The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide

by Michael E. Hobart

Overview

In their search for truth, contemporary religious believers and modern scientific investigators hold many values in common. But in their approaches, they express two fundamentally different conceptions of how to understand and represent the world. Michael E. Hobart looks for the origin of this difference in the work of Renaissance thinkers who invented a revolutionary mathematical system--relational numeracy. By creating meaning through numbers and abstract symbols rather than words, relational numeracy allowed inquisitive minds to vault beyond the constraints of language and explore the natural world with a fresh interpretive vision.

The Great Rift is the first book to examine the religion-science divide through the history of information technology. Hobart follows numeracy as it emerged from the practical counting systems of merchants, the abstract notations of musicians, the linear perspective of artists, and the calendars and clocks of astronomers. As the technology of the alphabet and of mere counting gave way to abstract symbols, the earlier "thing-mathematics" metamorphosed into the relational mathematics of modern scientific investigation. Using these new information symbols, Galileo and his contemporaries mathematized motion and matter, separating the demonstrations of science from the linguistic logic of religious narration.

Hobart locates the great rift between science and religion not in ideological disagreement but in advances in mathematics and symbolic representation that opened new windows onto nature. In so doing, he connects the cognitive breakthroughs of the past with intellectual debates ongoing in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674983632
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	04/16/2018
Pages:	520
Sales rank:	1,209,491
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Michael E. Hobart is Professor of History Emeritus, Bryant University, and recently Adjunct Professor in the History Department at Western Washington University.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Rift between Science and Religion 1

Part I A Prayer and a Theory: The Classifying Temper

Religio and Scientia 19

1 A World of Words and Things 34

2 Demonstrable Common Sense: Premodern Science 55

Part II From the "Imagination Mathematical" to the Threshold of Analysis

Teeming Things and Empty Relations 81

3 Early Numeracy and the Classifying of Mathematics 95

4 Thing-Mathematics: The Medieval Quadrivium 115

5 Arithmetic: Hindu-Arabic Numbers and the Rise of Commerce 139

6 Music: Taming Time, Tempering Tone 157

7 Geometry: The Illusions of Perspective and Proportion 178

8 Astronomy: The Technologies of Time 203

Part III Galileo and the Analytical Temper

The Moment of Modern Science 227

9 The Birth of Analysis 239

10 Toward the Mathematization of Matter 267

11 Demonstrations and Narrations: The Doctrine of Two Truths 289

Epilogue: The Great Rift Today 317

Appendixes 327

Illustration Credits 345

Notes 349

Index 493

Editorial Reviews

The immense scope of the chronicle, the professional scholarship, and the depth of insight manifested in this complex and comprehensive study of the rise of Western science provides a narrative both engrossing and enlightening…This book is a gem.

Choice

The Great Rift offers an innovative interpretation of the rupture between science and religion from the time of Galileo. Rather than new methods of experimental science or new cosmological conceptions as traditional accounts would have it, Hobart argues for a revolution in information technology that triggered new developments in early modern mathematics as the real culprit responsible for the ‘Great Rift.’ Informed by a lifetime of work on the history of mathematics as it relates to the history of information technology and intellectual history, this book is full of provocative arguments and fresh perspectives.

J. B. Shank

The Great Rift is a rich, original, and constructively provocative book that trumpets the value of history when examining the contrast between science and religion. Hobart presents a persuasive and deeply analytic overarching argument that avoids simplistic framing. Covering a wide range of material, this book is at once groundbreaking, satisfying, and a joy to read.

Joan Richards

Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God. Something or other happened in Renaissance Europe, the story goes, and it eventually distanced scientists from religion. Hobart locates this great shift in the field of mathematics…To make [his] argument, Hobart presents a virtuosic array of evidence…The Great Rift contains a huge wealth of historical anecdote, and Hobart marshals it confidently.

New Republic - Josephine Livingstone

2018-04-24
Why can't religion and science be reconciled? Because of math.Building on a long career studying information technologies, Hobart (Emeritus, History/Bryant Univ.; Science and Religion in the Thought of Nicolas Malebranche, 1982, etc.) holds that when science and religion relied on verbal literacy—i.e., on explanations in words—it was possible for them to tell much the same story. When, beginning in the Renaissance, the ancient foundations of "modern, relational numeracy" expanded into the full-blown mathematics of calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, and so forth, science had a full vocabulary, so to speak, to explain the universe, and this vocabulary had no need of the divine. The information technologies of literacy and numeracy were sufficiently different that the two realms evolved into "non-overlapping magisteria" that increasingly did not, and indeed could not, talk to each other. Hobart takes a long view of both science and religion, enlisting Aristotle here and Steven Jay Gould there to examine the origins and development of this apparently irreconcilable rift. Of special importance to his narrative is Galileo, who took up the Copernican heliocentric heresy but, unwilling to suffer the fate of heretics, backed away from his early view that the universe ticked along just fine without a supreme being in favor of a tendency to keep quiet about doctrinal matters: "Humans still had purposes, and those purposes could still reflect divine concern for human life and its ultimate redemption, but they resided outside the pale of scientific explanation." For the most part, it has been that way ever since. Scientists do not often venture into theology except to profess atheism, and theologians do not often venture into science except to say that the universe must have been specially created. Throughout the book, Hobart writes accessibly, and on the occasions when he ventures into the information technology of numbers, he backs up what he says with words, a help to readers who are less numerate than Leibniz and Euler.A sturdy contribution to the history of science.

Kirkus Reviews

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