This is the third part of a three-part (series on the Christian foundation of modern science. Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.
For whatever reason, humans have the unique need to make sense of their place in the universe. As far as I can tell, mice have no need to understand where they come from. Even impressively advanced animals, like dolphins and ravens, seem content to do what they do without searching out their origins and how they fit into the grand scheme of things. Humans, however, expend a lot of effort to tell each other stories about their origins, sometimes embellishing the narrative with dramatic details, other times relaying it in the cold prose of natural philosophy.
We started off painting these stories on cave walls or projecting them onto the heavens, embedding the details into the constellations. We’re still recording these stories, in scientific journals, documentaries, and movies. The more complex the society, the greater the need for depth of understanding of humanity’s place.
But does complexity in a human society necessarily lead to science?
When I was young and growing up atheist, the narrative I believed was that human society naturally progressed towards ever greater complexity, briefly interrupted by the spread of regressive Christianity, and finally breaking free of that, we advanced all the way to inventing things like science, modern medicine, and space travel, and it’s just a matter of time before we’d have our moon bases and flying cars.
Only that’s not what happened.
Humans are pretty clever. I get a kick out of reviewing the various inventions and advancements of ancient societies, because they’re remarkably advanced considering that they date back several hundreds to thousands of years ago.
There have been many advanced societies throughout history. They asked all of the profound questions of life that we’re still trying to answer. They invented all kinds of wonders. They knew math better than most educated people today. But not all of them invented modern science. In fact, only one society, at one time in history, invented modern science.
This is such a profound oddity that it begs investigation.
The Greeks
The Greeks were clearly philosophically advanced. When they exploded on the intellectual scene 2,500 years ago, they immediately began asking all the most important questions about, well, everything. They were mathematically inventive, they formulated the rules of logic, they came up with all kinds of theories about natural phenomena. If any society was poised to give birth to modern science, it was the Greeks. But for some reason, they didn’t.
Babylonians, Romans, and Chinese
Consider the Babylonians, the Romans, and the Chinese. They were all technologically advanced, and they were doing what they were doing hundreds and thousands of years ago. Among other things, Babylonians developed trigonometry, cartography, cuneiform writing, agriculture, sailboats, and the wheel. They were such keen observers and trackers of the passage of time that modern scientists use ancient Babylonian records of the motions of the heavens to analyze how the rotation of the Earth has changed over the last few thousand years.1
The Romans created marvels of engineering, including advanced public sanitation systems, architecture, aqueducts, medical tools, concrete, an ancient form of central heating, and roads that were so well built that some of them still exist today. They were masters of warfare, inventing weapons, tools, and techniques that helped to advance their expansive empire. Romans also invented the codex—the bound book—which is compact, sturdy, and convenient, compared with the more fragile and cumbersome scroll.
The Chinese made advances in farming, metal working, medicine, and paper making. They invented technological wonders, such as an early seismograph for detecting earthquakes, the rocket, gun powder, the first mechanical clock, the compass, and movable type printing.
Impressive achievements. How many of us would be able to produce these things even with all the knowledge and modern tools we have at our disposal? And yet none of these technological powerhouses invented modern science.
Arabs
During the Islamic Golden Age, Arabs made advancements in medicine, developing expansive literature on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. They used astronomical instruments to precisely track sunrises and sunsets, and to determine longitude and latitude. Mathematically, they invented algebra, expanded on the Indian concept of zero, advanced trigonometry, and invented decimals. They were also skilled architects and navigators. Arabs at this time were keenly interested in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, and placed great emphasis on education.
But they didn’t invent science.
If you were a visitor to planet Earth from some far-off solar system, and were to read human history from its very beginnings up until any of these points, you’d probably think the invention of modern science was inevitable in at least one, if not all, of these societies. And yet, it wasn’t. And it certainly wasn’t for lack of intelligence, knowledge, or cleverness.
So, why didn’t any of these advanced, intellectually- and technologically-gifted civilizations invent modern science?
The simple answer is this. Because they lacked the set of ideals and assumptions that are unique to Christianity.
Science is the study of nature, and just the possibility of science depends on one’s attitude toward nature.
Let’s briefly look at some of the core ideas of the Christian worldview, and contrast them with those of other worldviews.
Nature is real
Christianity holds that nature is real. That may sound like the most obvious statement ever, but that’s only because we look at nature from a modern, Western, culturally Christian, science-immersed perspective.
In pantheism and idealism, for instance, the assumption is that nature is not real. Individuality and separateness are illusions, and everything is an appearance of some absolute “One.” If this is your worldview, if you do not believe that nature is real, there isn’t much motivation to study it.
Christianity, on the other hand, holds that nature was created by God. The world is not part of God, but something produced by God. Everything in it is therefore real, and it can be studied philosophically and experimentally.
Nature is good
The belief in the realness of the world isn’t unique to Christianity. The Greeks believed the world is real, too; however, they also denigrated the material world as evil. As such, they eschewed physical work as much as possible, leaving the labor to slaves, while they pursued higher things, like politics and philosophizing. Even tradesmen, craftsmen, merchants, teachers, and physicians were looked down upon. This is the major reason the Greeks did not invent modern science. The main thing that distinguishes the Greek approach to science and the modern approach to science is experimentation; but experimentation is a form of labor, and was abhorred. The Greeks thought about the world, they made logical conclusions, but they didn’t experiment on it. That’s why the Aristotelian idea that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects persisted for so long, even though it’s demonstrably false (modulo some complications from air resistance; see the video below for a demonstration of this in the absence of an atmosphere). All Aristotle had to do was try it out to see that it wasn’t true! But he relied on reason without experimentation, and never realized he was wrong.
Contrast this view with that of Christianity. Christians believe the material world is good. It’s certainly not perfect, as it is “fallen,” but when the Bible records God’s assessment at the end of his labors in Genesis, it is described as good. God is the ultimate craftsman, fashioning the universe and the Earth in a step-by-step fashion. Jesus, during his incarnation on Earth, was a carpenter. The Christian world had a high view of the material world as God’s creation, and believed there was dignity in manual labor. In the Christian world, tradesmen, craftsmen, merchants, teachers, and physicians were all regarded with respect.
You can see this attitude permeating the work of the great scientists of the Scientific Revolution. Consider this spontaneous prayer, recorded in the notebook of Johannes Kepler, the great German astronomer and mathematician who formulated the laws of planetary motion:
“I give you thanks, Creator and God, that you have given me this joy in thy creation, and I rejoice in the works of your hands. See I have now completed the work to which I was called. In it I have used all the talents you have lent to my spirit.”
In fact, the idea of dignity in labor was manifested almost to the extreme in Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived and the epitome of genius. Of Newton, biographer Mitch Stokes remarks that his intensity in his work was “a measure of his devotion to God. For Newton, ‘to be constantly engaged in studying and probing into God’s actions was true worship.’ This idea defined the seventeenth century scientist, and in many cases, the scientists doubled as theologians.”
Nature is a creation
The pantheistic and sometimes pagan view of the world is that it is the home of gods or an emanation of God’s own essence. To the pagan, the world itself is alive, sacred, mysterious, filled with spirits, sprites, and demons, which need to be avoided or appeased.
Nature to Christians, as God’s creation, is good, but is not itself a god, nor is it alive or enchanted. It was created by God, and it is good, but it is merely a creation, not itself a deity. The de-deification of the natural world was a necessary step toward modern science.
Nature is ordered
In paganism, nature can be seen as arbitrary, subject to the whims of a multitude of immanent capricious gods, who are often personifications of what we now call natural forces and phenomena.
In the Christian view, the creator of the universe is trustworthy. While it may not be possible to understand everything God does, he is not capricious or arbitrary. His creation is therefore regular, ordered, and dependable. God is also a law-giver, therefore God is the legislator of his own creation, which is governed by laws.
Nature is precise
Another hang-up the Greeks had about nature is that it’s crude. They believed in an eternal cosmos, which was restructured by a lesser god who struggled against recalcitrant matter to reshape it into the world we inhabit. The Greeks saw the material world as a rough, crude copy of perfect Forms and Ideas. And while the Greeks were excellent mathematicians, they were so enchanted by math that they elevated it to the realm of the divine. This prohibited them from making a connection between mathematics and the material world, a key aspect of modern science. Even Aristotle, who was more grounded in reality than Plato, kept math and science separate.
Christians do not believe God struggled to make the universe. It is his creation entirely. Christian belief in an almighty God, perfectly omniscient and omnipotent, who created the world exactly as he intended, is why Kepler famously struggled to formulate his laws of planetary motion. His trust in God’s sovereignty, and therefore in the precision with which God made the universe, is why he worked so diligently to construct his laws of motion.
Any reasonable person might’ve given up trying to reconcile Tycho Brahe’s highly precise measurements of planetary movements in the heavens with a perfect mathematical model of the solar system. It seemed impossible. Kepler had initially assumed the planets would move in circular orbits—why would anyone assume otherwise?—and Brahe’s observations, which were known to be extremely careful, nearly matched these orbits. But they were off by a few fractions of a degree. Any reasonable person would say “good enough” at this point. But such was Kepler’s trust in God’s precision, that he couldn’t ignore this discrepancy, and this led to the momentous realization that the planets moved in elliptical orbits, not circular. Lest you not think this is such a big deal, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion led to Newton’s eventual formulation of the law of universal gravitation.
Nature is knowable
The pagan view of nature, as ruled by the whims of gods, leaves little room for any kind of scrutable order.
Christianity, however, holds that nature, as created by a rational, law-giving creator, is also knowable by other rational minds. As physicist Werner Heisenberg opined hundreds of years after the rise of modern science, “[The world] can be understood by Man, because Man was created as the spiritual image of God.” (Tradition in Science, 1983) God gave us rational minds, and therefore the capacity to understand his ordered, lawful, knowable creation.
Nature must be tested
The great flaw with Aristotle (as far as the development of science is concerned) is that he placed all his trust in the power of reason. Reason is important, but without the appropriate facts, it’s impotent. Aristotle believed that once we know an object’s purpose, we can use deductive logic to determine everything else we want to know about it. There is no need to take it apart or to put it through various tests in order to see what it will do. This attitude was inspired by the proofs of geometry, which, while powerful and compelling, can’t be extended to the physical world.
Christians believe God wants us to get our hands dirty playing with his creation. A belief, called voluntarism, held that God is not constrained by Forms, but only by his own nature. God is sovereign to exert his will on the world. Not all Christians believed this, however. There was a struggle between voluntarism and scholasticism, the Thomist melding of Aristotelian philosophy and Christianity. The voluntarist view is what led to experimentation.
Nature is for the glory of God—and the benefit of mankind
The pantheistic and animistic ideas of the world are that the divine is immanent, not transcendent. In other words, the gods are here, not beyond the universe, and the only reason to understand nature at all is to conform and adapt to it.
The Christian view could hardly differ more. Man is made in God’s image, therefore while we live in the world, we do not conform to it, but conform to God. As bearers of God’s image, we are free to explore and intellectually manipulate and experiment on his creation, which was at least in part created for us. This went so far after the Protestant Reformation as some Christians seeing the study of nature as a duty imposed on us by God, or, in Newton’s view, a “form of true worship.”
The linear nature of time
Pagans view time as primarily cyclical, with the world undergoing a series of births and deaths and rebirths, and so on. Babylonians, Buddhists, Hindus, Greeks, and pre-Christian Scandinavians, view time as circular, spiral, endlessly repeating. While Plato described in a beginning of time, it was interpreted as metaphorical by his followers. Aristotle, whose cosmology came to rule the Western intellectual world for thousands of years, held that the universe is eternal and unchanging, with cycles operating within the world.
It was the early church father, Augustine, in the fourth century, who intuited from the Bible that time is linear. He realized, based on the fact that the Bible chronicled several non-repeatable events—God’s creation of the universe, God’s covenant with the Israelites, the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, His eventual return, the end of the universe, and the establishment of a new universe—that time must be a finite line rather than an endless spiral. This linear view of time, and the concrete connection of its passage with earthly events, was necessary for the rise of modern science, which is, after all, an exercise in predicting the future based on the behavior of past events.
This collection of ideals and assumptions was necessary for the rise of modern science. It’s not that each and every one of these ideals and assumptions is exclusive to the Christian worldview, but that the entire set of ideals and assumptions is unique to Christianity. In some ways, the Greeks came so close to developing science, it’s almost a miracle that they didn’t. But their eschewing of experimentation, their separation of math and science, their belief in the crudeness of nature, and their nonlinear view of time were fatal to their developing true science.
Having said all that, here’s what I’m not saying: contributions from the Christian worldview were, all by themselves, sufficient to give rise to modern science. There was significant development and contribution from other traditions and cultures. But primarily, modern science arose from Greek logic, realism, and mathematics combined with Christian ideals and assumptions. This is why modern science arose in Christian Europe in the 17th century and nowhere (and no-when) else.
Knowing all of this makes remarks, like this one from New Atheist writer and speaker Sam Harris, all the more ridiculous:
“The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.”
“Science Must Destroy Religion” (2006)
The key figures of the Scientific Revolution
As the frosting on this historical cake, let’s look at the Who’s Who of the Scientific Revolution.
Sociologist Rodney Stark, in his book For the Glory of God, put together a definitive list of the architects of the Scientific Revolution with the intent of investigating their religious beliefs. He based his list on the most unbiased sources he could find, including a list compiled by atheist science fiction (and science) writer Isaac Asimov. He found that of the 52 people identified as the key figures of the Revolution, an overwhelming majority—50 of them, to be precise—were Christian. Only one person was identifiably atheist (Edmund Halley) and another’s religious identity was unknown.
When I present this historical fact to atheists who repeat the New Atheist mantra that science and religion are hopelessly at odds, the typical defense is:
“Everyone was Christian in those days.” With the addendum that most of these Christian scientists were probably Christian in name only.
They invented science in spite of Christianity.
The problem with this defense:
Stark clearly identifies 60% of these scientists as being “devoutly” Christian, and only 40% as being “conventional” Christians.
This is manifestly untrue, given the history presented in this three-part series. But even if this were somehow true, or even a little bit true, it proves that Christianity is far less dangerous to science than pretty much every other tradition on Earth, including atheism, because modern science didn’t appear anywhere else.
The history I’ve presented in this three-part series and its conclusion should leave little doubt as to the Christian roots of modern science. Every Christian should be rejoicing in the role Christianity has played in revealing God’s Book of Nature, which is not only not at odds with his Book of Scripture, but is wonderfully supportive.
Christians need to embrace science as one of the blessings of their religion, not a hostile force opposing it. True science, conducted carefully and with integrity, is a way to honor God and bring us closer to him.
Summary
Modern science arose in 17th century Christian Europe and nowhere else
Greek philosophy + Christian theology —> science
Science arose because of Christianity, not in spite of it
96% of the architects of the Scientific Revolution were Christian
60% were devoutly so
Christians need to embrace science as one of the blessings of their religion
I want to acknowledge The Soul of Science by Pearcey and Thaxton and For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark as inspirations for this series of articles.
Postscript
There is simply too much history and detail about the rise of modern science in Christian Europe to cover everything in a brief series of articles. However, I want to point out one important detail that I hope to eventually flesh out into its own article.
The mass-production of the Bible led to widespread literacy. In video game parlance, that was “Achievement: Unlocked.” And the reason I point this out is not just because widespread literacy defeats one of the relentless drumbeats against religion—in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens, that it “poisons everything”—but that it influenced the development and expansion of science by making science accessible to just about everyone.
By the late 17th century, the environment of science changed from scholastics and universities to everyday people in private societies and coffee houses. The latter had become such enormously popular hotspots of intellectual discourse that they came to be known as “penny universities,”2 since that was about the price of a cup of coffee. Given the relative ease with which ideas could be disseminated through print, and read and understood by common people, many of these societies developed their own scientific publications, some of which still operate to this day. All of this is directly traceable to the invention of the printing press and the mass production of the Bible.
Yes, the rate at which the Earth spins, and therefore the length of an Earth day, has changed significantly over its history, and continues to change. It’s estimated that the Earth initially spun so fast that a day was only six hours long. The Earth’s rotation changes due to tidal friction with the Moon, which steals some of the Earth’s angular momentum. As a result, the Moon gets further from the Earth (about 3.8 cm per year), and the Earth slows down in its rotation.
Is Penny University a great name for a chain of coffee shops or what?