CHRISTIANITY AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

 

Why did science take root in the Christian West and not in the great classical cultures?

 

Christian presuppositions/beliefs aligned with the reality of the physical world in a way that paved the way for the advancement of science. In Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer defended this thesis:

 

As historian and philosopher of science Steve Fuller notes, Western science is grounded in the “belief that the natural order is the product of a single intelligence from which our own intelligence descends.” Philosopher Holmes Rolston III puts the point this way: “It was monotheism that launched the coming of physical science, for it premised an intelligible world, sacred but disenchanted, a world with a blueprint, which was therefore open to the searches of the scientists. The great pioneers in physics—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus—devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world.” The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), for example, exclaimed that “God wanted us to recognize” natural laws and that God made this possible “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”

 

Why would this belief, rather than the Greek belief in the “logos,” provide the proper foundation for the advancement of science? Meyer argues:

 

·       Although the Greek philosophers thought that nature reflected an underlying order, they nevertheless believed that this order issued from an intrinsic self-existent logical principle called the logos, rather than from a mind or divine being with a will. For this reason, many Greek thinkers assumed that they could deduce how nature ought to behave from first principles based upon only superficial observations of natural phenomena or without actually observing nature at all.

 

According to Meyer, the Greeks believed that they didn’t have to investigate the physical world to understand it. For them, it was enough to apply the unchanging logic of the creative “logos” to understand the physical world it had created. Why? Since the logic of the “logos” is impersonal and unvarying, the philosopher only needed to understand the “logos” to understand the world that it had inevitably generated.

 

In contrast, the Christian believes that God had been free to create in any way He so pleased. Therefore, it was not enough to discover God’s unvarying logic to understand the creation. Instead, they would also have to observe and test the creation, the essence of science.