Signals
I’m reading a piece by Elizabeth Weiss about science museums and how they should respond to controversies. I’ve paused to follow up a sidetrack.
In the past two decades, science institutions have faced challenges from another source: indigenous religions. Unlike Christian fundamentalist beliefs, these indigenous beliefs often receive enthusiastic support from academics, scholars, and mainstream media journalists. This support might stem from a desire to oppose Western civilization and align with the “victims” of modernity as part of an effort to “decolonize” museums. Alternatively, it may also be linked to a trend of virtue signaling, which has allowed the misconception that “indigenous knowledge is science” to take root in academic circles.
It’s the virtue signaling bit that caused me to stop and think. It’s a label I find amusing, and probably deserved at least some of the time, but I also feel slightly uncomfortable or guilty about liking it. I second-guess myself when I smirk at it. Know what I mean? “Yes there is a lot of that around, but at the same time, what are people supposed to do, say nothing lest they be accused of virtue signaling?”
I think it’s not always that simple. I think it’s hard to tell the difference between virtue signaling and signaling solidarity or concern or sympathy and the like. I think it’s very possible, indeed likely, that sometimes what looks like virtue signaling to opponents of virtue signaling is actually solidarity and the like. No doubt it can also be a mixture of both.
I think what caused me to stop and question the label this time is the fact that it’s about things indigenous. My reading slowed when I got to that part, even before the virtue bit. Why? Because I’m ambivalent, I think. I’m not a fan of deference to religions, but on the other hand, indigenous people by definition were here first (that is, their ancestors were), and it seems a bit rude to blow off their concerns entirely. I think science museums should be science museums, but I also think indigenous people should get a little respect. I don’t think it’s necessarily virtue-signaling to say that.
Am I wrong? Do any of yiz have this kind of ambivalence?
I think I’m ambivalent about it too. It seems like virtue signalling is akin to being self-righteous or boasting, but less obvious, like another term in pop psychology — passive-aggressive. I don’t believe in that term either — if someone’s being an asshole, it’s not passive, it’s intentional. If someone’s trying to say how wonderful they are, then that’s also intentional.
I don’t believe that it is remotely controversial to note that modern science emerged from a background of Christian clerics trying to strengthen their faith by showing how God made everything we see today. The ‘why’ was considered to be the province of theologians, with the understanding that mere mortals would never get very close (ineffable, and all that).
Clerics had something which, for the most part, few other people had – a steady and adequate income, with a considerable amount of time to spend on whatever interested them. Of course, it soon became apparent that it’s not possible to fit what is real and accurate about the world into a preconceived belief framework. In the earliest days, the Church responded decisively and viciously to denounce heresy wherever reality was found to contradict doctrine. The Reformation removed much of the power of the RCC, the study of reality grew and became codified as science, and the rest, as they say, is history.
So the reason that non-Abrahamic religions aren’t of any interest to science is because they played no part in its development from superstition to a reliable method for finding facts. Any attempt to trawl the world for new myths to ignore would be a waste of time for any but the most determined of social scientists, and perhaps the reason that indigenous myths aren’t debunked in science classes is because the endeavour isn’t necessary.
As for virtue signalling, I was brought up to believe that true good deeds are done privately, without fanfare, with no publicity or boasting to others, and no expectation of reward other than the feeling which comes with knowing that a necessary deed has been done and the world is a bit better as a result. I was taught to be suspicious of anyone who constantly crows about how good they are being, because they’re very likely to be attempting a distraction from something about them which is definitely not good at all.
tigger @3 I was raised this way too. Actions louder than words and all that. Do what you think is right for it’s own sake. If someone needs to point out the good that they have done, then it’s usually because they don’t live their lives that way.
Tigger @ #2 — I guess I’m going to court controversy and assert that, to the contrary, science was off to a good start among the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Greeks, and Romans — until the Catholic Church rose to power and put a stop to critical thinking and the acquisition of new knowledge. It was the Enlightenment that got it going again in the West, a whole millennium lost. “If not for Christianity, Columbus would have landed on the moon”, as someone once said.
I think the term “virtue signalling” can be susceptible to overuse in something like the way “critical race theory” is. Signalling virtue in itself isn’t a bad thing, because virtue isn’t a bad thing; “virtue signalling” as a pejorative is meant to refer to a cynical or vacuous performance of a kind of artificial morality. Likewise, critical academic analysis of race in itself isn’t a bad thing, but “critical race theory” is a specific strand of academic theory which is a hot mess. The terms’ lack of clarity make them susceptible to being co-opted or misunderstood.
Nevertheless, I like the term “virtue signalling.” I like the juxtaposition of the two words. Virtue is supposed to evoke deep, rich and meaningful morality, but signalling suggests tinny pings of morse code. The idea of virtue as something to be merely signalled is, to me at least, always a little jarring, a little perverse. I like the sting it gives.
But yeah, not unlike the way Republicans have co-opted “critical race theory” to stop any academic discussion of race happening at all, rather than trying to ensure that it’s done well, “virtue signalling” has the potential to turn people against any displays of moral goodness, rather than simply trying to ensure there’s thought and meaning behind them. Which is going the wrong way.
The sting of “virtue signalling” is supposed to punish people for cheapening morality. But it could create disincentive for people to outwardly display any morality at all. Maybe it’s too cynical.
But we definitely need some kind of term for the phenomenon we’re seeing everywhere, which is that the relationship between incentive and moral behaviour has been warped. Everywhere I look, I see examples of people choosing to signal their allegiance to various groups or causes in ways that actually harm them. A thousand Trolley Problems, and everyone’s pulling the lever to drive the trolley over the victims because it gives the lever-pullers a short-term dose of social credibility.
People make a big show of embracing gender extremism because they want to appear aligned with gays and lesbians, even after we show them that it’s harmful to gays and lesbians. People make a big show of saying “trans women are women” because they want to appear as though they’re on the cutting edge of women’s rights and breaking gender stereotypes, even when it’s crystal clear that trans-identifying males are gutting women’s rights. People make a big show out of supporting ayurveda and other pseudoscience because they want to make a big show of how racially and culturally open-hearted they are, even though “alternative medicine” hurts many of the very people they’re signalling their allegiance with.
On and on. They pull the lever anyway.
We need a pithy, venomous term for that kind of incentive-reversal moral-cowardice-disguised-as-virtue that’s going on everywhere, something more precise than just “virtue signalling.”
Hmm. I’ll try to think of some ideas.
Jerry Coyne cautiously calls this kind of thing “performative wokeness”. To me this works because it suggests that the practitioners thereof are happy to appear to be on “the right side of history”, without actually willing to accomplish anything. Obligatory land acknowledgements, for example. TWAW, full stop, no debate.
It says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, arguably the work of Solomon (970–931 BCE):
Thus, within the Judeo-Christian tradition there is both an endorsement of critique and a discouragement of it. But as factionalism inevitably arose within those traditions (Pharisees, Sadduces and Essenes in Judaism; Sunni, Shia, Whabbi, Salafi, Berelvi, Sufi and Deobandi in Islam, the countless varieties of Christianity, with every cleric having a financial stake in denouncing all other factions apart from his own) it is not surprising that the cat of critique got out of the bag.
The result was philosophy, rationalism, and science.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%203&version=KJV
It is surely not simply a matter of ‘indigenous religions’ and beliefs that may be dismissed by the enlightened as ‘primitive’ and worthless. What needs to be recognised that ‘indigenous’ peoples had (and have, when they not been reduce to beggars on the outskirts of contemporary societies) a wealth of knowledge about their environment – necessary knowledge without which thy could not have lived: the behaviour of animals, edible & medicinal herbs, some of the latter of which, yes, were not in fact medicinal – but many were – and, given the incidence of magical thinking in the modern West (homeopathy, for example) it is hardly surprising. No, this knowledge was not structured into a scientific, theoretical form, but unless one is a proponent of the positivist idea that the only kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge – episteme as opposed to doxa, to use the Platonic distinction that still has an undue influence over the modern Western mind – it is hardly possible to dismiss the genuine knowledge of indigenous peoples as somehow not knowledge, and it seems to me to be ridiculous to dismiss it for fear of being accused of that terrible crime, ‘virtue-signalling’, or, in its weaker, Coynean form, ‘performative wokeness’.
Pace Peter N, I tend to wish that Columbus had landed on the moon. Nobody to massacre and enslave there.
Omar @8 Every time I see those Ecclesiastes passages I think of Pete Seeger’s song Turn! Turn! Turn!, of which the most popular version was recorded by The Byrds in 1965. Now I’m suffering from an ohrworm. How many times did I hear that on AM radio in the 60s… Too many to count. A simpler time.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4
Very nostalgic. :)
I don’t know anything about indigenous religions in the States and their reception by academic scholars. I did, however, blink a bit at tigger_the_wing’s post at #2 and I feel driven to say, in the nicest possible way, ‘Citations needed’. Who were these Christian theologians? Can we have their names? Achievements?
And then the statement that ‘the non-Abrahamic religions aren’t of any interest to science … because they played no part in its development from superstition to a reliable method for finding facts’. This is not my field, but for instance, here is an open-access article about Sushruta, a Hindu surgeon who lived two millenia ago and wrote a textbook on surgery. (There’s a translation of this work in three volumes available on the Internet Archive.)
And here’s an open-access book chapter on Daoist Contributions to Sciences in Ancient China.
Thank you, NightCrow. There is also Joseph Needham’s massive and multi-volume ‘Science & Civilisation in China’, a description of which may be found on Wikipedia by Googling the title. It is simply not the case that human beings were constitutionally incapable of doing or creating anything that required rigorous thinking and planning until (bang!) the Enlightenment came along and brought about the rise of modern science. Roman aqueducts, mediaeval cathedrals and other great engineering and architectural feats throughout the world are evidence of this, to mention just one aspect of what human beings were capable of before the rise of modern science. There is also Arabic & Indian mathematics… a host of things.
All religions are primitive and worthless. :P
I was disappointed a few years ago to see a large natural history museum with large sections of its Native American exhibits covered by opaque paper and signs saying Native American groups had challenged them on religious grounds. From what I remember from previous visits, the exhibit mostly consisted of religious attire and props. If they had Christian bishops’ hats and miters and incense, I would think that would be fine, even if some Catholic groups were scandalized.
Hear them out and make changes that make sense? Sure. But total veto power? No. No more than for the hypothetical Catholics. And if they’re mad, that’s unfortunate, but the museum’s primary role of documenting history and culture should have precedence.
And without having this actually cost them anything. A lot of trans activism is made up of men giving away women’s rights. They have no stake in the matter, so being generous with something that isn’t theirs costs nothing.* It accords perfectly with the trans ethos which demands centering, acclaim and attention without effort, accomplishment or sacrifice. It’s just another iteration of “Let’s you and him fight.”
Media compliance with preferred pronouns, trans talking points and trans spin that obscures the truth and import of what is being reported is another example. In this case, it is actually a hindrance to honest communication, and counters journalistic ideals of objectivity and neutrality. It serves little purpose (outside of obscuration and concealment) but to trumpet the progressive credentials of the captured outlets that so report.
Women who collaborate with trans activism are harder to figure out, though I’ve heard it said that many of those who do are unlikely to encounter the inside of a women’s prison, with or without men locked up with them. So again, we have the safety and wellbeing of women sacrificed by others who feel immune from the effects of their supposedly progressive “generosity.” That lofty distance from consequences, and immunity from blowback, along with the surrendering of things that don’t belong to them is part of what I read into the concept of virtue signaling.
*Nothing, perhaps, except their reputations outside the rarified bubble of social media activism, which mistakes itself for the entire world.
twilighter @#10: Yes, I saw Pete Seeger perform that live in Sydney once. Very impressive.
Tim Harris @#12: I spent some time in my youth in conversation with the New Zealander sinologist Rewi Alley, who knew Joseph Needham personally. The latter’s Science & Civilisation in China is truly an impressive piece of work.
The response of Western academics to Gavin Menzies’ controversial 1421 has been interesting IMHO. Menzies’ critics seem to oscillate between 1. doubt that the Chinese did what Menzies’ claims they did (discovered America before Columbus, likewise Australia long before Cook, etc.) and 2. doubt that they could ever have done it; which has racist overtones. Many of such scholars hail from the same institutions which gave the world the intellectual farce of postmodernism, and they never uttered so much as a critical peep about it.
Given that most of humanity in ancient times lived on the vast interconnected landmasses of Eurasia and Africa, it should surprise nobody that an idea once generated in a human mind somewhere could easily travel far and wide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies
I remember when “virtue signaling” was called “political correctness”. In both cases, the terms started as a critique within the Left, a way of pointing out that a particular person was talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Then the Right-wing noise machine picks up the phrase, having learned that it’s something you can criticize a Left-winger with, and it immediately becomes overused to the point of inanity, and becomes less an accusation of insincerity than it is just another word meaning bad-wrong.
Thank you, Omar. Menzies sounds like a real case! I’d never heard of him before, and am rather glad I hadn’t.
But to return to the question of ‘indigenous’ religious artefacts in museums, it should surely be pointed out that a great bone of contention is that a great many, if not most, of such artefacts were looted in the course of colonial wars, etc., and it is hardly surprising that the descendants of those peoples should not be happy about it, and the lack of respect shown to them then and now, a lack of respect that – forgive me for saying this – appears in at least one of the comments here.
There was the Younghusband invasion of Tibet in 1903, in which monasteries were sacked and plundered, and the man, Lawrence Waddell, mostly responsible for (as he said) ‘procuring from that closed land those manuscripts and books so greatly required by Western scholars’, even as he described Tibetan Buddhism as ‘a parasitic disease’ and Tibetans as ‘sunk in the lowest depths of savagery’, and as being ‘more like hideous gnomes than human beings’. There was the looting and burning of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1868. More than 10,000 Indigenous Australian & Torres Island artefacts have been identified in institutions around the world, a third of them in the British Museum. The ‘British Expedition to Abyssinia’ of 1868, in which… But I shan’t go on, except to say that you may find all this information, and more, in Sathnam Sanghera’s excellent and fair-minded book, Empireland.
I have confined the above to Britain, but I rather doubt that the objects in question in science museums in the USA were all happily handed over by happy ‘natives’ (‘Oh, great, you are going to put them in museums along with those skulls you need for your physiognomical research into IQ, etc.! Thank you so much’!). And I am not surprised at all that indigenous peoples are still unhappy about the situation.
I don’t think one should be worried about accusations of ‘virtue-signalling’, which come for the most part from people whose attitudes, even though they may proclaim themselves as atheists, seem uncomfortably close to those of nineteenth-century imperialists, colonisers, colonists, and Christian missionaries.
Please excuse the errors in the above, but I think the whole is understandable enough.
But in many instances, these museums are the repositories of the loot of empire, the guardians of plundered cultures outlawed or erased by the very states and governments that established these museums in the first place. Once vital parts of the social and spiritual lives of the communities from which they’ve been stripped, these objects are now the property of the conquerors’ institutiions, which assert sole authority over their care, and the meanings ascribed to them.
What if the Catholic artifacts had been stolen from churches, or dug out of cemetaries? What if the items in question had been “liberated” by ransacking soldiers, who had burned the churches down, and murdered the wearers of the regalia and ceremonial objects now displayed as part of an official effort by the financial patrons of the museum to destroy Catholicism and prevent the continuation of its teachings, when those teachings were a part of the life of the community in which it arose, and now form an important part of that community’s resistance to its own erasure and destruction? Does the religious affiliation of those who are “scandalized” somehow negate the claim they might have to the stolen, looted items?
Weiss actually points this out, as though the concept is laughable and up for mockery.
Personally I don’t see anything wrong with the Native Americans having the right to sign off on how these objects are shown and described (especially considering the circumstances of acquisition and the history) or they will “suddenly demand everything back”. I know that Weiss loves her skull collection, and I know that possession is 9/10 of the law, but I think the Native Americans are being very reasonable with this compromise of “our objects will be treated as we would treat them and with explanatory notes, or we’re going to use the courts to enforce our claim to them, now that this is recognised by law”.
As an idea, sure, letting whatever local tribe wants to happen with artifacts is fine, but the reality is often more akin to Catholic “relics”, many of which were stolen from pagan burial sites and crypts.
“Why no, my ancestors who have only been in the area for three or four hundred years did not at all murder every man, woman, and child of the population that thigh bone belongs to and oh actually we’ve been here on Turtle Island for 8,000 years (which is most assuredly when the world began).”
There probably ought to be an age of the artifact cut off somewhere.
Blood Knight #23 ‘There probably ought to be an age of the artefact cut off somewhere’ – precisely what the British Museum and various Tory politicians think, particularly where the Parthenon Marbles, or, as they would prefer to call them, the ‘Elgin Marbles’, are concerned!
I agree that the term “Virtue Signalling” can be an unfair accusation in situations like this, but as Tim has noted the formulation of what is considered science based isn’t the be-all and end-all of what science is made of. There is this book that I have recommended by Cliff Conner and I’ll share the link. (I have tried to get in contact with the author in order to interview him on “Ikonokast,” but maybe he reads this blog and will try to contact me that way.)
A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks and the main theme of the book is that knowledge that was gained for trades and traffic on the seas, for example, was gained systematically and should not be dismissed if it was pre-Bacon era science. And the giants whose shoulders Newton stood on had built accumulated knowledge through trial and error and rejection of bad hypotheses over the ages. This included Polynesian sailors, who could read the waves for their navigation rather than the stars, and they were able to get where they were going.
So, to decide if the indigenous people were doing science, it’s a good idea to define what science is.
You mention New Zealand, Omar. Since the early 1990’s the science education in New Zealand has included Maori cultural concepts, and while Richard Dawkins was dismissive of it, claiming they were substituting mythology for method, he had not actually looked closely into it. They teach all the rules of investigation, but they recognize that the culture contributes to the science. If the Red Queen can be used to illustrate an evolution concept, and she’s entirely fictional, is it so backwards to illustrate scientific concepts in ways that resonate with Maori schoolkids? Do we require that they not only learn science, but also be read well enough in British literature to understand an analogy?
Hypothesis are often suggested by cultural knowledge, and it’s not all lab coats and test tubes. Sometimes it comes from a knowledge of the environment based on mythology. Joseph Campbell pointed out that truths are carried in mythology, and stories are often easier to memorize than formulas. If science is enhanced for Kiwi kids by incorporating Maori mythologies, I believe that makes it stronger.
Here are the current curriculum objectives for New Zealand pupils:
https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Science/Achievement-objectives#collapsible1
I don’t see anything here that weakens the teaching of science. I’ve struggled with an exact definition, but the quick definition of science is that it is a set of formalized methods of gaining information through investigation and analysis of results, which are built up over several investigations to form a consensus among investigators.
It’s a bit condescending to claim that indigenous people weren’t able to do that. Science is shared, not imposed by the enlightened. So, if museums share knowledge from indigenous sources, it needn’t be dismissed out of had as mumbo-jumbo.
I understand what Weiss is getting at, and much of the language of “decolonization” reminds me of the claim that 2spirit was the way that indigenous people understood sex before they were forced into 2 sexes by the white man. The Noble Savage thing is as repulsive as the Ignorant Savage thing. But, because some museums are trying too hard to make up for past dismissals is no reason to dismiss the science out of hand.
Well the Parthenon chunks aren’t human skulls and human migration in the Americas was considerably greater and longer lasting than much of what you see in the Mediterranean, even with the Sea Peoples coming in.
As to the Maori nonsense you look at the cultural knowledge and apply the scientific method; if it’s something that’s working it sure would be nice to know why. If it’s just useless superstition then it should be identified as such; don’t treat it with kid gloves because it belongs to the higher levels of the progressive stack. Not a lot of space between what DeSantis and New Zealand are doing to their respective education systems.
Tim Harris @ #23
The case relating to the Parthenon Marbles is not clear-cut. As is well known, they were acquired at a time when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, and had been for several centuries. The Turks had not treated the Acropolis ruins well, as why should they? They were not part of their heritage. There are disputes over the legitimacy of their acquisition, limitations in the surviving documentation, etc, but anyone who thinks that Lord Elgin’s agents were able to remove these hefty chunks of marble and ship them to England without an agreement with the Turks, as the then governing power, is disregarding the obvious. There are also good reasons to believe that they would not have survived in their current state of presentation had they been left in situ.
All this is separate to the question of what should be done with the marbles now.
You’re missing the point, though. Science is not separate from culture, and “Maori nonsense” is not being substituted for science. Science in England and the US relies as much on our mythology to generate ideas for hypotheses as what they are doing in New Zealand. There’s a clear difference between that and what the Florida government is doing. Did you read the link on their curriculum? Should astronomy be dismissed as religious nonsense because planets are named after Roman and Greek gods? Of course not. But our science on astronomy was intertwined with astrology until the connection was untenable. The constellations were thought to be influential on our lives, but we don’t ditch them because astrology is bullshit. They are handy groupings of stars that help kids learn where the cool stars are, and if you tell the stories behind Orion, it’s more fun to look for Betelgeuse and then learn more about astronomy,
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2545-matauranga-maori-and-science
Is it science? No, it’s not claimed to be, but it’s useful for understanding the natural world and that aids science.
Science doesn’t begin and end wtih Popper.
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Mike Haubrich #24
“This included Polynesian sailors, who could read the waves for their navigation rather than the stars”
I thought that was in addition to the stars.
I recall reading something about Polynesians sailing to Hawaii from islands south of the equator sailed north until a particular bright star passed directly overhead sometime during the night so they knew they were at the right latitude, then sailed west to find Hawaii. I would expect the wave patterns would be useful only when *relatively* close.
Jim, I have been known to make an error of recollection or two.
Mike Haubrich#27. I think it might be better to say that science doesn’t begin or end with logical positivism and the thesis that only scientific knowledge can count as knowledge and everything else may be dismissed as nonsense, rather than with Karl Popper, whose works I devoured in my youth and remains the philosopher who means most to me because of his sturdy realism.
Here’s Werner Heisenberg on logical positivism:
‘The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.’
‘we had better pass over in silence’ – the reference is to the final proposition in Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, which enchanted me in my youth because of its crystalline structure and aphoristic propositions (not that I really understood what was being said in those long-gone days). Wittgenstein, as is well-known, turned against this early work, and his later work is fundamentally a critique of it.
Thank you, NightCrow: no, I am aware of the complexity of the matter, but couldn’t resist tilting at blustering Tories.
Of course they did, and do. They also had, and have, a wealth of superstitious codswallop–just like everybody else does. It’s when the latter seeps into museums nominally dedicated to science that Weiss objects.
From Weiss’s article:
@Mike
I think it kinda is, in that anyone from any culture can do it (and get the same results, providing they’ve done it right.)
(Does science itself comprise a culture? Or is it “just” a collection of methodologies? Somebody smarter than me can answer that.)
Just a note in support of Tigger_the_wing’s comment at #2.
I don’t think it’s remotely controversial, either. A few names that might be mentioned include Galileo, Kepler, Faraday, Newton, and Boyle. Churches are complicated entities comprising many people. Conflicts with church hierarchy doesn’t render the scientist non-Christian or negate the idea that his motivations were at least in part based on religious belief, or perhaps given a cover justification of that type. It really doesn’t seem much of a stretch.
Especially this point. A lot of music, too, came out of churches, because they had money to pay people to devote their time to it. And a lot of musicians employed by churches at the very least gave lip service to the idea that their work was for the glorification of God. Again, totally unsurprising.
None of this makes the churches benevolent or science-friendly. It’s just a recognition of the economics and culture of the time.
Sackbut @ #35
tigger_the_wing @ #2 stated that “I don’t believe that it is remotely controversial to note that modern science emerged from a background of Christian clerics trying to strengthen their faith by showing how God made everything we see today …”
You @ #35 agreed with her, stating:
I respectfully submit the following information:
Galileo – Not a member of the clergy (or ‘cleric’, as generally understood). Was famously persecuted by the Roman Inquisition for heresy, because he published evidence that the earth goes round the sun and not the other way about
Kepler – Lutheran. Was a maths teacher, not a clergyman, and later Imperial Mathematician to the Emperor Rudolf II.
Faraday – Member of an obscure Protestant sect, the Glasites or Sandemanians. At different times he held the positions of deacon and elder in his congregation, but he was not a pastor. It’s hard to find out much about the Sandemanians, and also not all congregations seem to have been organised on the same principles, but as far as I can make out, deacons and elders were responsible for organisation and discipline; they were not equivalent to priests or ministers in other denominations.
Newton – fellow of a Cambridge college and professor at the university. Went directly against the tradition of his time by declining to take holy orders. Christian, but rejected the doctrine of the Trinity
Boyle – aristocrat who inherited landed estates in England and Ireland. Devout Christian, but refused to take holy orders.