Christianity was cradle of scientific revolution

As published in The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat

Recently, a contributor to the Readers’ Forum took issue against another reader’s cherished faith and confidence in the special creation of man by God. Although I do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the creation stories as recorded in the Biblical book of Genesis, I think that the critic deserves a considered retort.

The reader stated, among other things, that “unlike religions that cling to antique foundations in ignorance and superstition, science advances as it investigates and learns about what it doesn’t know” and that the believer’s “omnificent creator needed legs to meander about collecting Adam’s dust, opposable thumbs to mold him, and two eyes for depth perception to get his proportions correct. Too bad these characteristics resulted from human evolution.”

He finished ponderously by saying “how dare (the believer) expect people, including the 4.5 billion non-Christians on the planet, to buy into (the believer’s) sanctimonious self-centeredness.”

These are the faint, local echoes of the rants and ravings of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and other self-described “bright” thinkers reverberating throughout the Conemaugh Valley.

Let me point out that the atheist letter writer interprets the Bible in a more literal manner than any fundamentalist I’ve ever known. Even “Bible-literalists” understand that the Bible’s descriptions of God’s actions and being are adaptive and metaphorical.

Ironically, our atheist is more of a fundamentalist in his reading of the Bible than the real fundamentalists are.

Rather than cartooning believers, the atheist critic should ponder this question instead: Why did modern science arise in Europe and nowhere else?

The answer: Because the fusion and ideas that in Rome we made of Athens and Jerusalem enabled us to take a quantum leap in thought that other global cultural centers failed to make. From classical Greek philosophy we got the notion of a rational order of the universe and the conviction that humans had the ability to describe this order rationally.

From Jerusalem, we received the notion that God is not only a God of law, but also a rational lawgiver who enabled His law to exist outside himself into the universe.

These ideas were not necessarily congruent. It took a long period of intense and orderly thought to bring them together into a cogent knowledge system. This was done in the often-derided Middle Ages, where an innovation was invented to explore these very issues: The university.

The church invented the university and with it, scientific knowledge. Let’s not forget that.

Let’s place this singular achievement into a larger cultural context and compare it with the worldview of Christianity’s most serious competitor in the West: Islam and the civilization it spawned.

We’ll see that Christianity succeeded where Islam failed.

It’s commonly known that for much of the Middle Ages Europe lagged behind Islamic civilization in terms of science, mathematics and other mechanical arts, as well as quality of life. Then came the Renaissance and the roles were reversed.

Why? Because Christianity inspired early empirical researchers with a revolutionary idea: That the universe is intelligible, knowable and describable because God made it that way. In Islam, there’s no law apart from God, therefore Muslim mathematicians were unable to leap from geometry or trigonometry – descriptive mathematics – to calculus, a mathematical discipline dealing with infinitesimal, continuous change in real time that was able to describe the universe in ways that geometry and trigonometry couldn’t.

Muslim theology did not conceive of God acting in accordance with his own natural law and therefore, their science and mathematics floundered. Islam did not conceive of science beyond the merely descriptive. That’s why classical Islamic civilization spawned great astronomers but no astrophysicists. In the Christian West, calculus went on to change the world, along with the rest of Christian-inspired, Western-devised empirical science.

Atheist ideologues like Hitchens and Dawkins, along with their faint local echoes, mischaracterize Christianity’s contribution to the development of science. They offer poor caricatures of Christian ignorance in its stead. They reach their extreme conclusions through selective use of evidence, while conveniently ignoring the remaining bulk substantiating the intellectual Christian achievement enabling the development of modern science. Perhaps theirs is the hubris and sanctimoniousness that we all ought to question and then set aside as unworthy of our intellectual consideration, as we all seek to understand the universe more and make this world a better place.