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” God, who founded everything in the world according to the norm of quantity, also has endowed humanity with a mind which can comprehend these norms.17 Wisdom 11:20 here is reduced to the concept of quantity. But this statement may be the closest we can come to Comenius’s own words. The dual beliefs are there, and so is the reference (albeit truncated) to Wisdom 11:20. In fact, Kepler may well have been one of Comenius’s models—Kepler resided for years at the court of Rudolf II at the Casde of Hradcany in Praha in the early 17th century, and he later became famous for in his own mathematical investigations of the orbit of the planet Mars. In this Kepler was sustained by his deep faith in the providence of God in creating the world and equipping humans with the intelligence to understand it. Comenius could not help but be favorably impressed. Significantly, Kepler’s faith in the comprehensibility of the natural world continued to be an influential model for physicists right into in the early 20th century. In fact, Albert Einstein cited Kepler as the inspiration for his own efforts in mathematical physics in the early 20th century: How great must Kepler’s faith in natural law have been, to have given him the strength to devote ten years of hard and patient work to the empirical investigation of the movement of the planets and the mathematical laws of that movement, entirely on his own account, supported by no one and understood by very few.18 This quote from Einstein brings our journey full circle. The beliefs underlying modern science are deeply rooted in the biblical tradition as mediated by pivotal figures like Kepler and Comenius. How did these ideas reach modern physicists like Einstein and Davies? Wisdom 11:20 continued to be used as an inspiration to scientific endeavor. Some examples of its use include seventeenth and eighteenth-century British natural philosophers like Walter Charleton, William Petty, Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hales. It even became the motto for the British Society of Civil Engineers, founded in 1771. In the immediate background of Einstein, it is enough to mention James Clerk Maxwell for whom the uniformity of physical parameters (like those of molecules) across the entire universe was evidence of their being created “perfect in number and measure and weight” and paralleled the intellectual gifts that God had impressed on humans as part of the divine image—exactly the same ideas we found in Kepler and Comenius.19 17 Kepler’s Letter to Mästlin, 9 April 1597; GW, 13:113, Nr. 64; ET in Holton, Thematic Origins [1973], 84; revised edn, 68. 18 Einstein, “Kepler” [no date], in The World as I See It (Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam, 1934, trans. Alan Harris, London, John Lane, 1935), 142. 19 James Clerk Maxwell, “Molecules” (1873 BAAS Lecture), in The Sdentific Papers of ]ames Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols., ed. W. D. Niven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; reprinted New York: Dover, 1965), 2:377. Sárospataki Füzetek 29
