Was Christianity an impediment to scientific progress?
By Brian D. Wilson
When I began college 20 years ago as an atheist I remember that what bothered me most about Christians were their foolish superstitions. No doubt the Bible was helpful in providing children with a moral foundation to build on, but so did Peter Pan. Christianity was a dreaded hemlock force fed upon Europe. Its leaders elevated superstition to the level of theological truth and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages.
By Brian D. Wilson
When I began college 20 years ago as an atheist I remember that what bothered me most about Christians were their foolish superstitions. No doubt the Bible was helpful in providing children with a moral foundation to build on, but so did Peter Pan. Christianity was a dreaded hemlock force fed upon Europe. Its leaders elevated superstition to the level of theological truth and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages.This all fit very well into a theory of History I called The Refining Pot Theory. Just as the metal smith heated the refining pot and purged the iron of its impurities, so humanity purged itself of its superstitions. Beliefs like “The sound of thunder is really the gods bowling” were humanity’s chief impediment to intellectual progress, and it was Man’s insatiable curiosity (apart from His religion) that began chipping away at this superstition.
First Man discarded his beliefs in magic potions, charms, and spells, then of the animistic spirits of the water and air, then finally of the greater gods themselves. For each shedding of superstition Man was rewarded with insights which slowly pulled Him away from His imaginary religious world and into reality. Thus secular Man pushed humanity kicking and screaming into the Modern World in spite of a Church that held it back at every turn.
However as I began my freshman year in college the validity of my theory began falling apart. I wrote an essay entitled Tearing Down The Wall of Ignorance, where I argued that, “Had Christianity’s presence not been so powerful and persistent Europe might have avoided the Dark Ages and continued on with the scientific progress of the Greeks and Romans who gave Europe the gifts of Logic, basic Empiricism, and Geometry.”
Yet as I explored a little deeper I soon discovered that Greco-Roman civilization was at least as superstitious if not more superstitious than Medieval Christian Europe. The Greeks believed the Universe was filled with countless deities, assigning to them power over the cycles of nature. To my horror they even assigned consciousness to the Universe itself.
For example Plato taught that the Demiurge (a god personifying pure reason) created the Universe as a living thing. In the Timeaus he said the world has a soul, and “Although it is solitary it is able by reason of its excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend but is sufficient to itself.” Many of Greece’s finest intellectuals conceived of the stars as a host of celestial beings. Their greatest mind Aristotle taught that celestial bodies move in circles because of their affection for one another and because of their love of having a purpose.
So how could I say on the one hand that superstition was the bane of human progress, then praise the superstition ridden Greco-Roman culture for all the scientific achievement it bestowed upon us? Hadn’t my observation disproved my very theory about the relationship between religious superstition and progress? How was it that Christian superstition supposedly brought intellectual retardation to Europe, but Greco-Roman superstition had no affect on scientific progress?
I toyed for a time with the notion that Christianity possessed a unique kind of superstition which made it far more dangerous to progress than anything which the Greeks suggested. This turned out to be silly. Some of Greece’s most famous intellectuals believed that every time lightening bolts hit the ground Zeus was throwing them from the sky. Yet I was maintaining somehow that Medieval Christians who believed God created the Earth’s weather systems, set them into motion, then left them to work on their own, independent of a deity, was responsible for the Dark Ages.
Many years earlier the famous atheist Bertrand Russell encountered a similar conundrum. He sat perplexed in his office one morning in 1922 wondering why there was such a lack of science in the China of his day (Bertrand Russell: The Problem of China). After all Christianity made no significant inroads there, plus the religion that Chinese intellectuals produced was remote, impersonal, and did not rely on superstitious concepts. As Princeton sociologist Rodney Stark pointed out, “From the perspective of Russell’s militant atheism, China should have had science long before Europe” (For the Glory of God).
Russell was right that religious beliefs can in principle impede intellectual progress. Yet not all religious beliefs are the same. What Russell failed to consider was how Christian Theology not only assisted, but was a central reason for, Europe’s forward progress. In fact, far from freeing Europe from the Dark Ages, Greece and China actually slowed and at times even impeded scientific advance.
China
In China the common people have always had a huge pantheon of spirits and of lesser gods. Their intellectuals however “Prided themselves on following god-less religions, wherein the supernatural is conceived of as an essence or principle governing life, but which is impersonal, remote, and definitely not a being” (Stark: For the Glory of God). The Tao is an essence, for example, and Yin and Yang are both principles.
The problem with being-less principles and essences to the question of scientific progress is that they cause nothing, do nothing, and explain nothing. The Universe simply is. That’s it. The mysteries of the Cosmos are too subtle and sublime to be penetrated, the Taoist would tell you. In that case why develop science in the first place?
Marxist historian Joseph Needham, a man who devoted most of his life and several volumes to the technological history of China, came to a shocking conclusion after years of attempting to explain why an otherwise literate civilization failed to bring about a culture of science. China’s inability to bring about science was due to its religion, specifically the inability of its intellectuals to believe in a personal and conscious god, which in turn kept the Chinese from positing the existence of Laws of nature.
As a result Needham concluded, “The conception of a divine celestial law giver imposing ordinances on non-human nature never developed. It was not that there was no order to nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was NOT an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which that god had decreed aforetime” (Needham: Science and Civilization in China, 6. Vols. 1954-84).
Greece
As for the Greeks, their gods, like humans, were subject to the whims and tides of the Universe. Plato’s Demiurge god tried to construct a perfectly good and ordered Cosmos but was confined to working with the
First Man discarded his beliefs in magic potions, charms, and spells, then of the animistic spirits of the water and air, then finally of the greater gods themselves. For each shedding of superstition Man was rewarded with insights which slowly pulled Him away from His imaginary religious world and into reality. Thus secular Man pushed humanity kicking and screaming into the Modern World in spite of a Church that held it back at every turn.
However as I began my freshman year in college the validity of my theory began falling apart. I wrote an essay entitled Tearing Down The Wall of Ignorance, where I argued that, “Had Christianity’s presence not been so powerful and persistent Europe might have avoided the Dark Ages and continued on with the scientific progress of the Greeks and Romans who gave Europe the gifts of Logic, basic Empiricism, and Geometry.”
Yet as I explored a little deeper I soon discovered that Greco-Roman civilization was at least as superstitious if not more superstitious than Medieval Christian Europe. The Greeks believed the Universe was filled with countless deities, assigning to them power over the cycles of nature. To my horror they even assigned consciousness to the Universe itself.
For example Plato taught that the Demiurge (a god personifying pure reason) created the Universe as a living thing. In the Timeaus he said the world has a soul, and “Although it is solitary it is able by reason of its excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend but is sufficient to itself.” Many of Greece’s finest intellectuals conceived of the stars as a host of celestial beings. Their greatest mind Aristotle taught that celestial bodies move in circles because of their affection for one another and because of their love of having a purpose.
So how could I say on the one hand that superstition was the bane of human progress, then praise the superstition ridden Greco-Roman culture for all the scientific achievement it bestowed upon us? Hadn’t my observation disproved my very theory about the relationship between religious superstition and progress? How was it that Christian superstition supposedly brought intellectual retardation to Europe, but Greco-Roman superstition had no affect on scientific progress?
I toyed for a time with the notion that Christianity possessed a unique kind of superstition which made it far more dangerous to progress than anything which the Greeks suggested. This turned out to be silly. Some of Greece’s most famous intellectuals believed that every time lightening bolts hit the ground Zeus was throwing them from the sky. Yet I was maintaining somehow that Medieval Christians who believed God created the Earth’s weather systems, set them into motion, then left them to work on their own, independent of a deity, was responsible for the Dark Ages.
Many years earlier the famous atheist Bertrand Russell encountered a similar conundrum. He sat perplexed in his office one morning in 1922 wondering why there was such a lack of science in the China of his day (Bertrand Russell: The Problem of China). After all Christianity made no significant inroads there, plus the religion that Chinese intellectuals produced was remote, impersonal, and did not rely on superstitious concepts. As Princeton sociologist Rodney Stark pointed out, “From the perspective of Russell’s militant atheism, China should have had science long before Europe” (For the Glory of God).
Russell was right that religious beliefs can in principle impede intellectual progress. Yet not all religious beliefs are the same. What Russell failed to consider was how Christian Theology not only assisted, but was a central reason for, Europe’s forward progress. In fact, far from freeing Europe from the Dark Ages, Greece and China actually slowed and at times even impeded scientific advance.
China
In China the common people have always had a huge pantheon of spirits and of lesser gods. Their intellectuals however “Prided themselves on following god-less religions, wherein the supernatural is conceived of as an essence or principle governing life, but which is impersonal, remote, and definitely not a being” (Stark: For the Glory of God). The Tao is an essence, for example, and Yin and Yang are both principles.
The problem with being-less principles and essences to the question of scientific progress is that they cause nothing, do nothing, and explain nothing. The Universe simply is. That’s it. The mysteries of the Cosmos are too subtle and sublime to be penetrated, the Taoist would tell you. In that case why develop science in the first place?
Marxist historian Joseph Needham, a man who devoted most of his life and several volumes to the technological history of China, came to a shocking conclusion after years of attempting to explain why an otherwise literate civilization failed to bring about a culture of science. China’s inability to bring about science was due to its religion, specifically the inability of its intellectuals to believe in a personal and conscious god, which in turn kept the Chinese from positing the existence of Laws of nature.
As a result Needham concluded, “The conception of a divine celestial law giver imposing ordinances on non-human nature never developed. It was not that there was no order to nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was NOT an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which that god had decreed aforetime” (Needham: Science and Civilization in China, 6. Vols. 1954-84).
Greece
As for the Greeks, their gods, like humans, were subject to the whims and tides of the Universe. Plato’s Demiurge god tried to construct a perfectly good and ordered Cosmos but was confined to working with the
Universe’s imperfect matter. Therefore true cosmic order could never be achieved. In an order-less universe why look for scientific laws? Other gods controlled seasonal forces. If gods control seasons why develop Meteorology?
The Greeks also conceived of the Cosmos as existing in endless repeating cycles. In Aristotle’s On the Heavens he said “The same ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again.” In the Politics he wrote that the same things in the history of the world have “been invented several times over the course of ages, or rather times without number.” Parmenides believed all perceptions of change are illusions and that the Cosmos was actually in a static state of perfection. In a perfect Universe where cause and change are illusions why look for explanations of phenomena? Science, in other words cannot flourish without a preexisting theory in the possibility of progress.
The Christian Difference
In 1925, three years after Bertrand Russell sat perplexed in his office over China, his friend Alfred North Whitehead had come to a very different conclusion concerning Christianity’s impact on Modern Science. In one of his famous Lowell Lectures at Harvard Whitehead commented, “Science arose in Europe because of the widespread faith in the possibility of science… derivative from medieval theology.”
Princeton’s Rodney Stark commenting upon the matter noted, “Whitehead’s pronouncement shocked not only his distinguished audience but Western intellectuals in general once his lectures were published. How could this great philosopher and mathematician, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the landmark Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), make such an outlandish claim?” The reason is that Whitehead knew better. He had a far deeper grasp of Christian history and theology which led him to say,
The Greeks also conceived of the Cosmos as existing in endless repeating cycles. In Aristotle’s On the Heavens he said “The same ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again.” In the Politics he wrote that the same things in the history of the world have “been invented several times over the course of ages, or rather times without number.” Parmenides believed all perceptions of change are illusions and that the Cosmos was actually in a static state of perfection. In a perfect Universe where cause and change are illusions why look for explanations of phenomena? Science, in other words cannot flourish without a preexisting theory in the possibility of progress.
The Christian Difference
In 1925, three years after Bertrand Russell sat perplexed in his office over China, his friend Alfred North Whitehead had come to a very different conclusion concerning Christianity’s impact on Modern Science. In one of his famous Lowell Lectures at Harvard Whitehead commented, “Science arose in Europe because of the widespread faith in the possibility of science… derivative from medieval theology.”
Princeton’s Rodney Stark commenting upon the matter noted, “Whitehead’s pronouncement shocked not only his distinguished audience but Western intellectuals in general once his lectures were published. How could this great philosopher and mathematician, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the landmark Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), make such an outlandish claim?” The reason is that Whitehead knew better. He had a far deeper grasp of Christian history and theology which led him to say,
I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with it’s antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research: that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind?
When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of the other civilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source of its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words.
Whitehead ended with the remark that the images of gods found in other religions, especially in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science. Sometimes our extreme focus keeps us from grappling with the obvious. With all of my railings against a supposedly anti-intellectual Church something had never occurred to me; the birth of science occurred at just one time in history, the late 16th Century, and in one place, Western Europe, and only then did it spread to the rest of the nations of the Earth. Science had more than 3 millennia to potentially develop in Mesopotamia, Greece, or China, but it did not. Yet it did develop in the most heavily Christianized place on the planet, Western Europe, where Christian ideals penetrated every aspect of life. How could this have occurred if Christian religion was an impediment to scientific progress?
This was possible because of Christian Theism. God was a conscious and rational soul and therefore Christians contemplated that if God is rational then the world which he created must be rational. The early church searched for the concept of laws of nature precisely because their theology taught them that such Laws existed and these Laws likely governed the Universe as well.
Another factor was the Church’s dualism. Christians have traditionally believed equally in two worlds. One world contained physical matter, and the other world contained immaterial objects like numbers, angels, Laws of logic, ideas, mathematical powers, demons, souls, and God. Furthermore God was a being which stood outside of time and space and brought the Universe into being.
This meant that there must be an apparatus by which God, being separate from the Cosmos, set the Cosmos into motion. Therefore an answer was sought which tried to explain how the Universe could work without God constantly being in the middle of it. This picture of God as on the outside, but intimately concerned with the Cosmos, drove Medieval Christians to seek out Natural Laws, again because of the church’s theology, not in opposition to it. Far from being an impediment, a dualistic Christian belief meant that you could not always appeal to the supernatural to explain the natural, since God created both worlds and each had its mechanisms to be discovered.
What is Science?
What Russell failed to recognize is that not all progress is science. What China and Greece produced in all it's centuries was simple engineering, basic empiricism, or craft. Science on the other hand, is, “A method utilized in organized efforts to formulate explanations of nature, always subject to modifications and corrections through systematic observations.” (Stark; The Victory of Reason).
It is not that the various inventions of these cultures were not ingenious or impressive. On the contrary, societies like Greece and China did make great progress without science even being present. This is because science is NOT a synonym for progress. It is merely one of many types of human progress. Engineering, craft, and economic experimentation, none of which are science, can all better a culture. I think most of us if forced to live either in 5th Century Greece during its Golden Age, or Greece’s Stone Age, we would choose the 5th Century, even though at neither time did Greece actually have science according to most historians of Science.
What is Science?
What Russell failed to recognize is that not all progress is science. What China and Greece produced in all it's centuries was simple engineering, basic empiricism, or craft. Science on the other hand, is, “A method utilized in organized efforts to formulate explanations of nature, always subject to modifications and corrections through systematic observations.” (Stark; The Victory of Reason).
It is not that the various inventions of these cultures were not ingenious or impressive. On the contrary, societies like Greece and China did make great progress without science even being present. This is because science is NOT a synonym for progress. It is merely one of many types of human progress. Engineering, craft, and economic experimentation, none of which are science, can all better a culture. I think most of us if forced to live either in 5th Century Greece during its Golden Age, or Greece’s Stone Age, we would choose the 5th Century, even though at neither time did Greece actually have science according to most historians of Science.
Since Science is system composed of many elements that must simultaneously be present most philosophers and historians of Science place Science’s birth at the end of the 16th Century. This again explains why you can have so many beneficial advances in a culture, but it would be a mistake to call thsese innovations science.
The historical record bears a certain pattern out. From the birth of Greece and Rome, all the way to the 16th Century you have either one or another element of Science operating, whether it be observations, the systemization of those observations, theorizing, or various systems of logical deduction. All of these parts of Science operating independently certainly had their beneficial effects on culture.
Yet part of the reason why the Scientific Revolution (1543) was called a revolution was that these elements all began to be integrated into a single entity called Science. In this regard you may speak of the world before and after Science without being too inaccurate.
The historical record bears a certain pattern out. From the birth of Greece and Rome, all the way to the 16th Century you have either one or another element of Science operating, whether it be observations, the systemization of those observations, theorizing, or various systems of logical deduction. All of these parts of Science operating independently certainly had their beneficial effects on culture.
Yet part of the reason why the Scientific Revolution (1543) was called a revolution was that these elements all began to be integrated into a single entity called Science. In this regard you may speak of the world before and after Science without being too inaccurate.
China was the first civilization to record astronomic observations yet for more than 5,000 years it lacked any theorizing that explained either the composition or motion of the stars. Greek mathematicians commented extensively on numbers and their relationships and values, but made no systematic attempts to link them to empirical based conclusions.
Greece had an empirical apparatus, but failed to link it to theoretical models which attempted to explain nature, nor did the Greeks link observations to systematic corrections or think in terms of Laws of Nature. They had logic, yet their world view made their rationalism impotent due to a strong determinism about the fate of matter and Man.
They were also impeded by a picture of a cyclical Universe that made the idea of progress through time impossible, and they had a philosophy that pictured a chaotic world that was subject to the whims of the gods. The Romans had similar cultural impediments which explains why without science they were able to build magnificient aqueducts.
They were also impeded by a picture of a cyclical Universe that made the idea of progress through time impossible, and they had a philosophy that pictured a chaotic world that was subject to the whims of the gods. The Romans had similar cultural impediments which explains why without science they were able to build magnificient aqueducts.
Christianity was not an impediment to human progress. I think the biggest obstacle to understanding this is our short memories and because of an increasing lack of historical education. From the very beginning modern science bore the very architecture of the Christian mind. It was the Christian Rene Descartes in 1596 who was among the first to lay down the principles of the scientific method in his work Discourse on Method.
The brilliant French and Catholic mathematical prodigy Blaise Pascal (1632-62) would follow. He founded modern Probability Theory, advanced Differential Calculus, modern Hydraulics, and was the inventor of one of the first mechanical calculators. Then came George Cuvier (1769-1832), the great French naturalist who founded the modern principles of Comparative Anatomy.
Christian Carolus Linneaus (1707-1778) became the founder of modern Taxonomy. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) would discover electro-magnetic induction. It was the Christian Monk Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) who laid down the foundational tenets of modern genetics. The list could be enlarged, but the point remains, far from being an impediment to progress Christianity has been one of the greatest assets to it.
Christian Carolus Linneaus (1707-1778) became the founder of modern Taxonomy. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) would discover electro-magnetic induction. It was the Christian Monk Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) who laid down the foundational tenets of modern genetics. The list could be enlarged, but the point remains, far from being an impediment to progress Christianity has been one of the greatest assets to it.
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