”Believing that only the planets whose existence is known to us today exist is no more reasonable than imagining that the sky is populated by no other birds than those who pass our window.” The great Christian philosopher Giordano Bruno wrote this at the end of the 16th century. He never accepted to endorse the dogmas of his time and only believed what reason led him to think. He paid for it with his life: in February 1600, on the order of Pope Clement VIII, he was burned alive in a public square in Rome.
This tragedy is part of the long history of those who, since the dawn of time, claim loud and clear the primacy of reason over all other dictates. Those for whom all certainty must yield to experience; all doctrine before facts; and all ideology before reason.
Even today, this sentence should resonate, and quite frankly it should be obvious. However, there are people, if not more and more, who still proclaim that the theory of evolution is false, that women are not equal to men, that there are several human races, unequal and different, that this or that nation is superior to another, that man is superior to nature and has no role in global warming.
In an uncertain world, overwhelmed, by thousands of changes, many people are holding on to all types of certainties. Religious, political, national, social, ideological. They refuse doubt and claim that even in a knowledgeable world, “it was better before.”
One can understand: it is difficult to experience the upheavals of the world. And when we see the ground of certainty shrinking under our feet, we cling to what we can. Like a mountaineer in danger by the slightest degree of roughness of the rock.
Totalitarian ideologies are born from this. And today, it appears to be what is forthcoming. These fanatics are of the same nature, even if they believe that they are opposed to each other: they have much more in common than they choose to believe—between those who do not doubt their way of reading history and those who cling to their way of reading the sacred texts.
It is, however, possible to reconcile ethics and reason, faith and science. For atheists, this should not call into question the faith in man. And for believers, faith in what they call God.
Is this not what the great Muslim philosopher of Cordoba, Ibn Ruschd, already said when he wrote in the middle of the 12th century this major sentence: “Truth cannot contradict truth; but agrees with it and supports it”, which means that, whatever the discoveries of science, faith must recognize it, and this should not prevent it from glorifying the wonders of the universe, which reason reveals. It is what Giordano Bruno took up again, five centuries later, after Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, writing: “Thus the splendour of God is magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest: he is not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in hundreds of thousands, I say in an infinity of worlds. ”
The intuition of the plurality of galaxies was already there, which took science more than two centuries to confirm.
It is by remembering these thoughts, and those who died to proclaim them, that we will be able to defend the duty of doubt, reason, tolerance, humility, without which there had never been humanity, civilization or freedom.
Nothing is more urgent today.
j@attali.com