Christianity Gave Birth to Science

One of the most unknown facts of our modern world is the reality that Christianity gave birth to science.  Such an idea feels odd – even outlandish – to the modern person who has been told over-and-over that Christianity and science are unreconcilable enemies.  How then could science be the product of Biblical Faith?

Firstly, it must be understood that science is a cultural phenomenon of the Christian West.  There have been many civilizations that have arisen in the past that had great accomplishments.  One thinks of the architectural marvels that are the pyramids of Egypt or the renowned philosophers of ancient Greece, but it was only in the Late Middle Ages in Post-Reformation Christian Europe, that the phenomenon we call “science” arose to the fore.

And it became prominent because the Bible affords one a view of the world that correlates exactly with the scientific method.  This is the case because:

1)  Scripture Teaches that there is only One God

The fact that the Triune God – who is one God in three Persons, that never clash with one another, yet remain distinct in their Personhood (John 10:30, John 5:19, John 16:13-15) – is the only God, makes it so there isn’t confusion and inconsistency in the world.  If – as many cultures have believed – there were many gods, that governed their “own providences according to their own laws” (Metaxas, IAD) then one would expect that the world would be an incoherent glob of forces that rival the seemingly infinite tax laws that preside over every city, state, district and locality.  Such a view of the world would discourage any kind of deep investigation into its principles.  But the belief that the same God who created man also created the universe gives the ideological foundation for the concept that we live in a coherent and ordered world.

2) The Bible Teaches that Creation is Good

Scriptures teaches that the natural world – though to some degree corrupted by the Fall of Man (Romans 8:20, Genesis 3:17) – was created by God as good (Genesis 1:31, 1 Timothy 4:4).  This, of course, is very different from Plato’s “Demiurge”, who was an evil deity that the philosopher believed fashioned the material world.  The Church, which was formed in the heyday of Platonic ideas, received significant blowback on this point and the temptation for Church leaders to concede to the Greek idea that matter was evil¹ must have been palpable.  For instance, Gnosticism, that infamous heresy that the early Church fathers battled, sought to embrace Christianity to some degree, but only on the condition that one accepts that matter is evil.  This seemingly small compromise had vast theological ramifications, and the true leaders of the faith could not accept it.   And we should be glad that they did not, for should one not believe that the material world that God has created is inherently good, then he would never exert the effort required to understand it in the way that Post-Reformation Christian Europe did.

3) God is a Person who Hides Truth in Mysteries

Scripture reveals God as inscrutably wise (Isaiah 40:28).  One who formed the Universe according to a meticulously planned blueprint (Proverbs 8:22-31) and who often does things differently than we would expect (Isaiah 55:8-9).  This again distinguishes Christianity from the philosophers of Greece, who believed in “an inherent order” but one that was largely confined to Plato’s forms.  This made the Greek approach to be more based on abstract concepts – like the notion that circles are perfect and due to this “planets must move in circles” (Metaxas, IAD) – rather than upon empirical observation.  Because God is a Person (John 14:16-21) who often conceals mysteries that He beckons mankind to discover (Proverbs 25:2), it makes the believer to lay down his assumptions about how he thinks things should be and instead discover how they really are.

4) Man is Both Made in God’s Image and Born into Sin

God created mankind in His Image (Genesis 1:26). This among others means that we have the ability to know God, to connect with Him through Holy Spirit and to discover the thoughts He possessed when He created the Universe.  But we also have been corrupted by Adam’s original sin (Romans 5:12) and due to this are prone to be quick to draw conclusions (1 Timothy 5:22), be obstinate in our opinions (Proverbs 11:2) and made blind by our prejudices (Matthew 7:3-5).  As such we must seek a humility (Zephaniah 2:3) that sees the opinions and corrections of others as a means to exposing our blind spots (Proverbs 9:8).  One can see that when this idea is translated to the pursuit of understanding – particularly the knowledge of the natural world – that this notion would have bolstered the concept of the Scientific Method.  Where one takes his findings, holds them off at a distance, submits them to others in the same pursuit, and only accepts his findings as legitimate after they are able to be consistently verified by experiment and recognized by his peers.

It should be clear to the reader that the humble, communal, rational, experimental approach towards understanding the world is based upon the basic beliefs of the Christian faith, without which the enterprise we know as “science” would never have been able to establish itself.

Is it then shocking that the boomerang has returned?  That after all these recent discoveries that science is pointing again to God?

 

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¹ One can see how Transgender and Transhumanist ideology is similar to Plato’s idea that matter is inherently evil and should be escaped from.  In Plato’s day the response to this was to emphasis the spiritual as a means of escaping the evil material world, but it our day we seek to re-shape the material world through the use of plastic surgery – whether that be gender reassignment surgery or some transhumanist attempt at exceeding the limits of the natural body through technology.  Ultimately the response today that the Church must embrace is the same as it was in the first and second centuries.  Which is to testify that Creation is good, and that God – the Creator – is good.  He gave us our natural bodies and we honor Him by accepting, and even learning to love, the bodies that He gave us.  I go into this more deeply in my post Strangers and Exiles Seeking a Country of their Own – Gender Disphoria.

* All References to (Metaxas, IAD) refer to the incredible book Is Atheism Dead? by Eric Metaxas that can be purchased here: https://socratesinthecity.com/product/is-atheism-dead/