In his book God’s Undertaker, John Lennox makes the important point that
for science to develop, thinking had to be freed from the hitherto ubiquitous Aristotelian method of deducing from fixed principles how the universe ought to be, to a methodology that allowed the universe to speak directly.
Francis Bacon is often hailed as being the father of modern science. He taught that God has provided us with two books – the book of Nature and the Bible. In his view, a properly educated mind was committed to studying both. Bacon and other towering figures of science (e.g. Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Babbage, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin adn Clerk Maxwell), were not shackled by Aristotelianism because they shared the notion of a contingent creation, believing God created the universe and could have created it any way he chose. This meant, contra Aristotle, that one cannot deduce how the universe works simply by reasoning from a priori philosophical principles. Instead, as per Galileo, Kepler and others, this presupposition of God as Creator encouraged them to go and look at what the universe is really like and see how it actually works.
It must be conceded that at times, because of a deficient other-worldly eschatology that has sublimated a healthy biblical understanding of creation, there have been times when the Christian church has not encouraged and even resisted scientific investigation. Ironically, today in some Christian circles an arguably distorted understanding of biblical creation is playing a similar role. It is one thing to critique purported scientific evidence and ‘facts’ on their own terms. It is quite another to rule them out of hand because of predetermined conclusions, not shared by significant numbers of other Bible-believing Christians, as to when such science is at loggerheads with a doctrine of biblical creation, e.g. views concerning the age of the earth.
Nevertheless, the basic scientific conviction that the universe is orderly, without which science would not be possible, historically owes much to theistic beliefs in a doctrine of creation. However, lest we overstate the indebtedness of science to theism, Lennox cites John Brooke, Oxford’s first Professor of Science and Religion:
In the past religious beliefs have served as a presupposition of the scientific enterprise insofar as they have underwritten that uniformity… a doctine of creation could give coherence to scientific endeavour insofar as it implied a dependable order behind the flux of nature… this need not entail the strong claim that without a prior theology, science would never have taken off, but it does mean that the particular conceptions of science held by its pioneers were often informed by theological and metaphysical beliefs.
Posted July 18, 2010
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