If you do not want to talk nonsense about these vital subjects it is essential to avoid at all costs the misuse of language: these three words – Science, Art and Religion – have been in circulation for more than 2000 years and their meaning has changed over time. ‘Science’ in the King James Bible means Gnosis, a particular form of heresy. Worse is to come. In the 14th Century, the good masons from Milan were building its cathedral and they found that they had made the columns so high that they did not know how to cover the church. They called in a very experienced master mason from France, Jean Mignot, who taught them how to proceed and pronounced a dictum that is famous to this day: Ars sine Scientia nihil est. Even today this phrase is mistranslated as Art without science is nothing. This is totally wrong: art meant something completely different at that time, craftsmanship is perhaps the nearest thing. (When TS Eliot appropriated for his Ash Wednesday Shakespeare’s line from Sonnet 29: ‘desiring this man’s art, that man’s scope,’ he substituted gift for art, not to mislead his readers. What a good poet does with words is not always, alas, done by some historians.) As for ‘science’ as we normally mean now, of which more later, as the occupation of scientists, it is a modern concept, the very word scientist having been coined by W. Whewell in 1834. So Mignot’s dictum should be translated as Craftmanship without knowledge is nothing, an entirely different meaning from the spurious proposition Art without science is nothing.
Remember: if you do not want to talk nonsense you must make sure what your words mean. So, beware of false prophets that talk of ancient science as if it were the same activity as that, for instance, carried out today at CERN.
You may think that Science, Art, and Religion have nothing in common, but they are fundamental human activities and as such, they have all been affected by the two most important ideas in the history of human thought: Platonism and the Theory of Evolution. Plato was the love of my youth: his writings are so wonderfully persuasive that it is impossible for a sixteen- years old not to be seduced. But when I came to my senses in my twenties I realized that he had been responsible for the worst error in human history: the flight from nature. Enough to quote for the time being: soma sema, ‘the body is the grave of the soul’ uttered by Socrates when nearing his death, as a welcome for shedding his earthly body. But you will hear a great deal more about the horrendous influence of Plato, especially on art and religion, although science itself is not immune from the disease.
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