Knowledge and Science

Milton’s Paradise Lost is a book I sometimes dip into. For modern readers it does not lend itself to a quick browse. It’s pretty clear from the start who dunnit. My version in paperback contains insightful explanatory notes. Apparently “Science” in the Tempter’s words“ O Sacred, Wise and Wisdom giving Plant, Mother of Science”,* being derived from the Latin verb “scire”, really means what we now understand as “knowledge”. This note seems to be for the benefit of such innocents who are unaware of the process of diachronic semantic change, and who may also entertain misgivings about nuclear power plants. Newton’s apple might jolt us into considering matters of considerable gravity. Today we are concerned more about fallout than with the Fall, more with the atom than with Adam. Science is not primarily concerned with moral questions, yet we have all benefited from science. That science has also furnished Man with the means of self-extermination and involves environmental pollution on a global scale we must accept as collateral damage, call it what you will. Science is not primarily concerned with moral questions. Even though scientific knowledge is based on the axiom that our sensory perceptions, the experiments, observations and theories of science cohere, being phenomena in one and the same time-space continuum, a scientist should not be diverted from his or her quest by troublesome thoughts about extraneous factors, be they social, political or moral in nature, that impinge on the awareness of one indivisible reality. In Milton’s day “science” simply meant “knowledge”. Milton was concerned with the problem of good and evil, the relationship of God and Man, the conflict between Truth and Mammon, not with the complex realities of our modern industrial high-tech world. Perhaps cogito ergo sum, that premise of the modern scientific method, also has a moral dimension. Milton’s Paradise Lost is a book I occasionally dip into.