The Binding and Unbinding of Worldviews

A long post today, but the subject I trust you'll find worthy of your time.

In 1972 I was in the throes of my second year at university and my first year away from home. Having achieved my major purpose in taking up a tertiary education, that being to leave home with my parents’ blessings, I was struggling with finding a purpose for what I was doing. One of the subjects I was required to undertake was ‘The History and Philosophy of Science’. As soon as I knew this was a mandatory subject I thought: ‘Gee, this will be fascinating...’ with all the whiplash, privileged-young-man sneering irony I could muster.

The subject was, more or less, much as I had anticipated. I struggled with it throughout that semester but eventually did achieve a pass, ‘minima cum laude’. Thus would well and truly have endeth my lesson were it not for being introduced to one man: Johann Kepler. Well not personally introduced as he's been dead for almost 400 years.

But before proceeding with the good Johann, a brief digression on ‘worldviews’.

We all have a worldview. One definition of ‘worldview’ from the online ‘Free Dictionary’ (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/worl...) provides two variations that mean more or less the same thing but in two contexts:
‘1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.
2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group. In both senses also called Weltanschauung.’
Look up that German term if you like circular arguments.

OK, worldview, fair enough, but where’s the rub? Well, I like this take on it from Foster Gamble (http://www.thrivemovement.com/what-wo...
‘The key is that our belief system determines what we think is possible, and what we think is possible influences the results we create or allow in life. The interactions of all our individual worldviews shapes the condition of humanity and therefore, given our technologies, of planet Earth.’

A pretty fundamental aspect of individual lives and a potentially earth shaping thing then.

So, let’s go back to Johann Kepler.

Kepler was born on the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, December 27th, in 1571. He grew to be a deeply religious man, who all his life held dear to his Christian faith. He was also a scientist and in particular an astronomer. Most likely from when he was at university in 1590, Kepler saw the solar system as a construct of his much loved God, and sought to find ways to reconcile the operations of the solar system with the inherent Godly organised patterning of the physical world. His major work supporting this view, Kepler’s worldview if you will, was the Mysterium Cosmographicam that he published in 1596.

In this great work, Kepler fitted the orbits of the solar system to a set of known shapes, the Platonic solids or polyhedra – basically three dimensional geometric shapes, of which a cube is one example. Kepler believed he had revealed God's ordained geometrical plan for the universe; his worldview made manifest.

Kepler continued to work on refining his work, but to his undoubted growing consternation began to find that the more and better quality information he obtained, the less well the planets’ orbits fit his God-supporting world view. For fifteen years Kepler strained to fit the increasingly obstinate data to his published and fundamental world view. Kepler was an astronomer, so this was his living, seven days a week. In a world where burning the candle at both ends bore a far more literal interpretation, it’s staggering to think of how many eye straining hours this constituted of Kepler’s life.

In 1602 Kepler reformulated his approach on the motion of the planets and set about trying to calculate the orbit of the planet Mars, the most recalcitrant of the then known planets. Over the next three years, Kepler failed forty times. The amount of work and dedication Kepler exhibited amazes me. Working for weeks on end by daylight and candlelight on one formulation only for it fail, then pick up his traces and start again takes tenacity and straight up ‘guts’.

Finally, in early 1605 he got it right, realising that the planets orbited in ellipses. To get there Kepler displayed not only enormous dedication and a meticulous approach to his work, but he’d also had to forgo his published beliefs, those that so beautifully ascribed God within the solar system. Instead he allowed the data, the actual facts, to drive how he interpreted the world, not the other way around.

I am to this day in awe of this man, this dedicated seeker of truth, this dedicated man of God. Johann Kepler was a deeply committed Christian, yet he could have been a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew or of any other religious denomination, for in the end it seems to me that Kepler understood that while God is fundamental to the world, our view of both is no more than that: our view, a changeable thing ever moving towards ‘truth’ but in no way a fundamental, immutable, irrefutable statement on the world; or God.

Over 400 years ago, one man seems to have found a deep truth that could, and should, still be held in great esteem today by people of all faiths and nationalities. My view is that the world would be a fundamentally better place if it were so.

God bless you, Johann, where-ever you are.