Science of Discworld III Read Online Free PDF Page A

that the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, which if true says something rather sad about the most expensive education system in the world.
    America is fighting, all over again, a battle that was fought to a finish in Europe a century ago. The European outcome was acompromise: Pope Pius XII did accept the truth of evolution in an encyclical of 1950, but that wasn’t a total victory for science. 2 In 1981 a successor, John Paul II, gently pointed out that ‘The Bible … does not wish to teach how the heavens were made, but how one goes to heaven.’ Science was vindicated, in that the theory of evolution was generally accepted, but religious people were free to interpret that process as God’s way of making living creatures. And it’s a very good way, as Darwin realised, so everyone can be happy and stop arguing. Creationists, in contrast, seem not to have appreciated that if they pin their religious beliefs to a 6000-year-old planet, they are doing themselves no favours and leaving themselves no real way out.
    Darwin’s Watch is about a Victorian society that never happened – well, once the wizards interfered, it stopped having happened. It is not the society that creationists are still attempting to arrange, which would be far more ‘fundamentalist’, full of self-righteous people telling everyone else what to do and stifling any true creativity. The real Victorian era was a paradox: a society with a very strong but rather flexible religious base, where it was taken for granted that God existed, but which gave birth to a whole series of major intellectual revolutions that led, fairly directly, to today’s secular Western society. Let us not forget that even in the USA there is a constitutional separation of the state from the Church. (Strangely, the United Kingdom, which in practice is one of the most secular countries in the world – hardly anyone attends church, except for christenings, weddings, and funerals – has its own state religion, and a monarch who claims to be appointed by God. Unlike Discworld, Roundworld doesn’t have to make sense.) At any rate, the real Victorians were a God-fearing race, but their society encouraged mavericks like Darwin to think outside the loop, with far-reaching consequences.
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    The thread of clocks and watches runs right across the metaphorical landscape of science. Newton’s vision of a solar system running according to precise mathematical ‘laws’ is often referred to as a ‘clockwork universe’. It’s not a bad image, and the orrery – a model solar system, whose cogwheels make the tiny planets revolve in some semblance of reality – does look rather like a piece of clockwork. Clocks were among the most complicated machines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were probably the most reliable. Even today, we say that something functions ‘like clockwork’; we have yet to amend this to ‘atomic accuracy’.
    By the Victorian age, the epitome of reliable gadgetry had become the pocket-watch. Darwin’s ideas are intimately bound up with a watch, which again plays the metaphorical role of intricate mechanical perfection. The watch in question was introduced by the clergyman William Paley, who died three years after Darwin was born. It features in the opening paragraph of Paley’s great work Natural Theology , first published in 1802. 3 The best way to gain a feeling for his line of thinking is to use his own words:
    In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet