From Newton to Darwin

Ancient Greek astronomy distinguished the ordered cosmos of the superlunary world from the disordered chaos of the sublunary world [see Remi Brague’s book The Wisdom of the World, English translation 2003, University of Chicago Press]. Isaac Newton undermined this distinction with his laws of physics published in 1687 by showing that universal gravitation accounted for both superlunary and sublunary movements.

His followers “proclaimed Newton’s intellectual achievements as a model and justification for social order, political harmony, and liberal but orthodox Christianity.” [Margaret C. Jacob, Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977), p. 1] The Enlightenment had begun.

The result was people looked on the universe as an ordered place and came to expect order, not chaos, disruption, and catastrophe. This led to the adoption of Steno’s principles of geology, which looked on the earth as an ordered place and expected an orderly progression to account for its features. This in turn undermined the commonly accepted ancient accounts of a great deluge that would have had a large impact on the earth’s features.

Charles Darwin built on this a progression of generations to account for all the diversity of life. The ancient principle of Natura non facit saltum (Latin for “nature does not make a jump”) had triumphed.

But the human desire for order, the Enlightenment confidence that order has been found, and the 19th century belief in progress all depend on culture, not on nature. If a culture comes to disbelieve in progress, if worldwide catastrophe comes to be expected, if confidence in order is lost, then a different science would result. We live in such a time.