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The Christian Origin of Modern Science
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14301 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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7 / 1988 |
4,197 Words |
| Author
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Peter E. Hodgson
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The world as we know it today, and the lives of many of its peoples, is almost unrecognizably different from previous eras. The world is unified as never before, and news flashes from one continent to another almost instantaneously. Transport within and between countries is faster and much safer than ever before. In the developed countries, the standard of food, housing, and domestic appliances has reached levels never previously achieved in the history of man. The lives of most people in ancient Egypt, Aztec Mexico, or medieval Europe were not that much different, and if a person from one period could be transported to another, he would be able to adapt after a while. But transport him to modern Manhattan and he would be utterly bewildered.
The essential difference between our civilization and all others is due to the development of modern science. It is the scientific understanding of the innermost workings of the natural world that has transformed the conditions of our lives. This understanding underlies and makes possible the vast range of machines, electronic devices, chemicals, and factory products that characterize our civilization. At a deeper level, the development of science has profoundly altered the way we think about ourselves and about the world.
It has frequently been argued that religion belongs to the primitive state of man's existence and that religion has now been replaced by science as a serious way of dealing with the world. Primitive man said that thunder was the anger of God; now we attribute it to an electrical discharge. We used to pray when we fell ill; now we call a doctor. It is thus hardly surprising that religious people have often been hostile to science, thinking that it threatens their beliefs.
There is, however, another way of looking at the relation of science to religion, in particular to Christianity. It can be argued that Christian beliefs played an important part in the development of modern science. The origin and development of science is an immensely complicated part of our history, and here we can only select a few strands for particular attention. By science we mean the systematic attempt to understand the material world, as distinguished from technology, which is knowledge obtained by trial and error or by applying scientific understanding. Modern science began in seventeenth-century Europe, and it is one of the most interesting of all questions to ask why it began when and where it did.
Europeans at that time were not materially much better off than people in the great civilizations of antiquity. We should therefore look at the ideas they had about the material world, and where they came from. The ideas necessary for the birth and growth of science are that the world is rational and orderly and open to the human mind. These are Christian beliefs about the world. What is essential, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, is the "inexpungeable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles." That is why he maintained that "the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology."
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