The Balance of Religion and Science

“Freemasonry contains a heavy dose of natural philosophy, an emphasis on science, which is to say the use of reason to comprehend matter. The essence of such an approach to the natural world can be traced back to texts like the Magia Naturalis written by Giambattista della Porta and first published in Naples in 1558. This work stressed the underlying order of the world that could be discerned in the Book of Nature. Natural philosophers like Newton postulated two books: the Bible and the Book of Nature. This view is what led Robert Boyle, Newton’s predecessor, to famously conclude that natural philosophers were the real priests because they could read the Book of Nature. This new scientific method placed more importance on empirical investigations of the natural world. An example of this is the Flammarion engraving, a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire. This image depicts a man with a staff, dressed in something close to a monkish habit, kneeling while poking his head through the firmament to glimpse beyond the star-studded canopy into the cosmos. What he sees there are the cogs, gears and wheels of creation, the often invisible yet empirically calculable mechanisms that control and create the universe, a representation not unlike the vision of God beheld by Ezekiel in the Hebrew Scriptures. A caption below reads: ‘A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch.’ The degrees of Freemasonry, with their focus on geometry, architecture, and the application of math within the useful arts and broader natural world, leads candidates to a similar view of the cosmos, as that of the traveler in the Flammarion engraving.”

[Jedediah French, “John Desaguliers: The Balance of Religion and Science,” in Exploring Early Grand Lodge Freemasonry, Christopher B. Murphy and Shawn Eyer, eds., (Alexandria, VA: Plumbstone, 2017), 384–85.]