The Christian roots of modern science—Part 1
The history of science (short-short version).
This is the first of what will be a three-part series on the Christian foundation of modern science. Let’s get this party started…
How many times have you heard that science and religion are at odds with each other? I’ve heard it countless times. The message is everywhere.
The late atheist physicist, Victor Stenger, put it concisely in an article he wrote for HuffPost in 2011: “Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible.” Other greater- and lesser-known atheists have been saying the same thing for the last 150 years. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s infamous “bulldog,” vividly described what he saw as the relationship between science and religion:
“Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.”
Ouch.
At the peak of his popularity, Sam Harris, one of the original New Atheists, explained that we can’t have both science and religion, because “The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. ...the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.”
But is this true?
In short, no. And, in fact, like many pervasive mistruths, this one is a near-complete inversion of the truth.
When atheists tell me that Christianity has always been opposed to science, I ask them how it’s possible that, in the words of historian Edward Grant, “modern science [indisputably] arose in seventeenth century Europe and nowhere else.” Because, as we all know, seventeenth century Europe was the center of the Christian world at the time.
The answers range from weak to evasive.
“Well, science arose in Europe in spite of Christianity.”
“Scientists at the time were probably Christian in name only.”
Not only is this contrary to their assertion that Christianity is a science-defeater, but it’s also provably untrue.
To see why, we need to take a brief tour through the history and philosophy of science.
The history and philosophy of science (the short version)
More than a century ago, Henri Poincaré, the great French mathematician and physicist, explained what science isn’t:
Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones. But science is no more an accumulation of facts than a heap of stones is a house.
Now, there’s a lot of confusion among non-scientists as to what constitutes a scientific fact. A scientific fact would be something like this: objects near the surface of the Earth accelerate towards the center of the Earth at g = 9.8 m/s2. The theory that explains this fact isn’t itself a fact. Partly that’s because there isn’t ‘a’ theory of gravity, there are many (some more popular and successful than others). And partly that’s because no theory is reality, the same way a map isn’t the terrain. All theories are attempts to model reality, and none of them are fact.
To paraphrase Poincaré, facts are the raw materials of science, but it takes intelligence, will, and a plan—as well as something to hold it all together—to construct those facts into something useful. The “house” in this analogy is a theory or a model of reality. And what determines whether that theory or model is useful is its power to predict the future. The more accurately and comprehensively it does that, the more successful it is.
So, what is science?
Not just a collection of facts.
Not just explanations.
Science is a system of knowledge held together by a particular worldview. That worldview is called a philosophy of science.
Put succinctly, science
· is the search for truth about the natural world
· follows the scientific method
· follows all of the evidence
· is based on faith (trust) in natural laws.
You read that right. Faith. In science. Never, ever, ever let anyone tell you that faith doesn’t belong in science. We’ll talk more about this later.
That’s science in a nutshell. Anything beyond those four points is just elaboration and details.
Modern science formally got its start in Europe in the 17th century, but it didn’t spontaneously appear out of nowhere. There was a long build up that required a catalyst to finally set it in motion.
Since as far back as there has been any record of human activities, it seems humans have been engaging in pre-scientific or science-like behavior, starting with my favorite subject, astronomy. Prehistoric cave paintings and stone monuments show that early man was aware of astronomical events and patterns and had the technology to make rudimentary tools. Over five thousand years ago, predynastic Egyptians and Indians were working with numerals and calculations. Four thousand years ago, Mesopotamians and ancient Egyptians were engaged with math, astronomy, and empiricism, not to mention somehow having the technological prowess to design and make things like the great pyramids at Giza.
In the 7th century B.C., history records the Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, as the “father of science,” because he was the first to propose naturalistic, as opposed to supernatural, explanations for the physical world. After that, Indians began doing more interesting things with mathematics, including trigonometry, algebra, and coming up with the deceptively deep concept of zero. Over the next few hundred years, the ancient Greeks produced the great philosopher and mathematician, Pythagorus, and came up with atomism and made advances in astronomy.
In the 4th century B.C., something interesting happened. There was an explosion of intellectual pre-scientific advances in ancient Greece. We got two of the greatest thinkers of all time—Plato and Aristotle—who established not only the formal rules of inductive and deductive logic, but provided a foundation for the Western way of thinking for thousands of years to come. Aristotle alone promoted much that would eventually influence modern science, including empiricism, pre-biology, pre-medicine, pre-physics, and pre-cosmology. The last of those—Aristotle’s model of the universe with the unmoving Earth at its center—would hang on for a surprisingly long time and would eventually involve itself in one of the most infamous battles in the Western world—Galileo vs. the Church.
Around this time, the Chinese also saw advances in astronomy and would eventually make mathematical progress with the concepts of decimals, negative numbers, and fractions. Over the next few hundred years, there were more advances with the Greeks, including the works of Euclid, Archimedes, (I’m skipping over a lot of development here) and Aristarchus, who was the first on record to propose the idea of a Sun-centered universe (unfortunately, it didn’t catch on).
From about the 2nd century A.D., after Rome conquered Greece, to the 12th century, we had advances by Greco-Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, Persians, and Chinese in a wide variety of subjects (again, skipping a lot of stuff), including astronomy, mathematics, medicine, alchemy (pre-chemistry), optics, geomorphology, and the precursors to Newtonian mechanics and gravitation.
During the 13th to 16th centuries, Europe came alive. Contrary to popular depictions of medieval Europe as dark and backwards, it was the scene of great progress that included (still skipping over lots of stuff) the beginnings of the scientific method, the establishment of universities and paper mills, advances in calculation methods, Occam’s Razor, advances in optics and mechanics, the invention of precision timekeeping pieces (spring-driven clocks), movable type, and the printing press.
The first book mass-produced with the printing press was the Bible, which had the practical benefit of leading directly to widespread literacy. One of the key ideas of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century was the emphasis placed on each person’s direct relationship with God, rather than through an intermediary. For Christians to know God, they had to read the Bible themselves. For this reason, Martin Luther, the main figure of the Reformation, wanted the Bible translated from Greek and Latin, the languages of scholars and the clergy, to the everyday languages of ordinary people. And for people to read the Bible, they of course had to be able to read. So, for the first time, literacy wasn’t just for the wealthy, scholarly, and priestly class, but for everyone.
This is the end of Part 1. I hope you’re enjoying this so far. In Part 2, we’ll talk about the myth of the Dark Ages, Plato vs. Aristotle, Aristotle and the Church, the neo-Platonic crisis, and the role all of this played in Western intellectual development. In Part 3, we’ll discuss the catalyst—the uniquely Christian set of ideals and assumptions—that led directly to the Scientific Revolution.
Where did you get the God/Big Bang image atop?
I am diving into Leviticus and the poodle! My picture of myself is too big and God too small.