The Origin of Science

...as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)

To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. This is not to say that the Bible is a science textbook that contains raw scientific truths, as some evangelical Christians would have us believe. The Christian faith contains deeper truths-- truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind's exploration of nature: man's place in God's creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.

In large part, the modern mind thinks little of these notions in much the same way that the last thing on a fish's mind is the water it breathes. It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.

The following selection summarizes the most notable work of Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science and Templeton Prize laureate.

Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.

Jaki links these stillbirths in science with the doctrine concerning original sin. It is the weakening of the intellect which was the cause of false visions of the cosmos, involving eternal cycles and a necessary universe. The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.

If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.

These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.

The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.

Buridan's vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle's approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan's work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton's first law of motion.

The doctrine that God created the universe out of nothing and that the universe had a beginning was later to be reiterated at the First Vatican Council, against the errors of materialism and pantheism which enjoyed a new vogue at that time. In addition, Vatican I stated the absolute freedom of God to create, and made clear (against fideism) the possibility of arriving at God's existence through a rational reflection upon creation. As Jaki states: ``The Council, in line with a tradition almost two millenia old, could but insist on the very foundation of that relation which is man's ability to see the reasonability of revelation, which in turn is inconceivable if man is not able to infer from the world surrounding him the existence of its Creator.

It is precisely the inability of many scientists to trace the grandeur of the Creator in His works that Jaki opposes with great skill. He challenges the atheistic positions of R. Dawkins in the biological sphere and of Stephen Hawking in physics. He shows that the best way to unmask the thought of non-believing scientists is to show how the basis for their reasoning cannot be proven scientifically. In an unjustified way they leave the realm of their own scientific disciplines and make a priori philosophical deductions against Christian belief. Again, one example of this is the pervasive ``chance'' or ``chaos'' ideology used to ``explain'' the coming into being of the material universe, of life and of the human person. Stanley Jaki has also refuted such approaches to the cosmos and creation in his masterly work, The Purpose of It All, published in 1990.

The originality of Jaki's thought also lies in the link which he describes between the dogmas of the Creation and the Incarnation. He shows how the development of the doctrine of creation out of nothing was ``connected with the conceptual refinements of the doctrine of the Incarnation around which raged the great inner debates of the early Church.'' Jaki then discusses how the Jewish position on creation underwent a change during the first few centuries of Christianity. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, tried to interpret the first chapter of Genesis, but his view ``showed him closer to Greek eternalism than to Biblical creationism.'' The earliest midrashim ``showed that Jewish theologians were no longer willing to uphold the doctrine of the complete submission of matter to the Maker of all.'' In the Mutazalite tradition of Islam there was also a tendency to slide towards emanationism and pantheism, as a result of endorsing the pantheistic necessitarianism of Aristotle.

Jaki clearly affirms that in Christianity, a slide into pantheism was prevented because the doctrine of the creation was bolstered up by faith in the Incarnation. Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world. The dogmas of the Creation and Incarnation mean ``an absolute and most revolutionary break with a past steeped in paganism,'' and the enunciation of these dogmas and their historical impact is ``an uphill fight never to be completed.''

What prevented a slide into pantheism in Christianity was the dogma that Christ is the only-begotten of the Father (monogenes in Greek or unigenitus in Latin), and is thus the only divinely-begotten Being. Jaki calls attention to the fact that with the Greeks and Romans, the expression monogenes or unigenitus ``had the universe for supreme reference point.'' Belief in Christ as monogenes put ``a damper on any flirtation with the idea that any other being might be a divine begetting in terms of emanationism which always carries an animist touch.''

As well as showing that the dogma of Creation is affected by that of the Incarnation Jaki demonstrates that the converse is also true: the dogma of Incarnation can be undermined by a faulty view of creation such as was true in the case Arius, ``whose primary and real error resided in his concept of creation and Creator,'' which was based on a neo-Platonist emanationism. This emanationism, which reduced the transcendence of God by making the world almost divine, obviated the need for any real Incarnation. Against Arius, it was necessary to affirm the equality of the Son with the Father via the expression homoousios (consubstantial). This meant that the Logos was completely divine and so his creative work could be ``the paragon of logic and order.'' The rationality of the cosmos is thus ``rooted in belief in the strict divinity of the Logos.''

Father Jaki has shown that science is possible in the first place because the entities studied by the sciences are believed to form a real and orderly whole, a cosmos, in principle accessible to human reason.

But the cosmos and all the specific laws which govern it do not form a self-explanatory system; they point beyond science and call for a metaphysical foundation in the Christian doctrine of creation. It is precisely this Christian doctrine of creation which, according to Jaki, was the stimulus for the unique viable birth of science. The Christian doctrine of creation finds its expression within the Church.

The Pope's Recent Statement on Evolution

The Galileo Affair by Sim Johnston
The truth about Galileo's treatment by the Church

`Letter to My Children' by Whittaker Chambers
Science, materialism, Communism, and faith
How are we all victims of science's blindness?

Does God Really Exist? by Fr. Robert A. Connor
The self, atheism, rationalism, empiricism, and God

`Death of Darwinism' by Sim Johnston
the Catholic Church's position on evolution

If you have trouble finding books by Jaki, you might try ordering them directly from the author:

This selection from ``The Pope's Physicist'' by Fr. Paul Haffner, pp. 66-73 of the Spring 1996 issue of Sursum Corda (subscriptions $26.95/yr.; write to Subscription Dept., 1331 Red Cedar Circle, Fort Collins, CO 80524) is reprinted with permission by The Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1997