Tag: history

Person of the Century

On X today, February 2, 2026, Charles Krauthammer nominates Winston Churchill for Person of the Twentieth Century.  I concur.

For Christmas a few years ago my daughter-in-law gave me Andrew Roberts’ Churchill biography.  I thanked her as follows.

March 7, 2020

Dear Mary,

I just finished Andrew Roberts’ Churchill and I want to say again, thanks!

It was quite a few years ago that I first realized how indebted we are to “the Greatest Generation,” and I have since then had a heightened interest in the history of the 50-year period prior to my birth in 1949.  One of my regrets is that I did not quiz my parents more closely about their experiences.

But now I realize for the first time the extent to which we owe our freedom and prosperity to one man.

Roberts concludes by saying (p 975) that if Hitler had delayed the Anschluss [the annexation of Austria] and Czech crises for a few years, Churchill’s moment would have passed.  Halifax would have become Prime Minister, and he would have sought, quite reasonably, to discover Hitler’s terms of peace.  Those terms might not have been very onerous, since all Hitler needed at that moment was a single front.  Churchill saw that if the Soviets were alone, they would more likely face defeat; whereupon there would be nothing to prevent Hitler from disavowing the settlement with England, who in turn, then, would also have been alone.  Then it would have been too late for the US to re-arm.

Churchill maintained that it was the British people who had the lion heart, and that he merely “had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”  Roberts denies that: “[I]t was much more the case that Churchill had the lion heart and also gave the roar, and in so doing taught the British people to rediscover the latent lionheartedness in themselves.”  (p 980.) 

Whether one believes in Providence, as I do, we can only regard these things with gratitude and awe.

By the way, thanks, too, for the WhatsApp call the other day for Leona to chat with us.  So great to see her walking and flourishing as she is clearly doing in every way.  Thanks for thinking of us.

Love,

Tom

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

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.