From Gods To Mathematical Laws — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

 Penrose (2004: 7-8):

What laws govern our universe? How shall we know them? How may this knowledge help us to comprehend the world and hence guide its actions to our advantage?

Since the dawn of humanity, people have been deeply concerned by questions like these. At first, they had tried to make sense of those influences that do control the world by referring to the kind of understanding that was available from their own lives. … Accordingly, the course of natural events — such as sunshine, rain, storms, famine, illness, or pestilence — was to be understood in terms of the whims of gods or goddesses motivated by such human urges. And the only action perceived as influencing these events would be appeasement of the god-figures.

But gradually patterns of a different kind began to establish their reliability. The precision of the Sun’s motion through the sky and its clear relation to the alternation of day with night provided the most obvious example; but also the Sun’s positioning in relation to the heavenly orb of stars was seen to be closely associated with the change and relentless regularity of the seasons, and with the attendant clear-cut influence on the weather, and consequently on vegetation and animal behaviour. The motion of the Moon, also, appeared to be tightly controlled, and its phases determined by its geometrical relation to the Sun. … If the heavens were indeed controlled by the whims of gods, then these gods themselves seemed under the spell of exact mathematical laws.

Likewise, the laws controlling earthly phenomena — such as the daily and yearly changes in temperature, the ebb and flow of the oceans, and the growth of plants — being seen to be influenced by the heavens in this respect at least, shared the mathematical regularity that appeared to guide the gods. … It took many centuries before the rigour of scientific understanding enabled the true influences of the heavens to be disentangled from purely suppositional and mystical ones. Yet it had been clear from the earliest times that such influences did indeed exist and that, accordingly, the mathematical laws of the heavens must have relevance also here on Earth.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this presents the history of natural science as the erection of a control hierarchy. First, gods are construed as controlling natural events, and later, mathematical laws are construed as controlling the gods that control natural events.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, this is a hierarchy with metaphenomena (mathematical laws) at the highest level, and phenomena (natural events) at the lowest level. But interestingly, the middle level of the hierarchy (gods) is ambiguous in terms of these two orders of phenomena, since gods acting on nature construes gods as phenomena, whereas gods as explanations of natural events construes them as metaphenomena.