Christianity Gave Birth to Science

The Book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible, with scholars dating it from a time that precedes Moses.  It is an incredible work, filled with both deep insight and stirring prose.  One, of course, would expect this, considering that it was inspired by the Holy Spirit and was preserved for our edification (2 Timothy 3:16).

Job is a story about a man who has lost everything and who, despite his suffering, decides to remain faithful to God.  Much of its content is a dialectical exploration of the philosophical problems that are presented by living in a fallen world.  Our world is good and was created by a Just God, yet we recognize that there is something amiss about it; bad things happen to good people and horrible atrocities are visited on the innocent; Job and his friend’s conversations illuminate this, seeking to find some kind of harmony between the good God and the fallen world.  In the end, Job and his friends come to acknowledge that not everything makes sense to us now (Job 42:3) and that we should trust God even in the midst of this mystery.  In the future One will come who will make everything right (Job 19:25, Revelation 21:5) and we can hold on to that hope as we struggle to make our way in a fallen world.

In the middle of this Job veers off into a reflection of the depths that man will go to find precious stones yet how he often doesn’t recognize that wisdom is actually more valuable than gold or silver (Job 28).  Yet wisdom, like diamonds, is hidden from man and takes effort to unearth.  Finding wisdom is like discovering the hidden blueprint that God used when He formed reality, the knowledge of which allows us to isolate its parts and principles to exercise dominion over the earth and to thrive in life (Genesis 1:28, Romans 5:17). 

Yet Job, and also Solomon in Proverbs 1:7, elucidates something that strikes us as shocking when read with fresh eyes.  This wisdom is intricately connected with “the Fear of the Lord”.

As such we understand that when God was using wisdom to form the world (Proverbs 8:22-31), that He was building it with those who Fear the Lord in mind.  Or to put differently, there is a moral component to the material world that is built in, unavoidable and cannot be escaped regardless of one's desire to create a world for himself.

In short, the universe was made for people who fear God.  The Fall has added a layer of disorder to the world, yes, but it remains true that there is a morality to reality that benefits those who live by it.

Is it any shock then that the movement to understand the fixed order of the material world would arise in a place and at a time when men were earnestly seeking to live for God?

Science Began in Post-Reformation Europe

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, from a historical perspective, was a cultural phenomenon of Christian Europe.  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, the aqueducts of Rome, the renowned philosophers of ancient Greece, the incredible inventions of early China, and the mathematical achievements of the Arab world; but it was only in the Late Middle Ages in Post-Reformation Christian Europe, that the phenomenon we call “science” arose to the fore.

Martin Luther’s stand for the supremacy of Scripture as the rule of faith and of man’s responsibility to live according to his conscience (which is the humble way of saying that he should live in the Fear of the Lord, but with recognition that we may often do things that we think are right at the time, only to discover later that we were in error), created a renewed desire in individuals to understand Truth and to know God.  The early natural philosophers, which is what scientists used to be called, saw the study of the natural world as the pursuit of God’s original thoughts when He created the universe.  Newton, Kepler and even Galileo were propelled to study the fixed order of the world out of a desire to know the Lord.

These fathers of modern science took up this endeavor 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?

-------------

To listen to this in Podcast Form click here 

-------------

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/