Review of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”
Part 2, History Of Science
by Daniel H Chew
Book: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London, UK: Penguin Random House, 2011)
Outline:
Specific critiques: History of primeval human development: preliminary concerns
Specific critiques: The problem of induction; Christianity and the Nature of Religion
Part Two: Specific Critiques: The History of Science
According to Harari, science and the [Modern] Scientific Revolution came about due to the discovery of ignorance. Specifically, Harari asserts that modern science came about because of (1) “the willingness to admit ignorance,” (2) “the centrality of observation and mathematics,” and (3) “the acquisition of new power” where scientific theories are used “to develop new technologies” which are then used for even more scientific discovery (p. 279). This idea that science came about due to the acknowledgment of ignorance seems like a forgone conclusion to modern and especially 21st century humans. Unfortunately, this narrative of Harari is a modern fairy tale—a modern myth that is absolutely false.
It is of course true that there was a Scientific Revolution in the 16-17th century AD. It is likewise true that there is something substantially different in science after the Scientific Revolution, than knowledge and learning prior to it. It is also not denied that modern science and technology has greatly advanced human society and has greatly improved our quality of life. But it is a non sequitur to assert that this implies that modern man is superior to premodern man. It just might be the case that we discovered modern science only because of the steps of progress that our ancestors have made, and that without them, modern science would not be discovered or practiced. In order to actually know how and why the Scientific Revolution happened, it is not sufficient to make an assertion based on how the scientific method is different from how we believe inquiry in premodern society was done.
Where Harari states how the Scientific Revolution came about due to a discovery of ignorance, it is a telling feature that there are no references at all to substantiate any of his assertions. In other words, while Harari does substantiate other parts of his books, especially where they deal with economics, present science, and technology, he does not substantiate the assertions he made on the history of science. Something should look amiss when he asserts, again without any references, that “we just don’t know” why the Scientific Revolution began (p. 272). Based on this, Harari’s knowledge of the Scientific Revolution seems to be no more scholarly than the average human being. Just because Harari is knowledgeable about the modern history of economics does not imply that he knows anything about the Scientific Revolution.
In discussing science, the first thing we must note is that the word “science” comes from the Latin word scientia, meaning “knowledge.” In other words, “science” did not originally mean what we today call science. Ancient civilizations practice some form of science (1), and thus it can be argued that science is coterminous with human civilization itself. Science was practiced in the Middle Ages, and in fact it was only in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages where the conditions for modern science to develop were present (2). Here is where Harari’s focus on ideas is a major flaw, because ideas do not think; people do. Why should any individual decide to do science? The founders of modern science all thought they did science because “nature had been created by God” (3), thus science was known then as “natural philosophy.” Whether one thinks that there is or is not a God is irrelevant to the history here, because the motives of people are important regardless of whether what they believe is true or false, as they act based upon their beliefs. If people who believed that “nature had been created by God” produced modern science, and those who did not believe that proposition did not produce modern science, then Enlightenment modernists like Harari can certainly reject that “nature had been created by God,” but they cannot therefore discount the fact that it is historically only those people who believed that “nature had been created by God” who have given rise to modern science.
As we look into the history of science, we see also that the reason for the Scientific Revolution was not an acknowledgment of ignorance, but rather the development of present and new ideas of their time. It is false that premodern humans thought they know it all. Harari is in error therefore in misrepresenting “premodern traditions of knowledge” as believing that the “wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom” (pp. 279, 280), and that there were only two types of ignorance in the premodern era: being “ignorant of something important,” or “an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things” (p. 280). Human society is always ignorant of something, and of course we are ignorant of what we are ignorant of, and that includes Harari. The issue here is that premodern societies do not discourage discovery as if they knew it all already. It is a strawman to assert that in Christianity, “understanding how spiders weave their webs were unimportant” because “whatever the great gods or the wise people of the past did not bother to tell us was unimportant” (p. 280). That the founders of modern science were all Christians, and many of them clergymen, did not seem to give Harari pause it seems.
The shift in thinking that marks the Scientific Revolution correlates with a shift from a focus on deductive reasoning to inductive reasoning (4), as seen in the father of modern science Francis Bacon. The shifts are however differences in focus, and it is not true that inductive reasoning acknowledges ignorance more than deductive reasoning does, as both are differences in method only. (5) What modern men other than Harari might be thinking is that science is inductive reasoning and deals with the data, whereas [premodern] deductive methods ignore the data and make conclusions based on some supernatural truth. As stated, this kind of reasoning however fails to understand that deduction and induction are not all-encompassing frameworks of thought, but methods that both ancient philosophers and modern scientists use. The difference between the premodern and the modern is not between deductive and inductive reasoning, but between views that use inductive reasoning less with a concurrent focus on deductive reasoning, and empiricism. The problem is that empiricism is a philosophical position and not science. Empiricism is a belief that the naked empirical facts yield truth, which is not the same as being empirical—a mere assertion that empirical facts are noted and used as evidence.
Harari’s history concerning the Scientific Revolution is in error. He has not shown any knowledge and research into the topic, and his facts are wrong. The Scientific Revolution was not an acknowledgment of ignorance, but rather a development of ideas, specifically the marriage of Christian natural philosophy with Greek philosophy. (6)
Modern science came about from within a Christian view of nature, and today’s scientists borrow from that worldview as they hold that nature has laws, and that finding out what these laws are and how to use them is a good thing, despite the fact that many modern scientists are not Christians. Harari is spinning a myth of the Scientific Revolution and not truly retelling history here.
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (2nd ed.; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011)
Hannam, 348
Steven Gimbel, “Syntactic view of theories: Deductivism,” in Steven Gimbel, ed. Exploring the Scientific Method: Cases and Questions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1-2; Gimbel, “Inductivism,” in Gimbel, ed., 43
Furthermore, it is not true that all scientists use only induction. In fact, most modern scientists as empiricists do both deduction and induction, both in the service of verification, with the hard sciences being the last holdout of logical positivism. [c.f. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 27]
See Hannan, The Genesis of Science.