Bible Stories

Modern science developed in one place only, and over a restricted period of time. The place was Western Europe; the time, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It is not immediately obvious why conditions were then particularly favourable. Much of the intellectual background of Western Europe at that time

“I have shown man the glory of your works, as much of their unending wealth as my feeble intellect was able to grasp.”

Johannes Kepler was not original — it was derived from classical antiquity. In technical invention, the Chinese had reached a higher level of sophistication than the Europeans, and at a much earlier stage. Why then was the decisive step to modern science not taken centuries before in Greece or China?

Historians have tried for many years to find an answer to this question. There are many different activities and attitudes which may have played a part. But among the various factors which have been proposed, the Christian faith invariably appears as a major influence. It enters in three ways:

• As a result of beliefs basic to Christianity as a whole;
• Through particular developments going on in
• Christian belief and church structure at the time;
• Because of the interplay between religious and secular trends.

A predictable universe

One of the basic Christian beliefs underpinning the new scientific enterprise was that when we observe how the material universe works, we are looking at the activity of God. It is therefore an eminently worthwhile study, with a definite spiritual spinoff. What is more, God did not influence the universe in an arbitrary fashion; he chose to operate through laws which applied everywhere and at all times. This emphasis on order, on the predictable, is one without which there can be no science. It was supplemented by the Christian view of history as a line running from point to point, rather than an endlessly repeating cycle of events. For science is an activity which moves on and builds, and only if people see the world doing the same will science come to mean much.

A more specific factor for the origins of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that Christians were in dispute over the nature of authority, and where authority came from. This played a significant role in overthrowing traditional views of the universe. Other issues in the Christian thinking of the time had a bearing too. For example, the Protestants were for playing down the pre- Reformation emphasis on contemporary miracles, and this led increasingly to a belief that God normally acts through secondary causes, rather than by direct interference. Science was seen as the best way of describing these secondary causes.

Besides its direct impact, Christianity also set the scene for science through the influence it had on the structure of society in Western Europe. One obvious area in which the

How clearly the sky reveals God’s glory! How plainly it shows what he has done!

Greek and Chinese societies differed from the Western European was in their attitude to manual labour. The former saw this as a fundamentally demeaning activity; the latter did not. This difference, rooted in the Christian basis of society, permitted the growth of a mixture of practical experiment and theory which is an essential feature of modern science.

That Christian ways of thinking had an impact on the origins of science can be seen as we read the comments of the early scientists themselves. Virtually without exception, they saw their investigations of the world around them as a religious activity. Its justification, for them, lay in the better understanding it provided of God’s handiwork.

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