Women's history 101

People often ask, why are there so few famous women writers, artists, scientists, and intellectuals?

They seem to be forgetting that, in previous centuries, it was rare for women to be educated. Women also often died younger due to infections contracted in childbirth.

Women were not allowed to attend university until the 1870s, and even then they were not allowed to graduate.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was very difficult for women to obtain a university education. In 1870 Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon helped to set up Girton College, the first university college for women, but it was not recognised by the university authorities. In 1880 Newnham College was established at Cambridge University. By 1910 there were just over a thousand women students at Oxford and Cambridge. However, they had to obtain permission to attend lectures and were not allowed to take degrees. 

Without a university degree it was very difficult for women to enter the professions. After a long struggle the medical profession had allowed women to become doctors. Even so, by 1900 there were only 200 women doctors. It was not until 1910 that women were allowed to become accountants and bankers. However, there were still no women diplomats, barristers or judges. (John Simkin)

The first social groups to routinely educate their daughters were the Unitarians and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), starting in the 1840s.

When women did succeed in producing literature or scientific research, quite often someone else got the credit for it, or their contribution or achievement was minimised. Even now, there are people who dispute that Ada Lovelace wrote programs for Babbage's calculating engine, and want to impute authorship of the Brontë sisters novels' to their brother Branwell. The scientific achievements of Lise Meitner, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Hedy Lamarr, Dorothy Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin, Katherine Jones, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, Caroline Herschel, and many others, are forgotten or sidelined. I did not learn about any of these women at school - I found out about them by researching on the internet, and reading blogposts from the Finding Ada project.

Many nineteenth-century female scientists and mathematicians were told that their scientific and mathematical activities were bad for their womb. Many were prevented from attending university, or not allowed to graduate, or made to work in a separate laboratory from the men.

The work of female writers, poets, artists, composers, and playwrights suffered a similar fate. Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings were attributed to her father. The Nobel Prize for Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars went to her male PhD supervisor. The work of the women Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist artists is largely forgotten.

A similar fate happens to Black & minority ethnic (BME) and LGBT scientists, authors, and heroes. And if you are a woman and BME and LGBT, then you are doubly or triply doomed to be sidelined. Just look at the marginalisation of Mary Seacole, Edward Carpenter, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and many another BME and/or LGBT person.

Even today, women's novels are marketed as less serious than novels by men. They also receive less reviews in serious journals.  The novels of white male authors are taught on English literature courses; the novels of female authors are taught on courses of women's studies or women's literature. Maureen Johnson writes:

For much of history, women read the works of men. Every once in a while we see a woman cracking through, maybe changing her name, maybe hiding her work, or maybe breaking through the strength of her genius or good luck or both. Then we see a huge break in the early 20th century, a flux of brilliant women. Women start to climb into the bestseller charts, but not so much into the reading lists.

There is no doubt that women (despite massive disadvantages) have achieved great things in every field of artistic, literary, and scientific endeavour, but all too often, they are forgotten, sidelined, their achievements dismissed or diminished, their work not taught in schools or universities. The corpus of literature that is considered "the canon" is overwhelmingly by white men (usually dead white men, usually heterosexual). No-one is saying that these authors should no longer be taught; just that "the canon" should include women, BME people, and LGBT people.

a symbol for science

There's an interesting article by Paul Root Wolpe in the Opinion section of New Scientist putting forward the idea that science needs a symbol so that people can express support for science, because it is under attack.

Is science really under attack (apart from by a few nutters on the extreme end of religion)? The article even admits that plenty of people of faith do support science. My own research into Pagans and science found a lot of support for science. Dr Wolpe himself is an expert in bioethics, so I guess he comes up against a lot of overlap and potential conflict between religion and science in his work.

American Atheists use the atomic whirl as a symbol, and it is recognised as the symbol for atheism on veterans' gravestones. That symbol might be one possibility. The New Scientist article points out that the DNA double helix won't do, because the symbol must represent physics and chemistry as well as biology. He goes on to say:

And it should be easy to modify, perhaps to identify a subject area - able to accommodate within it a double helix, or an atom, or the word NASA, or any other refinement locating the bearer in the scientific firmament. Perhaps it could even accommodate a cross or star of David or some other symbol to state: "I am a Christian (or Jew or Muslim) and support science as an enterprise."

You could certainly fit a pentagram or a chalice in the middle of an atomic whirl.

As to the points that the symbol would express support for...

• I'm not sure that I want a rigid demarcation between the areas that religion and science can pronounce upon, as I am not a supporter of the non-overlapping magisteria theory. May the person with the best evidence win the debate.
• I do want to express support for the scientific method, and empiricism generally.
• I think that politicians all too often make decisions which fly in the face of scientific evidence.
• I do want to show that I am full of awe and wonder at the beauty of the universe as revealed by science.
• However, I do think science could be more open to phenomena that do not appear to have a material basis (they probably do, but no-one has worked out how to measure them yet).
• I don't believe that scientists are entirely objective; they are too often influenced by politics and ideology.
• I don't want to express support for Dawkins' dismissal of myth and fairy-tales (I am sure no-one ever took them literally; they express mythopoeic truths)
• And I do think science should take ethical and environmental concerns into consideration more often.
• I would like to see more awareness among scientists of Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts.
• I would like to see more awareness among scientists of the history and philosophy of science generally, and how many times science and technology has made situations worse instead of making them better.

 So I probably wouldn't wear the symbol even if it existed, because I might not be able to sign up for everything it stands for, even though I think science is a jolly good thing and should form the basis of more decisions than it does.

The symbol could be an atom, except that it is already in use for a particular group. It could be a chemical flask, but that would not encompass astronomy. It's difficult to think of a symbol that would encompass the whole of science. Maybe a pair of compasses to represent the idea of measuring? or a pair of scales to indicate weighing up the evidence?

Will atheism supplant religion?

According to a blog at Psychology Today, atheism will replace religion because it provides a better explanation of how the world works. This is based on a Frazerian/Tylorian assumption that the primary function of religion is to explain how the world works.

I would argue that the primary function of religion is to provide a community of shared meaning, values and practice. Belief is secondary to these functions. Of course fundamentalists' explanations of how the world works (both morally and physically) are way off reality as evidenced by scientific research, personal experience, and any sense of spirituality.

The article suggests:

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people's daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

Not all religions require "slavish adherence to unscientific beliefs". The liberal and mystical tendency in religion has been questioning dogma for centuries. In the West, this questioning has resulted in four great liberal traditions: the Society of Friends (aka Quakers), the Unitarians, liberal Judaism, and the Pagan revival (which includes various traditions). None of these traditions requires adherence to a creed or even belief in God(s). They are about exploring the meaning of life (drawing on both secular and sacred sources of inspiration) among a community of shared values. In Islam, the mystical tradition of Sufism fulfils a similar role; and Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism are similarly diverse and include liberal perspectives. Please do some research before dismissing all religion as irrational and dogmatic.

The second aspect of this argument, that religion is about providing reassurance in an uncertain world, depends on what is meant by reassurance. Liberal religion provides the reassurance of having a community of shared values and interests, but it does not provide reassurance on the subject of life after death. Liberal religion is about enjoying being alive now, not about a future existence which is very uncertain.

Mythology and religion

New Scientist: The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything

But are we really getting any closer? Do we dare ask whether the search is fundamentally misguided? Could belief in a physical theory that unifies the secrets of the material world - a "hidden code" of nature - be the scientific equivalent of the religious belief in oneness held by the billions who go to churches, mosques and synagogues every day?

Even before what we now call physics existed, ancient Greek philosophers pondered whether the diversity of nature could radiate from a single source, a primal substance. Thales, regarded by Aristotle as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, proposed that everything was made of water, a substance he believed represented nature's dynamic essence. Later, Pythagoras and his followers believed that nature was a mathematical puzzle, constructed through ratios and patterns that combine integers, and that geometry was the key to deciphering it.

The idea of mathematics as a fundamental gateway to nature's secrets re-emerged during the late Renaissance. Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton made it clear that the mathematical description of nature succeeds only through the painstaking application of the scientific method, where hypotheses are tested by experiments and observations and then accepted or rejected. Physics became the science of the "how", leaving the "why" for philosophy and religion. When Newton was asked why matter attracts matter with a strength that weakens with the square of the distance, he answered that he "feigned no hypotheses"; it was enough to provide a quantitative description of the phenomenon.

That, however, is only half the story. To Newton, God was the supreme mathematician and the mathematical laws of nature were Creation's blueprint. As science advanced, the notion that god interfered explicitly with natural phenomena faded away, but not the idea that nature's hidden code lay in an all-encompassing mathematical theory. Einstein's "God" was far removed from Newton's, as he famously said: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists." His search for a unified field theory was very much a search for the essence of this natural god.

I agree that many of the assumptions made by physics and other sciences are hangovers from religious discourse. For example, the idea that the universe has laws seems to be a hangover from the idea of a Lawgiver (i.e. God).

But the passage quoted above runs together some very different theological concepts. The "oneness" allegedly espoused by "the billions who go to churches, mosques and synagogues" is very different depending on which of those billions you ask. Many members of the Abrahamic traditions believe that God is the ground of all being and not literally a person.  Christians are usually Trinitarians (that's a very different idea of "oneness", and interpretations of the Trinity vary wildly, even among people who are supposed to subscribe to the same doctrine on it). And neither Muslims nor Jews nor Unitarians believe in the Trinity. 

The idea of the single source of all existence is a neoPlatonic concept, again very different from Abrahamic ideas of God, both then and now. And Spinoza was a pantheist (though the article does point out that his idea of God was different from that of Newton).

The tweet alerting readers to the posting of the article said:

The quest for a "theory of everything" is driven by the same urges as religion - so we should stop http://bit.ly/ckZJX1

... implying that if religion does it, it must be wrong for scientists to do it (or am I being paranoid?)

My response was:

please don't lump all religion together - not all practitioners of religion believe literally in their mythology

followed by this:

do you have any scientific evidence for the urges that drive what you refer to as "religion"? #SoBoredOfLiteralMindedPeople

Anyway, the article is really interesting, and the author seems to know a bit more about theology than the sort of people who usually write these things; and I appreciate that it's difficult to be subtle in a tweet. But I'm fed up with the way some scientific commentators persist in lumping all practitioners of religion in one box, marked IRRATIONAL, DO NOT OPEN.

Also available on my Tumblr blog.

religion and science

Just been watching the absolutely marvellous Wonders of the Solar System (episode 1). Lots of beautiful imagery, lots of fascinating information about the solar system, and how the cycles of the sun drive river systems, and how to work out how much sunlight actually falls on the Earth.

Only one teensy little quibble. In the first five minutes of the programme, Prof Brian Cox says "science is different from all the religions that have been practised here in Varanasi; you can test science's explanations for things, you don't have to take them on faith".

Yep, that's true. Except that most religion is not about explaining how the universe works. Hinduism, the main religion of India, has multiple creation stories, all of which exist happily in parallel with each other and with science. They are symbolic stories.

I know there are lots of mad fundies who think that their religion explains how the world works, and I know they shout really loudly, and grab all the media attention, because for some reason journalists just love watching religious people frothing at the mouth (look how much media attention that old hypocrite Ratzinger gets).

But lots of religious people belong to a religion because they want the sense of community, and the mythological structure, the shared values, and the spiritual practices that go with it (meditation, prayer, singing, contemplation, yoga, whatever).

Most Unitarian Universalists and many Pagans and Quakers do religion because it reflects the inner reality of the psyche and they can share their spiritual journeys with others who share the same symbolism. It's not about belief, it's about spiritual practices (the efficacy of which can be verified empirically, by seeing if the people who do them are happier, calmer, etc.)

Many liberal people of religion enjoy science and find it fascinating and beautiful. I enjoy science very much, and wish that some scientists didn't think that all people of religion are nutters, just because some people of religion are out-and-out bigots and fools.

As Carl Sagan once said, "A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge." (But this should probably be taken in context with everything else that he said about religion.)

Omega point

Andy Pakula has written an interesting blog-post critiquing the view that we are evolving towards greater consciousness. He writes:

I have nothing against a good story, as long as we recognize that it is a story - to be taken metaphorically rather than as a fact. The problem with false facts is that they are eventually revealed, leaving behind the wreckage of shattered faith and lives roughly stripped of the meaning that sustained them. The world that we are told is evolving spiritually is also the site of tremendous hostility and hatred, an increasing gap between rich and poor, and catastrophic environmental degradation. Will these contrary trends not rattle the new stories?

The whole thing started with Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the Omega point, and was also put forward by Oberon Zell in his Gaia thealogy (which he also derived in part from the process philosophy of A N Whitehead and others).

I'm rather enamoured of process philosophy and its related ideas, but I can see how it could be seen as unrealistic in the face of all the negative stuff out there. I must admit, I would be quite reluctant to give it up, but would be forced to do so if it was shown to be contrary to evidence.

Moons of Jupiter

January 7, 1610

• Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei first observed three of the eventual four Galilean moons through his telescope:Io, Europa, and Callisto.
  

Wow. Four hundred years ago today, Galileo got out his telescope and observed the moons of Jupiter. There are now known to be 63 of them. Imagine how it must have been, discovering these new things which would undermine the commonly accepted model of the solar system. Exciting but scary.

Yay!

I've finished my dissertation, "Do Pagans see their beliefs as compatible with science?" (short answer: yes). Thanks to all those who took part in the survey.

Questionnaire

Are you a Pagan with views about science and religion? Would you be interested in completing my research questionnaire, "Pagans and science"? Thanks!

more on Pagans and science

Various websites and blogs talking about issues relating to Paganism and science:

• Starhawk: Pagans Embrace Science - On Faith at washingtonpost.com From a Pagan point of view, there’s no contradiction between religion and science. Our Goddess is immanent in the earth and the cycles of nature, and the more we understand about the earth, the deeper is our sense of awe and wonder.
• Madeleine Bunting: It is unscientific to pour wholesale scorn on complementary medicine | Comment is free | The Guardian
• The Wiccan Scientist: The Equinox and the Egg
  A Wiccan physicist
• Massey University: Dr Kathryn Rountree
• Accidental Historian: The Two Worst Things to Happen to Mythology, Part 1 reflecting on the problem with taking everything literally
• Nemeton: the darkness at the end of the paradigm
• Nemeton: why birds sing

Classical Pagan science

Science and Medieval Christianity by Richard Carrier (with lots of comments on classical pagan science). A fascinating blogpost, but I must take issue with the author's definition of religion:

'To be clear, by "religion" here (since I use that word in a different sense in other contexts) I mean any belief system that places faith above evidence and reason, accepting evidence and reason only when they do not conflict with an accepted set of faith-claims. Hence those two options for a religious person faced with scientific facts that contradict her faith: she can change her faith (and thus place science, and hence evidence, first in authority when choosing what to believe) or oppose science. Religion always produces the latter sort of person, even when it also produces the former, and that's what's wrong with it.'

That's kind of a circular argument. The word religion means "reconnection" (from religare). What he is referring to here is a creedal religion. Both ancient and modern Paganisms were and are non-creedal (i.e. there is no standard set of beliefs to which Pagans must adhere). Many Pagans employ something like the scientific method in trying to understand our spiritual experiences - i.e. we have a working hypothesis to interpret them, test it against others' experiences and hypotheses, and so on.

Similarly, many Buddhists (including the Dalai Lama) place reason and evidence above faith. For example, the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if it was scientifically proved that reincarnation doesn't happen; he said that he would advise his followers to stop believing in it.

Similarly, Unitarians have three main values: freedom, reason, and tolerance, and do not impose a creed (and many of them are atheists, or at least non-theists).

The difference is, that these people feel the need to follow a spiritual path of some kind, which is focussed on values and not beliefs. Also many of us would admit mystical feelings and experiences as quasi-evidence (not the same as observable material evidence, but enough to base a working hypothesis on).

However, there's loads of interesting points about science in ancient pagan times. Some scientists were persecuted, but not everywhere:

Anaxagoras was prosecuted by the Athenians for blasphemy simply for theorizing the sun is a hot stone. Other pagans tried to launch a blasphemy prosecution against Aristarchus when he claimed the earth revolves around the sun. Lucian had a contract put out on his head for claiming the miracles of a certain cult had natural explanations in ordinary fraud. Likewise, Neoplatonism sometimes resembled medieval Christianity in its disinterest in empirical studies and obsession with mystical approaches to science, often through armchair reasoning and "inspired intuition." But there was one enormous difference: science-hating pagans never had the institutional power and clout to enforce their views on the general society (all Anaxagoras and Aristarchus had to do to avoid their influence was leave town), but the Christians achieved and maintained precisely that power for many centuries, and so pervasively there was no way to escape their influence. What they did with that power was sufficiently scary that we should never want that to happen again.

There is of course another reason for disliking science - the potential for the invention of firecake and the like (nuclear weapons, etc.).

However, the benefits of science (medicine, astronomy, etc.) probably outweigh its disadvantages.

The reason that any pagans who hated science couldn't gain any leverage was because paganism (like Hinduism, Buddhism, Unitarianism, Judaism, and even Islam) accommodated and accommodates many different schools of thought:

freedom of thought not only existed, but was widely practiced and embraced, across the whole of the Roman world before Christianity came to power. Although things did start to roll toward fascism during the chaos of the 3rd century ... before then the vast diversity of philosophical and scientific sects and schools is evidence enough. Such open diversity could not have been the case had freethought been effectively opposed, and would not have been the case had it not been widely enough encouraged. Political freedom of speech was limited. But science was apolitical. Indeed, the phenomenon of "eclecticism," a widespread independence of thought whereby scientists and philosophers could pick and choose principles and theories from among all sects and schools as they themselves saw fit (rather than aligning themselves with only one) was the dominant intellectual fashion under the Hellenistic Greeks and especially the Romans. This is a fact of the times, a social and intellectual phenomenon that Christianity often attacked and then effectively eliminated.

Also, ancient pagans had some pretty inspiring ideas:

the greatest aspirations of the pagans [were] their struggling ideals of democracy and human rights, just like their empirical ideals and the scientific spirit they inspired...

And in a comment, the author continues:

the values that you learned to embrace that inspire you to value the pursuit of science came ultimately from pagans, and even though through Christian intermediaries, these were always (as history shows) intermediaries heavily influenced by the pagans who got this ball started. This is as true in democracy (a pagan idea filtered through Christian intellectuals heavily influenced and inspired by the pagan democratic thinkers and pagan democratic ideals) as in science.

And in a discussion about the relative merits of Plato and Augustine:

Plato ... advocated the advancement of science: he insisted on an education in, a deep study of, and actual progress in the mathematical sciences (particularly harmonics and astronomy) and he himself attempted to further work in those fields with his own advice and direct support of scientists in his school.

There's another discussion about astrology, as a Christian apologist asserted that Christians abolished astrology; the author points out that:

Attacks on astrology, often very sophisticated and bold, were already a staple in pagan antiquity.

The author maintains that there's nothing particular about paganism as a religion that actually encourages scientific enquiry. I beg to differ. A belief that the divine is immanent in the world (whether pantheism, animism, or polytheism) encourages curiosity about this world, and a love for it. Belief in magic encourages a desire to learn about the hidden workings of the world, and hence to science (i.e. chemistry came out of alchemy, physics from cosmology, and astronomy out of astrology). Not having a creed allows freedom of thought and enquiry.

He also asserts that the contribution of Hindus and Muslims to science were relatively minor. Really? Then how come we're using a Hindu numerical system? (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) Hindu mathematics was very advanced - they even had quadratic equations. Whereas the Christians had a superstitious fear of zero. (See The Nothing That Is: A natural history of zero by Robert Kaplan.) The Hindus also had advanced metallurgy. What about algebra (and algorithms, from Al Khwarizmi, the bloke who invented algebra)? And the many other Muslim inventions, in fields as diverse as Agricultural sciences, Applied sciences, Astrology, Astronomy, Chemistry (from al kimia, the black art), Earth sciences, Mathematics, Mechanics, Medicine, Optics, Psychology, Social sciences, and Zoology?

But it's a really good article, and I strongly recommend reading it.

the Enlightenment and contemporary Paganism

Some notes I gleaned from Enlightenment Britain and the Creation of the Modern World by Roy Porter.

It was interesting to see the origins of some the ideas we now hold dear. It seems to me that modern Paganisms are empiricist, whereas revealed religions are a priori and essentialist or systematic. This would go a long way towards explaining the lack of any formalised theological system in modern Paganisms.

Apparently (p 56), the idea of the pineal gland as "the seat of the soul" comes from Descartes. It was part of his attempt to separate the body from the soul (mainstream Christian thought had insisted on the unity of body and soul, because of the doctrine of bodily resurrection). Descartes' insistence that body and soul were separate represented a mechanistic view of the universe; he also didn't believe that animals had consciousness.

The phrase "the Book of Nature" comes from early science, and the writings of Francis Bacon in particular (circa 1620). In 1605, Bacon (as Lord Chancellor) separated science from theology in order to get round the problem of churchmen who were wary of prying into God's secrets. Bacon said that theologians studied the Bible, whereas natural philosophers studied the Book of Nature. (p 56)

The idea of the priesthood of all believers is a Protestant idea (originally found in Greek Orthodox Christianity) which has fed directly into modern Paganisms, and which was strongly influenced by Locke's empiricism. Locke said that the mind matures from ignorance (the tabula rasa) to knowledge by gaining practical experience through the senses. His ideas of rational self-responsibility tie in nicely with the idea of direct contact with the divine. (pp 69-71)

Another similarity is the belief in formulating your own belief system.

"every man in this enlightened age (having been fully instructed by those genteel and easy conveyances of knowledge, newspapers and magazines..." [presumed to have]... "the liberty of making a philosophy (and I might add indeed a religion) for himself." (Alexander Catcott)

Indeed, it was during the Enlightenment that some early advocates of a return to Paganism began to make themselves heard, including Erasmus Darwin (who wrote about Linnaeus' sexual system of plant classification in terms of classical mythology, and believed that sex was the basic principle of life), William Hamilton (excavator of Pompeii and Herculaneum), and Richard Payne-Knight (a friend of Josiah Wedgwood and William Hamilton's publisher). (p 273)

Of course, the seeds of Romanticism were planted in the Enlightenment with the cult of the sublime. I had always assumed that the Romantics were the major impulse behind the Pagan revival (despite the strong Christian streak in Romanticism, expressed in, among other things, Gothic architecture); so I was interested to see these Pagan impulses in the Enlightenment. One also thinks of the enthronement of the Goddess Reason... I also think the pendulum swinging from reason to romance has not stopped oscillating and we are still feeling the reverberations.