Science Literature

A web-search on the "father of modern philosophy" reveals the name of the Frenchman Rene Descartes. He was totally opposed to the authority given to Aristotle by his peers. Knowledge is not something handed down by an individual or a group of enlightened thinkers: it has to be justified on its merits.

Descartes is remembered for the way he approached the problem: via doubt. He found reasons for doubting everything, but he realised that he could not doubt his own existence. Je pense, donc je suis has gone down in history as Descartes' way of laying a foundation stone. He went on to develop his ideas about the mind being distinct from the body (Cartesian dualism), the certainty of God's existence, the reality of the external world, and ultimately a unified view of everything. His relentless march of reason captured the imagination of many, and Descartes has been hailed as the champion of rationalism, pre-empting the Enlightenment vision by several generations.

Strange things happened to Descartes' body after his untimely death in Sweden. He was buried in 1650 in a churchyard near to Stockholm. 16 years later, his body was exhumed and conveyed in the darkness of night to the residence of de Terlon, the French ambassador. There, the bones were put in a copper coffin and preparations were made for the long journey to Paris. Before departure, some dismembering of the body took place. This was initiated by the ambassador, who

"had requested the authorities that he might himself be allowed, "religiously", to take possession of Descartes' right index finger, the bone "which had served as an instrument in the immortal writings of the deceased"."

Apparently, several other bones disappeared. "The Swedish family that became the proud owners of Descartes' skull - how, it is not clear - had it lovingly inscribed with Latin verses celebrating its significance as a souvenir of the beginnings of rationality. Successive owners added their own signatures and inscriptions testifying to their own 'faith' in the relic." According to the author of the book under review:

"By the time de Terlon's convoy set off for home, [. . .] fragments of the controversial thinker's earthly remains had already started to be dispersed, as admirers licitly and covertly acquired relics - souvenirs to be treasured and revered, and handed down through the generations."

Celebrating reason by acquiring relics of Descartes (Credit: S. Kambayashi)

Another bout of pilfering took place during the French Revolution.

"As reason replaced faith in the new French Republic, Lenoir rescued the bones of France's greatest rationalist from the church of St Genevieve in Paris [. . .]. Meanwhile, on the eve of the Terror, a French revolutionary committee decreed that the bones should be moved to the Pantheon - the new secular cathedral of the revolution - and a statue erected to Descartes' memory. [. . .]
Once again, the whereabouts of Descartes' bones become shrouded in mystery. It is not even clear that Lenoir's rescued remains were those of the father of rationalism. Nor is it clear what happened to them thereafter. They seem to have gone missing among the carefully documented treasures in Lenoir's museum."

What is to be made of the extraordinary hunger for a piece of Descartes' skeleton? Those who praised this champion of reason might be expected to repudiate superstition and the veneration of relics. There is a paradox here for us to consider. The reviewer and the author appear to have come to the same conclusion:

"For Shorto, his own fascination with this curious piece of narrative history is a mirror for the concerns of each and every one of us, bewildered by modernity and struggling to find meaning and belief in a confusing world. [. . .][His] suggestion is, I think, that we cannot escape from our felt need for faith and devotion, and that, deprived of religious relics we turn to secular forms of worship."

Modern-day atheists frequently present themselves as champions of reason (but never acknowledge that Christians see human rationality as a gift of God). They associate superstition with religion and present themselves as having left that behind. Although they have made enormous strides in creating secular cultures in the Western world, it is noteworthy that superstition, horoscopes and New Age practices are widespread. Rationalism as an agenda does not change mankind's innate "felt need" for something more meaningful. "Secular forms of worship" emerge with remarkable ease. Significantly, it is the Christian community that is far better at resisting superstition than the secularists!

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians. (Source here)

Rationalists also make a big mistake when they think of the Deism of Enlightenment scholars as peripheral to their philosophical agenda. Descartes himself is illustrative of this. His foundation is often quoted: "I think, therefore I am", but where does that get us? How do we build on that? It does not take us very far! It was not how Descartes developed his Grand philosophical scheme. Descartes' Deism was needed to give validity to reason and to realism.

"He writes that the certainty of his own existence is the "first principle" of his philosophy. But this just turns out to mean that it is the first certainty that he decided to accept, not that anything else is based upon it. Actually, Descartes infers nothing from his own existence. Instead, he asks how he comes to possess this one certainty, so that he can then find other certainties in the same way. The secret of that certainty is just that it involved "a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting." Crucially, Descartes then introduces God. He offers several arguments for the existence of God, and, having satisfied himself that there must be a God, he reasons that this God, being good, would not allow His creatures to be seriously deceived, provided that they exercise some restraint and confine their beliefs to what they "clearly and distinctly" perceive to be true. Thus Descartes' system of knowledge depends not on his own existence but on God's." (Source: Gottlieb, 2006)

This becomes crucially important when people present science as a secularised Enlightenment project. The problem is: our senses are being asked to do something that can be justified if we presuppose foundations that cannot be justified by our senses alone: intelligibility, realism, rationality. Descartes and the Enlightenment thinkers needed Deism to do this. Today, it is only the Theist or the Deist who can build a philosophically coherent framework for science. Steve Fuller's comment is very much to the point:

"To be sure, scientific progress is sometimes portrayed as the distinctly human extension of this general evolutionary proclivity. But this is to miss entirely the point of science, which is to do with a unified understanding of all reality, not just the specific bits that permit specific groups reproductive advantage. Science does not make sense unless reality possesses a depth that eludes our normal sensory encounters with the world but can nevertheless be accessed with sufficient application under the right conditions. Thus, science presupposes the intelligibility of reality; that its organisation, whatever its ultimate cause, is tractable to the human mind. Evolutionists have been much quicker to explain religion than science itself, yet it is the latter that should worry them, given the peculiar combination of mental dispositions needed to sustain scientific enquiry." (pages 44-45).

Relics of the modern mind
Lisa Jardine
Nature 455, 863-864 (16 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/455863a

BOOK REVIEWED - Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, by Russell Shorto, Doubleday: 2008. 320 pp.

See also:

Fuller, S. Dissent over Descent, Icon Books Ltd., Cambridge, 2008.

Gottlieb, A. Think again, New Yorker, 2006-11-20