Just Finished Reading: The Scientific Revolution – A Very Short Introduction by Lawrence M Principe

Although not exactly a new subject – having read several books about the Scientific Revolution of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries – I was kind of looking forward to reacquainting myself with a period of history that changed the direction of global human culture and gave us much of what we increasingly take for granted today – a world suffused with science and technology.

But from quite early one in the narrative I began to wonder about an underlying agenda. Subtly at first and then with increasing clarity I started questioning what I can only describe as the authors tone. Although he was treading the well worn path of enquiring minds, early scientific observations, slow dissemination of the new discoveries leading to the early scientific community questioning much of the accepted understanding of the world which led to an increasing level of breakthroughs, revelations and many surprises the author seemed, on more than one occasion, either ignore the increasingly bitter disputes between the new scientists and the all powerful Catholic Church. The iconic, if now rather clichéd, dispute between Galileo and the Church about the Heliocentric or Geocentric nature of the Solar System was reduced, according to the author, to a personal disagreement between the scientist and his good friend the Pope – who actually agreed with him that the Earth did (obviously) go around the Sun and not the other way around. Indeed how could the Church possibly have thought anything else? The classic practically founding case, it seemed to the author, of the ‘war’ between religion and science turned out to be a complete myth put about by atheists to undermine the truth of the matter – that religion and science are actually two sides to the same coin: humanities desire to understand the universe. Conflict? What conflict?

He says it all in his conclusion: “The vision of a tightly interconnected cosmos has been fractured by the abandonment of questions of meaning and purpose, by narrowed perspectives and aims, and by a literalism ill-equipped to comprehend the analogy and metaphor fundamental to early modern thought.” If the author had said this rubbish at the beginning of his text rather than at the end I would have saved myself a days reading. This is the first VSI book I have found to be distasteful – it purports to be a book about the history of the European scientific revolution while in fact it is actually a barely disguised revision of history that downplays the real disagreements between early scientists and the dogmatism of the Catholic Church. Luckily for all of us the church never managed to control, suppress or greatly influence the spread of real knowledge (rather than the faux knowledge they held on to for far too long) helped along by the development of the printing press. I was very disappointed that Oxford University Press could publish such a disingenuous book which attempts to pass itself off as a history of what ‘really’ happened rather than the rewrites of anti-church historians in later years. Interesting only as a work of poorly concealed propaganda.