The Supposed Warfare between Christianity and Science

Real science arose only once: in Europe. China, Islam, India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. By the same token, many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe did astrology lead to astronomy. Why?

 
The answer lies in the Christian West’s view of God, creation and humanity. Unlike cultures elsewhere, “Christians developed science because they believed it could be done, and should be done.” 
 
Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead noted in Science and the Modern World that the medievalists insisted 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 into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”
 
Lacking any doctrine of creation, these other cultures could only posit a universe that is, “a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary. For those holding these religious premises, the path to wisdom is through meditation into mystical insights and there is no occasion to celebrate reason.” But Christianity, on the contrary, “depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.”

- Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: 

A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2011.

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.