Soviet Science

I have been asked to explain my remark yesterday that there never really was all that much scientific progress in the Soviet Union.

Science arose out of the uniquely Christian rejection of humanity's otherwise universal concepts of eternalism, that the universe has always existed and always will; animism, that the universe is a living thing, an animal; pantheism, that the universe is itself the ultimate reality, God; cyclicism, that everything which happens has already happened in exactly the same form, and will happen again in exactly the same form, an infinite number of times; and astrology, that events on earth are controlled by the movements of celestial bodies within an eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic and cyclicistic universe.

Science cannot prove that these closely interrelated things are not the case; it simply has to presuppose their falseness, first established in thirteenth-century Paris when their Aristotelian expression was condemned at the Sorbonne specifically by ecclesial authority, and specifically by reference to the Biblical Revelation. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe. And it is why science did not last, or flower as it might have done, in the Islamic world: whereas Christianity sees the rationally investigable order in the universe as reflecting and expressing the rationality of the Creator, the Qur'an repeatedly depicts the will of Allah as capricious.

No less ruinous was dialectical materialism. It begat Lysenkoism, Japheticism, and Kuznetsov's 1952 attempt to enforce "the total renunciation of Einstein's conception, without compromise or half-measure." It was practically impossible to communicate or interact with scientists from several major countries. There was a heavy dependence on Western equipment. Even the atomic bomb and the space programme relied greatly on previous American and German work.

We all know about Soviet computers, and about Soviet attempts to copy Concorde. When British scientists were at work on penicillin, their Soviet counterparts were actually boasting that they were close to perfecting a synthetic drug "likely to have curative properties not inferior to those of Peruvian balsam." Balsam of Peru was introduced to Europe by Nicholas Monardes of Seville. In 1560.

Forget the earth being flat. No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of "Gotham" to refer to New York.

Forget Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the earth moved around the sun (although he could not prove that scientifically at the time - we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing), but that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing.

Whereas the abuses of the Soviet system really did happen. Well within living memory.