Four Fundamental Principles of Science

Christopher Kaiser, in his book Creation and the History of Science, has shown how the Cappadocian theologians developed four fundamental principles that were to shape the development of science through the centuries and up to the present day. The important point to note here is that these principles were formulated on the basis of belief in the divine revelation given in Scripture and supremely in the work of Christ. In brief, these principles were as follows:

 

1. Because the cosmos is the creation of a rational God who has also made us in his image, it follows that the cosmos is in principle comprehensible by the human mind. It is a coherent cosmos, not a chaos of random events. Therefore, (in contrast to important strands in Indian thought) there are no ultimate self-contradictions. It is not to be understood in terms of a yin-yang duality as in Far Eastern thought. It has an ultimate coherence, a coherence of which the central secret is made known in the Incarnation.

 

2. Because the cosmos is a creation by God as a free act of his will and not an emanation of God (as in some elements in Indian thought), the cosmos has a relative autonomy. Not everything that happens is the direct will of God. It follows, then, that the way to knowledge of the cosmos is not opening the mind to ultimate reality through mystical contemplation. To discover how the cosmos works, we must investigate the empirical facts by careful observation.

 

3. Because Scripture says that God created the heavens and the earth, it follows that the “heavenly bodies” are not (as Aristotle said) made of a substance different from the elements that comprise the earth, but are, on the contrary, of the same substance. (It is one of the many ironies in the history of the later conflicts between science and religion that when Galileo, as a result of his use of a telescope, decided that the moon was made of the same substance as the earth, he was condemned by the church because the church had meanwhile co-opted Aristotelian philosophy into its doctrine.)

 

4. Because of the work of Christ in the incarnation, we may use material means for the advancement of human salvation. The implication of this was that the church did not have to follow the Hebrew tradition of rejecting Greek medicine; instead, it could use Greek medicine in the development of the healing ministry which was to be such an important part of its work in succeeding centuries.

 

These four principles, which were to provide the foundation for the subsequent development of science in Europe (a science which was destined to outstrip the far more brilliant thinking of India, China, and the Arab world), were based on faith in the biblical revelation. They were part of the whole reconstitution of thought necessitated by the new fact, the action of God, the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ.

 

--- Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. 1995.

Christianity and the Making of a Distinct Europe

What has made Europe a distinct cultural and spiritual entity is the fact that, for a thousand years, the barbarian tribes who had found their home there were schooled in both the biblical story and the learning of classical antiquity, the legacy of Greece and Rome. These tribes, or at least their intellectual leaders, were taught to think in Greek and Latin, but the story that shaped their thinking was the Bible. Therefore, from the beginning of what we now call “Europe,” there was a tension between historical and philosophical streams, one flowing from Greece and Rome and the other from Israel.

 

The Jews, whose synagogues were in every major city, were a people apart. One could admire their high moral standards and perhaps their noble monotheism, but their religion was outside the main currents of philosophical investigation.

 

Christianity presented itself to the classical world as a development of this Jewish faith, but—unlike Judaism—it reached out in vigorous propaganda among all sectors of the people. Its scriptures were also offered in Greek, but more significantly, commentary and interpretation were available in Greek, not the Aramaic of the emerging rabbinic tradition…… 

 

At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted—and let us remember that the original meaning of “fact” is the Latin factum, “something done.” God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them.

 

--- Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. 1995