Religion, the Occult and Philosophy as Central Sources of Inspiration for the Development of Modern Science

Written and posted to online groups on  7 July 2010 

Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy were central to the Scientific Revolution through the inspiration they gave to the cosmological explorations of Jonannes Kepler,Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton as well as the occult discipline  of alchemy to the chemical research of Issac Newton.Stephen Hawking,one of the leading figures in modern scientific cosmology,also invokes  explicitly the inspirational relationship  between religious and   scientific cosmology in his  A Brief History of Time,where he explores,among other questions, the subject of gaining  a unified grasp of the fundamental laws of nature, a level of knowledge  he argues would enable human beings understand the mind of God.The point here is,religion, spirituality and the occult can and have  inspired scientific discovery.

Religion and the Occult as Inspiring Science

This does not imply that Hawkins claimed or implied that there  is a scientific basis for belief in God.I  also did  not state that Hawkin's book indicates  that "scientific facts can be gleaned from superstitious beliefs",superstition being what I believe you mean by religion,a 'superstition' you acknowledge,however, a  man of Hawkin's intelligence still considers it relevant to entertain.

What I state was that  "Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy were central to the Scientific Revolution through the inspiration they gave to the cosmological explorations of Johannes Kepler,Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton as well as the occult discipline  of alchemy to the chemical research of Issac Newton.Stephen Hawking,one of the leading figures in modern scientific cosmology,also invokes  explicitly the inspirational relationship  between religious and   scientific cosmology in his  A Brief History of Time,where he explores,among other questions, the subject of gaining  a unified grasp of the fundamental laws of nature, a level of knowledge  he argues would enable human beings understand the mind of God.The point here is,religion, spirituality and the occult can and have inspired scientific discovery."

 Note the words emphasized in black. I repeatedly state a relationship between religion and science as one  of inspiration,which is very different from stating that scientists  derive facts, from the study of religion.

Cross Fertilization between Forms of Knowledge

Inspiration  in this context can be described as  a motive force leading to the development of knowledge.The source of inspiration does not have to be an identical form of knowledge as the knowledge it eventually inspires.A form of knowledge can be understood as one of the distinctive categories,with its own distinctive procedures,through which human beings develop,organize and apply knowledge(Paul Hirst, "Liberal Education and the Forms of Knowledge"; "The Forms of Knowledge Revisited";Knowledge and the Curriculum).

Religion is one such form,where faith,imagination and speculative thinking are central.Science is another,where a range of approaches may be employed depending on the individuality of the scientist but where they must ultimately be related to the logical structure and existing body of knowledge constituted by science.

In the light of such a situation,Hawkin might be inspired by a conception of a creator who created the laws that constitute the character of the universe and whose mind would contain a unified understanding of those laws,to explore in scientific terms the unity of those laws,so as to understand the mind of that God.The concept of God is a philosophical and religious concept,reliant on speculation and faith to be upheld.The study of the physical laws of the universe and the unity of those laws,however,is a  scientific  enterprise,which,even though it might derive its inspiration from philosophy and religion,is dependent on the mutually validatable logic of science,operating in relation to known scientific knowledge,even if it tries to revise or overturn that knowledge.

Respective Relationships to the idea of Validation as Distinguishing Religion,Philosophy and Science

Differences in their respective relationships to  validation distinguish science,religion.and philosophy.Validation means proving the actuality of a proposition.A proposition is an assertion about the nature of a phenomenon.Phenomena are anything,concrete or abstract that  can be described.The propositions of religion are often not capable of validation by everyone,regardless of how prepared they might be to validate them.The idea of God can be described as an example of a   phenomenon.The question of whether or not God exists implies  propositions that assert or deny the actuality of the proposition:propositions that state that God exists;that God does not exist;that it is impossible to prove whether God exists or not.All these are possibilities,possible positions emerging from the question as to whether or not God exists.

The proposition that God exists is not one that can be validated by everybody,if it can be validated at  all,beceause even if one agrees that God does exist,it can hardly  be proven or proven conclusively to others.Even if it were possible to prove it for  oneself as some people  claim they have for themselves,it is a delicate issue  whether others can also  do so using the methods that anyone else might have used to prove it for themselves.On account of the difficulty or impossibility, for most,of proving the existence of God and many  other religious postulates,religion often operates more in terms  faith than  in terms of propositions that can be mutually validated.

Philosophy might start from faith in religious ideas, from wonder at the marvels of the universe or from curiosity about its perplexities but could be described as trying to go beyond faith by reasoning about its propositions  and showing how conclusions follow logically through a chain  of reasoning.Even then,as evident from the history of philosophy,not everyone who follows the same chain of reasoning agrees that the conclusions reached necessarily follow from that sequence of reasoning  or even that the method of reasoning is adequate to the task or even that the right question is being  asked in the first place.Validation in philosophy,therefore,is more general and more widely developed than in religion but it is still not mutually binding.

Science,on the other hand,might be inspired by or even use the methods of religion and philosophy but must develop its ideas in terms that can be  validated by anybody who follows the reasoning used to arrive at its conclusions.On account of the need to develop a universally acceptable style of reasoning,science  uses the artificial language called mathematics,which,in  its dominant form demonstrates  a degree of universality developed through centuries from early civilizations to the present.Science also uses experiment,which involves testing propositions to see whether they can be upheld  under precisely  worked out conditions.It is held that anyone who tests those propositions under the  same conditions should get the same result.Science,therefore,operates in terms of a strict  concept of mutual validation.


The Intercourse of Science and Religion in  Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy


A superb demonstration of the inspirational relationship between the speculative but not necessarily mutually validatable logic  of philosophy,the speculative logic and faith of religion and the mutually validating aspiration of scientific logic  is Isaac Newton'sMathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.In this work,described by Newton scholar Richard Westfall as the most important foundational work of modern science,Newton takes the reader through a volume of closely reasoned arguments,using  mathematical  proofs at every step.At the conclusion of the book,however,the Cambridge scholar departs from his mutually validating logic,a logical progression which anybody who takes the time can follow,and possibly even understand fully its mathematical details,and makes statements on relationships between these logical and mathematical  conclusions about the physical laws of the universe,laws that operate throughout the material cosmos,and the creator of the universe,who, as he concludes must be the originator of those laws, which he,Newton,using his mathematical and logical methods,has discovered.

In fact,the concluding section of this book is most instructive in suggesting  how a scientist  may develop scientific  ideas in relation to a non-scientific cosmology,as exemplified by religion and philosophy,beceause Newton goes one to postulate further relationships,beyond gravitational theory, which the book develops, between material bodies and  the cosmic force he attributes to God, but states that he is not able to proceed further to prove the unity of these effects of that cosmic force  using the logical and experimental tools of his scientific discipline: "We are not furnished with  with a sufficiency of experiments to prove these things..."

Newton does not claim to prove that God is the creator of those laws.He merely asserts his faith.In that regard,he shares  a similarity with the German  philosopher Immanuel Kant,whom I understand postulates the value of the idea of God while stating that he cannot prove the existence of God and that efforts to do so so far  are faulty.His religious consciousness,however,  seems to suffuse his work becaeuse he develops a kind of  a kind of religiosity within  the  logical and speculative structures of his philosophy.

Relationships between Theory and Fact in the History of Science and Scientific Methodology

You focused on Hawkin but went so far as to deride the notion of religious ideas inspiring the development of  scientific facts.Your conception is mistaken  on two grounds.It is mistaken  on the grounds of historical accuracy. It is also problematic because  it seems to be based on limited  conception of science as different from its actual practice.  


To take the second one first. Science is not only about fact.It is to a  large degree about theory,which  itself demonstrates a complex relationship to fact.Theories  are  general statements about phenomena, their intrinsic or internal characteristics and the conditions that hold between them.Theories are useful in science because they facilitate the understanding  of relationships among broad groups of phenomena,and indicate  how such relationships enable us to describe and predict  particular instances.The relationship between particular examples that demonstrate a theory can be arrived at through induction or deduction.To deduce is to "infer  (something) about a particular case from a general principle that holds of all such cases".Inductive reasoning is  reasoning  "from a part to the whole,from particulars to generals,or from the individual to the universal".Specific example- "a process of mathematical demonstration in which the validity of a law is inferred from its observed validity in particular cases by proving that if the law holds in a certain case it must hold in the next and therefore in successive cases" (Both  definitions from Webster's Third New International Dictionary)


An example of a theory is Newton's theory of gravitation.Another is Darwin's theory of evolution.Both these conceptions represent  lofty levels of abstract generalization.In the case ofNewton he developed an idea that deals  with the relationships of bodies to each other throughout space   and developed an understanding of the laws   that are demonstrated in such relationships,central to which is the inverse square law  which describes in quantitative,measurable terms,the relationship between gravity,mass and distance.From this theory it is possible to work out gravitational relationships between  the celestial bodies and between artificial forms such as human made satellites  and those natural celestial bodies.

Darwin worked out an idea in relation to biological  developments of animate  species,his theory of evolution.From that theory scientists   are able to work out ideas about particular examples of evolution in specific species.

A fine work on relationships between theory and fact in science is P.B.Medwar,The Art of the Soluble. I also understand that Karl Popper,as in The Logic of Scientific Discovery addresses the subject. Also striking, I am informed, is the more modern James Gleick,Chaos.

  Scientific theory, being abstract and general,has drawn inspiration from bodies of generalisation about the nature of the universe which are not scientific,specifically religion and  the occult.This is because religious cosmology,a description within a religion of the general character of the universe, represents  the earliest and longest existing form of large scale generalization  in many societies.Kepler sums up the relationship between the religious philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras  which understood numbers as the structural foundations of the universe,in its combination with  the theistic Christian characterization  of the creator of the universe,   in stating that "In the beginning,God geometrised".Johannes Kepler,whose work is a turning point  in scientific cosmology,was inspired by an effort to understand the motions of the celestial bodies in terms of the geometric postulates of Platonism,Platonism being a central inspiration to Western philosophy,religion and science(Frances Yates,Giordano Bruno  and the Hermetic Tradition; Alexander Koyre,In Praise of Measurement).Newtonwas not only inspired by the occult practice of alchemy,described by historians of science as the mother of chemistry,his gravitational theory is described by Westfall as being essentially a scientific  transposition of an occult concept-the idea of action at a distance  without visible means of conduction,a basic concept in magic and possibly new in science at that time( "Newton,Isaac", Encyclopaedia Britannica 1992; Isaac Newton  and Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton)


All in all,Kepler sums up the difference between a completely religious or philosophical approach to the universe and an approach which, though inspired by occult,philosophical or religious ideas,develops its conceptions in terms of mutually validatable scientific logic often represented by mathematics,  in stating that he approached his scientific work in a  spirit  "more gemetrico" (more geometrical) (Yates,Giordano Bruno).

The fact that religion and the occult have inspired Western science has been a  mainstay of modern Western philosophy of science since the work of Frances Yates.The relationship between philosophy and science has always been acknowledged.These philosophies  have  often demonstrated a relationship with religion.

A beautiful modern summation of these relationships between domains of  knowledge in the history and philosophy of science is the work of Tian Yu  Cao,as his Conceptual Developments in Twentieth Century Field Theories.

I would have liked to further develop these points by  addressing the following topics emerging from the critique of Benin Olokun belief and practice [on Nigerian internet groups]  but I don’t seem have the energy for that now:

Basic Cognitive Implications of Benin Olokun Graphic Symbols

       Spatial and Temporal Division and Unity through Geometric Abstraction

Relating Space, Time, Ultimate and Contingent Reality, Ultimate and  Derived Spirit through Geometric Abstraction

Multidisciplinary Cultural Development : Contemporary Nigeria in Relation to Western Intellectual and Science History

In my secondary school days, the science students were seen as the brighter students. Interestingly, though, Nigeria is better known through her artists than through her scientists.

Dominic Ogbonna sums up what is a  realistic assessment, validated by history,  of the role of  the study and practice of the arts, the social sciences and the sciences in creating civilisation, particularly the beacons represented by Western civilisations :

"...a successful and civilized  nation is NOT just any one thing only [It] is also a nation that respects the freedom of the individual, and the freedom of the press, and the freedom of association, and property rights.  It is a nation with Jurisprudence, and universal suffrage, and all kinds of other ideological and sociological intangibles that are clearly NOT reducible to Abba's "science and technology". Some  of these non-scientific aspects of civilization are just as critical to civilization, and to the quality of human society, as the things that come from science and technology...  [ Their ]  very presence... makes science possible in the first place."

I  present a similar perspective but with precise historical references across a range of disciplines as evident in Nigerian and Western history.

The Arts and Cultural and Economic Development

            The Cultural and Economic Colossus that is  the  Western Arts

 The  arts play a central role in building the contemporary dominance of Western civilisation, as well as its leadership in creating the template that forms the basis of contemporary global science. The role of the narrative arts- the story telling Abba looks down on-  and other  arts, is evident in the contemporary global  dominance of Western culture which permeates all corners of the globe, projecting the self perception of the West through its imaginative and social values, as well as earning the US a huge amount of money through foreign screenings  and purchases of its films, which, along with its music,  are still the global standard. 

Are there any films or musicians who cross national boundaries the way these art forms from the US permeate the globe?

Michael Jackson died the other day and the whole world changed beceause he was no longer in it. From Asia to Africa and Europe, people were openly changed by his passing. Whitney  Houston died recently and the world took note.

Which artiste, anywhere else, has passed away and the whole world took note? One will have to look much further back to a personality like Bob Marley and his kind is rare outside the US.

A lady from Saudi Arabia told me a few years ago that they suffer there from Western cultural dominance, in which the West is perceived as the culture of preference. 

Can anyone point to any non-US film of the last 20 years that has a global presence? Yet US films are routinely global presences. Can you imagine the sheer economic power this pervasive penetration of the world through the arts  means, plus the sheer cultural heft it gives the US as flag bearer of the West? Can you imagine the sheer economic power they are raking in from all over the world, concentrating it in their corner of North America?

        The Domestic and Global Achievement of the Story Telling of  Nigeria's Nollywood 

In the whole of Nigerian history, the one collective achievement of a body of Nigerians that has registered on the global stage is the story telling of Nollywood. As far as I know, Nollywood is the first original and still the only achievement of Nigerians as a group on the global stage. Is there any other creative activity, from the arts to the sciences, in which Nigerians have excelled as a group and has achieved such economic force in the history of this country? 

The US has Hollywood and their technology companies Microsoft , Google and Yahoo as their most prominent global brands. Nigeria has Nollywood. I cannot identify any other collective Nigerian achievement of global renown and perhaps such domestic and global economic  force, equal to the achievement of Nollywood. Nollywood is basically the story telling Abba describes as not being central to national development. Nollywood story telling  is described as the  second largest film industry in the world, in terms of annual number of films produced, ahead of Hollywood and behind India, with a distinctive character of its own.

 I discount the Nigerian oil industry because I cannot see the creativity in that industry in Nigeria. 

Economic and social development is demonstrated, among other values, by being able to create jobs that enrich the populace and project its image positively. Nollywood could have contributed to those achievements  more than any other Nigerian industry in the last  20 or more years.

The Cultural Framework of Western Civilisation

Some contributors on this thread are mistakenly conflating  Asian social, technological  and scientific development with the kind of total cultural construction represented by Western civilisation.   Ogbonna provides an  insightful listing of the ideas that form the bulwark of US political and economic existence:

1. The Democratic System of Government
2. The Rule Of Law
3. The Bill of Rights
4. The Separation Of Powers
5. The Separation of the Church and the State
6. The Abolition of slavery

Abba responds that "What you listed are government policies/interventions...and not ``arts".  What you listed are interventions that create a conducive atmosphere for science and technology to flourish (you forgot to mention many other measures taken to encourage, promote and reward excellence; the US built a culture of meritocracy and competence; a culture that recognizes and salute these).

But all these ain't ``arts"...or are they? "

These "government policies/interventions", however, were enabled by the work of the arts, political and economic philosophy, political activism, political oratory  and religious vision, among other domains of the arts, expressing  ideals people fought and died for across centuries stretching from ancient Greece to the present and enshrined in canonical writings ranging from the philosophies of Plato to Adam Smith, to Martin Luther and Thomas Paine, to name a few, and which have been central to ideas about the role of knowledge in human life, which, in relation to determined  social struggles, created an environment where science and technology have thrived. 

                Faith, Religion and Reason

Interestingly, the people who determine the environment that enables science and technology to thrive   are less  scientists  than they are politicians and others directly involved in  public life. If not for the desperate struggles of Martin Luther and his supporters at the Protestant Reformation, the stranglehold of the Church on scholarship is less likely to have been broken, enabling the Church to continue to dictate the boundaries of scholarship, as it  tried to in harassing Galileo Galilei  for insisting that the earth  revolves round the sun. 

There is a lot of merit to the argument  that the continuing strength of Islam as a political force is central to the fall of scholarship in Islamic civilisation from its previous stellar  height to its present lacklustre position in the world of learning, in which subservience  to faith has triumphed  over rationality or even a balanced relationship between rationality and other forms of knowledge, such as faith. A  decisive  point in  this defeat is described as the debate  between Al Ghazzali , Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, represented by Al Ghazzali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers and Ibn Rushd's  reply The Incoherence of the Incoherence (link to free PDF copy) , a debate between the faith  centred position of Al Ghazzali  and the more rationalistic position of Ibn Rushd, though he is described as trying to integrate faith and reason, keeping in mind that  this rough summary may be  best understood as a  simplification of these sophisticated issues. According to this view, Islamic scholarship and civilisation have  not recovered from this dominance of religion. 

Europe, on the other hand, integrated with its Christian culture the rationalistic dimension of the Greek heritage transmitted to it by the Arabs and eventually subsumed the rational within the religious  so thoroughly that  they feed each other while reason is allowed to hold  a prominent dominant  place, an  outcome of which is the spectacular success of science. Landmarks in this journey range from  the works of Thomas Aquinas on the harmony of faith and reason, built on Aristotelian philosophy, the work of the great Renaissance scientists,  artists and architects Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo  Buonarroti,  to the works that helped to foment the revolutions in Europe and the US, such as the works of Thomas Paine and those that fired the visions of the builders of modern Europe and the US founding fathers, of whom Paine was one. 

        Thomas Paine,  Political Thought and Practice and the Culture of Learning

The history of Western democratic, revolutionary and capitalist thought is profoundly affected by Paine's books and activities, such as Common Sense , the central book that gains Paine the title of The Father of the American Revolution, his book  The Rights of Man in defence of the French Revolution, arguing for citizen's  rights as source of state authority and the Age of Reason, one of the most influential advocates of a rational critique of religion and religious institutions, a mindset that is the bulwark of modern Western secular society, a secularism of which science is a central beneficiary and central standard bearer. 

           Capitalism, Democracy and Scientific and Technological Progress

There exists an intimate relationship  between capitalism, democracy and the scientific and technological  leadership of the West. Democratic systems encourage freedom of thought and speech, and scope of research and application.  Capitalism enables the accumulation of funds to invest in research and development  as well as the reaping  of financial  investments from science  and technology which are ploughed  back to create  more developments in those fields. Without a robust capitalist  environment, would we have had the Industrial Revolution and certainly  not the Information Revolution, a prominent aspect of which   runs on the economic lifelines provided by venture capitalists with money  to innovators  without money. Bill Gates, the founders of Yahoo and Google, along with Zuckerberg and Facebook all started as students without money,  money which investors provided. This match between innovative  talent and wealth is central to the success of the global technology hub that is Silicon Valley.

How did the West develop such a robust capitalist system? Through a combination of the work of business people, politicians and the sheer historical convergence of various unanticipated factors, including religion, the latter  suggested by the debate around Marx Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism. 

Cultural Foundations of Western Science and Technology

          Magic, the Occult and Science 

The arts have played a fundamental role in the development of Western science. Central to this is the contribution of religious, occult  and philosophical cosmology to scientific cosmology. Tian Yu Cao in Conceptual Developments of Twentieth Century Field Theories, argues that the modern scientific understanding of nature as constituted by laws that can be understood and even worked with by the trained expert, the scientist, was a development from Western magic, itself derived centrally from the Hermetic tradition, the roots of which are described as being  in Egypt. Cao makes this point beceause Western magic introduced to the Western intelligentsia the idea of the cosmos as not only a unified structure,   an idea already familiar to them from the Greeks   and the Arabs, but the Hermetic idea that this cosmos was organised in terms of laws that could be discovered, understood through study and cooperated with to produce results. 

A book that demonstrates this occult culture in its combination of imagination and rationality, learning and experimentation, integrating broad scholarship with spiritual activity in which the magician  trains themselves to  understand natural law and work with it, but in a manner different from the instruments of modern science, is Israel Regardie's The Tree of Life : A Study in Magic( link to free PDF copy),   which is based on the sweep of the Western magical tradition, from its Egyptian appropriations, to its blend of neo-Platonism and magic, down through the Middle Ages to the present. A historical text that demonstrates how the mentality represented by ideas and practices like those described by Regardie shaped the minds of scientists in the formative period of modern science in 17th to 18th century Europe  and how it was transmitted in a modified form into modern science is Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (link to free PDF copy). More modern works take off from Yates' pioneering efforts. The relevant information is plentiful online. 

Taking inspiration from this early cosmology of human understanding and management of cosmic law, some of the most influential of the earlier Western scientists were magicians and occultists, these disciplines being central to how they saw the universe, inspiring them in their quest for knowledge and providing the ideational template which they transposed  into what is now known as modern science. Some of the most influential   modern scientists  develop along similar lines, but more in terms of philosophical and religious ideas. Useful guides in the relationships between religion, science and philosophy, particularly in exploring their roles in contemporary  scientific discoveries are the works of Paul Davies, such as The Mind of God : Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning. 

           Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Occultism and Mathematical Cosmology 

Central to the influence of the occult and religion on science is Isaac Newton, whose work in the Western esoteric school -dealing with hidden skills and knowledge not available through conventional  education- of Hermeticism along with his deep study of the Bible and theology shaped decisively his mind and his scientific discoveries. A central tenent of Hermeticism is the maxim of Hermes Trismegistus , after whom the school is named 'As Above, So Below'. Within that context, the cosmos is understood as organised in terms of the correspondence of order at various levels of existence, from the more abstract levels to the material plane.  This world view may be correlated with that of modern scientific cosmology, which understands the cosmos as organised in terms of laws  that unify its totality. 

Central to the quest to understand cosmic unity is the study of unifying laws and Newton's work in gravitational law and the laws of motion is central to that. Central to Newton's work in gravitation and laws of motion is the concept of force, which I would describe as a layperson as the impulse acting upon bodies.  The concept  of force is central to Newton's  development of gravitational theory in terms of  invisible forces acting upon each other at a distance, an idea, which,  according to Richard Westfall  in his Encyclopaedia Britannica 1992 essay onNewton, the great scientist adapted from the occult idea of invisible forces that act upon forms across space and perhaps unify the cosmos. 

Westfall describes Newton's achievement as bringing to a consummation the vision of the great Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras who understood the cosmos as organised in terms of mathematical form and whose mathematical work was related to an effort to understand that cosmic order.  Like Pythagoras, Newton was fired by the vision of grasping cosmic order through both intellectual and supra-intellectual methods, as testified to by his magnum opus Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which rounds off with Newton's celebration of his understanding of cosmic law as a demonstration of divine order as expressed through the creation and transcendence of time and space by God. 

" In the Beginning, God Geometrised" so declares an expression from an idea attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato and described as adapted by the great mathematician Friedrich Gauss stating 'God arithmeticises', thereby carrying forward the Pythagorean and Platonic vision which has become central to modern science, even though the divine justification for cosmic order in terms revealed by mathematical form is no longer canonical in science. This mathematico-cosmic vision,  as it were, has shaped Western science across the centuries, as represented, for example,  by the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, who understood the orbits of the planets as organised in terms of geometric solids as well as practising successfully the occult discipline of astrology, which is based on mathematical calculations of relationship between the celestial bodies and events in human life. 

  Frances Yates in Giodarno Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition describes  the difference between Kepler's occult and scientific work, and if I would add, that of Newton and other occult and philosopher scientists, as the ability to allow various realms of knowledge to feed each other while distinguishing   between them. Kepler and Newton were  inspired by philosophy, occultism and religion but they understood that to  demonstrate conclusively their  ideas in scientific cosmology, they needed a form of   logic, that, unlike the logic of philosophy and the occult, has to be accessible to verification by other scholars who might have little or no interest in their  occult and philosophical inspiration, those not being in the realm of science, science as it was emerging in the 17th century scientific revolution in which these men played a central role. Yates develops these ideas further in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. 

Also prominent in this emergent scientific culture was John Dee, prominent mathematician and dedicated and ambitious occultist. 

Newton describes most forcefully and poignantly his sensitivity to this correlative symbiosis and difference between various realms of knowledge in concluding his Principia with a description of his religious vision as encapsulating his scientific cosmology and describing his further vision of unity in the physical world, in which a force shapes the motion of all forms within the physical world and the human body, from electricity to blood, but concluding that there is no sufficiency  of experiments to prove this expanded vision of his, thereby  leaving that vision outside the domain of scientific proof. 

                   Alchemy 

One of the most spectacular examples of the transformation of occult theory and practice into science is the discipline of alchemy. It involved a complex of theoretical ideas and practical techniques involving material instruments. My understanding so far of this very secretive and arcane field is that it might have been a system for developing a  transformation of the human self in relation to the transformation of material substances, with this transformative process symbolised by and related with the transformation of material  forms from one state to another, centred in the idea of transforming other metals to gold and making one immortal,  through the creation or discovery of the Philosopher's Stone.

The alchemists are described as central to  laying the foundations of the relationship between scientific theory and experiment that is the defining mark of modern science. They developed elaborate laboratories and instruments for experimentation, testing their theoretical formulations, and encoding their ideas in symbols that the uninitiated would not understand, even though presented in books that were at times publicly available and written in European languages, a technique of encoding, of hiding information in plain view in a manner related to the highly specialised terminology of modern science. 

The culture of experimenting on the material  world using specialised laboratory instruments, and  correlating such experimentation with theory, passed into modern science, but the ideas of transforming the self were left behind. I would not argue for a direct influence from alchemy to nuclear science and  the Hadron Collider, but one may deduce in such efforts the persistence of the idea that material forms can be transformed from one state to another through human effort. A modern interpretation of the alchemical theory of transformation between elements  is evident  in the exploits of the alchemist Nicholas Flamel in Michael Scott's fantasy novel series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. 

Perhaps the most successful  transformer of the occult world of alchemy to science while working actively in both worlds was Isaac Newton, whose work in alchemy and religion is described as more voluminous than his better known work in physics and mathematics.  Alchemy provided for Newton a cosmology and an experimental framework which he mined diligently, adapting to his scientific discoveries, and like many  occultists, he hid the occult roots of a number of his most important scientific  ideas  so that,   along with the influence of the disdain people later had for alchemy, for centuries people were baffled as to why such a great mind should devote so much effort to what they saw as a pseudo-scientific pursuit like alchemy or why the father of modern science should be so committed to research on religion. 

Modern Newton scholarship demonstrates how these interests feed each other in his works, studying his extensive original documents  in various libraries  and posted online at such sites as The Chymistry of Isaac Newton and The Newton Project. His writings on religion and philosophy are  published online and in print as in the Newton Manuscript Project on his theological work. 

Books that are very successful at  showing how  these interests are woven together in Newton's life are Richard Westfall's,  Never at Rest : A Biography of Isaac Newton  abridged in The Life of Isaac Newton, distilled in his Encyclopaedia Britannica 1992 essay on Newton and in his Britannica online essay, and the compact but very rich and meticulous  Newton : A Very Short Introduction by Rob Lliffe. 

                20th Century  Science, Philosophy and Religion

It is very useful in  understanding  the  implications of the two great discoveries of 20th century science, Special and General Relativity and  quantum theory, to  understanding the role of philosophical ideas and ideas related to religion in forming the scientific explorations of scientists like Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Niels Bohr, Srinivassa Ramanujan, Henri Poincare, as well the scientists’ interpretations of the philosophical implications of their work, as in Weiner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy : The Revolution in Modern Science  ( link to free PDF copy). 

              Georg Cantor,  Kurt Godel and Philosophies  of Mathematics

Science, religion,  philosophy,  the occult and esotericism  are best understood as symbiotic because of the mutual fertilisation of these disciplines as well as the light they throw on each other even when they don't affect each other directly in the work of practitioners of these disciplines. Rene Descartes made foundational achievements in philosophy and science through his philosophical program of developing authoritative methods of knowledge, ranging from introspective self enquiry to mathematics. The great mathematicians Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel are described as understanding mathematics as existing in a  world independent of the human mind, a world into which mathematicians  penetrate to perceive these forms and make them accessible to their fellow humans, an idea manifest in Platonism, one of the earliest ways it was introduced to Western thought, but also existing in various cosmologies, from Yoruba Orisa cosmology, in the odu ifa, mathematical forms described as spirits  representing the identity of all possibilities of existence, abstract and concrete, actual and potential, to Hindu yantras, geometric forms understood as the embodiment of deities, the permutations of which demonstrate the structure  and development of the cosmos. 

         Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Cosmologies  and the  Creation of the Universe from 'Nothing'. 

Tian Yu Cao in  'Ontology and Scientific Explanation' in Explanations: Styles of Explanations in Science   describes eloquently the idea of the universe as emerging from nothing, an idea developed in quantum theory to explain the ultimate origins of the universe beyond the generally accepted scientific  theory that the universe came into existence through an explosion known as the big bang. What existed before the big bang? Cao argues that  a very good answer is ' nothing'. This 'nothing' he describes as a self created and self sustaining mode of being, having no connection with any forms in the observable universe, and therefore not susceptible to the question  "what came before what you describe as causing the universe, whether the matter that led to  the big bang or a quantum space?"

Is this idea of  "nothing" as the source of the universe not familiar from non-scientific sources? From the Biblical,  " In the beginning, the world was without form and void"  to the Buddhist idea of sunyata, Emptiness, the Void, to the Jewish and Hermetic  Kabbalistic notion of Ain Soph, No-thingness, the Unmanifest, the idea of 'nothing',  self created and self sustaining, has been central to religious  and philosophical cosmology. It is also deployed most powerfully in Soyinka's Credo of Being and Nothingness and The Man Died. 

  Literature, Recreation and Inspiration 

While developing scientific and technological innovation, whether influenced by philosophy, religion or the occult or not,  how does one relax? How does one rest the mind and body? Can body and mind remain healthy without rest, without play? May the arts not play a central role in the rejuvenation of mind and body? May the arts not be central vehicles for those very religious, philosophical and occult ideas through which people find meaning in life? Is it adequate to enjoy the wonders of science and technology without a sense of the meaning of life beyond such physical conveniences? 

Is it not relevant to learn how others have managed challenges like being deprived of their freedom in the name of a cause they understood as just? The struggle for justice is sustained by the awareness that one can survive persecution. Such awareness may be gained through learning about others' efforts in that direction, the 'fellow voyagers' as described in Soyinka's prison poem ' O, Roots'. Rather than succumb to the soul destroying culture of conformity represented by the corruption that has made the development of a scientific and technological culture in Nigeria difficult  on account of inadequate funding, one could subsist on inner wealth instead of  enriching oneself by guzzling public funds, inner wealth as demonstrated by Soyinka's meditations in solitary  confinement in prison during the Nigerian Civil War in which he drew inspiration from the most basic elements of his prison environment, lizards, flying birds, the falling feather of a bird, men being led to be hanged, the walls of his prison cell, the garden  constructed by his fellow inmates and destroyed by the warders, , rain, keyholes, etc etc,  as portrayed eloquently in The Man Died his prison autobiography and  A Shuttle in  the Crypt, his poems written in prison.

Wole Soyinka's Global Stature 

Is there any other Nigerian figure of  Soyinka's global stature?

As for the following  comment from Abba: "Besides, there are many others in Africa who are probably as, or even more, deserving of the literature prize (Achebe is surely one)."

I would like to know about such writers since I want to learn more about African writing and keeping in mind that the prize is politicised  being largely Western centred.

In terms of sheer ideational power, imaginative inventiveness and linguistic force, Soyinka has earned a unique place in world literature. Soyinka has  one work of ultimate sublimity  in poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt; an incomparable essay collection, Myth, Literature and the African World( I refer here to the three essays "The Ritual Archetype", "Drama and the African World View" and "The Fourth Stage", excluding the other two on the history of African literature. Soyinka has many other essays but from my reading of them, even if they are up to 100 they might not be equal those three in the  immortal power of  their ability to speak to the perennial and deepest challenges of the human condition) ; a bombshell of an autobiography, The Man Died ( I have not read his three or four other autobiographies) ; a most memorable dramatic work, Death and the Kings Horseman ( I have not read some  of his plays, described as his best known works, The Road seems particularly well regarded). 

A  Nigerian writer known to me  who comes close to   Soyinka is Christopher  Okigbo, although he published  only a slim body of poems, Labyrinths, but the book's  power is like  the power contained in the atomic nucleus that can trigger an atomic bomb. Sadly, Okigbo's greater promise was not fulfilled since he died fighting in the Biafran side in the Nigerian Civil War, his body lost as he covered his men retreating from a federal advance. 

Soyinka's three essays I mentioned from Myth, Literature and the African World and The Man Died will stand till the end of time as monuments in the landscape of human achievement, as  signposts on the journey of human progress  across the ages. As long as the human mind remains what it is, as long as it is not fundamentally  restructured to a higher cognitive level, creating a different form of humanity than is evident today, I expect  these works will remain  be among those of which Hans Georg Gadamer in Truth andMethod declares can never be superseded, like ideas and achievements in science and technology can be superseded by  later developments in those fields. 

Even explorers from other worlds who are able to understand human cognition and appreciate human values are likely to revere such works as demonstrations of what the German poet Rainer Marie Rilke described as his task as a poet but which may be extended to a task on behalf of all beings in existence, on earth and beyond earth-to justify one's existence by transforming the visible world into visible art.

Soyinka on the Link Between Boko Haram and Prominent Political and Social Orientations of Northern Nigeria 

Soyinka  makes the following points on Boko Haram: 

1.Boko Haram is a manifestation of religious mania in Northern Nigeria that has gone out of control. Whatever one might  think of a direct relationship between Northern religious extremism and Boko Haram, history abounds in examples of a culture  of religious extremism in Northern Nigeria, often leading to mob actions resulting in the murder of Southerners and Christians in the North, these mob actions at times being inspired by perceived slights against  Islam originating from outside Nigeria, without any provocation from  Christians.

Such periodic murderous mob actions are the sporadic but recurrent  manifestation of a culture of extremism expressed most forcefully in Northern religious extremist groups, from the earlier examples to the more recent Maitasine and Boko Haram.

2. Northern Nigeria is prone to such murderous  mob actions and organised religious fanaticism partly because it runs an educational systen that provides ready foot soldiers  for such campaigns, these being the alamjiris, products of a system described by Zainab Usman  as based on the idea of the migrant scholars travelling in search of knowledge  but, as described by Gillian Parker  seemingly often abused  to become a collection of poor young people who are available for manipulation, and being poor and often disenfranchised by poverty and limited education  from full participation in society, are prone to flare up against perceived  enemies.

3. That Boko Haram is the tool of disgruntled  Northern politicians who are aggrieved at their loss of power. Soyinka has not proven this point conclusively  but he sums up deductions that may be made between the threats of violence by Northern politicians like Atiku on the failure of the North to secure the Presidency as expected  on the PDP platform and the eventual  escalation of Boko Haram terrorism on the swearing in  of Jonathan's government, along with the politically sharpened  thrust of Boko Haram's pronouncements  as the group openly seeks to achieve its declared goal of bringing down the government.

 thanks

toyin