William RevilleChristianity nurtured the birth of modern science
Both science and religion, and the relationship between the two, have changed considerably over the ages. Today, in the developed Western world, formal adherence to religion is weak and in decline and science is in the ascendant. But, throughout most of recorded history, and up to recent times, God was centre stage in all societies.
The gods who ruled the ancient pagan world were a sort of superhuman human beings whose personalities displayed all the common human frailties, including capriciousness and unpredictability. People therefore did not expect the natural world to work in a rational and predictable manner and there was therefore no incentive for science to get started.
Nevertheless, the Babylonians (4000 BC – 330BC) developed mathematics to a considerable extent for practical purposes, e.g. to measure the size of fields. They also studied the movements of stars and planets in the sky for religious reasons, believing that these bodies were deities. By 400 BC they had developed a sophisticated system of astrology which the Greeks inherited.
Deductive reasoning
Mathematics was important in ancient Greece (800 BC – 50 BC) but more as a philosophy than as a tool for investigating the natural world. Greek philosophers used deductive reasoning as the primary way of finding truth. They assumed the existence of eternal forms and thought that these forms were reflected in the physical world. They used their intuition to decide what the eternal forms were and then deduced conclusions from them. They did not, by and large, reach conclusions based on close observations of the natural world or by carrying out experiments. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was the most famous of the Greek philosopher-scientists.
Thinking changed at the dawn of modernity (from 1400 on) in favour of deciding what reality is like by observing the world closely. The British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) proposed that we should collect evidence by looking at small areas of reality, deduce an overall pattern on the basis of this evidence, and then we should continually check these conclusions by making further observations.
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) practically invented modern science on his own – formulating laws to explain the results of observations and experiment.
Galileo discovered that freely falling bodies, heavy or light, all have the same constant acceleration and he also roundly criticised Aristotle’s science. He championed the proposal made by Nicolai Copernicus (1473 – 1543) that the sun, not the Earth, sits at the centre of our solar system, and that the Earth revolves around the sun. He offered observations made through his telescope as evidence for the Copernican system.
Galileo fell foul of the Church and also of the academic community. His proposal that the Earth moves around the sun clashes with a literal interpretation of certain passages in Scripture, which angered powerful Churchmen.
However, it is possible that it was his disdain for the philosophy of Aristotle that was more worrying to the Church, because the doctrine of transubstantiation depends on the distinction made by Aristotle between appearance and essence. The Catholic Church teaches that bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ at the consecration in the Mass. Obviously the appearance of the bread and wine doesn’t change, but the Church teaches that their essence does change.
Galileo was famously tried before the Inquisition and forced to recant his teaching that the Earth moves around the sun.
The story is told with gusto to this day to illustrate how dogmatic religion is the implacable enemy of scientific progress. However, the real story of Galileo is much more complicated, as I have recounted in this column before. For example, Galileo was fiery, argumentative and vindictive, and made many enemies unnecessarily.
Diplomatic
It is likely that, had he been a little more diplomatic, the famous Galileo affair would never have blown up in the first place. Nevertheless, the Church was wrong in the Galileo affair. Galileo clearly saw that when the Bible explains an aspect of the natural world in contradiction to the explanation given by science, then the scientific explanation must prevail. St Augustine (354 – 430) had also said this many years before and, of course, mainline Christianity now accepts this view.
In fact, rather than viewing science as an implacable foe of science, a credible argument can be made that Christianity provided the essential nurturing environment that facilitated the birth of modern science. Modern science arose specifically in Christian Western Europe and nowhere else.
This can be explained by the nature of Christianity. Firstly, Christians believe the world was made by a rational, faithful God. Secondly, Christians believe that humans are made in the image of God and therefore, thirdly, we can expect to understand the world God has created. Fourthly, the world is worth studying because God created it. These reasons did not exist in the pagan world ruled by capricious gods.
But, you may ask, did science not also flourish under Islam? Well, yes it did, but only temporarily. Early Islam took over some major centres of learning such as Baghdad and Alexandria (641 AD), giving them access to Greek mathematics and philosophy in the libraries.
They made good use of this knowledge, making rapid developments in astronomy, chemistry, mathematics and so on, and were way ahead of the Europeans at this stage. But then dominant Islamic theology changed under the influence of philosophers such as al-Ghazzali (1058 – 1111), emphasising that every event is directly caused by an inscrutable Allah.
This attitude inhibits the search for natural causes and scientific progress under Islam ground to a halt.
Stability
Most of the great scientists in history were Christians, who were motivated to understand the natural world in order to understand and appreciate the mind of God. Probably the greatest ever scientist was Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) who discovered the laws of motion and the law of gravity and explained why the planets in our solar system orbit the sun. He explained the solar system in terms of the gravitational attraction between the central massive sun and the planets that revolve around it. However, he understood that the planets also attract each other through gravity and he couldn’t explain why this did not make the solar system unstable.
This question was later settled by Frenchman Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827) who showed that a phenomenon called resonance allows the solar system to settle down into a stable system.
In order to explain the stability of the solar system, Newton postulated that God intervenes periodically to smooth out instability. This was a ‘god of the gaps’ argument and such arguments were often used by Christianity to patch over gaps in scientific knowledge, thereby providing evidence for the existence of God.
This device turned out to be counterproductive for religion because, as science advanced, gaps in scientific knowledge were filled in, thereby discrediting ‘god of the gaps’ arguments.
There never was a second Galileo-type affair and gods of the gaps arguments are no longer made by mainline Christianity. The introduction of the theory of the evolution by natural selection in 1858 caused tension again between science and religion but this tension was relatively short-lived and the theory of evolution was accepted relatively quickly by mainline Christianity.
Today it is generally accepted that science and religion occupy two largely non-overlapping spheres. The function of science is to provide natural explanations as to how the natural world works. The function of religion is to help us to fathom the purpose of our existence and to teach us how to live good lives.
Science does not deal in moral or aesthetic values and religion has no competence to uncover the natural mechanisms that underpin the natural world.
William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC. http://understandingscience.ucc.ie