Posted on 08/14/2014 7:47:42 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 1925 the renowned philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead speaking to scholars at Harvard said that science originated in Christian Europe in the 13th century. Whitehead pointed out that science arose 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”, from which it follows that human minds created in that image are capable of understanding nature.
The audience, assuming that science and Christianity are enemies, was astonished.
Equally astonished are scientists writing in the March 12 edition of Nature, the respected science journal. These scientists are studying a treatise written in 1225 by Robert Grosseteste, a bishop and theologian, which is “dense with mathematical thinking” as it describes the birth of the universe “four centuries before Newton proposed gravity and seven centuries before the Big Bang theory.”
Science itself developed from the medieval university, another uniquely Western institution. And universities were favored by popes and kings, who were protective of the institutions which they chartered and funded. In fact, “tenure” was instituted in universities in order to maintain their independence when “town and gown” battles erupted.
One of the singularly important pioneers in science was the Franciscan, Roger Bacon, called “the first scientist” because he emphasized experimentation as opposed to accepting things on authority. He published a recipe for gunpowder in 1242 about the same time as the Chinese invented it.
Yes, the Chinese invented gunpowder and the misnamed “Arabic numbers” actually originated in India. But as Stanley Jaki, the eminent science historian has said, Science “was stillborn” in these cultures.
Why?
For many reasons but two are prominent: Their religions, their worldviews, did not allow for an ordered universe conducive to science. Also the West offered freedom to explore new ideas;
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflect intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers. Even the outspoke critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord, following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The common used expression “the book of nature” referred to the universal practice of viewing nature as a revelation of God’s power and wisdom. Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the Bible and the book of nature. For desists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature alone sufficed, rendering what he called the “fables” of the Bible superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or – more commonly – Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.
Today, science itself has become the intellectuals' god.
Good article.
The first universities arose out of monasteries who had the only libraries at the time.
In a nutshell,
the Chinese worshiped their ancestors and were required to exactly duplicate their accomplishments before they were allowed to explore their own ideas.
The Arab/Muslim culture views it as “chaining Allah”, apostasy worthy of death, to assume a rational and predictable universe, which is a pre-requisite to the scientific method.
Christianity is such a confusing religion (hence its many hundreds of denominations), that there's no doubt that a lot of the scientific method arose from trying to figure out the nature of God, Jesus, and Christian religious texts through research, reason, and experimentation.
I don't think religion has anything to offer today, and in many cases rejects science (Ken Ham and his cult for example).
I think this is a good point. Stalin's religion of the state demanded its own miracles, like Lysenkoism and the mentioned communist genetics.
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Excellent post .......Thanks SaF
Bkmk
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