Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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JUDAISM,HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION,MODERN PERIOD

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The early modern period (sixteenth to early

nineteenth centuries)

As is clear from the example of religious scientists

such as the astronomer Levi Ben Gershom (Ger-

sonides, 1288–1344), Jews followed Maimonides’s

directives and made first-rate contributions to the

advancement of scientific knowledge in the late

middle ages. However, this consensus on the sym-

biosis of religion and science disappeared by the

early modern period in European civilization. The

level of Jewish studies in the sciences as of the

middle of the fourteenth century was the peak of

this development. Jews continued to study science,

but there was little growth. While the level of Jew-

ish achievements in the field of medicine remained

high by comparison with the level of medical sci-

ences in Christian Europe, the same cannot be said

for the other sciences, even in the case of astron-

omy and physics.

From the sixteenth through the early nine-

teenth centuries the focus of Jewish spiritual prac-

tice turned away from natural philosophy (from

science) towards a concentration on Jewish law

(Halachah) and mysticism (Kabbalah). Still, there

were many Jews who continued the Maimonidean

tradition of scientific inquiry, especially in astron-

omy. Among their notable tractates were Judah

Loew ben Bezalel’s Torat ha-Olah (Prague, 1569),

Mordecai ben Abraham Jaffe’s Levush’s Or Yekarot

(Lubin, 1594), David Gans’s Nechmad ve-Na’im

(1613), Joseph Solomon Delmedigo’s Elim (Ams-

terdam, 1629), Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Turiyyah

(Venice, 1707/8), Jonathan ben Joseph from

Ruchim’s Yeshu’ah be-Yisrael (Frankfurt 1720),

Raphael ha-Levi of Hannover’s Tekhumat ha-

Shamayim (Amsterdam, 1756), Israel ben Moses

ha-Levi of Zamosc’s Netzach Yisrael (Frankfurt am

Oder, 1741), and Israel David ben Mordecai Jaffe-

Margoliot’s Chazon Mo’ed (Pressburg, 1843).

In general, by the second half of the sixteenth

century Jewish students of astronomy were famil-

iar with Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. How-

ever, their attitudes to it were no more enlightened

than that of the Roman Catholic Church, for in

general all of these books were written as an

apologetic defense of Maimonides’s Aristotelian

geocentric theory.

What happened that so dramatically altered the

status of scientific learning in traditional Jewish

communities between the twelfth and the sixteenth

centuries? This is a question that scholars continue

to debate. Critical factors include the increase of

Jewish persecution in Christian Europe, which is

conjoined to the increase of interest in Kabbalah

and the decline of interest in the kind of natural phi-

losophy that would develop into modern science.

The dramatic focus of this competition between

legal studies, Kabbalah, and philosophic/scientific

studies to win the hearts of intelligent Jews was the

so-called “Maimonidean Controversies” that began

in Europe during Maimonides’s own lifetime, broke

out again in Provence between 1230 and 1232, and

spread from Provence into Christian Spain between

1300 and 1306. One of the important consequences

of these controversies occurred in fifteenth-century

Spain, where the curriculum of Jewish studies was

revised to intensify the emphasis on law and all but

eliminate the sciences as something identifiably

“Jewish.” (The critical exception to this generaliza-

tion was the study of medicine and, as part of med-

icine, the study of what would become chemistry.)

Whatever the causes, Jews who identified them-

selves primarily as Jews, as opposed to as members

of a particular nation state, ceased to make any sig-

nificant contributions to science. The same can also

be said of Jews as human beings. However, this sit-

uation changed dramatically in the second half of

the nineteenth century.

The modern period (late nineteenth and

twentieth centuries)

When the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–

1677) was offered a professorship at the University

of Heidelberg, he became, as far as we know, the

first Jew ever to be offered a teaching position in a

Christian European university. However, this was

not a proper beginning, for Spinoza was a Dutch

Jew who, as such, represented a most atypical Jew-

ish community that had only recently emerged

from its secret Jewish life as conversos in Spain.

Moreover, Spinoza was a heretic. That a Jew could

enter a Christian university if he left Judaism and

became a Christian was not uncommon. However,

Spinoza did not become a believing Christian even

though he ceased to be a believing Jew. In the

end, Spinoza did not accept the position in Hei-

delberg, and his thought had no significant impact

on Jews until the late nineteenth century.

Excluding Spinoza, the first Jew to complete a

doctorate in a Christian university was Joseph ben

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Judah Chamitz, who earned a degree in philoso-

phy and medicine from the University of Padua in

1624. Other Jews followed his example throughout

western Europe after Joseph II of Austria issued his

Edit of Toleration in 1782, after the Jews were

emancipated in France in 1791, and after the Con-

gress of Vienna created an union of German states

to replace the Holy Roman Empire in 1815 and

Italy was unified in 1861. The Jews were emanci-

pated in Switzerland in 1866 and in Austria-

Hungary in 1867. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870

to 1871 resulted in William I of Prussia becoming

emperor of all the German states, and Germany

became unified in 1871 under Otto von Bismarck.

Two other, related critical events occurred in 1871:

the new German constitution gave full rights to

Jews, and the term anti-Semitism was used for the

first time. The former event opened the doors to

Jews throughout Germany, and from Germany

throughout the Western world, from the late nine-

teenth through the early twentieth centuries. The

latter event closed the doors of the university, cul-

minating in the Nazi German attempt to “eliminate”

Jews altogether.

The achievements of Jews as individuals (as

citizens of their nation states and not especially as

Jews) from the late nineteenth through the early

twentieth centuries are impressive. By 1910, 2.5

percent of all full professors in Germany were Jew-

ish, and 7.5 percent of all German students and 9.4

percent of all students (including foreigners) at

Prussian universities were Jewish. Furthermore, by

1933 Jews constituted thirty percent of academic

staff in natural sciences, over forty percent in med-

ical faculties, and almost fifty percent of the math-

ematicians in German universities.

In general, the achievements of Jews as indi-

viduals in every academic field are even more dra-

matic. The originality that Jews failed to achieve in

the early modern period was more than compen-

sated for in late modern times. Notable Jewish as-

tronomers include Hermann Goldschmidt

(1802–1866, in France) who from 1852 to 1861 dis-

covered fourteen asteroids between mars and

Jupiter; Maurice Loewy (1857–1938, in Austria)

who invented the Coudé telescope at the Paris Ob-

servatory; and Richard Prager (1883–1945, in Ger-

many) who made major discoveries about variable

stars at Berlin. In the United States, Frank

Schlesinger (1871–1943) devised photographic

methods for making parallax-determinations; Mar-

tin Schwarzchild (1912-1997) researched stellar

evolution and designed satellite-born telescopes at

Princeton University in New Jersey; and Herbert A.

Friedman (1916–2000) studied outer-space spec-

troscopy at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory in

Washington, D.C.

Jewish involvement in chemistry was a natural

outgrowth of earlier Jewish interest in medicine. In

this respect it is notable that between 1905 and

2000 twenty-two Jews received the Nobel Prize in

chemistry: Adolph Von Baeyer (1905), Henri

Moissan (1906), Otto Wallach (1910), Richard Will-

staetter (1915), Fritz Haber (1918), George Charles

de Hevesy (1943), Melvin Calvin (1961), Max Fer-

dinand Perutz (1962), William Howard Stein

(1972), Ilya Prigogine (1977), Herbert Charles

Brown (1979), Paul Berg (1980), Walter Gilbert

(1980), Ronald Hoffmann (1981), Aaron Klug

(1982), Albert A. Hauptman (1985), Jerome Karle

(1985), Dudley R. Herschbach (1986), Robert

Huber (1988), Sidney Altman (1989), Rudolph Mar-

cus (1992), and Alan J. Heeger (2000).

Jews even excelled in physics, which had

ceased to be part of the Jewish curriculum in the

early modern period. For example, during the

twentieth century, Jews received thirty one Nobel

prizes in physics: Albert Abraham Michelson (1907),

Gabriel Lippmann (1908), Albert Einstein (1921),

Niels Bohr (1922), James Franck (1925), Gustav

Hertz (1925), Gustav Stern (1943), Isidor Issac Rabi

(1944), Felix Bloch (1952), Max Born (1954), Igor

Tamm (1958), Emilio Segre (1959), Donald A.

Glaser (1960), Robert Hofstadter (1961), Lev Davi-

dovich Landau (1962), Richard Phillips Feynman

(1965), Julian Schwinger (1965), Murray Gell-Mann

(1969), Dennis Gabor (1971), Brian David Joseph-

son (1973), Benjamin Mottleson (1975), Burton

Richter (1976), Arno Allan Penzias (1978), Peter L

Kapitza (1978), Stephen Weinberg (1979), Sheldon

Glashow (1979), Leon Lederman (1988), Melvin

Schwartz (1988), Jack Steinberger (1988), Jerome

Friedman (1990), and Martin Perl (1995).

The works of these physicists include: the per-

fection of the electromagnetic theory of radiation;

quantum theory and its experimental confirmation;

relativity concepts and their universal impact;

atomic structure and its implication for electronics;

and nuclear physics with its applications and im-

plications for the study of high energy particles. Of

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these Jewish physicists, the most famous is Albert

Einstein (1879–1955), who is especially known for

his work on relativity theory. Many of the mathe-

maticians who provided the foundation for Ein-

stein’s contributions to physics were also Jews. Of

special note were Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

(1804–1851) for his work on elliptic functions, Her-

man Minkowski (1864–1909) for his work on

four dimensional space, and Tullio Levi-Civitá

(1873–1941) for fundamental mathematics of rela-

tivity theory.

The least surprising area of Jewish excellence

in science was medicine, since this was the one

scientific subject Jews continued to study into the

modern period in their traditional Jewish commu-

nity schools. It is the area of scientific research

whose application to Judaism is most evident,

since it raises any number of questions concerning

morality and Jewish law. For example, what is the

role of sex in marriage independent of reproduc-

tion? Under Jewish law are any of the modern

methods of treating infertility (including cloning,

artificial insemination, and the use of surrogate

mothers) permissible? The same questions apply to

applications of genetic engineering and screening.

Conversely, are any of the ways of preventing

pregnancy (especially contraception, sterilization,

and abortion) permissible? Furthermore, as mod-

ern science impacts on Jewish law and ethics with

respect to life, it has implications for ways of

dying, including questions about assisted suicide,

cremation, autopsies, and organ donations. Finally,

modern medicine raises questions for social ethics,

from issues about a fair distribution of health care

to issues about cosmetics (tattooing, body piercing,

and cosmetic surgery).

By the middle of the seventeenth century Eu-

ropean medical schools (notably in Germany,

Poland, and Russia) began to admit Jews. One of

the first was the University of Frankfurt on the

Oder in Germany. One of its first students was To-

bias ben Moses Cohen of Metz. Although he did

not complete his studies there, he received his

M.D. degree later from the University of Padua.

Eventually he became a court physician to five

successive sultans in Constantinople. Among the

notable Jewish physicians of the eighteenth cen-

tury were Marcus Eliezer Bloch in Berlin and

Gumpertz Levison in England and Sweden, as well

as Elias Henschel, who was a pioneer of modern

obstetrics.

Jewish involvement in medical practice and re-

search grew exponentially after the 1782 Edit of

Tolerance in Austria. Still Jews tended to be held

back, rarely rising academically beyond the titular

professorial position of privatdocent. Jews tended

to prefer new fields that were less attractive to

non-Jewish competitors. An example is the pio-

neering work of Moritz Kaposi, Isador Neumann,

and Heinrich Auspits in dermatology-venereology

in Austria. In Germany dermatology came to be

known as Judenhaut ( Jews’ skin). German spe-

cialists in this study included Paul Unna, Oskar

Lassar, and Josef Jadassohn, and in Switzerland,

Bruno Bloch.

Jews tended to dominate biochemistry, im-

munology, psychiatry, heatology, histology, and

microscopic pathology. Among the leaders of mi-

croscopy were Ludwig Traube; of neuropathology

is Moritz Romberg; and of neurology were Leopold

Auerbach, Ludwig Edinger, and Hermann Oppen-

heim. In the twentieth century Jews entered freely

into all fields of medicine and made major contri-

butions to them, especially chemotherapy, im-

munology, hematology, heart disease research,

lung and kidney disease research, gastroenterol-

ogy, dermatology, pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics,

gynecology, radiology, pathology, public health,

and medical education.

In this respect it is notable that between 1908

and 1995, forty-four Jews received the Nobel Prize

in medicine: Elie Metchnikoff (1908), Paul Erlich

(1908), Robert Barany (1914), Otto Meyerhof

(1922), Karl Landsteiner (1930), Otto Warburg

(1931), Otto Loewi (1936), Joseph Erlanger (1944),

Herbert Spencer Gasser (1944), Ernst Boris Chain

(1945), Hermann Joseph Muller (1946), Tadeus Re-

ichstein (1950), Selman Abraham Waksman (1952),

Hans Krebs (1953), Fritz Albert Lipmann (1953),

Joshua Lederberg (1958), Arthur Kornberg (1959),

Konrad Bloch (1964), Francois Jacob (1965), Andre

Lewoff (1965), George Wald (1967), Marshall W.

Nirenberg (1968), Salvador Luria (1969), Julius Ax-

elrod (1970), Sir Bernard Katz (1970), Gerald Mau-

rice Edelman (1972), David Baltimore (1975),

Howard Martin Temin (1975), Baruch S. Blumberg

(1976), Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1977), Daniel

Nathans (1978), Baruj Benacerraf (1980), Cesar

Milstein (1984), Michael Stuart Brown (1985),

Joseph L. Goldstein (1985), Stanley Cohen [& Rita

Levi Montalcini] (1986), Gertrude Elion (1988),

Harold Varmus (1989), Erwin Neher (1991), Bert

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Sakmann (1991), Richard J. Roberts (1993), Phillip

Sharp (1993), Alfred Gilman (1994), and Edward B.

Lewis (1995)

Of special importance within the discipline of

medicine is psychology, within psychology is psy-

chiatry, and within psychiatry is the work of Sig-

mund Freud (1856–1939) and his followers in psy-

choanalysis. As psychology emerged at the end of

the nineteenth century, there were few Jews in-

volved, G. F. Heymans at Louvain in Belgium being

a notable exception. Modern psychiatry began

with the work of Phillipe Pinel in France after the

French revolution. The first Jewish psychiatrists to

join this movement were Cesare Lombroso and

Hippolyte Bernheim. Freud’s own study began as

an observer of Bernheim’s work with hypnosis on

mental patients. Freud published Interpretation of

Dreams in 1900. Those initially associated with

psychoanalysis in Freud’s “inner circle” included

the Jews Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max

Eitingon, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs. Most notable

among those who followed Freud were Alfred

Adler, Hans Sachs, Paul Federn, Theodor Reik, He-

lene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, and Freud’s daughter

Anna. Leading psychiatrists in the United States in-

cluded Erik Homberber Erikson, Margarert Mahler,

Leo Kanner, Lauretta Bender, Moritz Tramer, Paul

Schilder, Beata Rank, and Rene Spitz.

Jewish science

One must be careful to distinguish the role of Jews

in modern science as individuals from their role as

Jews. Jews have been scientists in the modern pe-

riod not as members of a Jewish community (as

they were in the Middle Ages) but as free citizens

in secular nation states. The schools where they

studied, did research, published, and taught were

sponsored by the secular state and not by any

agency of the Jewish community. Is it legitimate to

ask about these Jews whether or not their being

Jewish in any way contributed to their science?

Those most likely to give an affirmative answer to

this question would be anti-Semites, especially

those who dominated German culture in the 1930s

and 1940s. Certainly most of these scientists them-

selves would make a sharp distinction between

who they are as Jews (if anything) and who they

are as scientists.

The most obvious names that people associate

with Jews are Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Henri

Bergson, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. All

five would have strongly denied that their Jewish

ethnic identity had any bearing on their contribu-

tions to science. Spinoza was a product of a con-

verso community, and furthermore, he was excom-

municated; the excommunication did not seem to

matter much to him, for he could live as easily

among his Christian friends as he had lived in a

Jewish community. Karl Heinrich Marx

(1818–1883) can hardly be called Jewish at all. His

father converted with his children to Christianity in

1824 (when Karl six years old). The case is almost

the same with Henri Louis Bergson (1859–1941).

He was raised in Paris by a father from Warsaw

and mother from England, and Henri himself did

the best that he could to conceal his upbringing,

including the fact that he was Jewish.

There are many other Jews who could be

listed in the category of those whose Jewish iden-

tity, even on cultural terms, was so tenuous that to

call them “Jewish” is seriously misleading. Notable

in this category are the sociologist Emile Durkheim

(1859–1917) and the philosopher Edmund Husserl

(1859–1938). Others include Karl Gustav Jacob Ja-

cobi (1801–1851), who developed the generaliza-

tion of Hamilton’s theory in mechanics, and Georg

Cantor (1845–1910), who made major contribu-

tions to the theory of the functions of real num-

bers. Felix Klein (1849–1925), who in 1882 pub-

lished a paper on Riemann’s theory of algebraic

functions, developed the Erlangen program. which

classified geometries in mathematical group the-

ory. Ferdinand Cohn (1828–1898) identified sev-

eral bacteria as agents of disease. Eugen Goldstein

(1850–1930), together with Cromwell Varley

(1828–1883), developed the leading hypothesis

(waive interpretation) of the nature of cathode ra-

diation. Finally, Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915) created

chemotherapy.

The only notable modern Jewish scientist who

understood his major work to be specifically Jew-

ish was Hermann Cohen (1848–1918). Cohen is

known primarily as a leading German philosopher

of the neo-Kantian Marburg School and as a the-

ologian of Reform Judaism. However, his career

began as a philosopher of mathematics with the

1883 publication of his Das Prinzip der infinitesi-

mal methode und seine Geschichte (The Principle

of the infinitesimal method and its History), in

which he developed an account of the meaning of

differentiation and integration in calculus that

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served later as the foundation of his Marburg phi-

losophy and his liberal Jewish theology. Cohen’s

colleague Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and his first

pupil Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) were both distin-

guished Jewish philosophers in the first half of the

twentieth century. Both were oppressed for being

Jewish and both shared the widespread view, in

opposition to Hermann Cohen, that their Jewish

identity was a sheer accident, of no relevance to

their work as intellectuals.

The most interesting scientist in this respect

was Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Jewishness played

an important part in his life in terms of secular pol-

itics because he was a lifelong Zionist who was of-

fered the first presidency of the modern secular

state of Israel. Similarly, religious belief of some

sort seemed to play a role in his speculations as a

scientist. However, the role of religion in his life

was always a private form of religiosity that he con-

sciously dissociated from any traditional or conser-

vative form of historical rabbinic Judaism. To the

extent that Einstein was religious it was more like

the religion of Spinoza, whose work he first read in

1920, when he was already forty-one years old.

The religion of Einstein was a religion that

identified the highest form of divine worship with

the uncompromising pursuit of the truth about the

universe in general. Einstein identified this religious

quest with Spinoza, who arrived at his distinctive

conception of science as worship through his study

of the Jewish philosophy of Maimonides. So we

end where we began—with a symbiosis of science

and religion, one that was clearly Jewish and reli-

gious in the medieval period and became increas-

ingly universalist and secular in the modern period.

See also EINSTEIN, ALBERT; JUDAISM; JUDAISM,

ONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND

RELIGION; JUDAISM, HISTORY OF SCIENCE

AND

RELIGION, MEDIEVAL PERIOD;

AIMONIDES

Bibliography

Bleach, J. David. Bioethical Dilemmas: A Jewish Perspec-

tive. Hoboken N.J.: Ktav, 1998.

Dorff, Elliot N. Matters of Life and Death: A Jewish

Approach to Modern Medical Ethics. Philadelphia:

Jewish Publication Society of America, 1998.

Jammer, Max. Einstein and Religion. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1999.

Kaku, Michio, and Trainer, Jennifer. Beyond Einstein: The

Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe. New

York: Bantam, 1987.

Poma, Andrea. The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Robertson, Ritchie. The “Jewish Question” in German Lit-

erature: 1749–1939. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2001.

Ruderman, David B. Jewish Thought and Scientific Dis-

cover in Early Modern Europe. New Haven, Conn.,

and London: Yale University Press, 1995.

Volkov, Shulamit. “Jewish Scientists in Imperial Germany

(Parts I and II).” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science

and Judaism 1 (2000): 215–281.

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Ter-

minable and Interminable. New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1991.

NORBERT M. SAMUELSON

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KANT,IMMANUEL

Immanuel Kant, it is said, never traveled more than

fifty miles from his native city of Königsberg in

East Prussia. Nevertheless, there are few thinkers

who have had as wide an influence as Kant in the

history of Western thought. His importance for dis-

cussions about science and religion stems from his

reasoned defense of the position that religion and

science should be kept clearly separated from one

another.

Life and writings

Born in 1724, Kant was the son of humble pietistic

parents who wished for him to have an education.

At sixteen he entered the University of Königsberg,

where he studied Christian Wolff’s interpretation of

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s (1646–1716) phi-

losophy. Kant’s encounter with Isaac Newton’s

(1642–1727) work during his student years encour-

aged in him an independent attitude toward Leib-

niz’s thought, with the additional result that he de-

veloped a profound interest in the natural sciences.

When his father died during his university training,

Kant left the university and served as a tutor in pri-

vate families near Königsberg between 1748 and

1754. After returning to the university he completed

a thesis in June of 1755 and, on finishing a second

thesis in September, was granted permission to lec-

ture. Prior to the age of thirty-six, Kant’s writings

dealt primarily, although not exclusively, with the

natural sciences. His most famous work from this

period, the Universal Natural History and Theory of

the Heavens, was published in 1755 and contained

Kant’s ideas on the how a cosmos subject to New-

ton’s laws of motion might have formed.

After Kant received a professorship in logic and

metaphysics at Königsberg in 1770 it took some

time before his writings reflected the turn his ap-

pointment marked from a precritical stance to what

he himself labeled critical philosophy. Once Kant

began publishing, the works came thick and fast.

The first edition of his most famous book, the Cri-

tique of Pure Reason, did not appear until 1781.

When it did so it was largely misunderstood, mov-

ing Kant to restate its main arguments two years

later in his Prolegomena to Every Future Meta-

physics. He also expanded the Critique in a second

edition in 1787, and in the following year he pub-

lished the first of two new critiques, the Critique of

Practical Reason. This second critique picked up

on a concern with moral philosophy Kant had ini-

tially addressed in another work from the 1780s.

The Critique of Judgment, which appeared in 1790,

dealt with reasoning about the realms of the aes-

thetic and the purposeful. Earlier in 1786 Kant re-

turned to his reflections on science and its methods

in a work entitled The Metaphysical Foundations of

Natural Science. Finally, his Religion Within the

Boundaries of Pure Reason, which appeared in

1793, provoked King Frederick William II to forbid

him from publishing anything more on religion, a

mandate he honored until the king’s death in 1797.

Kant died February 12, 1804.

Impact on science and religion discussion

Kant’s impact on the subject of natural science and

religion is best understood in his relation to the

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KANT,IMMANUEL

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Scottish thinker David Hume (1711–1776), whom

Kant claimed awakened him from his dogmatic

slumber. Exactly when this was to have occurred is

unclear; however, among other things Hume rep-

resented for Kant the possibility that the use of rea-

son in fact undermined the essential truths of reli-

gion, morality, and common sense. Kant faced

squarely Hume’s skepticism about causality and

other conclusions of common sense that haunted

the thinkers of the late eighteenth century. The fear

was that if Hume’s reasoning was correct about

these matters, then how was one to retain one’s

belief in God? As Kant’s contemporary Friedrich

Jacobi (1743–1819) put it, “Nothing frightens man

so much, nothing darkens his mind to such a de-

gree as when God disappears from nature …

when purpose, wisdom, and goodness no longer

seem to reign in nature, but only a blind necessity

of dumb chance.”

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

(1779) Hume exposed the inadequacy where the

relationship of God to nature was concerned of

both classical metaphysical rationalism, in which

one reasoned from principles accepted apart from

or before experience (a priori), and empiricism,

where reasoning was undertaken only after one

experienced the world (a posteriori). In the Cri-

tique of Pure Reason, Kant attempted to forge a

new path between both rationalism and empiri-

cism by introducing what he called in the preface

to the second edition a “Copernican” viewpoint in

philosophy. The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus

(1483–1543) had shown that the way to think

about the relationship of the earth and the sun was

to reverse their traditional roles. Kant demanded

that to understand the relationship of the world of

experience and the mind one must also reverse

the way in which roles were traditionally assigned.

It is not that the mind is shaped by experience of

the world (empiricism); rather, the world of expe-

rience is shaped by “categories” associated with

the mind’s operation. But in shaping our experi-

ence of the world the categories themselves pre-

scribe only the structure for objects of possible ex-

perience (not the content of actual experience, as

in metaphysical rationalism). Human minds dictate

in advance, for example, that experience can only

be apprehended in accordance with causal rela-

tionships between events, but they cannot deter-

mine prior to a person’s experiencing the world

which specific causal relationships actually obtain.

Without content supplied by sense experience, the

mind, even equipped as it is by its categories,

would still be blind. But without the ordering im-

pact of the categories, experience would be chaos.

This is why Kant said at the beginning of the in-

troduction to the Critique that “although all our

knowledge begins with experience, it does not fol-

low that it all arises out of experience.”

This middle way contained important implica-

tions for the understanding of scientific knowl-

edge. If the mind contributes in a formative way to

the manner in which people experience the world,

then they can no longer claim that the world they

experience is necessarily the world that exists apart

from the mind. Regularities in one’s experience of

the world, even those so repetitious as to earn the

label of scientific laws, cannot be known as regu-

larities in nature that one discovers; rather, they

bear the touch of one’s mind. People are, as Kant

says in his Prolegomena to Every Future Meta-

physics, “lawgivers of reason.” Scientific knowl-

edge, then, refers to the world of experience, the

world of phenomena apprehended with the

senses, not to a reality lying behind human expe-

rience. Gone is the possibility of conceiving truth

as the correspondence of one’s ideas to the way

things are, a common conception of many scien-

tists. One cannot be sure of the way things are, so

there is no possibility of checking that against

one’s ideas.

If Kant’s critique of reason introduced a radical

limitation of what could be known, he was

adamant that there was a realm that lay beyond

cognition. “I have therefore found it necessary to

deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,”

he wrote in the preface to the second edition of

the Critique. The object of faith, however, could

not by definition be articulated or expressed in

terms of knowledge. Religion for Kant did not and

could not have to do with cognitive propositions

about nature. In his 1793 book, Religion within the

Boundaries of Reason Alone, he made clear that he

accepted Hume’s negative conclusions about the

so-called argument from design, according to

which one reasoned from evidence of design in

the world to the existence of a designer. Religion

did not commence with nor have to do with one’s

knowledge of the world. Religion had to do with

the purity of one’s heart. To be religious is to view

one’s duties as if they are divine commands. It

should be noted that Kant’s religious stance was

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purely intellectual. In spite of the fact that his phi-

losophy made room for the possibility of eternal

life, it was clear to those close to him that he

scoffed at prayer and other religious practices and

that he had no faith in a personal God.

Kant’s position, then, radically separated sci-

ence from religion, as if the two subjects contained

no common ground. It took some time for this po-

sition to gain a hearing since in the Romantic pe-

riod, which dominated in the first decades of the

nineteenth century, there was great dissatisfaction

with Kant’s severe restriction of reason’s scope to

the realm of phenomena. Even one of the earliest

neo-Kantian thinkers from this era, Jakob Fries

(1773–1843), added Ahndung (aesthetic sense) to

knowledge and faith as a third possible way in

which people may relate to that which exists out-

side of them. Fries believed that through aesthetic

sense people could intimate the infinite that was

present in the finite.

It was not until the neo-Kantian revival of the

late nineteenth century that Kant’s radical separa-

tion of science from religion emerged in earnest. In

the works of the Marburg theologian Wilhelm Her-

rmann (1846–1922), composed during the heyday

of debates about biological evolution, one recog-

nizes the attempt to cede to natural science the

freedom to investigate natural phenomena without

restriction while at the same time stressing religion’s

right to address questions of value and right. If re-

ligion must surrender nature to natural science, nat-

ural science, in turn, must along with religion re-

nounce any claim to have arrived at metaphysical

reality. Religion becomes morality while science be-

comes Naturbeherrschung, mastery of the world.

In the twentieth century the separation of nat-

ural science and religion continued to mark much

of German theology, especially the works of well-

known existential theologians who wrote in the

decades following World War I. Most recently

something of a Kantian position on the relation-

ship between science and religion has been advo-

cated by the noted American paleontologist

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2000) who, without ever

naming Kant, introduced the notion of non-over-

lapping magisteria (NOMA) as a means of dealing

with the realities of science, which is concerned

with the factual construction of nature, and reli-

gion, which concerns itself with moral issues about

the value and meaning of life. Gould acknowledge

more than classical neo-Kantians, however, that

while magisteria do not overlap, they are every-

where interlaced in a complex manner that often

makes it extremely challenging to keep the two

separate. Critics of the Kantian position maintain

that in practice it is impossible to retain a rigid sep-

aration of science and religion.