Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
In both regions of thought, additions, distinctions, and modifications
have been introduced. So that now, even when the same assertion is made
to-day as was made a thousand, or fifteen hundred years ago, it is made
subject to limitations or expansions of meaning, which were not
contemplated at the earlier epoch. We are told by logicians that a
proposition must be either true or false, and that there is no middle
term. But in practice, we may know that a proposition expresses an
important truth, but that it is subject to limitations and
qualifications which at present remain undiscovered. It is a general
feature of our knowledge, that we are insistently aware of important
truths; and yet that the only formulations of these truths which we are
able to make presuppose a general standpoint of conceptions which may
have to be modified. I will give you two illustrations, both from
science: Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed;
the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and the sun moves; and
Newtonian astronomers, adopting an absolute theory of space, said that
both the sun and the earth move. But now we say that any one of these
three statements is equally true, provided that you have fixed your
sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement
adopted. At the date of Galileo’s controversy with the Inquisition,
Galileo’s way of stating the facts was, beyond question, the fruitful
procedure for the sake of scientific research. But in itself it was not
more true than the formulation of the Inquisition. But at that time the
modern concepts of relative motion were in nobody’s mind; so that the
statements were made in ignorance of the qualifications required for
their more perfect truth. Yet this question of the motions of the earth
and the sun expresses a real fact in the universe; and all sides had got
hold of important truths concerning it. But with the knowledge of those
times, the truths appeared to be inconsistent.
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