Steve Gould dealt with the whole preformationist debate in his essay “For want of a metaphor” in The Flamingo’s Smile (1985).

the anti_supernaturalist

• says that giving Nicolaas Hartsoeker the title “Mr.” was disrespectful. This was the first indication that we’re dealing with a trollesque character.
• offers long commentary full of content I certainly agree with, then implies I do not. Quite a waste of words on his part, and such strawmanning is not appropriate for someone claiming to have truth as his objective.
• claims I said my paper “gave a ‘history of science’” when I said no such thing. The title of my paper makes it clear it is on methodological naturalism, merely one theme within the history of science. I really dislike being misquoted and strawmanned.
• most egregiously suggests that I think Mr. Hartsoeker contributed nothing to science. My point was clear. There is no reason for us today to revert to an immature approach to science that unparsimoniously invokes imaginative solutions simply because they are consistent with religious dogma. I poke fun at Mr. Hartsoeker in the context of the history of science in the same way I poke fun at myself when I was 10 and thought I had telepathy. And it is not so much Mr. Hartsoeker that I scorn. It is more the non-scientists who co-opted his hypothesis to support their own agenda as we see today. Neither does Isaac Newton, in spite of his enormous contributions, escape a bit of scorn for dabbling in alchemy, though many of us in the context of his age would have done the same. Making fun of our blunders in our shared humanity over the ages is a healthy way to keep ourselves on track today. I’m sure most of you understood my playful article in the context of my previous satirical posts. One reader did not.

Call me grumpy, but I’ve no tolerance for such childish and confrontational antics.

Thanks again to those of you who have offered constructive criticism.

Tthe impression he gives is clear. That this guy was silly, came up with a theory on his own, and supported it by religion and it was rejected by science. That view is as close to a lie as twilight is to night. Phil Stilwell can’t even get the century right, much less the history.

He says things like “While squinting credulously at microcosms has fallen out of fashion” — but that’s not what the professor did. That not what any of the very good scientists who all believed that same theory did. Including the father of microbiology. The argument they were having at the time was whether the little men lived in the sperm or in the egg. They had long since known there was a little man in one of the gametes, it was clear as day to them by that point.

The impression seems to be there was this religious nutter who made up this crazy theory and all the Bible believers thought it was great but awesome scientists today reject that notion. — And that impression is inescapable and wrong.

We could split hairs about what this Mister or that Mister did or did not say about the history of science, but that isn’t the point here. The point is that as scientific knowledge progresses, theological knowledge does not. When someone tells us in 2010 that the Bible was vindicated by Galleleo because the Bible contains the expression “circle of the Earth”, we could reference the Epic of Gilgamesh, but we could also reference the long forgotten appologists who felt vindicated by Mister Hartsoeker. Modern theologans will see the problems with Spermist Theology. Will they also see the problems with their own current ideas?

It seems odd to call that a strawman. Your paper was full of misapprehensions and misunderstandings about the history of science portending a real ignorance of the subject.

I’m at a loss as to how I can call you ignorant of a subject with copious explanations and you can say “there there, I agree with all of that”.I don’t much care for conflict, I’d prefer you review the subject and simply come back and admit I was right.

You clearly are portraying a good scientist, for his time, as if he believed in fairies during the 19th century. He accepted the standard theories of biology at the time. That’s not some phantasmagorical failure on his part to strictly adhere to methodological naturalism, it is something that he accepted upon good evidence as the best explanation available at the time.

You make it look like an science vs. antiscience with Nicolaas Hartsoeker playing the role of the antiscience buffoon defended by Bible believers (in the 17th century Europe, who wasn’t?). You might as well replace his name with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek the father of microbiology, and chastise him for accepting things later proven false. Professor Hartsoeker was a noble representative of the science at the time. And your “oh, look at the poor Bible defended idiot” is purely wrong. There is nothing about his positions or his life that give portent to a coming dark age.

—

That said, having read your paper I must admit that it’s worse than I thought. Your understanding of history of science is downright terrible to non-existent. You portray ancient science as hardly able to grasp wheels or levers, and make it seem that from Aristotle to Ptolemy to the Dark Ages, there was no science at all, and what explanations were available were most magic than mechanics.

I could likely compose an errata of that entire section which would necessarily include proper history of science which you somehow grossly glossed over. You give history of science about as coherent of a treatment as Rodney Stark does in his books. I suppose I should address a few points.

* People believed the sky was orderly long before Aristotle.
* Aristotle claimed (with good reason) in On the Heavens that the heavens were unchanging and therefore were of a different substance called “aether”.
* Aristotle’s claims lasted perhaps a generation until the successors of Aristotle saw a supernova and realized that they did change.
* The science of the ancient world didn’t ascribe things to a black box of supernaturalism. They often did good science on the understanding that that was how the gods made things.
* Diseases find their first proper answer in the ancient world as germ theory in the first century.
* Many atmospheric phenomenon were given reasonable scientific explanations within pneumatics.
* The dynamics of celestial bodies were well understood and they were measuring the circumference of the Earth, making theories of parallax optics to measure the distance to the moon, predicting to exquisite detail the position of the planets at any point in time.
* They knew well enough celestial mechanics to properly debate the question of heliocentric vs. geocentric universes.
* Anaximander proposed evolutionary naturalistic explanations for man in the negative seventh century.

The ancient scientists weren’t powerless to answer the questions, in fact they had many very good answers and were already well versed in methodological naturalism to the point where atomists and others suggested that there were only material explanations for things (the atomists thought there were only atoms and space) and although they were considered too atheistic to be given consideration in the medieval period there were plenty of other groups (in fact most of them) that were rightly embracing empiricism and experimentation.

You also seem to sweep Aristotle right into the Dark Ages. As if there wasn’t that period many hundreds of years of scientific discovery and advancement. You make a passing reference to the heliocentrists like Aristarchus but quickly conclude that they were quickly forgotten when the Dark Ages began. But, all science save perhaps Ptolemy and Galen was largely ignored and lost for a thousand years. And real scientific advancement stopped a few hundred years before the Fall of the Empire. But, you’d have us believe that it never began in the first place as supernaturalists would go around frightfully touching wheels like those chimps at the start of 2001.

You portray the world of science as starting with the Enlightenment, and that everything before was the epistemological equivalent of “There Be Dragons!” You suppose that the ancient Greeks supposed that thought experiments were acceptable methods of testing things when Aristotle and vast number of ancient scientists argued against this position, which you ascribe to Galileo ending when he demonstrated that differences in weight of falling objects is irrelevant to their speed. When in fact, he didn’t demonstrate this, he appears to have only done a thought experiment himself to show it. And more importantly ancient scientists understood that objects fall at constant rates, and actually performed the experiment.

While the general thesis of your paper is fine. When you step away from empiricism science crumbles. Claiming that this requires methodological naturalism is quite suspect though. Many great scientists were religious and freely let their theology and science mingle. Galen wrote a rather large anatomy enclopedia that rightfully advanced the idea of intelligent design over the aforementioned evolutionary theories (evolution was rightfully the intellectual loser of that debate until Darwin). We had an ancient world with robots and computers and fantastically brilliant understandings of the heavens, anatomy, and the world and then science lost out to mysticism and empiricism was abandoned and it wasn’t until the Enlightenment picked up these values again did the scientific revolution take off.

My criticism was that you had horrible ignorance with regard to the history of science. Your paper which you overly optimistically suggest is “on the history of science” reaffirms my previous criticism here. Casually rolling from Aristotle to the Dark Ages without so much as a ‘how do you do’ to six hundred years of sustained scientific progress, much of which was then lost during the Dark Ages and had to be reinvented, is pretty horrible. And with crazy accusations like they’d be afraid of wheels and levers which they could “intuitively” understand (as if the Archimedes scientific law of the lever was just some silly intuitive bit of inconsequential nothing they came up with after a night of drinking).

They had naturalism, empiricism, and gobs of science in the ancient world. Then the world lost it, embraced spiritualism and then Christianity, from about 300 to 1300 and came up with jack squat. It was the readoption of these pagan values, which somehow you suggest is all magic all the time, that kick off the Scientific revolution.

You give the general impression that there was always attempts to explain the world, that it was just that in the ancient world and the dark ages that there was too much reliance on supernatural explanations and with the adoption of metaphysical naturalism science took off. And so long as we cling to natural explanations and banish religion from even standing at the sidelines of the history of science, we’ll continue our scientific progress. That there is something laughable about performationists noting the synchronicity between their scientific theory and Genesis (originally credited to Malebranche), or Galen explaining huge amounts of human anatomy to show that it was too complex to have come about by the mechanisms proposed by early evolutionists, or Herophilus and Erasistratus performing dissections and vivisections on animals to find out “Where is the soul?” Herophilius is also sometimes credited as the inventor of the scientific method.

You give us a terrible view of the history of science. Science isn’t atheistic because it needs to be to work. Science is atheistic because that’s where the answers seem to be and science goes where the answers are. Science is about empiricism, curiosity and progress. And these are the very values that Christians opposed from the early Church fathers onward. This is why we had science in the ancient world among those who endorsed such virtues, and why science ended when these values were abandoned, and why it started back up when they are salvaged from the waste bin of philosophical history.

I stand by my assessment.