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"The book of nature that we must read is written with the fingers of God."
(Michael Faraday)
You cannot find, perhaps in the entire history of science, a case more contemplative than "Michael Faraday", he grew up as a child in a poor family in a London neighborhood, he was slow in his learning and did not complete his studies because he could not pronounce some letters easily, and even when he found his way in the discoverer of sodium and potassium, the famous chemist at the time, "Humphrey Davey", and the signs of his genius appeared, he was traveling with him as a servant, and Mr. Davey's wife worked to remind him of the extent of the decadence of that job as much as Possibility(1).
Without experience in physics or mathematics, without wealth or a job in scientific research, you would have expected that no matter how talented Faraday was, he would inevitably stand at the limits of the hobby, but he didn't. We are talking here about one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, the father of electromagnetism, no student at different stages of education can but pass by the name of this man who was associated with various laws, quantities and innovations that made what we know about physics, and by extension the whole universe, what it is today. It is enough for you to know that without this man's achievements you would not be able to read this now.
That's why Faraday's life has attracted the attention of so many writers, that you will find his story in almost every physics book presented to the public, but the most striking in all of this man's life was -no doubt- seven years, between the ages of thirteen and twenty, spent in a bookbinding workshop after he left school, usually you do not find anyone to dwell on it, there Faraday learned on his own.
Michael Faraday
Sindamani the Savior
This type of learning about the methodological system is characterized by the fact that it allows your passion to lead you, you do not need to continue learning things that you do not like just because they are in the curriculum, take language classes, literature, or geography for a high school student who loves physics, Faraday was free of all that and went on to read only what he liked who wrote in this workshop, but that is only half the story.
While working in the workshop, Faraday's most influential book was "Improving the Mind"(2) by the author, theologian, poet, experimental philosopher and hymn writer famous in Christian circles "Isaac Watts", in this book Watts provides very important tips for the learning mechanism and shows how best to benefit from lectures, reading, conversations and how to write notes, in fact Watts' advice was the reason Faraday's transition from a bookbinding career to working with Humphrey Davey.
The book "Improving the Mind" by Isaac Watts
Where Watts advised his readers to keep a blogging diary, as well as pointed out the importance of attending lectures and exchanging messages with people with common interests, this was the reason why Faraday, a young man in his early twenties, accepted an invitation to "Humphrey Davy" lectures, during which he recorded everything the man said with an enviable organization, and when he wanted to work for the man, he sent him those wonderful posts as a gift, and as soon as Davy saw it, he asked him to work as an assistant, and from here Faraday's path towards creativity began. Scientific.
But Faraday did not find this book in the binding workshop, it was his book. Faraday was a devout Christian, but he followed a sect called "Glassism"(3), founded around 1730 by a Christian priest named John Glass, who built his ideas on the basis that the kingdom of Christ is spiritual, and therefore the Christian church could not be built or supported by political weapons or actions on any basis other than the Word and Spirit of Christ.
From here Glass was interested in the literal application of the committed and dedicated words of the Bible, and when he was deposed because of his beliefs from the Church of Scotland he founded his own church and his ideas then spread throughout Europe, in Britain it was published by "Robert Sandman" and the followers of the movement were called "Sandmans", including the Faraday family, who was raised on those teachings.
Robert Sandman
The reader in the book of nature
But the followers of this church were relatively few, and they were regarded with a degree of contempt among Christians, perhaps for this reason they did not care much about preaching their ideas, a point that influenced so much the young Faraday by extension, as he was not eager to argue to prove the validity of his religious method, and therefore he would not use science to confirm the validity of his way to God, which freed him for something else more important to him, which is to use God to confirm to him the correctness of his way in science!
To understand the depth of this idea and its impact on Faraday, let us consider a famous quote in which Faraday says: "The book of nature that we must read is written with the fingers of God", Faraday uses here the metaphor of the two books(4), which says that God revealed himself through the "book of nature" with its organizing laws, and the "Bible" in its historical narrative and consideration of miracles.
But the metaphor of the two books is usually used to demonstrate the existence of God, while Faraday used it to search for facts among the mountains of opinions, intuitions and common sense, he imagined that scientific facts are the words of God in the book of nature, so that he once said that "facts never fail us, and their evidence is always true", and his job was to use experimentation to reach those facts, and experimentation in Faraday's school is the most important thing in science, and he was interested in theoretical production but he always distinguished accurately And clarity between empirical facts and theoretical explanations.
In the same footsteps, Faraday set out for the laws of nature. Since facts are the language of nature, the laws of nature were the fixed grammatical rules of this language, which link words together in useful sentences, and Faraday once wrote, "God dealt in his material creation with his laws," Faraday believed that God's creation of the universe involved the creation of laws that work together in harmony to keep its components in balance, and therefore they are immutable laws.
In his book "Michael Faraday.. George Kantor*, professor of the history of science at the University of Leeds, says that principles such as "harmony of nature", "simplicity in its apparent complexity" and "unity of nature" were not the end stations in Faraday's path, that is, he did not reach them through his work in the field of scientific research, but on the contrary, they were the starting points of scientific research, so Faraday's efforts to unify electricity, magnetism and light were consistent with his metaphysical convictions.
The book "Michael Faraday .. Sandmani and the World" by George Kantor
Faraday had developed a model based on what resembles – to some extent – the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy is neither destroyed nor created from nothing, but can be transformed from one form to another. In a series of lectures he gave in 5, he explicitly stated that God had placed a certain amount of power in the creation of the universe, so it could not be diminished or increased from the universe, because humans are unable to control God's creation, whether that power or the laws He created to govern.
The fact that Faraday is therefore a precise system designed according to a divine plan that used laws to regulate it, those original laws are still in force until now, because of the perfection of God's plan, and they are also simple laws on the complexity of nature, and consistent with each other because they serve one goal, and are suitable for every time and place because they are universal in nature, and scientists can observe nature and collect facts wisely by understanding the small number of laws that govern cosmic phenomena, this is the universe that Faraday entered the realm of science And not what came out with it.
Science and religion
Some may see a contradiction in those ideas with the scientific methodology that may require complete absence of previous ideas before entering the area of searching for facts, but this is unrealistic, we are usually loaded with previous assumptions whatever their source, and these ideas may confirm our scientific results or may contradict them, and as Karl Popper (6), the most famous philosopher of science, explains, the objectivity of scientific progress and its rationality are not due to personal objectivity and the rationality of the scientist himself, but may discover the mathematical proof or unconscious scientific theories, guided by inspiration of an aesthetic (or religious, say) nature rather than rational thinking, but Popper, like Faraday, though radically different in their respective philosophy of science, agreed that such revelations should be subject to the microscope of rational scrutiny.
Karl Popper
In any case, Faraday's case opens the door to contemplation of one of the most famous models that explain the possible relationship between religion and science, the "model of dialogue"(7) which assumes common ground between the two domains in their previous assumptions, methods and concepts. For example, religious doctrine may have encouraged science, assuming that creation, being a determined product, is orderly and rationally manageable, so one can expect that there are laws that can be discovered from this idea, which is probably what happened in the case of Faraday.
Ian Barbour(8), an American physicist and specialist in the relationship between science and religion, believes that religion can push deeper than that, since God's creation is inherently limited in power compared to God's total capabilities, the laws of nature cannot be reached automatically, but some effort must be made in interpreting them, which can urge the need for an empirical investigation or work on building theories, especially since obtaining religious knowledge itself may require Some logic, creating intellectual models, metaphors, etc.
Although this model of dialogue or complementarity between science and religion, especially from the clergy, is supported, it is not the most common in the field of philosophy that studies science and religion (philosophers are more inclined to the hypothesis of "non-overlap"), for two main reasons: first, at some point this dialogue will cause a critical contradiction between science and religion, which in turn will lead to the second reason, which is that science will become an arena trying to prove Or denying the existence of God.
In the case of Faraday, his previous ideas derived from his doctrine led, in addition to useful results, to major scientific problems(9) in his thought, for example, he had opposed the atomic school based on the ideas themselves, as well as his reservations about the definition and definition of "energy", which prevented him from advancing in understanding it, the source of these reservations has to do with the fact that he believed in a "universe full of energy", and that only God knew what it was, Faraday set out from that point to reject the mechanical philosophy of Foundation. On the other hand, you will not find many comments by Faraday on the issue of the creation of the universe, and his religiosity literally did not explain the number of days of the creation of the universe in an interpretive way.
Two Paths to Truth
But the most inviting reflection in this context was that the scientists who decided to fight the two worlds together, the world of religion and the world of science, and accomplished them together, were very keen to separate the two scopes, and did not slip into the focus of throwing religion into scientific conflicts, or throwing science into religious conflicts, perhaps for the simple reason that they know that if the convictions of religion lead to scientific ideas, they do not do so literally, that is, they lie in the background of the world as a guiding model. No scientific facts recorded in his Bible, whatsoever.
Faraday was one of those, as was Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian Catholic astronomer and priest who concluded that the universe is expanding and led him to the Big Bang model, and you may not even know that the Hubble constant is now known as the "Hubble Lemameter constant" modified by scientists of the International Astronomical Union in 2018, to fulfill the man's right to this most famous constant in cosmology.
Lemaitre, although he was the work of a clergyman, was perhaps more careful than Faraday himself on that point(10) about the separation of science and religion, often pointing out that "the Bible is not a science book, as long as you realize that you will get rid of the idea of the contradiction between science and religion," and he referred to this harmony between his work of science and religion once, saying: "I was just as interested in reaching truth from the point of view of religious salvation as I was interested in reaching it from the point of view of scientific certainty. It seemed to me that there were two paths to the truth, and I decided to follow both."
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*Basically, the author relied in this report on the book "Michael Faraday .. Sandmani and the World", by George Cantor, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Leeds.