A Five-Part Series
Part Two: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason
As we saw in Part One, there are reasons science arose in the West. At the same time there are also reasons why it did NOT arise anywhere else: their theology did not permit it.
Barbour argues that “science in its modern form [arose] in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”1 These included, as noted in Part One, the belief in a rational God who created an orderly cosmos and humans in his image as also rational beings precisely because he wished to be known.
Greece.
Ancient Greek philosophy is a case in point. Many Greek philosophers “assumed they could deduce how nature ought to behave . . . based on only superficial observations of natural phenomena or without actually observing nature at all.”2. Thus, Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was based more on his suppositions about the divinity of the celestial objects and his assumptions about what kinds of motions would be suitable to them, given their divine nature. Supposing that a circular motion was most perfect, for example, Aristotle concluded that the orbit of the sun around the Earth must be perfectly circular. (Of course the sun does not orbit the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit of the sun is elliptical, not circular.) He also reasoned that the Earth must be eternal and the center of the universe.
Egypt
Despite Egypt’s technical prowess in building the pyramids, Egyptian mathematics and geometry remained a practical art.
Any possibility for scientific breakthroughs was destroyed by
the polytheistic, animistic precepts central to Egyptian religion. In polytheism, each god governs its domain according to its own rules; uniformity and hence intelligibility are elusive. In animism, likewise, many gods inhabit natural things such as trees and animals.
Eastern pantheistic monism
The Hindu and Buddhist precept that all is One implies that all distinctions are illusory – a real curiosity-killer! The study of nature requires duality: the knower and the thing which is known. They are not the same thing. Just as importantly, classification is an indispensable scientific exercise. E.g., a dolphin is not a porpoise, and a bacterium is not a virus. Study of the Creation entails careful distinctions. But in Eastern thought, to realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond knowledge. This is hardly a view that encourages scientific inquiry.
NEXT WEEK: Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science
ENDNOTES
1Barbour, Religion and Science, 27.
2Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 32.
Joshualetter 