This paper argues that science and philosophy were never naturally separate disciplines — their division was an artificial product of historical intellectual movements, particularly the Age of Reason. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stephen Hawking, the paper traces the gradual sundering and potential reunification of scientific and philosophical thought. Through an annotated literature review and qualitative analysis, it examines how quantum physics, string theory, and New Thought metaphysics are converging toward a unified framework of understanding. Three hypotheses are developed: that science and philosophy were once unified, that the Age of Reason artificially divided them, and that contemporary thinkers are actively forging their reunion.
In the primordial "soup," there was no science and no philosophy — there was simply being. When sentient humanity arrived, that soup became a source of both activity (science) and thought about that activity (philosophy). Early humans likely saw no difference between the two; it took later, self-styled "rational" men to define and dissociate various fields of study. In recent decades, however, it has begun to appear that these are in many ways unnatural divisions, produced by unsophisticated thinkers to advance the species. Integrative thinking now seems a necessity for dealing with a world so complex — and finally known to be so complex — that examining any single aspect of reality in isolation is likely to yield only limited understanding. Understanding is, in fact, the aim of both science and philosophy. Today, science — once thought a purely mechanical process — appears to be the prime mover driving a closer relationship, and perhaps even a full unity, between the two disciplines.
For the latter half of the twentieth century, the question "Is God dead?" seemed to have been answered in the affirmative. God had been replaced by science. In some minds, there was no longer a need for theology — so why should there be a need for theology's younger sibling, philosophy? Giants of modern thought, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, had done as much as any arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles to persuade much of the world's population that living for today was a rational response to life's problems, and that in the end, nothing mattered anyway. It is easy to see how such thinking could elevate science to the position of savior. Three-quarters of the way through the twentieth century, it appeared as if God was dead and the rest of us would soon follow, unless science found some way to save us. The dichotomy was complete: one was a scientist, or one was deluded into beseeching emasculated gods for salvation.
In some quarters — notably in the fundamentalist right of U.S. politics — this dichotomy persists. There are those who believe stem cell research is anathema to their conception of God, and there are those who believe it is simply another expression of the gifts given by God to aid humanity. Still others are entirely neutral on such subjects, as well as on other debates that spark intense and sometimes acrimonious conflict between believers in science and those who hold that the answers to life reside in philosophy, theology included.
Strangely enough, there is a large and growing current of thought attempting to return to an Aristotelian — or even pre-Aristotelian — age, in which science and philosophy are one. Known as New Age thought, or metaphysics, it encompasses the genuinely intangible (the speed of thought, the hundredth monkey theory, and so on), the mildly tangible (quarks), and the fully tangible (stem cells, for example).
An historical reading of the great thinkers on science and philosophy — David Hume, St. Thomas Aquinas, the German constellation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers, and modern theologians such as Hans Küng and Thomas Troward — leads to the conviction that the relationship between science and philosophy has long been a central concern for philosophers. Today, however, it is also receiving input from scientists. Stephen Hawking, for example, is not fully comprehensible unless his physics is situated within a philosophical framework. Popular author Gary Zukav, in his major work The Dancing Wu Li Masters, marries the concepts of science and philosophy within a New Thought framework.
Because so much of the modern understanding of the marriage between physics and philosophy is found in New Thought works, it is perhaps too easily dismissed by both scientists and philosophers. And yet there is the Hundredth Monkey to consider. Is this merely a convenient story by which unschooled philosophers attempt to explain the intricate workings of the universe — much as early peoples explained those workings by assigning gods to volcanoes — or is it a reality that will, in time, bring science and philosophy not merely into relationship, but into unity? Is it possible that the truly enlightened philosophers and scientists always knew there was no meaningful distinction?
These are vital questions for our time. When significant parts of the world appear to be descending into chaos, it becomes necessary to discover somewhere a unity upon which to base the continuance of human life. The research problems posed for this study are therefore framed as three hypotheses:
Hypothesis One: Science and philosophy were once a single discipline, and thinkers did not have to choose between them. This unity of thought was responsible for significant forward movement in human affairs.
Hypothesis Two: The great thinkers of the Age of Reason, in particular, unfortunately sundered this unity — breaking great thought into science and philosophy, and creating a tension between them that assisted the ascendance of science while relegating philosophy to a secondary position. Further, this had a deleterious effect on human happiness.
Hypothesis Three: Currently, powerful forces are working to reunite science and philosophy. Rather than merely establishing a new relationship, both scientists and philosopher-theologians of the New Thought era are forging a unity that will assist humanity in finally transcending the problems of separation, whether national or notional in character.
Norris, C. (1999). "Theory-change and the logic of enquiry: New bearings in philosophy of science." The Review of Metaphysics, 53(1), 21.
In the West, this work contends, the philosophy of science has defined itself against metaphysical approaches that were older and more eastern in nature — eastern at least via the Bosporus, Greece, and so on. A priori forms of human knowledge, which intimate a unity of science and philosophy, are central to the author's intentions.
Parsons, T.D., & Stafford, N.S. (2005). "Noncommutative geometry for peaceful coexistence between science and theology." Journal of Psychology and Theology, 33(1), 70+.
Parsons states the matter plainly: "Relations between theology and science have historically been antagonistic in part because of their seemingly different methodologies for providing insight and meaning to the nature of the world around us. While theology's focus is upon revelation and faith, science tends to be founded upon empiricism and analysis." He notes, however, that scholarly interest in the relationship between the two has recently emerged, with thinkers on both sides attempting to find ways to improve the relationship so that each field may bring deeper meaning to the other.
Schall, J.V. (1997). "The uniqueness of the political philosophy of Thomas Aquinas." Perspectives on Political Science, 26(2), 85–91.
Schall deals with ideas of power and law, equating political power with "science" in many respects and attempting to join "natural law" to the discussion. He demonstrates how Thomas Aquinas, more than most thinkers, was able to create a workable relationship between science and philosophy even when the predominant worldview argued against it.
Schall, J.V. (1998). "Aristotle: Religion, politics, and philosophy." Perspectives on Political Science, 27(1), 5–12.
Among other assertions, Schall notes that "Reason was the realm of the naturally political and the philosophical, not something belonging to both natural and supernatural realms in a noncontradictory way as it had been for Saint Thomas Aquinas," indicating that he does not view Aquinas as an unproblematic unifier.
Ulfers, F., & Cohen, M.D. (2002). "Friedrich Nietzsche as bridge from nineteenth-century atomistic science to process philosophy in twentieth-century physics, literature and ethics." 21+.
Ulfers and Cohen's work is seminal in explicating the convoluted relationship between science and philosophy in the nineteenth century, with important material concerning the process philosophy that was almost certain to develop as quantum theory moved toward the mainstream.
Wulf, S.J. (2000). "The skeptical life in Hume's political thought." Polity, 33(1), 77.
Wulf uses David Hume's well-known skepticism to contextualize the extreme degrees to which philosophy had been taken before returning to less radical modes. He develops material about antithetical ideas — putting into context the ideas of those philosophers who, working at the edge of the intelligible, refused to "accede to the judgment of reason and even their own senses."
Zukav, Gary. (1984). The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: Bantam.
One of the first statements Zukav makes in this book is that he found, while visiting the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Berkeley, California, that physics "was not the sterile, boring discipline that I had assumed it to be. It was a rich, profound venture, which had become inseparable from philosophy. Incredibly, no one but physicists seemed to be aware of this remarkable development." Zukav traces the new science of philosophy and the new philosophy of science in a readily understandable way. First issued in 1978, this book was likely many readers' introduction to the possibility of rapprochement between science and philosophy.
Zimmerman, D.W. (1997). "Is a final theory conceivable?" The Psychological Record, 47(3), 423+.
This author provides excellent material concerning a "final theory" — one that would necessarily combine physics and philosophy. He cites Stephen Hawking's 1993 work referring to "a complete, consistent, and unified theory of the physical interactions that would describe all possible observations." This notion of a "grand unified theory" or "theory of everything" has become prominent in elementary particle physics in recent years. As such, it is difficult to see how it can be divorced from philosophy.
Zumbrunnen, J. (2002). "Courage in the face of reality: Nietzsche's admiration for Thucydides." Polity, 35(2), 237+.
The ancient Greeks and Nietzsche form the basis for this author's effort to tie together threads from both philosophy and science, with the view that understanding the ancient Greeks will illuminate the scientist-philosophers of today.
"Qualitative literature review and fresh source outreach"
In order to develop information concerning the current state of science and philosophy, fresh information will also be sought from philosophers such as Zukav and other metaphysicians affiliated with the New Thought movement. There are a number of such sources in Africa, notably in Nigeria and South Africa. When the materials have been gathered, they will be assessed to determine whether the hypotheses have been supported.
The relationship between science and philosophy has never been clear-cut. That distinction frequently draws into discussion the issues of philosophy and politics, or political science: is one the same as the other, or are they different, with one superior? The same question might be applied to science and philosophy. The farther one travels into quantum theory, string theory, and even age-old metaphysics as traditionally practiced or as practiced in the New Age, the more these paths lead toward a very close relationship between science and philosophy — if indeed they are not already one and the same.
It would also be a mistake to omit the question of theology: Is it the same as philosophy, minus a godhead? If it is the same, or very similar, what position does science occupy vis-à-vis theology, and can it be thought of as analogous to the relationship between science and philosophy? Or is this entire discussion no more than the old quandary about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin — insoluble, not least because of what we do not yet know? Whether insoluble or not, many have attempted to address it, or at least to bring possibilities into consideration.
While we understand science today to be a discipline of experimentation, theoretical investigation, and application to the physical necessities of the current world and the one we wish to build — the Internet, space travel, bionic human parts, stem cell research, and so on — it was once a far more mundane discipline. Ethics and politics were thought to be practical sciences, enabling humanity to live in peace, relative happiness, and with a minimum of irrationality (Schall, 1998, p. 5). The history of political philosophy, according to Schall (1997, p. 45), is directly related to the history of theology.
Priests — theologians — were considered by Aristotle and his contemporaries to be grounded in the physical world: the world of appeasing anthropomorphic gods, which was in itself a science, based on crops, winds, tides, the sun and moon, and doubtless the rumblings of the earth. Philosophy, on the other hand, was the province of men who intended someday to know all things (Schall, 1998, p. 6).
At that time, it would be fair to say that science — which included political science and anything having to do with arranging the world in more hospitable configurations — was concerned only with "the conditions for living a good life" (Schall, 1998, p. 6). Philosophy, by contrast, concerned itself with thinking in and of itself, regardless of whether life was good or horrid. It concerned itself with absolutes, while science concerned itself with relativities.
Still, Aristotle and his contemporaries considered men to be microcosmoi — beings containing within themselves all grades of being, from barely sentient to highly intellectual, from barely alive to bursting with life. It is this concept that seems to foretell the ideas regarding science and philosophy that have been growing, some would say by leaps and bounds, since the last decades of the previous millennium.
Aristotle defined man as the "rational animal" — the being different from living things that lacked reason, but also different from gods who evidently had no physical form or presence. "Human beings were thus the lowest of the spiritual beings but the highest of those that included matter in their substance" (Schall, 1998, p. 7). If one accepts this early definition, which is remarkably logical even today, it becomes easy to see that there would of necessity be a relationship between science (the physical) and philosophy (the spiritual) that cannot be broken — because to break it would be to propose that humanity was dual, that one part of a man, his body, could act without his soul's involvement, and vice versa. On the face of it, that would be ludicrous. Schall (1998) notes:
"The being composed of body and rational soul achieved its end or perfection when it suffused all of the actions under its real control with this very reason. However, this reason had its own function, its own activity, over and beyond any of its other practical functions of ruling passions, families, or polities, or of making things" (p. 7).
"Hume's skepticism and Nietzsche's bridge to modern physics"
Whether the question of science and philosophy's relationship is ultimately insoluble or not, many have attempted to solve it, or at least to bring possibilities into consideration. From Nietzsche's realism to the modern pursuit of a grand unified theory in quantum string theory, the trajectory of intellectual history points unmistakably toward unity rather than division.
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