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WAS
CHRISTIANITY A CAUSE OF MODERN SCIENCE?
What Historical Evidence Shows
that the Christian Faith Helped to Create Science?
The Duhem-Jaki and Merton Theses
Explained
by
Eric V. Snow
When we think
of Christianity's role in the rise of science, what do we think of? How it hindered it, such as the conflict
between Galileo (1564-1642) and the Inquisition in the seventeenth century? Or, perhaps, do we think of Thomas Huxley
debating evolution with Bishop Wilberforce in the nineteenth century? What we need to do now is take a deep
breath, and take a step out of today's overwhelmingly secularized intellectual
climate, and consider this: Modern
science arose among avowedly Christian clerics, theologians, monks, and
professors of medieval and renaissance Catholic universities and
monasteries. Normally, the Middle Ages
are regarded as having a worldv[1]iew
very opposed to that of science by atheists and agnostics similar to the manner
Leonard Peikoff, the literary and philosophical heir of novelist Ayn Rand,
expressed himself: "For centuries,
nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal
deity, a realm whose significance lay the clues it offered to the purposes of
its author."[2] Yet, if science gradually arose during the
medieval and Renaissance periods, but Christianity and science are seen as
totally incompatible, how did this occur?
After all, neither Galileo nor Copernicus (1473-1543), who maintained
the sun was at the center of the solar system, not the earth, were skeptics or
unbelievers, unlike such medieval predecessors as the Islamic poet and
astronomer Omar Khayyam (1048?-1122) or Frederick II (1194-1250), Holy Roman
Emperor? The remarkable truth is that
the worldview of Christianity was absolutely necessary for the rise of modern
science, as shown by the Duhem-Jaki and (only secondarily) Merton theses.
The
Duhem-Jaki and Merton theses are quite different in how they tie Christianity
to the birth of science. Pierre Duhem
and Stanley Jaki, respectively past and present professors of Roman
Catholicism, see a direct tie between Christian metaphysics, its rejections of
various classical Greek philosophical conceptions, and the birth of a
self-sustaining science.[3] On the other hand, Robert K. Merton, the
sociologist who wrote Science in Seventeenth Century England,[4] ties
seventeenth century English Puritanism's ethics to the rise of English science
much the same way the German sociologist Max Weber tied the rise of capitalism
to Calvinism.[5] Merton's approach is quite different from
Jaki's and Duhem's, since Merton sees the rise of English science only as a
relatively inadvertent product of Puritanism's values and beliefs, using an externalist
approach that analyzes how religious beliefs and actions caused by them affect
the larger society. By contrast, Duhem
and Jaki take a more internalist approach by looking at the intellectual
roots of science and by seeing theology and science as closely tied together in
the medieval era since the same people often did both (such as the Frenchman
Nicole Oresme).[6] Merton only sees Protestantism as helping
science along, and not as creating it, for Galileo, the discoverer of
the inverse squared law of the acceleration of falling bodies in physics, and
his predecessors were Catholics.[7] Somewhat curiously, these two theses often
seem to pass each other like two ships in the night without partisans or
critics of one mentioning the other.[8]
TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE DOES NOT EQUAL SCIENCE
We must avoid
assuming technological advance proves a given civilization has science, or
modern science, for most inventions that affected daily life in the pre-modern
world economically were "empirical" discoveries by craftsmen and
other pragmatic types, not true scientists meditating on the laws of
nature. While the Greeks, Chinese,
Indians, and Islam all had what can be fairly called "science," their
science lacked the rigor and vigor that would characterize the West's science
from Galileo onwards, and soon fizzled out on own. In order to have some idea of what culture's science really
qualifies as science it's best to introduce a definition here to avoid
misunderstandings: The systematized
collection of knowledge about nature through using only reason and sense
experience in order to discover the underlying laws of nature, which explain
how nature is organized and allow future accurate predictions about nature's
processes or objects to be made. For
all the world's civilizations, only Greek geometry fully met this definition,
along with mathematics in general, prior to the time of Galileo, and that is
only by excising the "sense experience" part of this definition.
Just what are
the tenets of the Duhem-Jaki thesis?
First, it denies that sociological non-intellectual, externalist causes
are sufficient conditions to create modern science. As Jaki put it:
This
historiography of science has still to face up honestly to the problem of why
three great ancient cultures (China, India, and Egypt) display independently of
one another, a similar pattern vis-a-vis science. The pattern is the stillbirth of science in each of them in spite
of the availability of talents, social organization, and peace--the standard
explanatory devices furnished by all-knowing sociologies of science on which
that historiography relies ever more heavily.[9]
All of these conditions may be necessary to allow a
civilization to develop science, but we have to look to the intellectual
climate to understand why only one particular civilization developed a
self-sustaining, modern science.
Peculiarly, this same culture had been in the immediately preceding
centuries intellectually and economically quite backward compared to the great
Eurasian cultures that rivaled it.
Those influenced by Marxism may often be loathe to investigate how the
intellectual climate can independently change on its own, and influence
politics and economics. For we should
realize that while the mode of production (the technology and system of
economics utilized by a society) can and does influence the superstructure of
ideology as Marx maintained, the reverse influence can and does happen
also. "Ideas have consequences"
is an assumption that won't be proven here,[10] but it is
a perfectly reasonable one when so much religious behavior is not tied to the
economic self-interest of some class in society.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS A CULTURE MUST AVOID TO DEVELOP
SCIENCE
So now,
according to Duhem and Jaki, what ideas are necessary to have (or, to be more
precise generally, not have) in the intellectual climate of a
civilization to keep science self-sustaining, instead of dying out after a few
centuries of progress? First, a linear,
potentially quantifiable conception of time that clearly distinguishes past,
present, and future promotes a scientific view of nature and its cause-effect
relationships is necessary for a scientific outlook. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this idea comes from the act of
God in creating the universe from nothing at some specific point of time in the
past, and then time is seen as progressing through the present on to the future
with the second coming and the day of judgment. The alternative view of time, the concept of the "Great
Year," maintains centuries-long time cycles exist in which the future repeats
the past exactly or almost exactly, making progress of any kind theoretically
impossible. This idea of time breeds a
sense of complacency ("we know it all already") and/or hopelessness,
hindering the development of science in a given culture. Second, if science is to exist, explanations
of natural phenomena must avoid a priori, pseudo-scientific
"explanations" that really do not describe the causes of events, such
as astrology. Third, science is
hindered by the organismic view of nature.
This idea conceives all of the universe as alive, as if it was one huge
organism which goes through the above mentioned cyclical process from birth, to
maturity, then death, to be born again.
The tie to pantheism--believing EVERYTHING is God, a standard Hindu
view--is obvious here. This outlook
sees what we moderns consider inanimate (and non-divine) objects, like rocks,
the planets, the stars, the oceans, and other natural objects to have wills of
their own, or intelligences of their own.
Fourth, science is hindered if the reality of the basic orderliness of
the universe ("the external real world") is denied. Humans will not often investigate carefully
what is considered not to really exist, or that which will be changed at whim
by the God(s), or nature herself. Fifth, the heavens (outer space) must not be considered alive, or
divine, if a scientific astronomy is to exist.
Sixth, a balance between reason and faith is necessary, without the
religious people totally rejecting science or natural laws, and without the
philosophers/scientists totally rejecting the claims of religious truth. Seventh, man needs to be seen as
fundamentally different from the rest of nature, as having a mind that makes
him qualitatively different from the animals, etc., not just quantitatively
different. The foundations for this
view are laid in the Judeo-Christian worldview in Genesis where man and woman
were made in God's likeness and image, and were told they had dominion over the
animals (Gen. 1:26-29). So long as all
or most of false ideas in these areas are believed by a great majority of the
intellectuals/"wisemen" of a given culture, a self-sustaining science
will not comes to exist in a given civilization, especially any true science of
bodies moving in the external real world (i.e., physics, unlike math).
Now, the tie
between the acceptance or rejection of such ideas and the rise of modern
science may not be altogether obvious.[11] Hence, a lot of explanation is needed to
prove such connections, and this essay is only scratching the surface. Readers seeking more evidence should read
Jaki's works in particular.[12] Also, it should be noted that some
civilizations had all or most of these false ideas, such as Hindu India, while
other(s) had fewer of them (China), and other(s) still fewer (Islam). Correspondingly, the last progressed in
science further as compared to the other two correspondingly to the acceptance
of such ideas, and the second more than the first. For instance, the Chinese lacked the delusion the heavens were
divine and/or living.[13] Such an idea was found in On the
Heavens, a very influential work by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle
(384-322 b.c.), which hindered indigenous Islamic science[14]
permanently, and Christian science for many centuries before being finally cast
off. On the other hand, Hindu science
concerning the material world was crushed by almost all these faulty
intellectual ideas: the external real
world and its orderliness were denied, eternal cycles and the organismic view
of nature were espoused, and the heavens were seen as divine. Islamic science would have become
self-sustaining possibly, if its holy book the Quran (Koran) had not emphasized
God's will and power so much as against His reason, and if Muslim philosophers
and scientists had not become so mesmerized by Aristotle's physics and
philosophy. Let's briefly consider each
of these great civilizations in turn, and see how these faulty metaphysical
concepts held their science back from continual development.
WHY DIDN'T CHINA DEVELOP SCIENCE BEFORE EUROPE?
When we look
at the great civilization of China, and its marvelous wealth, population, and
technological prowess during the ancient and medieval periods, it is easy to
wonder why science did not occur there first.[15] Paper, gunpowder, the compass, and moveable
type were all Chinese inventions.
China's sophisticated rice agriculture, improved by selective plant
breeding, was much more productive than contemporaneous medieval
European agriculture.[16] Yet, such technological accomplishments do
not prove China had modern science:
Nevertheless
the accompanying assumption of Singer [who influenced Joseph Needham, the great
Sinologist of Chinese science and technology] and of his era [the early
twentieth century] that engineering innovation has almost always sprung from
prior scientific discovery is not warranted by the facts. This certainly confused Needham about
China's influence upon European science, and I suspect that it has not
clarified his probings of the Chinese phenomena.[17]
This distinction Abu-Lughod appears to have missed,[18] which is
why it was not mere time and chance China declined whilst the West rose, riding
the back of the first modern science.
What were
some of the science-hindering metaphysical concepts found in Chinese philosophy
and religion? First of all, the concept
of eternal cycles was most certainly present.
One Buddhist monk attacked the Christian dogma of creation as follows:
Space,
worlds, and beings have no beginning nor end if we consider them not in
themselves and individuals but in their totality. They are eternal from this global point of view. They proliferate without end and during
incalculable cosmic periods progress through successive stages of formation,
stability, degradation and then a return to nothingness.[19]
Such ideas were no mere individual eccentricity of this
monk, but were part and parcel of Chinese intellectual life, having apparently
been strengthened by the entrance of Buddhism from Hindu India, and were
assimilated into Neo-Confucian thought.[20] What are the problems caused by acceptance
of such cycles of thousands of years in which the world and its civilizations
are repeatedly created and destroyed only to be created again? Such views create a sense of metaphysically-induced
hopelessness and passivity since no matter how hard humans may struggle to
achieve, work, and think, the results of all efforts will be destroyed.[21] Also, a non-linear view of time makes
careful, precise quantification (measurement using numbers) of time irrelevant.
It also makes people tend to confuse the order of cause and effect since the
idea of this-after-that (succession) is weakened. Yet science requires non-passive investigators of nature, precise
quantification of time, and the correct knowledge of causes, so the above false
ideas need to be firmly rejected for it to exist.
Jaki
illustrates the consequences of the Chinese view of time as lacking of sense of
succession, weakening their view of cause and effect with
the
fact that the Chinese saw nothing inordinate in attributing the political
failure of a certain prince to the sacrificing of humans at his burial. As both political impotence and cruelty
evidence the absence of the same virtue, one could replace the other as
explanation regardless of their sequence.[22]
Jaki goes on to quote Granet's comment that cause and effect
did not matter to the Chinese, but instead saw the world as consisting of
manifestations whose order did not matter since being "Equally
expressive, they appeared interchangeable."[23] With the Chinese having such a conception of
time, a true modern science would never have spontaneously arise among them--or
any other civilization believing in eternal cycles so firmly, since it undercut
the idea of succession in time which is so necessary to developing an idea of,
and applying, the law of cause and effect.
SOME CHINESE PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC "EXPLANATIONS" THAT
HINDERED SCIENCE
Another
metaphysical delusion the Chinese sadly suffered from (though they were hardly
alone) were various a priori pseudo-scientific "explanations"
of natural events. In Chinese thought
the two best examples of this were the two forces of Yin and Yang on the one
hand, and the book of Changes (I Ching) on the other. Yin (female) and Yang (male) were seen as
the two forces pervading all of nature and its processes. As a result, the Chinese would not hesitate
to assign "the changes of weather to the stillness of Yin."[24] Yin and Yang were used to explain why
magnets became attracted to each other, and describe the movements of the sun,
moon, and stars.[25] Likewise, the I Ching was a manual of
divination that would line up various sayings and interpretations of natural
events through various symbols such as lines, trigrams, and hexagrams. Through this book any observation in nature
("omen") would be given an instant interpretation as to its cause and
significance. (Compare this to the
Roman practice of examining animals' livers to make major decisions of state,
etc.) Although normally very sympathetic
to the claims of Chinese culture and science, Needham still was willing to say: "Yet really they [Han dynasty scholars]
would have been wiser to tie a millstone about the neck of the I Ching
and cast it into the sea."[26] The most widespread of pseudo-scientific
delusions was astrology. It plagued
Islam, India, even Christendom to a great degree--and China as well.[27] At the Emperor's court, various "wise
men" (astrologers, astronomers, and meteorologists) would interpret and
blame on the emperor various portents and "signs."[28] What are the costs of having such a
priori "explanations" of natural events? They dull the human mind through thinking it
DOES know why such events occur, when in fact the laws of nature are still
unknown. To posit such metaphysical
entities as Yin and Yang, or the effects of stars upon people's destinies, and
then say they determine natural processes, creates the delusion of knowledge
out of ignorance. Of course, the
Chinese were hardly alone in embracing such
science-hindering deceptions--see Aristotle's On the Heavens, and
his four elements theory, for starters.
THE CHINESE VERSION OF THE ORGANISMIC VIEW OF NATURE
Another
metaphysical conception that impeded Chinese science was an organismic view of
nature, which sees all of nature as being one huge living creature that goes
through a repeating cycle of birth, maturity, and death. Humans are considered to be part of it and
fundamentally being like the animals, not basically different from them. Correspondingly, Taoism, which was espoused
by the sixth century b.c. Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, conceived of nature as
"an all-encompassing living entity animated by impersonal volitions,"
was a source of trouble for Chinese science.[29] True, Needham, sympathetic as always,
strongly emphasizes how Taoists would contemplate nature and believe it had an
underlying order. (Needham believed
"Tao" could be best translated "order of nature").[30] However, the Taoists would not actively
investigate nature as opposed to a mystically-inclined contemplation and
inactivity concerning it: "He who
practices the Tao, daily diminishes his doing.
He diminishes it and again diminishes it, till he arrives at doing
nothing. Having arrived at this
non-inaction, there is nothing that he does not do."[31] This attitude of non-activity (not intended
to be taken literally, as even Jaki commented),[32] is at
least partly due to how Taoism would see man as totally weak and impotent
compared to the majesty of nature, with which he should see an intimate organic
unity.[33] By seeing nature as a vast, single
spontaneously acting organism (albeit as mystically inspiring as that may be
for many in the New Age/environmentalist crowd), it kept them from developing
the idea of natural law in the modern sense.
Needham himself, although noting the tie in Chinese thought between the
cyclical time and organismic concepts, failed to realize the negative consequences
of such concepts by trying to put them in the most positive light.[34] However, such ideas have negative effects on
developing an active mindset towards nature, which was necessary to develop
modern science, as Jaki describes:
The
organismic concept of the world (not in the Whiteheadian sense) invariably
fosters a state of mind dominated by a nostalgic longing for the primitive
golden age, with its idyllic settings in which everything takes place in an
effortless way. In that dreamlike
condition of spontaneousness men live off nature without disturbing it [compare
this thought with what some environmentalists believe today!], and carry
out their social propensities without the sense of constraint due to
authorities and laws.[35]
In short, both belief in eternal time cycles and in nature
as one huge organism encourage the passivity that opposes the mentally active,
investigating spirit of science, such as shown by Aristotle and Leonardo da
Vinci (1452-1519) dissecting carcasses, instead of just meditating and
contemplating passively deep within a forest about Nature.
CHINESE CONCEPTIONS OF THE LAWS OF NATURE
The Chinese
believed nature both was orderly and had an actual existence (when not
influenced by the rather pervasive, Hindu-derived Buddhist ideas of maya,
the belief all is illusion). However,
they lacked the concept of natural law, as ordained by a personal God,
which assured nature was rationally understandable to mankind's
mind:
It
was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it
was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no
conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their
lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed
aforetime.[36]
For a man who was a Marxist (and, admittedly, simultaneously,
a very liberal Protestant),[37] this must
have been a very hard concession to make, as Jaki observed,[38] for it
points to an ideological cause for why modern science did not appear in
China, not an economic or political cause.
In contrast, the view of how Christianity's concept of the rationality
of God was tied to the rise of science in the West is best stated by the English
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947):
I
do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest
contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpungable belief that every
detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly
definite manner, exemplifying general principles. . . . When we compare this
tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to
themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on
the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and
with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.
Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search could only result in the vindication of the faith in
rationality.[39]
The rationality of God is implied through certain texts,
although written specifically concerning church services, a broader application
of these texts is still appropriate:
"God is not a God of confusion but of peace," who wants
activities to be "done properly and in an orderly manner" (I Cor.
14:33, 40). Since Whitehead was a
pantheist, he would not be especially likely to concede too much to medieval
Christianity about its sense of nature being rationally knowable and its role
in causing modern science to exist.
WHY DIDN'T INDIA DEVELOP SCIENCE BEFORE EUROPE?
Moving
westwards to the land of India, an equally perplexing problem with the lack of
modern science seems to present itself.
Hindu civilization on the subcontinent was ancient, well-settled, and
extremely rich materially by the standards of the time. India routinely ran surplus balances of
trade with the West, as China did. As
late as 1770, after the industrial revolution had begun by some
dating schemes in England, the British wool industry tried to prohibit the
import of Bengali calicoes into the United Kingdom.[40] And enormous credit should be given to the
Indian mind for the momentous invention of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, with
their place notation and the concept of zero.
For without this system of enumeration, the (easy) quantification of
natural events and substances, so necessary to the development of modern
science, would never have occurred.[41] (If you doubt this, try multiplying using
Roman numerals alone, without any mental use of the Hindu-Arabic numerals,
MDCCCLXVIII by CCLIX!)
Unfortunately,
Hindu civilization as a whole was weighted down with almost the most
anti-scientific metaphysics imaginable.
The Hindu concept of maya, the view that sense data tell only of
illusion, not a real external world, was anti-scientific in the extreme.[42] Generally, you do not systematically
investigate that which you think is a mirage.
Hence--the Hindu mind turned inwards, and progressed in math by leaps
and bounds, but failed utterly to come up with a science of the external
real world, such as physics. The
concept of eternal cycles, with its view of universal destruction and
recreation, saturated Indian culture as well.
The sense of hopelessness and passivity caused by this latter concept is
aptly illustrated by the comment of king Brithadratha in the Maitri
Upanishad as he contemplates an endless series of the transmigrations of
the soul: "In the cycle of
existence I am like a frog in a waterless well."[43] Or, consider what the god Vishnu told the
god Indra in the Brhamavaivarta Purana:
"I have known the dreadful dissolution of the universe. I have seen all perish, again and again, at
the end of every cycle. At that
terrible time, every single atom dissolves into the primal, pure water of
eternity whence originally all arose."[44] Our modern minds, which presumably
automatically reject such concepts, unless influenced by New Age mush, etc.,
may see their deadening effects on constructive activity by how some today
react to the fear of nuclear war:
"let us eat, and rink for tomorrow we die" (I Cor.
15:32). Worse yet, death is no escape,
for that will bring only another rather meaningless life by a rebirth, unless
you have reached the final necessary stage of perfection before being absorbed
into Brahma and the end of your individual existence.
THE HIGH COST OF PANTHEISM AND THE ORGANISMIC VIEW OF THE
UNIVERSE FOR INDIA
Hindu
pantheism caused problems in developing a scientific astronomy, for the heavens
were seen as divine and animate. Here
the organismic view of the cosmos levies a terrible tax, for then the heavens
are seen as alive with a will of their own, instead of being merely inanimate,
inorganic matter. In contrast,
eventually, in the West, Aristotle's view of the heavens being divine and/or
intelligent was extinguished, but only after many centuries of the Christian
era:
.
. . [D]uring the twelfth century in Latin Europe, those aspects of
Judeo-Christian thought which emphasized the idea of creation out of nothing
and the distance between God and the world, in certain contexts and with
certain men, had the effect of eliminating all semi-divine entities from the
realm of nature. Thus nature tended to
become a mechanistic entity, running according to the characteristics with
which it had been endowed and powered by the forces it had been given in the
beginning.[45]
Left to itself, Hindu pantheism never would have eliminated
the divine, organismic view of nature since it saw no ultimate difference
between God and the universe.
The most
widespread pseudo-science in Eurasia was (and is) astrology, and to this day it
plagues India with its influence. Tying
a person's destiny to an arbitrary interpretation of a given position of the
stars and planets on some given day is a denial of the scientific outlook. It encourage a passive, fatalistic attitude
in individuals through its complete denial of free will. Why bother to know or try to change the
world, when your destiny has been decreed by the heavens? Even today, India is saturated by this
nonsense, and far more people take the predictions made far more seriously than
in the West. As Jaki observed: "Call for such conversion [that is, an
acceptance of science and modern technology by a changed mindset] will hardly
be heeded as long as the voice of astrologers is not on the wane but on the
rise (in spite of science and education) and carefully listened to by higher
government [Indian] officials."[46] True, astrology attained a grip upon much of
the Islamic and Christian worlds in the medieval past, and even devotees in
modern, twentieth century America such as Nancy Reagan. Nevertheless, the culture of Christendom had
built-in limits to its broad cultural acceptance since it is seen as an
idolatrous system that also denies moral responsibility. Hence even as astrology grew in the West
with the recovery of the Greek classics and the growth of interest in science,[47] the
Church continued to condemn it.[48] Unfortunately, India had nothing intrinsic
to its culture that frontally assaulted astrology--hence, the former remains
deeply in the latter's thrall to this very day.
WHY DIDN'T THE ISLAMIC/ARAB WORLD DEVELOP SCIENCE BEFORE
CHRISTENDOM?
Now the
failure of the Islamic world to produce modern science is much more curious
than India's or even China's. The
flourishing of Islamic science and scholarship under the Umayyads and early
Abbasids, using the ancient Greek classics, was simply remarkable. The medical works of al-Razi and Avicenna
(980-1037) were used by Christendom deep into the sixteenth century, more than
500 years after their deaths. The fact
such English words as astrolabe, chemistry, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, and
azimuth are derived from Arabic shows the influence Islamic science had on the
West. Islamic mathematicians made
immense contributions such as al-Khwarizimi (the algorithm and algebra), Thabit
ibin Quarra (studied irrational numbers), Albategnius and Abu al-Wafa
(trigonometry), Umar Khayyam (works on analytical geometry), and Nasir al-Din
al Tusi (trigonometry).[49] Furthermore, believing in a single God who
created the universe at a definite point in time, with time linearly proceeding
to judgment day, Muslims were not obvious, easy prey for eternal cycles, the
organismic view of the universe, or astrology.
Orthodox Islam did not deny the reality of the external world, nor was
it apt to think the heavens were divine/alive since they emphasized the
monotheistic nature (oneness) of God so strongly. So why did Islamic science mostly fizzle out after 1200?
Unfortunately,
for the Islamic world, its leading philosophical, theological, and scientific
figures made some very serious wrong turns.
The key problem was a lack of balance between faith and reason, which
ultimately extended from the Quran's emphasis on the absolute (and arbitrary)
will of God. No Islamic equivalent
of Thomas Aquinas appeared on the scene
to systematically reconcile and integrate the theology of Islam with the
rationalism of the Greek classics, without unduly bending one to fit with the
other. Hence, the two most important
Islamic theologians, al-Ashari (873-935) and al-Ghazzali (1058-1111) were very
mystically inclined, and both stressed God's will as opposed to His
reason. Al-Ghazzali's work, Incoherence
of the Philosophers, sharply assaulted the Aristotelian philosophers called
the mutazilites. It asserted the
doctrine of occasionalism, which sees the law of cause and effect as only
occurring due to God's continual, direct intervention in the
universe. Hence, to al-Ghazzali, if a
rock lands on my big toe after I release it, the resulting pain is only due to
God putting it there in me, not due to the properties of the rock and toe
themselves. The direct consequences of
such a concept against the idea of a scientific law of nature can easily be
imagined.[50]
THE COST OF LACKING BALANCE CONCERNING THE IDEAS OF THE
GREEK CLASSICS
On the other
hand, the Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes (1126-1198) clearly
subordinated their Islamic faith to Aristotle's metaphysics. Indeed, Averroes' concept of double
truth--of saying what was true for religion was not necessarily true for
philosophy--denies the metaphysical unity of the intellectual and sensible
world. This view allows him to avoid
having to deny Aristotle's On the Heavens when it conflicts with the
Islamic faith.[51] These two philosophers, much like the
mutazilites, fell nearly completely under the spell of the ancient Greek
classics, and could not conceive how these classics could be wrong. They did not try to reconcile the conflict
between Islam and the Greek classics, but basically ignored or denied it. Yet, as we will see, such a conflict between
the teachings of Christianity and various pagan Greek ideas, combined with the
clear rejection of some of the latter, was necessary in order to strip the
latter of metaphysical falsehoods that would have prevented the rise of a
self-sustaining science. Here, these
Islamic philosophers fell into the trap of accepting easily gained a priori
concepts about the physical world. It's
much easier to read and accept what someone says rather than to do experiments
or think carefully in original ways. A
true science of physics could not develop until Aristotle's On the Heavens
and Physics were junked. That
only occurred in the West due to the tenets of Christian theology conflicting
with these two works, and individual philosophers and theologians pointing out
such conflicts without ignoring or denying them. The rejection of such errors in the Greek classics in the culture
around him made it much more possible for someone like Galileo to boldly say
"Aristotle was wrong!" concerning some point of his physics which didn't
conflict with Christian theology.
Unfortunately, this process of partial rejection and partial acceptance
in an overall synthesis like that of Summa Theologica, the master work
of probably the single greatest Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-1274), did not occur in the Islamic
world. Putting it in crude, exaggerated
terms, Avicenna and Averroes seemed to think Aristotle could think no wrong,
and al-Ghazzali and al-Ashari seemed to think Aristotle could think nothing
right. A balance was necessary here,
within the culture and individual intellectuals as a whole to have a
self-sustaining science occur, using the insights of the ancient classics yet
being willing to point out their errors, theological and scientific, something
which occurred in Christendom but not the Islamic world, which is why modern
science arose in the former and not the latter.
In addition,
and rather strangely considering the tenets of orthodox Islam definitely
conflict with such concepts, the Muslim world had a wide acceptance of eternal
cycles, astrology,[52] and the
organismic view of nature as reflected in the belief that the heavens were
alive, or even divine. For instance,
al-Kindi vehemently attacked alchemy, the crude, "magical" forerunner
of chemistry, but promoted the ideas of eternal cycles along with ibn-Khaldun
(1332-1406), the famous north African Islamic historian. Both tried to fit historical events into 20
and 240 year time cycles. Abu-Mashar,
in his Book of the Revolution of Birth Years, said the Deluge would
recur every 180,000 years.[53] The Brethren of Purity's encyclopedia that
summarized knowledge (Rasa'il) was saturated with astrology, the occult,
and contained even the view that 3000 year time cycles corresponded with the
rise and fall of civilizations as determined by the Zodiac. Avicenna did not see God as directly
creating mankind (versus Gen. 2:7), but the latter was the emanation of a
series of higher intelligences, each of which grew weaker, until the final,
weakest one made humanity. Astrology
ran surprisingly rampant, due to the influence of the Persians and Hindus the
Muslims had conquered, as well as the Greek classics themselves. Even such a critic of eternal cycles as
al-Birundi still wrote a book espousing astrology.[54] The end result of these concepts running
amuck, despite they plainly conflicted with Islamic theology, helped to
strangle science in the Muslim world.
No equivalent of the 1277 condemnation by Bishop of Paris Tempier
against pagan Greek concepts (or other such condemnations or cultural acts of
resistance) occurred in the Arab or Islamic world.
HOW MUHAMMAD'S VIEW OF GOD'S WILL UNDERMINED ISLAMIC SCIENCE
However, the
Muslim failure in creating a self-sustaining science has a deeper root: Muhammad (c. 570-632), the founder and
prophet of Islam, in the Quran emphasized God's will and power at the expense
of His rationality. It is common for
people to think of the God of the Bible as being just like the God of the
Quran, especially the non-religious who think, "All religions are the
same." However, this assumption
can be seriously questioned once the texts and accompanying history of the
Bible and Quran are compared. Drawing
upon a list of comparisons made by Morey, some evident differences arise. The God of the Quran is not active directly
in history in the same manner as Jehovah, since He did not enter history
personally as Jesus via the Incarnation did, but used angels and prophets as
messengers. He is totally unlimited in
his possible choices, but the Christian God is limited by His essence, as
illustrated by Titus 1:2, which says He cannot lie. He is less knowable.
Islam's condemned applying positive predications to God; humanity's
knowledge of God consists really only of negative stated attributes such as,
"He is not limited," or "God is not mortal." He is less personal. Allah is seen as so transcendent men cannot
know Him personally or as personally.[55] Consider the following sobering comment by
Morey, when investigating the impact of the Quran's theology on science:
6. Because the God of the Bible is limited by
his own righteous nature and there are certain things He cannot do, he is
completely consistent and trustworthy.
But when we turn to study the actions of Allah in the Quran, we discover
that he is totally capricious and untrustworthy. He is not bound by his nature or his word.[56]
Hence, when al-Ghazzali condemns the concept of the laws of
nature as restricting God's freedom to act, he is perfectly in line with the
Quran: It is not just his personal
idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam's chief holy book. The consequences of such a view were well
described by the great Jewish scholar, Maimonides (1135-1204). He saw the Mutakallium (orthodox Islamic
theologians) as only willing at most to concede the laws of nature were like
the customary riding habits of the caliph going through a city: subject to change at whim if desired. Maimonides put it thus: "[T]he thing which exists with certain
constant and permanent forms, dimensions, and properties (in nature) only
follows the direction of habit . . . on this foundation their whole fabric is
constructed."[57] Hence, the metaphysics of the Quran, by
emphasizing God's arbitrary and changeable WILL, as opposed to His reason,
helped to sink Islamic science through creating a weak view of the laws of
nature and an orderly universe.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND ANTI-SCIENTIFIC
PAGAN IDEAS
In the West,
pagan beliefs in eternal cycles, the organismic view of nature, astrological
speculation, the divinity/aliveness of the heavens and the illusionary nature
of the external world ran into the hard rock of Christian theology. Hence, although the classical corpus (as
elucidated by Muslims like Avicenna and Averroes who were not truly orthodox)
strongly encouraged belief in such anti-scientific concepts in the West, there
was always enough intrinsic cultural resistance in the Christian intellectual
community as a whole to keep such pagan concepts from totally mesmerizing
Christendom. Most likely, Christianity by
itself, without the Greek classics (or Hindu-Arabic numerals) would not
have created modern science. However,
the dogmas of Christian theology allowed a certain intellectual community to
strip the classics of antiquity of the disastrous influence of these
anti-scientific concepts due to their conflict with their religious ideas,
allowing a true modern science to eventually blossom. Of course, if Catholic Christians had not believed in concepts
opposed to these pagan ones due to their theology, such a conflict would not
have occurred and science would not have reached a modern, self-sustaining form
in the West. Duhem, in his Le
Systeme Du Monde, maintained that modern science was made possible by the
Bishop of Paris Tempier's condemnation in 1277 of 219 propositions, which
blasted these anti-scientific concepts of antiquity.[58]
True, Jaki
and Duhem mistakenly overemphasize the contribution of Christian theology
relative to the ancient Greek contribution to the rise of science. The mindset exemplified by the Elements
of Euclid (living c. 300 b.c.) in using general propositions in geometry as
proofs and building upon them through demonstrations, and Aristotle's Prior
Analytics, which stated the laws of logic, the idea of the syllogism, and
how to analyze an argument's form for its soundness, was necessary for the rise
of science.[59] The Greek mind always had an authentic
respect for reason even in the works of Plato (c. 428-348 b.c.). He was an irrationalist, but still couched
his beliefs in dialogs and arguments that purported to be a dialectical
process of reaching the truth, and not as a mystical revelation. Nevertheless, an important contribution was
made by Christian theology that is normally TOTALLY overlooked. Imagine--the dogmas of Catholicism promoted
the rise of science! We must not let
Galileo's fate at the hands of the Inquisition blind us to Christian theology's
contribution in sweeping away the rubbish of these pagan beliefs from science,
which kept science from becoming self-sustaining and modern. These beliefs, if accepted, turn the human
mind inward, causing it to accept too blindly what occurs in the real external
world, making it impossible to develop the most basic science of moving bodies
(physics). However, notice that the
Christian contribution is not so much as creating a broad respect for
rationality, or the discovery of the basic laws of logic used in scientific
reasoning (as found in the Organon, Aristotle's body of logical
works). Rather, Christian theology (by
chance conflict, someone could argue) shot down the false, self-inhibiting
ideas of pagan Greek science, absorbed much of its respect for reason from
them, and then allowed science to blossom forth. However, since the God of the Bible operates
in a much more rational manner than the stories of the pagan gods non-Christian
cultures believed, Christianity helped promote rationality to a degree as
well. (Doubters of this should
carefully read Genesis 1-2, and then compare read the bloody battles among the
gods involved in the creation of the world in the Babylonian myth Enuma
elish, which is absurdly asserted to have influenced Moses/the writer(s) of
Genesis). Christian theology removed
the intrinsic stunting inhibitions of Greek science. It did not create science
by itself mostly from scratch. However,
neither could have the philosophy of the Greeks without the theology of Judeo-Christianity
have created modern science by themselves either, for it took Christianity to
remove various science-inhibiting false metaphysical concepts from the former's
philosophy to have modern science born.
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY'S LINEAR TIME CONCEPT OF TIME VERSUS
PAGAN ETERNAL CYCLES
Because it
would involve repeating exactly or almost exactly the events of the Bible's
history, Christians fundamentally could never accept the idea of eternal
cycles. To a Christian, the thought of
his savior God dying horribly on a stake repeatedly again and again is too
horrible to contemplate: ". . .
because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself" (Heb.
7:27). Hence, even when some Christians
influenced by pagan thought accepted by idea of eternal cycles, who include the
rather unorthodox Catholic church writer Origen (185?-254? A.D.)[60] and
even Thomas Aquinas,[61] the
concept was accepted in a highly mitigated, attenuated form that greatly
lessened its ill effects.[62] Origen and
Thomas both still believed in an absolute starting point (creation), and
ending point (judgment). They still
believed free will existed, which mean the passivity and sense of hopelessness
induced by the treadmill of meaningless alterations of catastrophes and golden
ages in ages past and to come was largely removed. Some early Christian theologians, such as Jerome (c. 374-419
A.D., translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible) and Hippoclytus, condemned eternal
cycles totally.[63] Augustine, the greatest of the Catholic
Church?s earlier writers (354-430 A.D.), was more equivocal, but was willing to
forcefully condemn the more literal forms of eternal cycles, and still believed
in creation and judgment. He denied
reincarnation as well. This allowed him
to maintain a basically linear concept of time with the two end points between
God beginning everything and judging everyone.[64] Bishop Tempier's condemnations in 1277
helped put a limit on the acceptance of such anti-scientific doctrines through
an attack on eternal cycles in proposition 92, and against the eternal
existence of the universe (a belief necessarily tied to the former) in
propositions 83-91. These condemnations
helped keep many philosophers/theologians in Christendom from totally
capitulating to Aristotelian thought, as had happened with Islamic culture with
Avicenna Averroes, and the mutazilites.[65] Oresme (1323?-1382), a direct forerunner of
Galileo in developing physics freed from Aristotelian conceptions, condemned
belief in such cycles.[66] Hence, the Christian belief in creation and
judgment kept Christendom off "the treadmill of the Yugas" (Jaki's
phrase), killing a sense of passivity caused by helpless hopelessness, by
promoting a linear conception of time that made its precise quantification and
cause-effect relations to be more easily conceived.
Astrology,
that prime example of an answer-giving a priori pseudo-science, ran into
repeated condemnations by church writers and theologians in the West. Augustine, as noted above, blasted it in
the Confessions. Hippolytus hit
it hard in The Refutations of All Heresies.[67] While the early medieval Church fought
astrology very successfully, the increasing interest in science due to the
recovery of the Greek classics, made interest in astrology surge as well.[68] Correspondingly, a condemnation of astrology
figured in proposition 105 of Tempier's list.[69] Oresme told the king of France, his patron,
in a booklet to ignore astrology.[70] Isadore of Spain in the early medieval
church attacked it also.[71] Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292), famous for his
predictions of future human inventions, agreed with astrology to some degree,
but still rejected its control over individuals' destinies as opposed to that
of nations.[72] Astrology did have some major influence in
Christendom, but as even Bacon's case shows, there were limits to the
acceptance of this pseudo-science that allowed science to eventually develop
independently of it.
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY VERSUS THE DIVINITY OF THE HEAVENS
The divinity
of the heavens, normally closely allied to the organismic view of the natural
world, was gradually eliminated by the medievals.[73] The mesmerizing power of Aristotle (384-322
b.c.), who propounded such views in On the Heavens, was felt in Europe
too, which was why this process took so long.
Jerome denied the heavens were alive, but Augustine remained in an anguished uncertainty.[74] Thomas entertained the notion, but only to
a limited degree.[75] Even Kepler, the discoverer of elliptical
orbits of the planets, still believed intelligences controlled the movements of
the heavens.[76] However, due to an already developed concept
of natural law there were natural limits on accepting this idea. "The overwhelming majority of European
thinkers accepted the reality of the order of nature [unlike the Hindus], and
most considered nature to be a self-sufficient creation of God, containing all
the powers necessary for its operation without God's direct intervention
[unlike al-Ghazzali's concept of occasionalism concerning the universe's
natural laws]."[77] Of course, the Christian rejection of
pantheism, which says the material world is God also, was instrumental in
destroying the idea of the heavens being divine as well.
The West
began to develop the idea of the universe being rationally knowable since God
made it:
The
cosmologists [of the twelfth century] felt certain that all of nature was
fundamentally rational because the all-knowing God had made it so. . . .
William of Conches writes that "the world is an ordered aggregation of
created things". And Thierry of
Chartes says: "The world would
seem to have causes for its existence, and so to have come into existence in a
predictable sequence of time. This
existence and this order can be shown to be rational."[78]
The clock maker metaphor for the universe by used by Oresme.[79] Bacon felt all branches of learning had
basic unity, interdependence, and interconnectedness since only one God
made them all.[80] With the approval Thomas gave to reason in Summa Theologica, science could
go forward as secure in the existence of natural law, which was a concept
al-Ghazzali and al-Ashari denied to Islam by emphasizing God's will and power
too much relative to His reason.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BURIDAN AND ORESME IN BUILDING THE
FOUNDATIONS GALILEO USED
The first key
steps in totally discarding Aristotle's physics were done by Buridan and
Oresme. For Galileo and Leonardo da
Vinci had leaned upon them indirectly for many of their seemingly totally
new ideas in physics or in other fields.[81] Ancient Greece had developed a science of
geometry that could be called "modern," but this concerns mental
entities, not material objects. Its
physics remained hopelessly backward by comparison due to pagan ideas about
eternal cycles, the irrationality of the universe, and the divinity of the
heavens. The second century astromer
Ptolemy, whose work the Almagest espoused an earth-centered solar
system, as well as Plato, believed the heavens were divine, which prevented
belief that the laws of motion on earth applied to the stars and planets, and
in developing correct conceptions of these laws to begin with. By contrast, the medieval Christian Catholic
Buridan, in a crucial passage, anticipated the idea of inertia (the idea an
object once in motion continues to move in the same direction until it
encounters resistance) through his discussion of impetus. Notice the reference to God not
directly making the laws of nature operate:
Also,
since the Bible does not state that appropriate intelligences move the
celestial bodies, it could be said that it does not appear necessary to posit
intelligences of this kind, because it would be answered that God, when He
created the world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in
moving them He impressed in them impetuses which moved them without His having
to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby He
concurs as a co-agent in all things which take place; 'for thus on the seventh
day He rested for all work . . .' [Gen. 2:2]
And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not
decreased nor corrupted afterwards, because there was not inclination of the
celestial bodies for movements.[82]
Also note this additional statement as a nascent form of the
idea of inertia:
But
because of the resistance which results from the weight of the [waterwheel of
the] mill, the impetus would continually diminish until the mill ceased to
turn. And perhaps, if the mill should
last forever without any diminution or change, and there were no other
resistance to corrupt the impetus, the mill would move forever because of its
perpetual impetus.[83]
While these passages are only halting steps on a long road
to repealing Aristotle's physics, they do show a move to break out of his
conceptions of how moving bodies move.
These men show that the Church never uncritically accepted the Greek
classics as many in the Islamic world had done earlier. True, it tied itself and lent its authority
to the Greek classics excessively, which set the stage for its eventual
disaster resulting from it using force that made Galileo recant his belief that
the earth moved. With the later
discoveries of Galileo, Hooke, Kepler, Torricelli, Boyle, Newton, and others,
Europe's science took a vast qualitative leap, but we should not overlook its
origins and these men's predecessors in the Middle Ages.
THE MERTON THESIS STATED
Now Merton's
thesis does not claim as much for Christianity as the Duhem-Jaki thesis does,
for the former merely sees seventeenth century Puritan ethical values as being
conducive to engaging in scientific endeavors.
One partial critic of Merton's thesis pointed out how some values of
Puritanism opposed science even as some promoted it:
If
seventeenth-century science grew in harmony with Puritan values of utility,
reason, empiricism, and the glory of God, it also grew by distancing its
activities and goal from other values or sentiments displayed by
Puritanism: intolerance, dogmatism,
enthusiasm.[84]
Also, since Merton is a sociologist, he is approaching
science through its relationship to the rest of society, which is an
externalist approach, instead of looking at science from inside its own
history.
Merton lists various
values that helped promote science among Puritan Englishmen in the seventeenth
century.[85] One is to glorify God and serve Him through
doing activities of utility to the community as a whole, as opposed to
the contemplative, monastic ideal of withdrawal from the community. Through "the drive for the conviction
of one's election, . . . the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination escapes any
drift toward an apathetic pessimism."[86] Through emphasizing a vocation (again,
something useful to the community as a whole) this created diligence, industry,
and hard work in Puritans. As the
Quaker leader Baxter put it:
"No: no man should do so
without a special necessity or call:
for there are general precepts on all that are able, that we live to the
benefit of others, and prefer the common good, and as we have opportunity do
good to all men."[87] The result is the individual chooses the
vocation that is best suited for his abilities. Reason and education were both praised, the latter needing to be
practical in nature, not highly literary in content, and definitely not
consisting in the philosophy of scholasticism, with which the Catholic
"Angelic Doctor" Thomas
Aquinas is identified.
VARIOUS ENGLISH PURITAN SCIENTISTS
The religious
values and beliefs of many English scientists of this period are easily
documented. For instance, Charles Boyle
(1627-1691), the deviser of the namesake law concerning the compression of
gases, the English chemist and physicist wrote in his last will and
testament: "Wish [the Royal
Society, a group of scientists] a happy success in their laudable Attempts, to
discover the Nature of the Works of God, and prayer that they and all other
Searchers into Physical Truths, may Cordially refer their Attainments to the
Glory of the Great Author of Nature, and to the Comfort of Mankind."[88] John Ray (1627-1705), the great biologist,
told a friend that sparing time to investigate nature was good: "What time you have to spare you will
do well to spend, as you are doing, in the inquisition and contemplation of the
works of God and nature."[89] Although not a Puritan himself, Francis
Bacon (1561-1626), who some have thought wrote Shakespeare's plays, had a
Puritan mother who (as mothers tend to do!) influenced him. His emphasis on the utility of scientific
discoveries, as opposed to gaining knowledge for its own sake, which was
Aristotle's tendency, has a Puritan ring to it. Forty-two of the 68 founding members of the Royal Society
(starting through meetings in 1645 unofficially) for which their religious
background was known were Puritans.
Such a high proportion is very much out of whack compared to their
proportion in the total English population, which was mainly Anglican. Sir Robert Moray, Sir William Petty, Robert
Boyle, John Wilkins, John Wallis, and Jonathan Goddard were all prominent
leaders of the Royal Society--and all Puritans.[90]
Furthermore,
the scientific method needs both an empiricist and rationalist[91] approach
to nature to work properly, something which Jaki comes back to again and
again. Curiously, Puritanism provided
both by having the rationalism of
Augustine's type of Neo-Platonism, yet needing empiricism in order to
serve one's calling (vocation/occupation) and be useful to the community as a
whole.[92] The irony to this is that the man who
sparked the Reformation, Martin Luther (1483-1546) had anti-rationalistic
tendencies,[93] and
attacked the Copernican view of the universe.
John Calvin (1509-1564), whose Institutes of the Christian Religion
systematically set the doctrinal agenda of many Protestants, including the
Puritans, was not enthusiastic over many of the scientific discoveries of his
day.[94] What this shows is the unintended
consequences of the new religious values of Protestantism.[95] Interestingly, even as the
Counter-Reformation was damaging Catholic science (the Inquisition's effort
against Galileo, for instance), Protestant science was taking off, helping to
make up for the slack.[96] Although we have only briefly surveyed the
Merton thesis, partly because it overlaps the Duhem-Jaki thesis in pointing to
religion as positively influencing science, although by a rather
different means. However, it helps to
show when pious Puritan scientists discussed thinking God's thoughts after Him
and trying to know God's attributes better through studying His creation (compare
Romans 1:20), they were not saying this as a rationalization to justify their
activities, but really meant it.
WHEN CHRISTIANITY GETS BLAMED FOR SCIENCE: THE ENVIRONMENTALIST CRITIQUE
A supreme
irony is that many environmentalists publicly concede the Christian origins of
science, but in a spirit of condemnation, since various ecological disasters
get blamed on the Bible's injunctions to multiply and subdue the earth.[97] The reversion to ideas rejected by our
medieval ancestors--in the "New" Age movement--involves reviving the
ideas of eastern mysticism as found in Hinduism and Buddhism, and dressing them
in some western garb. Of course, the
Unity School of Christianity, "New Thought," and Christian Science
have been at this for decades going into the last century. The religious outlook of Transcedentalist
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American poet and essayist, was unquestionably
pantheistic. Similarly, the United
Nations' Environmental Programme's Global Biodiversity Assessment, some
1,140 pages long, explicitly condemns the Western (read Christian)
worldview as being "characterized by the denial of sacred attributes in
nature, a characteristic that has its roots in Greek philosophy [a basically
false statement, as shown above--they weren't familiar with Aristotle's On
the Heavens evidently], and became firmly established about 2,000 years ago
with the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions." Further, they condemn the abandonment of the
organismic view of nature thus:
This
perspective, especially as elaborated in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, set
humans not as part of a wider community of beings, but apart. . . . Societies
dominated by Islam, and especially by Christianity, have gone the farthest in
setting humans apart from nature and in embracing a value system that has
converted the world into a warehouse of commodities for human enjoyment.
They go on to condemn pagan cultures which converted to
Christianity that "began to cut down the sacred groves [compare the KJV's
translation for Canaanite Asherah poles!], to bring the land under
cultivation"![98] Considering such attacks on Christianity for
helping cause a rationalistic, scientific worldview that led to environmental
destruction, it's then absurd to complain about Christianity or the Bible as
the roadblock to science getting started in the late Middle Ages,[99] or to
make broad general statements about the necessary warfare of science and
religion the next time evolution get attacked by various fundamentalists. As Jaki put it:
The
argument would make some sense if it were accompanied by the recognition that
the medieval state of mind nurtured by the Gospel has indeed been responsible
for the rise of science. Responsibility
for the effect, the misuses of science, implies responsibility for the
cause. But the latter responsibility,
which in this age of science appears to be the most coveted credit, the credit
for the rise of science, is not attributed to Christianity when its mentality
is blamed, for instance, by the noted historian of technology, L. White, for
the ecological misuse of science.[100]
Hence, if you're an environmentalist or New Ager who blames
Christian worldview for creating the science and technology that is supposedly
ravaging the earth[101], it's
time to start admitting the facts of history showing how it helped to cause
modern science to exist. It's time to stop repeating bromides about the warfare
of science and religion that could have come from the 1925 Scopes "monkey
trial" where the agnostic lawyer for the defense Clarence Darrow
embarrassed William Jennings Bryan, thrice-time presidential candidate loser
for the Democratic party, who was assisting the prosecution.
Briefly above
the Duhem-Jaki and Merton theses were surveyed, which show how Christianity led
to the rise of modern, self-sustaining science in Europe by stripping pagan
Greek thought of false metaphysical ideas that hindered science, or had values
conducive to scientific endeavor practically.
Generally the militant secular view that sways most western intellectuals
has allowed the raw facts of the Christian role in the rise of science to be
covered up, often causing intellectuals to leap some two millenia from ancient
Greece to Galileo in their reconstructions of the history science, ignoring the
influence of the culture filling the time in between as irrelevant to the rise
of science. Christianity normally only
gets "credit" for helping cause the rise of a scientific worldview
when a whipping boy besides industry or the military is needed for New Age
environmentalists. They, like famed
science fiction writer H.G. Wells in The Outline of History, commit the
error religious historian Christopher Dawson observed, by focusing on "the
technical and mechanical achievements of modern civilization . . . [but lack an]
adequate account of the movement of scientific thought that preceded those
achievements and made them possible."[102] What such intellectuals should now consider,
with the rise of Eastern Mysticism, astrology, and the occult in the west in
the form of the New Age movement, is whether and how long science can survive
in a world increasingly reverting back to the ideas that had kept it from
existing in the past and which Christianity had largely defeated, should they
deny the second coming of Jesus the Messiah will occur, and will occur
soon. If one, seeing mankind's past
intellectually as a struggle between "witch doctors" and
"attilas" as philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand did, thinking the medieval
worldview dominated by Genesis 1 and the Cross was irrational, imagine what
would happen if the Zen Buddhists and monist Hindu mystics dominated the
intellectual scene (such as concerning the perplexities of quantum mechanics)
instead. For, as Jaki observed, Jesus
was the Savior of science--without His birth, life, and resurrection, it never
would have existed in this world.
[2]Leonard
Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels as quoted in Harry Binswanger, ed., The
Ayn Rand Lexicon Objectivism from A to
Z (New York: New American Library,
1988), p. 297.
[3]Jaki
himself probably would be embarrassed by entitling this historical
interpretation in this manner. He
routinely freely draws upon and repeatedly mentioning in his works Pierre
Duhem, and even wrote a biography of him.
Pierre Duhem is the French scientist and historian of science who wrote
the magisterial ten volume Le Systeme Du Monde. I label this thesis after the both of them
because Jaki seems to be the main "scholarly popularizer" of Duhem's
thesis in the English speaking world.
Duhem's work mentioned above is significant for almost single-handedly
creating scholarly interest in medieval science.
[4]Robert K.
Merton, "Science in Seventeenth Century England," Osiris,
1938, pp. 360-632. This is the original
edition of this book.
[5]Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958). Especially interesting in this context is
note 145 on p. 249, where Puritanism's tendencies toward empiricism are
mentioned. Discussing Spener's work in
this area, he says a consequence of Puritanism scientifically was "that
just as the Christian is known by the fruits of his belief, the knowledge of
God and His designs can only be attained through a knowledge of His
works."
[6]See the
explanation of externalist and internalist approaches in the introduction of
George Basalla, ed., The Rise of Modern Science External or Internal Factors? (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1968), pp. vii-xiv.
[7]Theodore
K. Rabb, "Religion and the Rise of Modern Science," Past and
Present, July 1965, pp. 122, 125.
[8]Stanley
Jaki never seems to mention the Merton thesis in any his books I used for this
essay. Likewise, such a critic of the
Merton thesis as Rabb seems to be oblivious to Duhem's thesis. Hence, he write when attacking Hill: "In the story of the rise of science,
therefore, religion is a peripheral concern." Duhem doesn't even rate a (negative) mention. See Rabb, "Religion and the Rise of
Modern Science," Past and Present, July 1965, p. 126. About the only place I found the two
mentioned together was this comment by Hall:
"Merton, who made no reference to either Duhem or Wohlwill, saw a
parallel lack of continuity in the attitudes of society to science." See A. Ruppert Hall, "Merton revisited
or Science and Society in the
Seventeenth Century," History of Science (Cambridge, England: W. Heffer & Sons, 1963), p. 12.
[10]A
contemporary example is how Boris Yeltsin and his group of revolutionaries have
the ideology of capitalism (or did!), and seek to impose it on a
(formerly?) socialist economy.
[11]Probably
the best one book on this subject in English is: Stanley Jaki, Science and Creation From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (New
York: Science History Publications,
1974). Of course, the ultimate source
on this subject is Pierre Duhem's Le Systeme du Monde, with its ten (!)
volumes, most of which has yet to be translated from the French. A good project for someone or some group who
wishes to do immeasurable good for the cause of Christian apologetics would be
to pay a group of scholars to translate this work into English so it could have
more influence in the English-speaking world.
[12]Two good
places to begin are: Stanley L. Jaki, The
Savior of Science (Washington, D.C.:
Regnery Gateway, 1988) and Jaki, The Origin of Science and the
Science of Its Origin (South Bend, IN:
Regnery/Gateway, 1978).
[13]Jacques
Gernet, "Christian and Chinese World Views in the Seventeenth
Century," Diogenes, Spring 1979, p. 105.
[15]See Janet
L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony
The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 322. An in-depth analysis in the form of a series of articles can be
found in Hu Daojing, Li Guohao, et al., eds., Explorations in the
History of Science and Technology in China (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House,
1982).
[16]Alan K.
Smith, Creating a World Economy
Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade 1400-1825 (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 17-18.
[17]Lynn White
Jr., "Review Symposia Science in
China," Isis, March 1984, p. 178.
Another useful critique of Needham's work is Willard J. Peterson,
"'Chinese Scientific Philosophy' and Some Chinese Attitudes Towards
Knowledge about the Realm of Heaven-and-Earth," Past and Present,
May 1980, pp. 20-30.
[19]As quoted
from Jacques Gernet, "Christian and Chinese World Views," p.
104. See pp. 100-102 for more examples.
[20]Joseph
Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 2, History of
Scientific Thought (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1962), with the assistance of Wang Ling, pp.
485-487, 420, 404; Jaki, Science and Creation, pp. 33-35.
[21]However,
such ideas could also breed the opposite attitude, of complacency, "the
illusion that one is and remains on top, at least in the sense that the
irreversible decline will begin to be felt only by one's distant progeny"
(Jaki, Savior of Science, p. 42).
That is, instead of despondently waiting for the cycles of history to
bring a future "golden age," you may think you are presently living
during a "golden age." Hence,
you begin to think no further improvements are possible or necessary.
[28]See
Wolfram Eberhard in John K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1957), p. 69. In fairness, since
portents were used as political weapons many times (shades of Rome!), in order
to dissuade the emperor from this or that decision, they were not always taken
seriously. Nevertheless, such
activities did not promote science or a scientific worldview: "It is quite obvious that specialists
were interested only in the political application of their observations and not
in philosophical reasoning or scientific abstractions."
[31]The Chuang
Tzu, the second most important text, as quoted in Jaki, Science and
Creation, p. 29. Wide variations of
belief existed in Taoism, which included many practitioners of the Chinese
peasantry's varied superstitions, not just philosophers like Lao-tzu. See N. Sivin, "On the Word 'Taoist' as
a Source of Perplexity. With Special
Reference to the Relations of Science and Religion in Traditional China," History
of Religions, February-May 1978, p. 314.
[33]Ibid., p.
36. Note the contrast to the Hebrew
view of Gen. 1, where mankind is place above and separate from nature, as being
like God, and dominate over the animal kingdom.
[36]Needham, Science
and Civilisation, p. 581. The
Judeo-Christian mindset stemming from Genesis 1 is that if man's mind was made
in the image of God, and nature also reflects God's attributes (Romans
1:19-20), then scientists investigating nature can be assured it can be
understood by their minds in turn.
[38]Jaki, Savior
of Science, p. 33. A somewhat
different analysis as to why China developed no modern science due to its
philosophy focuses on its tendency to turn inward to know the mind and the
individual, as opposed to the outside world.
See Yu-Lan Fung, "Why China Has No Science--An Interpretation of
the History and Consequences of Chinese Philosophy," International
Journal of Ethics, April 1922, pp. 237-263. However, a sociological explanation for the failure of modern
science to arise in China involving what could be called "Mandarin
bureaucratism," also exists. See
Max Weber, The Religion of China Confucianism
and Taoism (Glencoe, IL: The Free
Press, 1951), pp. 150-152. Jaki's
analysis doesn't hit on all the reasons why modern science did not arise
in China, though I have stressed it here.
[40]John R.
Gillis, The Development of European Society 1770-1870 (Lanham,
Maryland: University Press of America,
1983), p. 13.
[41]However,
Christianity still had a role here concerning the application of the
then new system of numerals, due to its view God was rational and created an
orderly universe. "They [the
Parisian precursors of Galileo, Buridan and Oresme] became the starting point
[of modern science] because they were imbued with what is Gospel truth for
Christians though it had never been for the Greeks of old, namely, that the
universe is not God, but only the fully consistent artifact of a rational
Creator. Because of their belief in
that consistency, they could approach with quantitative eyes the
phenomenon of motion in a broad sense, an approach alien to the Greeks,"
my emphasis, Jaki, Origin of Science, p. 85. Such an analysis badly undermines the standard belief of
agnostics and atheists that the Greeks could have created modern science except
for the rise of Christianity and the collapse of the Roman empire.
[42]Mainstream
Christianity could never accept the fundamental unreality of matter or the
material world because Jesus became a material, fleshy Being through the
incarnation (John 1:1-2, 14). Those who
thought Jesus was just a spirit being who just appeared to be a man--the
gnostics generally--were condemned in the strongest possible terms by orthodox
Christians, including the apostle John.
For example, II John 7 says:
"For many decievers have gone out into the world, those who do not
acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist." Or, we have I John 1:1: "What was from the beginning, what we
have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands
handled, concerning the Word of Life . . ." Further, unlike Hinduism and its myths, Christianity is a religion
based upon the reality of certain historical facts, such as the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. It
doesn't really matter, to the Hindu mind, whether Krishna really did anything
as described in a Hindu holy book, but Christianity is a hopeless religion if
Jesus didn't really exist, didn't really die, or didn't really arise from the
dead. As Paul said (I Cor.
15:13-15): "But if there is no
resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has
not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover we are even found to be false
witnesses of God, because we witnessed against God that He raised
Christ." This fundamental
difference between Judeo-Christianity as based on historical fact that it is potentially
falsifiable is very different from the metaphysical speculation of various
pagan myths, whether Hindu or Greek.
[45]Richard C.
Dales, "A Twelfth-Century Concept of the Natural Order," Viator Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol.
9, 1978, pp. 191-192.
[46]Jaki, The
Savior of Science, p. 30; Jaki footnotes his source as the January 6, 1983 International
Herald Tribune.
[47]Lynn
White, Jr., "Science and the Sense of Self: The Medieval Background of a Modern Confrontation," Daedalus,
Spring 1978, pp. 56-58.
[48]For
example, Savonrola (1452-1498), a Catholic religious revivalist and reformer in
Renaissance Florence, condemned Florentines as believing in astrology more than
God. See Richard C. Trexler, Public
Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell, University Press, 1991), p. 79. Augustine attacks astrology in Confessions (Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 73,
139-142.
[49]Sydney
Nettleton Fisher and William Ochsenwald, The Middle East a History (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., 1990), pp.
99-116.
[50]Jaki, Science
and Creation, pp. 204-205. It is
quite clear the traditionalist theologians beat out the Aristotelian
philosophers culturally, because of the concept of bid'a, which saw any
innovation as evil, with one exception:
If the unbelievers used it in battle, you (the Muslim) could use it
also. "In the Muslim tradition,
innovation is generally assumed to be bad unless it can be shown to be
good. The word bid'a, innovation
or novelty, denote a departure from the sacred precept and practice
communicated to mankind by the Prophet, his disciples, and the early
Muslims," Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1982), p. 224.
[52]Thomas F.
Glick, "George Sarton and the Spanish Arabists," Isis,
December 1985, p. 497. Glick notes how
astrology was considerably stronger in the Islamic world compared to Christian
Europe.
[53]This view
plainly conflicts against Genesis 8:21-22; 9:11-16 and God's promise to never
flood the earth again, as symbolized by the rainbow. Here, perhaps, having the Bible itself, instead of the Quran
(Koran), would have helped him avoid this error.
[55]See the
list of comparisons in Robert Morey, Islam Unveiled The True Desert Storm (Shermans Dale,
PA: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 57-60.
[59]Galileo
leaned heavily on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics not just during his
earlier Scholastic stage, but throughout his life. Scholasticism was a philosophy thoroughly imbued with Aristotelian
thought due to the influence of Thomas
Aquinas attempting to reconcile Christian theology and the philosophy of
Aristotle. See the works of W.A.
Wallace and W.R. Shea cited in Jaki, Origin of Science, footnote 62, p.
143. This shows, incidently, how the
rebirth of Platonism in the Renaissance may have hindered science instead of
helping it, since Aristotle had manifestly a more rational and scientific
worldview than Plato.
[62]See A.G.
Molland, "Medieval Ideas of Scientific Progress," Journal of the
History of Ideas, October-December 1978, pp. 562-564.
[64]Jaki, Science
and Creation, pp. 178-184. See also
Molland, "Medieval Ideas," p. 562.
"Eternal cycles" are only "eternal" if they have no
beginning (creation) and no end (judgment).
If they are eternal, then they induce the existentialist feeling
of hopelessness, of life being two spans between nothing, of nothing being
important since all doesn't matter since everything will be destroyed, etc.
[65]Jaki, Ibid.,
p. 229. Also see Edward Grant,
"The Condemnation of 1277, God's Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in
the Late Middle Ages," Viator, Vol. 10, 1979.
[68]Lynn
White, Jr., "Science and the Sense of Self: The Medieval Background of a Modern Confrontation," Daedalus,
Spring 1978, p. 56.
[71]Richard C.
Dales, "The De-Animation of the Heavens in the Middle Ages," Journal
of the History of Ideas, October-December 1980, p. 534.
[72]Jaki, Science
and Creation, p. 227. More on Roger
Bacon and astrology can be found in:
David C. Lindberg, "On the Applicability of Mathematics to
Nature: Roger Bacon and His
Predecessors," British Journal for the History of Science, March
1982, pp. 22-24.
[73]Dales,
"The De-Animation," p. 549-550.
Ironically today, this view is coming back through New
Age/environmentalist thinking.
[78]Tina
Stiefel, "Science, Reason and Faith in the Twelfth Century: The Cosmologist' Attack on Tradition," Journal
of European Studies, March 1976, p. 4.
Also see her article on a highly similar subject: "The Heresy of Science: A Twelfth-Century Conceptual Revolution,"
Isis, September 1977, pp. 346-362.
In a useful corrective to Jaki, she points out the resistance faced by
these innovators from other theologians or philosophers. Also along the same lines of a corrective,
although it is rather speculative, is:
Manfred Gordon, "A Strategy For Medieval Science," Diogenes,
Winter 1981, pp. 70-93. These
innovators did face serious opposition, even persecution, which should not be
ignored.
[79]Jaki, Science
and Creation, p. 240. Jaki notes
that Oresme did not dispense with the notion the heavens had intelligences, but
this metaphor certainly leads in this direction.
[81]H.
Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1949), pp. 8-9.
[83]Dales,
"The De-Animation," p. 547.
However, note that Dales says that Buridan still was largely
Aristotelian in outlook. A similar
point in made by A.C. Crombie in Augustine to Galileo, vol. 2, Science
in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times XIII-XVII Centuries
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1961), pp. 66-73. Hence, Buridan
was making only the first steps towards a correct physics that broke away from
Aristotle's mistakes, it must be stressed.
[84]Thomas F.
Gieryn, "Distancing Science from Religion in Seventeenth-Century England,"
Isis, December 1988, p. 590.
[91]Empiricism
maintains knowledge is mostly gained by the senses, while rationalism maintains
knowledge is mostly gained by thinking, reasoning, and logic.
[93]R.C.
Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith
and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), pp. 196-198. This work attempts to minimize Luther as
being an irrationalist, it should be noted.
[99]The
philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper once said: "Science was invented once.
It was suppressed by Christianity, and it was only reinvented or,
rather, recovered with the rebirth of Platonism in the Renaissance," as
quoted in Jaki, Origin of Science, p. 152. This view also slights the importance of Aristotle's Organon,
such as in the Prior Analytics, which provided humanity with the basic
laws of logic.
[101]The
standard environmentalist scare stories are largely either false or
exaggerated, especially concerning conditions in America itself, wherein the
environment today overall is unquestionably better than it was in 1950.
The newspapers columns of the late Warren Brookes were good on this point. Also, see Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo, Trashing
the Planet (New York: Harper
Collins, 1990) and Edith Efron, The Apocalytics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
[102]Christopher
Dawson, John J. Mulloy, ed., The Dynamics of World History (New
York: New American Library, 1956), p.
364.
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