What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? The Impact of Christianity upon Scientific Development

In continuing our discussion of the impact of Jesus Christ upon Western Civilization using the D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe book entitled What If Jesus Had Never been Born? as a guide, we come to the inevitable topic that many skeptics hold up as their coup de grace in any intellectual discussion concerning the existance of God, the topic of science. What some atheists are loathe to admit is that the very foundations of modern science were established by Christians. On pages 94-95 we read...

"Dr Malcolm Jeeves ponders the question why the Greeks never went further in their scientific queries in his book The Scientific Enterprise and the Christian Faith. He points out that a unique blend of Greek thinking with a specific strand of Christianity-namely, the Reformed faith-birthed modern science. Jeeves writes:

"It was with the rediscovery of the Bible and of its message at the time of the Reformation....that a new impetus came to the development of science. This new impetus, flowing together with all that was best in Greek thinking, was to produce the right mixture to detonate the chain reaction leading to the explosion of knowledge which began at the start of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, and which is proceeding with ever-increasing momentum today."

Not only did science not develop with the Greeks, but it is also true that science would not have originated among the Hebrew people-it did not and would not-for the simple reason that to the Hebrews, as you recall in Psalms, the world was simply an occaision for praise to the Creator. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork" (Psalms 19:1).

Nor could modern science ever have come into existance among the Arabs, because of the Muslim religion. The writings of Aristotle, when lost to the Western world from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1100, were kept by the Arabs of North Africa and finally reintroduced into Europe in the 1100's and 1200's. Aristotle-unlike Plato-had a philosophy that would lend itself to the scientific type of study because it was more inductive than Plato's deductive kind of reasoning. Plato would get an ideal and deduce all manner of things from it. Aristotle would tend to look at the particulars and induce principles from them. Because of the Aristotelian thought they had access to, the Arabs-including Nestorian Christians-generally made greater scientific and mathematical advances than the Europeans during the Middle Ages.

But during all of that time the Arabs never introduced nor created any real science. Why? Because of their religion. Because of the fatalism that dominates the Muslim religion. Since everything is fatalistically determined, obviously there is no point in trying to manipulate the natural world to change anything, because all things are unchangeable.

Science could never have come into being among the animists of central or southern Africa or many other places in the world because they never would have begun to experiment on the natural world, since everything-whether stones or trees or animals or anything else-contained within it living spirits of various gods or ancestors.

Nor could science have originated in India among the Hindus, nor in China among the Buddhists, for both Hinduism and Buddhism teach that the physical world is unreal and that the only reality is that of the world's soul and that the greatest thing anyone has to learn is that the physical world is not real. Therefore, there would have been no point in spending one's life fooling with that which had no reality in the first place.

It waited for Christianity to come and take several of the different strains and weave them together to produce in the sixteenth century the phenomenon we know know as modern science. It was because of a number of basic teachings of Christianity. First of all is the fact that there is a rational God who is the source of all truth, and that this world is a rational world. This gives rise to the possibility of scientific laws.

It is interesting to note that science could not originate in the philisophical view prevelant in the world today. The prevailing philosophy of the Western world is existentialism, which is irrational. It would not be possible for science to develop in an irrational world because science is based on the fact that if water boils at 212 degrees today, it will boil at 212 degrees tomorrow, and the same thing the next day, and that there are certain laws and regularities that control the universe. This all stems from the Christian concept of the God who created the world-a God who is rational and who created a rational world."

Kennedy and Newcombe bring up some interesting points in their above commentary. One other (demonstrably false) concept brought up by skeptics concerning the faux war between science and religion is the idea that science and religion are incompatible, a baseless assertion which is demolished by Vox Day in his book The Irrational Atheist. On page 58 we read...

"The idea that religion is the enemy of science is a remarkably silly one when examined in scientific terms. Consider that Christian nation and the hostility to science it supposedly harbors due to it's extraordinary religiosity. And yet the United States of America accounts for more than one-third of global scientific output despite representing only 4.5 percent of the global population. The scientific overproduction of religious America is a factor of 7.89, representing 28.7 percent more scientific output per capita than the most atheistic nation in Europe, France."

I can't leave without bringing up something quoted by Kennedy and Newcombe concerning the founders of so many branches of science. Let's look at a partial list from page 101, shall we?

"Antiseptic surgery, Joseph Lister

Bacteriology, Louis Pastuer

Calculus, Dynamics, Isaac Newton

Celestial Mechanics, Johannes Kepler

Chemistry, Gas Dynamics, Robert Boyle

Comparative Anatomy, Georges Cuvier

Computer Science, Charles Babbage

Dimensional Analysis, Model Analysis, Lord Rayleigh

Electronics, John Ambrose Fleming

Electrodynamics, James Clark Maxwell

Electromagnetics, Field Theory, Michael Faraday

Energetics, Lord Kelvin

Entomology of Living Insects, Henri Fabre

Field Mechanics, George Stokes

Galactic Astronomy, Sir William Herschel

Genetics, Gregor Mendel

Glacial Geology, Ichthyology, Louis Agassiz

Gynecology, James Simpson

Hydrography, Oceanography, Matthew Maury

Hydrostatics, Blaise Pascal

Isotropic Chemistry, Willam Ramsey

Natural History, John Ray

Non-Euclidean Geometry, Bernard Riemann

Optical Mineralogy, David Brewster

And on it goes. All of these founders were Bible believers...."