The Synthesis of Science and Faith in Western History

S.Augustin, by Louis Comfort Tiffany
Lightner Museum

By studying the history of science, one fact becomes evident: while other civilizations reached remarkable technical, mathematical, or astronomical heights, within European Christendom germinated a systematic, accelerated, and extraordinary scientific development, incomparable to that of any other civilization, past or present. Why this spectacular difference? The answer is not a matter of chance, but of worldview. Science and faith are not adversaries, but pieces of a puzzle designed with astonishing precision.

The supposed war between science and faith is a false diatribe fueled by nineteenth-century prejudices. While science deals with the material and experimental world, philosophy and faith deal with being and purpose. The error of scientists like Stephen Hawking was to declare that philosophy is dead and then, immediately afterward, propose theories (such as model realism or the multiverse) that are philosophical speculations.

Quantification of science

Chapter 2 of my book, The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World, is dedicated to quantifying science, something I had done in the introduction to my dictionary, 1.000 grandes científicos (1,000 Great Scientists, Editorial Espasa, 1996), although in this new book I have introduced new tables and figures, and expanded upon the analyses carried out there. Here I will summarize some of the results of this chapter.

The following table shows the list of the 24 greatest scientists in the history of Greco-Roman and Western civilizations. The complete study considers the names of 1,000 scientists, who have been ordered according to the number of lines dedicated to them in the sources and encyclopedias used as the basis for the selection. Personally, I don't agree with all the results, but if I were to give in to the temptation to alter them at any point, that would have been an end to the objectivity I was seeking.

Quantification of literature

William Shakespeare

The analyses conducted about the literary field in the book The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World cover almost three thousand years of Greco-Roman and Western literary history. This is a biographical analysis, based on recording the birth, flourishing, and death dates (if known), as well as the nationality of the writers. Each of the 210 historical figures considered has been assigned a quantitative rating, represented by a number between zero and ten. This number was calculated based on the number of lines dedicated to each author in the texts or encyclopedias used as the basis for the study.

Can history be quantified?

Can the history of culture be quantified? I believe many historians would answer this question in the negative. The prevailing view seems to be that historical events are unique and unrepeatable, and any attempt to discover laws or recurring patterns in these phenomena is usually met with extreme suspicion. Let us remember as an example the antagonistic reaction provoked by works such as The Decline of the West by the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, or A Study of History by the British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, whose conclusions, however, were based on qualitative analysis. It is not surprising, therefore, that to find true quantifiers of history, one must turn to authors who were not professional historians.

The case of Galileo

The case of Galileo is one of the most widespread modern historical myths, widely used by anti-Catholic propaganda, along with the anti-Spanish Black Legend. It surfaces even in the most unexpected places. For example, in the book A Song for Nagasaki, an excellent biography of Takashi Nagai, scientist, convert, and atomic bomb survivor, whose beatification process is underway, his biographer Paul Glynn, an Australian Catholic priest, states twice that Nagai's conversion was delayed due to his concern about the atrocities committed by Catholics throughout history, and cites four: a) the Crusades; b) the Inquisition; c) the genocide of native Americans in South America; and d) the case of Galileo. It is curious that Nagai says nothing about this in his autobiography, and it is surprising that a Catholic priest would fall for such historical fallacies.

New Ways to Scam the Unwary

Wallet scam
Spanish film "Los Tramposos"

About 30 years ago, I received my first attempt at the Nigerian scam: a letter from someone unknown to me offering me the chance to participate in a capital evasion operation involving several million dollars, which they proposed depositing into my bank account, offering to share the profits in return. Of course, I didn't reply, although I kept the Nigerian stamp that came with the letter. I suppose that if I had replied, they would have asked for access to my account to make the transfer, and instead, it would have been emptied.

Since then, I've received dozens of similar attempts, since a certain time via email, always originating from some African country. This scam is, in a way, similar to the wallet scam, because in addition to the swindler, the victim also tries to commit fraud; in one case against the supposed mentally challenged person offering the alleged money, in the other against the governments affected by the capital evasion.

The inconstant constant

Georges Lemaître

In a previous post, The Hubble-Lemaître Law, I explained how Georges Lemaître discovered in 1927 the expansion of the universe, but as he published in a French-language journal, it didn't make a great impact, and for almost a century the discovery was attributed to Edwin Hubble, who published in 1929 in a much more widely circulated English-language journal. This injustice was corrected on October 29, 2018, by the International Astronomical Union, and I echoed the renaming of the law in my post, published three days later in this blog.

The Hubble-Lemaître Law says this: The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us. Its recessional velocity is proportional to its distance. The constant of proportionality is called the Hubble constant, which has the dimension of 1/time. In the International System of Units, this dimension would be expressed as seconds⁻¹ or 1/second, but in practice, its definition (speed/distance) is used, with the following units: km/s/Mpc, which means: the increase in the recessional velocity of a galaxy (in km/s) as its distance from us increases (measured in Megaparsecs). One Megaparsec (Mpc) is one million parsecs, and one parsec is equal to 3.2616 light-years.