by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan
French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte argued that there ought to be an atheist’s religion, the Religion of Man, with holidays, rituals, symbols, saints, and social gatherings for those who maintain a scientific worldview without belief in an all-being. If such a religion existed, 2023 would be a celebratory year: the centenary of its version of the Council of Nicea, the conference at Erlangen.
The First Council of Nicea, in 325 C.E., brought together bishops from across the Christian world. At the time, there was no single institutional structure and no coherent theology within Christianity. Bishops and theologians held a wide range of positions and endorsed quite different practices, which resulted in a splintering within the Christian community. One question about which there was disagreement: is Jesus God or the son of God? If Jesus isn’t God, then aren’t Christians violating the first commandment not to put other gods before God? If Jesus is God, then how can one be the son of the other? The ensuing debate led to the doctrine of the Trinity coming out of Nicea.
The First Council of Nicea was instigated by the Emperor Constantine, who was understandably fond of strong institutions wielding power. He brought the various players together to hash out their differences and create a unified Church, which then became the dominant power not only in religious life, but in geopolitical matters as well.
A similar impulse guided German advocates of what they termed “the scientific philosophy” in the early decades of the 20th century. Chief among them was philosopher Hans Reichenbach.
Reichenbach earned his Ph.D. for a dissertation on the foundations of probability… eventually. Fascinated by statistical mechanics, he realized—before quantum mechanics—that non-deterministic mathematical methods in natural science raised serious epistemological questions. How could we gain knowledge about how the world operates from situations in which we cannot really know exactly how the world operates? He wrote about the nature of knowledge and the foundations of statistics and the ways in which these are employed scientifically. He submitted it to the faculty at the University of Erlangen, but the philosophers said that it was not philosophy, but physics. The physicists said that it was not physics at all, but philosophy. Eventually, he was able to cobble together a committee from both disciplines, and the dissertation was approved, but it took political wrangling among disagreeing parties with different backgrounds. It was an experience that would serve him later in life.
Almost immediately after he received his degree, World War I began. Because of his technical background, Reichenbach was sent to the Eastern front to work in the radio corps. When the punishing Russian winter gave him a lung ailment, he was discharged, finding work in the research and development shop of a radio company. The stability of a paycheck was nice, but his mind was restless. He learned about the new general theory of relativity and realized that it contained profound philosophical ramifications.
As luck would have it, Albert Einstein himself was offering a seminar on the topic—the first ever—at the University of Berlin, where Reichenbach had spent time as an undergraduate. While he was there, he studied physics and philosophy, but he was also a campus rabble-rouser, starting socialist political organizations and building infrastructure for students, many of them Jewish, who weren’t welcomed into the school’s fraternal organizations.
There were only eight students in Einstein’s seminar, so Reichenbach became friendly with Einstein, who shared his interest in the philosophical aspects of science. They happened to live on the same streetcar line and would ride home together, discussing the ways in which relativity challenged the worldview of Immanuel Kant, who dominated academic philosophy in Germany at the time.
After the seminar, Reichenbach committed himself to the Academy and, with Einstein’s recommendation, got a position teaching physics and philosophy at the Technical University in Stuttgart, an engineering school. While in Stuttgart, he wrote his first book, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, a draft of which he sent to Einstein for comments. (Einstein’s copious marginal notes still exist on that original copy in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh). Einstein was quite pleased with Reichenbach’s arguments, and the book was published.
The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge found its way into the hands of another lone wolf scholar who also bought into the scientific philosophy, this one working alone in the mountains outside of Freiburg. Rudolf Carnap had written a dissertation on the different concepts of space employed in philosophy, physics, and geometry. Submitting it to the University in Jena, his hometown, he got the same treatment as Reichenbach. The philosophers thought it was physics, and the physicists thought it was philosophy. The same sort of negotiating was required to create a committee in which no faculty member actually understood the content. As with Reichenbach, Carnap was eventually awarded the degree.
Reichenbach’s book made Carnap feel a little better. At least there was someone else who shared not only his professional experience, but also his intellectual alienation. The works of Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and a few others were opening up new vistas for a scientific worldview. That worldview offered incredibly rich possibilities, along with some big questions that needed answering. The two men corresponded about technical questions and commiserated about the way in which advocates of this new scientific philosophy were being kept out of professorial positions. Carnap was married with two kids, and the possibility of an uncertain work future worried him.
Reichenbach told Carnap about several others he knew who shared their orientation toward the world, including Mortiz Schlick, who wrote another book on the philosophy of relativity and who had recently gotten a plum job at the University of Vienna. The same university had been the ultimate professional destination of Ernst Mach, the patron saint of the scientific worldview, and Schlick was brought in to make the new scientific worldview a part of the institution.
Carnap suggested getting all of these people together for an opportunity to meet and feel a sense of cohesion. Reichenbach quickly realized that the gathering would be even more important than a chance to feel less alone. The burgeoning scientific philosophy they all thought about was more than just a few technical formulations of big questions. It was even more than a worldview; with the appearance of fascism in Europe between the wars, which was based on questionable metaphysical presuppositions, the scientific philosophy was a political movement. Carnap’s conference became a constitutional congress: an opportunity to craft a new way of seeing the world, of being in the world, based on logic and observation.
From his college days, Reichenbach knew how to organize. He contacted Dr. Rolf Hoffmann, a wealthy entrepreneur from Erlangen who loved philosophy and would be sympathetic to their movement. Hoffmann had just converted a mansion in the beautiful Burgberg garden district into a home for philosophy, with each room named after a classic thinker. Hoffmann agreed to host the gathering. With the economy floundering, Reichenbach raised funds from the Kant Society to help pay for food for the attendees: food for thought, one might say.
With practical details in place, Reichenbach and Carnap drew up the list of invitees. They made up formal invitations and sent them to Berlin, Munich, Halle, Freiburg, and Göttingen, to every thinker who seemed to share their worldview across the German speaking world. They sent one to Schlick, but unfortunately he did not attend.
A host of others did. The two-day schedule was divided; on the first day, attendees examined questions concerning the foundation of mathematics and logic, and on the second, they considered physics and scientific reasoning. To everyone’s surprise, both days were quite contentious, with a range of views on the different questions. Believing that scientific reasoning ought to be the basis for life did not guarantee that careful thinkers would agree on the basis of scientific thinking. What emerged from the conference wasn’t a unified platform, but rather the structure of an ongoing project. Attendees agreed that they would need to be able to distinguish between questions that had answers that must be true and those that might be true. They would need to understand how to approach questions of necessary truth—those of mathematics, for example—and those that are contingent, like science.
That project became what we now know as analytic philosophy. It was launched as both an intellectual movement to understand the world in terms of observation and rationality, without recourse to spiritual metaphysics, and as a political movement opposed to hypernationalism. If we believe in science, analytic philosophers asserted, we will make more rational choices in terms of policy and personal behavior and create a better society for all.
We see echoes of what happened in Erlangen today in the fight over global warming and vaccines. Those of us who take science seriously, who make it the basis of a worldview, should think back 100 years to that gathering in Erlangen as a historic, foundational moment. If there is indeed a Religion of Man, which we might now call a Religion of Humanity, Erlangen is where it was born.