Resurrecting the Renaissance Scientist
“Stay in your lane”
In modern academia, the winning formula for a successful career seems to go as follows: “Find your niche, dig down deep, and go farther than anyone else.” Received wisdom says it is foolhardy to generalize across multiple fields of study. Perhaps one could get away with such an approach in the past, when humanity waded in the shallow end of the knowledge pool. But in the depths of the information age? Forget it.
Perhaps in no academic area is this more apparent than in the natural sciences. For example, biology alone appears well-nigh impossible to master, with its seemingly endless genomic (DNA code), transcriptomic (RNA transcript code), proteomic (protein code), and other “-omics” data sets growing vaster and more complex by the day.
Because there is far more to know on any given topic in the natural sciences than anyone could productively assimilate over the course of a lifetime, much less a career, the goal of the modern scientist should be to specialize in one subject and stick as closely to this expertise as possible. The idea is that if you play your cards right, and pile up a sufficiently high stack of Science and Nature publications, then perhaps one day you’ll get that coveted promotion and maybe even a phone call from the Nobel Committee— a man can dream, can’t he?
Conversely, those who spread themselves too thin fail to make substantial progress in any field, let alone one. Better to “stay in your lane” and the finish race than to bounce around, step on others’ toes, and gas out prematurely.
Now let’s admit that there is certainly some wisdom in this approach. All of us must restrict our physical and intellectual energies to a limited number of tasks. After all, we can’t all be Elon Musk, and even he has his limits.
However, it has been evident for some time that our modern, compartmentalized approach to academics is not broadening our horizons, but shrinking them. For abundant evidence of this, one need look no further than the conceptual framework surrounding both teaching and research in the modern academic-industrial complex.
Academic echo chambers
Our approach to studying the natural sciences, as well as just about every other field, has led to widespread academic siloing, the modern habit of placing each discipline in its own separate, hermetically-sealed thought container. Consequently, each discipline, and increasingly even subdiscipline, becomes at best a world unto itself, and at worst an isolated wandering star, whizzing past the other disciplines like space ships passing in the night.
Such a conception would have been totally foreign to the classically-trained scholar of the Western tradition, who often had a surgeon’s scalpel in one hand and a sculptor’s chisel in the other, carving both men and men from stone. Today, we smugly dismiss such well-rounded individuals as “jacks of all trades, masters of none,” forgetting that many of them were in fact literal “masters” of their primary trade. In place of the “Renaissance man” we have substituted the modern specialist, the “master of one,” if master of even that. If that sounds hyperbolic, just ask the scores of aspiring scholars, from graduate students to pre-tenure assistant professors, suffering from “imposter syndrome,” that nagging doubt that, in spite of one’s expertise, one is still, at bottom, a fraudulent know-nothing.
Is it just me, or is there something profoundly demoralizing, even dehumanizing, about our modern approach to academics, one which seems to have sacrificed balanced breadth for the depths of despair? Have towering figures like da Vinci, Kepler, and Pascal all gone the way of the dinosaur? Is there hope for humane science at the dawn of artificial intelligence?
I believe the answer is “Yes,” but only if we reject modern reductionist approaches to science and embrace the older vision of science as a liberal art.
Stunted science
The term “scientist” is a relatively recent label, and a rather restrictive one at that. Previously, politically-incorrect terms such as “gentlemen naturalist,” “natural philosopher,” or even the scandalous “natural theologian” were preferred in the Christian West, the birth place of modern science. More than merely reflecting the professional demographics of those times, such titles encompassed the breadth of knowledge those thinkers drew upon to understand the universe and how it ticked.
Modern approaches to scientific inquiry, however, stem overwhelmingly from a naturalistic worldview, which reduces all of existence to the supposed rube-Goldberg-like machinations of molecules in motion. Worse still, the philosophy of “scientism” that stems from this worldview goes even further by claiming that science, and science alone (“sola scientia!”), is the only means by which we can arrive at the truth about any topic.
But this is surely a stunted vision of the sciences, an unnatural view of nature. As important as physical mechanisms may be, scripture and universal human experience indicate that there is more, indeed much more, to the story of the cosmos than this.
Classical Christian educators should lead the way in rejecting the false choice between matter and meaning and instead wholeheartedly embrace both. Indeed, expanding one’s exploration of the creation (i.e., biology, geology, astronomy, etc.) to include, for example, the study of the Creator (i.e., theology), is about as natural and obvious a thing to do as studying da Vinci’s creations alongside the writings and biographies of the man himself. It is only our modern naturalistic bias that lead us to feel otherwise.
True, many “enlightened” thinkers of the past may have opted for “reason over revelation,” but the classically-trained scientist emphatically chooses both.
What could be more enlightening than that?
Liberating the natural sciences
Scientific giants like St. Albertus Magnus, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Gregor Mendel studied the Bible and theology (among many other subjects) as much as, if not far more than, the natural sciences, and their scientific work was all the better for it. As a good friend of mine has written, “A humanities-rich version of science is more beneficial and engaging than a humanities-poor version” because “There is a natural and synergistic traffic of great ideas among the liberal arts, including science.”1
Yes, you read that last quotation correctly: Science is indeed a liberal art! Say it with me a thousand times over. Shout it from the rooftops. Science is a liberal art! As such, scientific studies, when paired with the study of the other liberal arts, expand both the mind and the heart to encompass far more than the myopic methodologies of the nit-picking naturalists. Microscopes are fantastic tools for examining the world below, but their focus is all the more clear when paired with a telescope aimed at the heavens above.
The Renaissance man may be extinct, but he is not beyond the hope of resurrection. C. S. Lewis, a holdover “specimen” of “Old Western men” and self-described medieval “dinosaur,”2 provides us with a glimmer of hope. To paraphrase and repurpose an oft quoted passage from his address “The Weight of Glory,”3 if we refuse to content ourselves with tinkering over small problems in the dimly lit slums of scientism, then perhaps we can find our way back to the expansive shores of the liberal arts tradition, tackling the “big questions” under the starry firmament above, basking in the light of another world.4
That, in a nutshell, is the difference between modern, reductionist approaches to science and classical, holistic approaches. The former envisions science as imprisoned, the latter, as liberated.
Science pedagogy in the West largely neglects the rich heritage of the Western liberal arts tradition that nurtured it in its formative years. To reach intellectual maturity, science must move beyond its adolescent prodigality and humbly return to the vast inheritance it is currently squandering. There are tremendous, untapped possibilities for conducting science in a Classical Christian paradigm. The time is long overdue for us to reject the meager methods of modernity and dive headlong into creation in its fullness.
The wind is at our sails. The sea is beckoning.
As Newton famously said, “To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” Clearly, Newton conducted his science on “holiday at the sea.”5
Let’s join him there, shall we?
To learn more about this approach to the sciences, check out my online course offered through Kepler Education, “Biology: Studying Life in Light of the Logos,” now accepting registrations for the 2024–2025 academic year.
Top image credit: Gerrit Dou, Astronomer by Candlelight, c.1665.
Garrett League obtained his doctorate in biology from Vanderbilt and conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell. He works as an independent scholar with Kepler and writes regularly with the League of Believers newsletter ministry at garrettpleague.substack.com.
- p. XV, “Preface,” and p. 6, “Introduction,” Hugh G. Gauch, Jr., Scientific Method In Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ↩︎
- “De Descriptione Temporum,” Inaugural Lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University, 1954. ↩︎
- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, HarperOne, 2001. ↩︎
- For a thorough academic treatment of these options, see: Hugh Gauch, “Big Reason: Public Discussion of Big Questions,” Evangelical Quarterly. 2023; 94(4): 330–337. ↩︎
- Lewis, The Weight of Glory. ↩︎
