Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)
2010 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kaiser, Christopher Barina: "Isten bölcsességének jelei" Comenius Panorthosia c. művében: egy bibliai téma a modern tudomány alapjaiban
"Marks of God Wisdom" meaningful resonance between the human mind and the underlying organization of the natural world?3 What Davies points out here is that the pursuit of science is the result of faith. In fact, there is a dual faith at the foundation of scientific endeavor. First, scientists must believe that the cosmos is rationally ordered—that it is governed by mathematical laws of some sort. This is an article of faith since science can not tell us where that rational order or those mathematical laws come from. Second, scientists must believe that human minds are actually capable of understanding that order—humans can develop mathematical models and rational formalisms and that will test positively in the laboratory and even in the farthest reaches of space-time. This dual faith—rational order and human understanding—is a theme that we will find running all through the history of Western ideas, particularly in Comenius. The fact that scientific endeavor is motivated and sustained by faith was not realized for the first time by Paul Davies. In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein clearly recognized that faith lay at the foundation of his own work. Here is the way he put it in 1941 in an essay entitled, “Science and Religion”: Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this [sphere of religion] there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to [human] reason.4 Here Einstein refers back to the ideas of Christian natural philosophers of the 19th century like James Clerk Maxwell.5 He was keenly aware of the faith dimension of all scientific work. Like Paul Davies and a number of other more recent philosophers and physicists, Einstein clearly identified the twin beliefs: (1) that the world is governed by regulations or laws; and (2) that those regulations are “rational” in the sense that human reason is capable of grasping them.6 If Einstein and Davies are right, the emergence of modern science itself was dependent on a prior belief in the possibility of science. If so, we should be able to find actual examples of that belief in early modern writers like Comenius. Though Comenius’s writings were not “scientific” in the technical modern sense, they thoroughly explored the ideological and pedagogical underpinnings of science, and they anticipated the work of architects of the “scientific revolution” like Robert 3 Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Sdentific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 20. 4 Albert Einstein, “Science and Religion II” (1941), in idem, Out of My Tater Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 26; also in idem, Ideas and Opinions (London: Alvin Redman, 1954), 46. 5 On Maxwell’s faith and its impact on Einstein, see my Creational Theology and the History of Physical Science: The Creationist Tradition from Basil to Bohr (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 379-99. 6 Interestingly, Einstein did not view the new science of quantum theory as “rational” in this sense due to the seemingly contradictory properties of photons; see Marcus Chown, “Einstein’s Rio Requiem,” New 3dentist 181 (6 March 2004), 50-51. SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK 23
