hearts. This isn’t just the “scientism” of some ideology. It is the practical, seemingly favorable impact of the discoveries of experimental science on modern life, which are there for all to see, while religion, particularly Christian religion, is relegated to the sacristy and the church, as though irrelevant to modern life – according to the principle enunciated by William Cowper in the midst of the eighteenth century, “God made the country, but man made the town.”

Other words that have impressed me in this historical context of “science and scientism” are those of Darwin himself in his Origin of Species, where he also admits, “In my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes.” So when his theory of evolution came to the attention of Newman, the latter gave it as his opinion that this might well be harmonized with the account of creation in Genesis, since what we expect of the Bible isn’t scientific fact but religious truth. Here we see a man of science like Darwin confronting a man of religion like Newman and encountering no opposition but rather approval. This is so different from the legendary confrontation between Darwin’s professed spokesman Thomas Huxley and Newman’s (might have been) Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce, in which already science has verged upon scientism and religion upon what may be termed “religiosity”. Yet it is the latter confrontation which has become not just familiarized by the media but rather exhibited in daily practice by the fact that people today have come to rely largely on the results of modern science than on what is regarded as “medieval” religion.

This is where I wish to go back not just from Dawkins to Darwin, nor just from Newton to Bacon and Galileo, to what would have been acceptable to both Shakespeare and Donne and Pope as “metaphysical” and even “medieval”. What has been forgotten in the long-drawn-out process of “enlightenment” and “progress” and “evolution”, is the ideal of Christendom, which has been all but abandoned even within living memory, even in the European Community, which was formed in the aftermath of World War II under clearly Christian auspices, but which has now turned its back on its Christian origins in the face of a new Islamic part aggression part immigration. Looking back to the sixteenth century and the origins of the “reformation” in England under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, we come upon three outstanding witnesses to that ideal. First we see and hear St. Thomas More, both in his speech after having been sentenced to death for treason in Westminster Hall and in his beheading as a traitor outside the Tower of London in 1535. Next we see and hear St. Edmund Campion, both in his speech after having been sentenced to death for treason in the same Westminster Hall and in his hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn in 1581. Thirdly, we may see with our eyes and hear with our ears (and hopefully understand in our hearts) the plays of William Shakespeare on the London stage during a period of twenty years from roughly 1590 to 1610.

“What!” I may be challenged, “with what effrontery can you claim Shakespeare as witnessing in his plays to what two canonized saints witnessed in London before him?” Well, I answer, may not a cat look at a king? And may not a great dramatist like Shakespeare have derived the basic inspiration for his plays from those two saintly witnesses before him? What is more, I can prove that derivation, even in all his authentic plays, and especially in a triplet of plays on the Catholic theme of “disinheritance”, namely, the history of Richard II, the comedy of As You Like It, and the tragedy of King Lear. But for my present purpose let me concentrate on the history of Richard II and the seemingly patriotic speech by John of Gaunt on “this England”, which generations of English schoolboys and schoolgirls have to learn by heart to inculcate due feelings of patriotism. What the dramatist and his speaker inculcate in this speech, however, isn’t patriotism, or at least such patriotism as was for Dr. Johnson “the last refuge of the scoundrel”, but love of one’s homeland, which is very different. In this speech the speaker isn’t looking forward to the unknown glories of the future British Empire, still less looking on the present rule of England by Richard II (or by Elizabeth, who famously recognized herself in Richard), but looking back to the days when great kings like Richard I and Edward I participated in the crusades “as far from home,/ For Christian service and true chivalry,/ As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry/ Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.” In other words, he is looking to the ideal of Christendom – not just in this one speech, but also in the contrast subsequently drawn by the deposed Richard and the followers of the deposing Bolingbroke. Whereas the latter “intend to thrive in this new world”, like the supporters of the new Tudor establishment, the former advises his weeping queen, “Hie thee to France,/ And cloister thee in some religious house,” where “our holy lives must win a new world’s crown.” It is interesting to note how closely Richard’s situation at this moment comes to that of St. Thomas More on his way from Westminster Hall to the Tower, when he is greeted by his dear daughter Margaret. Paradoxically, it is on such occasions of seeming defeat, like that of Christ on the cross, that the true ideal of Christendom stands out most vividly. Such is also the meaning of “the uses of adversity” praised by the exiled Duke in the Forest of Arden, as well as the practical adversity encountered by the “poor, infirm, weak and despised old” Lear on the lonely heath amid the terrible storm, which is but the prelude to his meeting with his dear daughter Cordelia. Such, in brief, is the wisdom propounded by Shakespeare, in his witness to the ideal of Christendom, as contrasted with the knowledge offered by Bacon to the modern world.