From The Modern Churchman (now Modern Believing),
with permission from Modern Churchpeople’s Union, 25 Birch Grove, London W3
9SP, U.K.
24
Biblical Contributions to the
Development of the Scientific Method
By Professor E. La B. CHERBONNIER
Professor
Cherbonnier is Head of the Department of Religion at Trinity College, Hartford,
Connecticut.
It has been more than twenty years
since Michael Foster touched off a discussion which, after his untimely death,
was never adequately followed up, and from which we still have something to
learn about the biblical contribution to Western civilization. In a series of
articles in Mind, he challenged the standard, textbook account of the
origins of modern science, which traces it exclusively to Greek and Roman
antecedents - as though Kepler and Galileo were merely re‑kindling the
lamps which had been lit by Pythagoras and Archimedes, only to be extinguished
for a thousand years by the dark ages.
At first glance this interpretation
is quite convincing. To the Greeks we do owe the intellectual discipline which
is the sine qua non of the scientific method: systematic, logical,
abstract thinking. Moreover, the ancients themselves anticipated a number of
the discoveries of the seventeenth century, which in fact were often only re‑discoveries
of forgotten Greek ideas. To recall a few of the more familiar:
Aristarchus of Samos concluded that
the earth and other planets revolve around the sun; Eratosthanes computed the
diameter of the earth with an error of only one‑half of one per cent;
Hipparchus calculated the distance to the moon with an error of only three‑tenths
of one per cent; his catalogue of the fixed stars, and Ptolemy’s table for
calculating planetary motion, were accurate enough to guide the navigation of
Columbus and other early explorers; Aristotle even gives a hint of the theory
of evolution (though he hastily retracts it).
In the light of these and other
parallels between ancient and modern science, it seems almost self‑evident
that the latter’s genealogy runs directly back to Athens and Alexandria, and
certainly not to Jerusalem. And yet, on second thought, these parallels do not
prove what they seem to prove. Rather, they raise a perplexing problem. For if
the Greeks were that close to modern science, why did they not go the rest of
the way? What restrained them? More than one historian has been baffled by this
question. There is one in particular (Benjamin Farrington) whose testimony is
the more significant, in as much as, being a Marxist, he would indignantly
reject the conclusion which, following Michael Foster, I am going to draw from
the following observation:
25
With
astonishment we find . . . the science of Alexandria and of Rome on the
threshold of the modern world . . . But, if our first impression is favourable,
it is quickly succeeded by a strange doubt. The Greeks and Romans stood on the
threshold of the modern world. Why did they not push open the door? The
situation is paradoxical in the extreme . . . The capacity to organize
knowledge was great. The range of positive information was impressive, the rate
of its acquisition more impressive still. The theory of experiment had been grasped.
Applications of science to various ingenious mechanisms were not lacking. It
was not, then, only with Ptolemy and Galen that the ancients had stood on the
threshold of the modern world. By that late date they had already been
loitering on the threshold for four hundred years. They had indeed demonstrated
their inability to cross it . . . Here, then, we have evidence of a real
paralysis of science . . .1
Why could not the Greeks cross the threshold?
Certainly not for the lack of knowledge, or of imagination, or of brain power.
What then inhibited them from reaping the harvest of their own creative
thoughts? There seems to be a missing link in the evolution of science -- or at
least in the theory that traces it exclusively to classical origins.
Michael Foster maintained that the
missing link was to be found in the other main source of Western civilization,
one often associated with indifference to science, if not outright hostility:
the Bible. Of course he did not suggest that the Bible contains any revealed
truths of a scientific kind, still less that science could ever have arisen
without its classical heritage. His argument was more sophisticated than that.
It was based upon what R. G. Collingwood had called the ‘absolute
presuppositions’ upon which every civilization rests: its grand assumptions
about man and his destiny, about what is worth living for, and why. The
presuppositions of classical civilization, Foster held, were not merely unfavourable
to the development of the scientific method as we understand it, but actually
inimical to it. That is, intellectual competence, though a necessary condition
of modern science, cannot alone account for it. There had also to be a
revolution in outlook and attitude, a transformation in men’s thinking about
what constitutes worthwhile knowledge, where to find it, and what to do with
it.
In short, Greek science was the
prisoner of Greek presuppositions. It could be liberated only when they had
been replaced by another, contrary set of primary assumptions. These latter
have now become so habitual, and so thoroughly vindicated by science itself,
that one tends to regard them as the product of science, rather than its pre‑condition;
to take them for granted as the natural mode of thinking of all men everywhere,
at least after the cobwebs of superstition have been swept away. In actual
fact,
_________________________________________
1Farrington, Benjamin: Greek Science: Its Meaning for
Us; New York, Penguin Books, 1953, pp. 301f.
26
however, these
presuppositions are a rarity in the history of thought. They were foreign to
the two oldest surviving civilizations, in China and India, and they were
foreign to the Greeks and Romans. Yet without them not even the Greek genius
could bring ancient science to fruition. Where then did they come from? The
only source from which they could have come, and where they do ring out loud
and clear, is the Bible.
To support the argument I shall
first adduce three presuppositions of classical antiquity which blocked the
development of the scientific method. and then contrast them with their
biblical contraries. Next, I shall cite three more Greek attitudes which
militate against the technological application of science to human problems,
again contrasting them with their biblical counterparts. (Though this
distinction between theoretical and applied science is an artificial one, which
in fact constitutes a vestige of Greek thinking, it is still useful for
purposes of exposition).
PURE SCIENCE
1. Greek deterrents.
There is no better place to begin
than Plato’s celebrated myth of the cave (Republic, Bk. 7), in which he
likens mankind to prisoners facing the wall of a cavern with their backs to the
light. Unable to see anything but the flickering shadows cast upon the wall by
the objects behind them, they naturally mistake these shadows for real things.
The person who takes these images most seriously of all is the scientist, whose
enterprise is consequently the most futile. In Plato’s words:
Now
suppose that those prisoners had among themselves a system of honours and
commendations, that prizes were granted to the man who had the keenest eye for
passing objects and the best memory for which usually came first, and which second,
and which came together, and who could most cleverly conjecture from this what
was likely to come in the future, do you think that our friend would . . . envy
the men whom the prisoners honour and set in authority? Would he not . . .
suffer anything rather than be so the victim of seeming, and live in their way?2
Of course, not all Greeks were
platonists, and simple generalizations about ‘the Greek temper’ are rightly
suspect. Nevertheless, even those who, like the Sophists or the Epicureans, disagreed
with Plato, still shared his negative attitude toward the subject matter of the
sciences. Though Plato may exaggerate, therefore, he is for that very reason
perhaps a better window into the Greek mind, for he merely carried to its
logical conclusion a bias that even his critics shared.
The ground of Plato’s complaint
against the world of natural objects, the reason why he lumps them all together
as shadow, rather than substance,
_________________________________________________
2Plato, Republic, Book VII, par. 516.
27
was that they
could not be perfectly known. For knowledge, as he defined it, flatly
contradicts what the modern scientist means by the same word, at three points. In
the first place, the natural world was not intelligible because it would not
hold still. Knowledge, to the Greek, had to do with those things which do not
change. As Plato elsewhere puts it:
There
is one kind of being which is always the same and indestructible, invisible and
imperceptible by any sense, of which the contemplation is granted to
intelligence only. And there is another nature, perceived by sense, always in
motion, becoming in place and again vanishing out of place, which is
apprehended by opinion and sense . . . That which is apprehended by
intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is
conceived by opinion, with the help of sensation and without reason, is always
in a process of becoming and perishing, and never really is.3
Plato’s critics did not question his
conclusion that the spatio‑temporal world is at best only imperfectly
intelligible. For them, as for him, only a realm of immutable ideas and forms
could be truly ‘known’, in the eminent sense. They differed only in denying the
existence of such a realm. They consequently did not, like modern scientists,
throw themselves with enthusiasm into the investigation of natural laws.
Rather, they invoked natural causes only as a means to that private, refined
pursuit to which they gave their name: Epicureanism, the quest for a point of
imperturbability within the self which should be immune to the ebb and flow of
circumstance.
There is a certain logic to this
passion for the immutable. Unless two plus two always equal four, it
does not constitute knowledge. Hence the Greek conviction that the highest form
of mathematics, and indeed the highest science, was geometry, which could deal
only with the static, and was inapplicable to moving objects. Is it so surprising,
then, that they never developed the foundation stone of modern science,
Newton’s laws of motion? Between Euclid and Newton there is a metaphysical
chasm that could only be bridged by a revolution in thought, a philosophical
conversion to the belief that change is not inferior to changelessness, and
that motion and process are intelligible. Such a belief never flourished on
Greek soil. It had to come from somewhere else.
A second point at which Greek
assumptions ran counter to the scientific method as we understand it concerns
the reliability and the significance of empirical observation. For the Greeks,
none of the five senses could yield reliable knowledge. The information they
provide concerns the material world of individual things which, being in a
constant state of flux, can never be truly known. Moreover, since the senses
themselves belong to this same transitory world, to rely on them is like using
a distorting lens
____________________________________________
3Plato, Timaeus,
par. 28.
28
to examine
defective lenses. Plato, in the preceding quotation, even declares that sense
perception occurs without reason.
To
be sure, there are on record some precise and exhaustive observations by the
ancients which have scarcely been improved upon to the present day. Aristotle’s
On the Parts of Animals is astonishing in detail and accuracy. But the
point is that when they did make such observations, the ancients tended to be
apologetic about it. Aristotle regarded physics as an inferior area of
investigation, from which only a limited degree of accuracy could be expected.
True knowledge on the contrary,
consisted in the intellectual apprehension of disembodied forms and concepts:
As Plato called them, ‘pure, formless, intangible essences, visible only to the
mind, the pilot of the soul.4 Of course modern science too is concerned with abstract
principles and formulae. It conceives knowledge, in Kant’s phrase, as
‘determination by means of concepts’. But it must begin with the kind of
knowing which the Greeks disparaged: the painstaking recording of sense data.
And not only that: scientific theories and hypotheses must themselves be tested
and corrected in the light of further observations -- a process which to the
Greeks was somewhat infra dig. For Plato, the most that sense data can
do is to stimulate the mind to an act of recollection in which it grasps the
class concept to which the individual object belongs. Significantly, when his
successors did make their observations of individual things, the most they aimed
for was classification. A perfect being, however, would be able to conceive the
class concept without the help of sense perception. Quite consistently,
therefore, Aristotle declared that God, being perfect, could have no know ledge of individual entities. This
was the logical conclusion of Greek pre suppositions about knowledge. Nothing
could alter it short of a radically different conception of God.
The
third point at which Greek philosophy inhibited Greek science concerns the
experimental method, together with the inductive reasoning which it entails.
Truth was not to be reached by inferring a theory from observed data, but
deductively, by reasoning ‘downward’ from a major premise until all its
implicit consequences had been
explicated. Again, the type of such reasoning is geometry, and strange as it
may seem in the twentieth century, the Greek ambition was to construct a
science of nature after the deductive, geometric model. This ambition inspires
Plato’s account of the creation of the world, in the Timaeus. When the
demi‑urge fashions the world, he shapes it in accordance with the
intellectual archetypes, the patterns of perfection which are visible only to
the mind, and uncontaminated by matter. If this is how the world was created,
then the method of natural science is clear. In order to find out how nature
functions, one must apprehend the archetypes which it imitates, by an act of
intellectual intuition. Once in possession of the master copy, one is in a
position to infer the
___________________________________________________
4Plato, Phaedrus,
par. 247.
29
consequences.
It is unnecessary to observe and experiment, for the conclusion is implicit in
the premise just as it is unnecessary to measure the angles of a triangle in
order to know that their sum equals 180 degrees.
The first premises, of course, are
not open to empirical investigation; they must be apprehended intuitively. The
scientist’s task is to intuit the right premise; all else follows
automatically. The Greeks were therefore not only armchair philosophers, but
armchair scientists as well. Archimedes discovered his famous principle, not in
the laboratory, but in the bath. Hence Greek science never became an organized,
cooperative enterprise. Instead, each
individual thinker propounded his own system, based upon his private intuition
of first principles. The scientific theories of antiquity resemble artistic
visions, to be evaluated by their consistency and elegance, rather than by
reference to concrete fact.
There were of course some lucky
guesses, even some inspired ones. But without a systematic method of
verification, there was no way to distinguish them from speculations wildly off
the mark. Consequently, wrong guesses were as likely to be accepted as right
ones, especially when made by a prestigious author. The heliocentric theory of
the solar system, for example, which Aristarchus had propounded, was buried for
centuries under the reputation of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
This orientation toward deductive reasoning
is perfectly summed up in the following statement by Ptolemy himself:
‘We
believe that the object which the astronomer must strive to achieve is this: to
demonstrate that all phenomena in the sky are produced by uniform, circular
motion, because only such motions are appropriate to their divine nature. The
accomplishment of this task is the ultimate aim of mathematical science based
on philosophy.’5
In other words, the clue to
astronomy is to be found by contemplating the same heavenly archetypes which
the demi‑urge copied when he fashioned the world. Ptolemy knows in
advance that the planets must have circular orbits. If the facts seem to
contradict this, the test of the astronomer is whether he can nevertheless make
them fit the theory. This conception of science would prevail until Greek
presuppositions had been overthrown by an utterly different understanding of
how the world was created.
2. Biblical antidotes.
Is it conceivable that such a
revolution in thought could have originated with the Bible, which makes no pretentions
of philosophical profundity? Granted that all other possible explanations
should be investigated before turning to such an unlikely source; but the
trouble is that they all turn out to be blind alleys. Benjamin Farrington is
not the only historian to reach this conclusion. The same perplexity is shared
by one of the most pene-
_______________________________________________
5Cited by Koestler, Arthur: The Sleepwalkers;
London, Hutchinson, 1968, p. 74.
30
trating and
stimulating students of the history of science, Arthur Koestler, who writes:
From
Aristarchus there is, logically, only one step to Copernicus; from Hippocrates,
only a step to Paracelsus; from Archimedes, only a step to Galileo. And yet the
continuity was broken for a time-span of nearly 2000 years. Looking back at the
road along which human science has travelled, one has the image of a destroyed
bridge, with rafters jutting out from both sides; and in between, nothing.6
And Koestler
adds significantly, ‘We know how this happened; if we knew exactly why
it happened we would probably have the remedy to the ills of our own time’. He
himself has spent a vast amount of intellectual energy in a search for the
missing link. But there is one place it has yet to occur to him to look: the
place suggested by Michael Foster.
As a last resort, then, let us
follow Foster’s hint, and compare biblical presuppositions with Greek at the
three points, mentioned above, where the latter contravene the scientific
method. At once we find ourselves breathing a completely different atmosphere.
In the first place, whereas the Greeks were at a loss to discover true
knowledge in the world of time and change, the Hebrews were not. For them, the
highest Reality was not static and immutable, but Himself involved in action.
The definitive biblical statement about God is that he is first and foremost an
Agent. The words the Bible uses to describe Him are almost all verbs: He loves,
forgives, chastises, creates, judges, chooses, summons. The philosophical
implications of this conception have still to be systematically worked out. But
at least it puts pay to the notion that the immutable is superior to that which
changes. Indeed, biblical man was at home in the world of time as perhaps no other
men ever have been. If such a world was good enough for God, it was good enough
for him -- let philosopher and scientist make of it what they will. It is
doubtful in fact if he would have had much use for a timeless eternity. There
has never been a convincing rebuttal of the book by Oscar Cullmann, entitled Christ
and Time, which denies that such a concept is to be found in the Bible at
all. The realm of history is the proper milieu for a living God. Eternity is a
mausoleum for dead gods.
Once the temporal world is seen as
the expression of God’s action, it becomes intelligible in a way that it never
was for the Greek. The clue is the concept of purpose. The Hebrews were not
naive about the threat of meaninglessness that hangs over all things transient.
They were well aware, as the prophet says, that ‘all flesh is as the grass’.
Though ‘the grass withereth, and the flower fadeth’, however, ‘the word of our
God shall stand for ever’ (Isaiah 40: 8). According to the most recent Old
Testament scholarship, ‘the word of our God’, in this context, means his
active, intelligible intention. This was the Hebraic alternative to the
timeless eternity of Plato: the depend-
______________________________________________
6Ibid., p. 51.
31
able will of God,
which could be relied upon throughout change, and which consequently gave
meaning both to the events of history and to the processes of nature. The
Hebrews themselves concentrated upon the former, and in doing so plumbed the
depths of human motivation to an extent never rivalled until the advent of
psychoanalysis. Lacking the categories of impersonal logic which the Greeks
developed, they made no direct contributions to natural science. In principle,
however, their belief in the intelligibility of natural process opened up a
whole new area to scientific investigation, as soon as men were ready to grasp
it.
It took a long time for this to
happen. Indeed, there have been Christians, from medieval times to the present,
who still have not quite got used to the idea of a living, active God. But with
the triumph of Christianity, this revolutionary idea was unleashed upon the
world, and kept percolating into the consciousness of Western man until
eventually the unfinished business of ancient science could be consummated.
Then the Greek heritage of rational inquiry, logical structure, and general
principles got a new lease on life. Mankind was at last ready to cope with the
world of change, instead of longing for a heaven where nothing ever happens. In
the fullness of time, the appropriate mathematics was devised concurrently by
Newton and Leibnitz. Armed with the calculus, Newton could formulate the laws
of motion, and modern science was on its way. Hence Whitehead’s observations
that modern science has a dual ancestry: the Greek conception of universal law,
and the biblical conception of meaningful change.7
Secondly, modern science is indebted
to biblical presuppositions for establishing the primacy of empirical
observation. Before that could happen, there had to be a reversal of the scale
of priorities which ranked abstract universals above individual things. Until
then, perception was bound to be disparaged, since it could provide knowledge
only of the latter. In the twentieth century, the primacy of empirical
observation is so self‑evident that it is difficult to imagine its ever
being otherwise. It has only become so, however, as a result of the gradual displacement
of Greek ideas by an all‑important biblical concept; namely, that God
himself is an individual, not a platonic idea; a definite personality, not the
mystical absolute in which all individuality is swallowed up; a concrete agent,
not a universal principle. It may be oversimplifying to classify biblical
thought in terms of the traditional controversy between nominalism and realism,
but surely the Bible has far more in common with the former.
The way to know an individual is not
through intellectual cogitation, but through direct acquaintance, and that is
impossible apart from sense perception. Accordingly, when the Bible speaks of
the knowledge of God, it uses, quite literally, the language of seeing and
hearing. The First Epistle of St. John, for example, begins: ‘That which we
have seen with our eyes,
_________________________________________
7Whitehead, A. N.: Science and the Modern World;
Cambridge University Press, 1938, p. 15.
32
and heard with our ears, and felt with our hands,
concerning the word of life . . . .’ And conversely if people are ignorant of
God, it is because they ‘have eyes to see, but do not perceive; ears to hear
but do not understand’ (Isaiah 6: 9).
If God is an individual, then the
Greek mind must reorder its priorities. Individual things are no longer to be
disregarded as imperfect copies of ideal patterns; they are promoted to a mode
of existence comparable to God’s own. No longer opaque to reason, they can be
understood in terms of their Creator’s intelligible design. In such a context,
the observation and study of rocks and elements, tissues, and organisms, acquires
a status it never enjoyed in antiquity. No longer need the scientist apologize
for demeaning himself with such preoccupations. His eyes can at last be
directed without regret to the solid world of here and now, and not to some
visionary realm beyond.
It is only too true, of course, that
official Christian teaching has often obscured this biblical epistemology, and
consequently discouraged the scientific spirit. In such cases, however, the
Church was unfaithful to the implications of its own central belief. In that
respect, Galileo and Darwin were truer to Christianity than were its official
spokesmen.
The third debt which modern science
owes to the Bible is its rationale for inductive reasoning, as opposed to the
deductive method preferred by the Greeks. Unlike Plato’s ‘creator’, the
biblical God was free to make the world in whatever way He chose. The demi‑urge
was under a double constraint: to imitate the heavenly archetypes, and to make
the best he could of his recalcitrant medium, the material stuff from which he
shaped the cosmos. The biblical Creator, on the contrary, was caught in no such
double bind, but was at liberty to organize the world in whatever way he chose.
He could have made the sky pink, or water flow uphill, or the earth a cube.
Because of this radical contingency
in the way the world is structured, it is quite impossible to arrive at any
verifiable conclusions about it a priori; that is, by beginning with a
first premise and deducing from it the details of natural processes. This method
purports to discover how God would have been obliged to make the world
once he had elected to do so. For the Bible, on the contrary, there is a
radical contingency about creation. One can indeed find out how God has
organized the world, but one cannot read his mind. One must rather wait until
after He has made the world, and then go about discovering precisely how he set
it up. That is the significance of the famous saying by Kepler, that in
discovering the way in which the planets revolve around the sun, he was
‘thinking God’s thoughts after him’. The key word is after. Unlike
Ptolemy, the astronomer cannot foresee what God must necessarily have done; he
can only find out a posteriori, by checking the facts and reasoning
‘upward’ from them to the principles they illustrate.
33
This change in the outlook of
Western man was so gradual that people were scarcely aware of it. The scientific
pioneers of the seventeenth century did not themselves realize how far they had
come from their classical predecessors. A further remark of Kepler’s
illustrates the point. When it first began to dawn on him that the orbits of
the planets were elliptical, instead of circular, he could scarcely bring
himself to believe it. For, he wrote, ‘if the answer were as simple as that,
then the problem would already have been solved by Archimedes and Apollonius’.8 In other words, Kepler himself was not aware
of the intellectual revolution which had intervened between himself and the
Greeks and Romans.
One
author who was aware of it was R. G. Collingwood, who had this to say about it:
The breakdown of Greek metaphysics implied a breakdown of
Greek science . . . and because science and civilization stand or fall
together, the metaphysical error which
killed pagan science killed pagan civilization with it. Christianity, by
maintaining that God is omnipotent, and that the world of nature is a world of
God’s creation, completely altered this situation. It became a matter of faith
that the world of nature should be regarded no longer as the realm of
imprecision, but as the realm of precision. To say that a line in nature is not
quite straight means for a platonist that it is only an approximation to a
straight line, the result of a praiseworthy but not altogether successful
attempt on the part of some natural thing to construct a straight line or to
travel in one. For a Christian, it cannot mean that. The line was drawn by God;
and if God had wanted it to be straight, it would have been straight. To say
that it is not exactly straight, therefore, means that it is exactly something
else. The natural scientist must find out exactly what . . .9
The way was
open at last for the experimental method. It is not too far fetched for
Collingwood to add: ‘The guardianship of the “scientific frame of mind” is
vested in the religious institutions of European civilization.’10
APPLIED SCIENCE
1. Greek inhibitions.
So
much for the three points at which Greek presuppositions had to give way to biblical
ones before scientific knowledge in the modern sense could get started. Now for
three more which have to do with applied science in particular. The first two
comprise the ambivalent attitude toward the world of nature which characterized
the Greek mind. On the one hand the natural
_______________________________________________
8Cited by Koestler, op. cit., p. 77.
9Collingwood, R. G.: Essay on Metaphysics; Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1940, pp. 218, 224, 253f.
10Ibid., p. 198.
34
world is an
inferior realm, both because it changes, and because it is material. Matter, as
the ‘principle of individuation’, is responsible for the obstinate singularity
of natural objects, which makes them opaque to conceptual thought. The man of
intellect withdraws from such a world lest he be demeaned or contaminated by
it. He has a certain horror of soiling his hands by manual labour, an
occupation fit for slaves and artisans (whose toil, incidentally, takes the
place of technology). His attitude is neatly conveyed by the following passage
from Plutarch, which tells what happened when an attempt was made to introduce
some rudiments of engineering:
The
first that turned their thoughts to mechanics . . . were Eudoxus and
Archytas, who thus gave a variety and an agreeable turn to geometry, and
confirmed certain problems by sensible experiments and the use of instruments,
which could be demonstrated by way of theorem .... But when Plato inveighed
against them, with great indignation, as corrupting and debasing the excellence
of geometry, by making her descend from incorporeal and intellectual to
corporeal and sensible things, and obliging her to make use of matter, which requires
much manual labor, and is the object of servile trades; then mechanics
were separated from geometry, and being a long time despised by the
philosopher, were considered a branch of the military art…11
In his pursuit
of ideal perfection, the man of wisdom is not content with its shadowy copy,
the temporal, material world, and consequently recoils from technology as a
degrading occupation. As the Latin proverb has it, Omne corpus fugiendum est.
On the other hand‑and this is
the other half of the Greeks’ ambivalent attitude -- they also stood in a kind
of reverential awe before Nature with a capital ‘N’; not, of course, before
material objects per se, but the formative principle within and behind
them, whether conceived primarily as structural logos or as vital
energy. Plato seems to have both in mind when he teaches, in the Timaeus,
that the world was actually alive, and governed by a soul. This was his
philosophical validation of the poet’s dictum that ‘all things are full of
gods’, which found expression on the one hand in the Pythagorean lore of mystic
numbers, and on the other in fertility cults, with their Dionysiac rites.
Such an attitude is no more
conducive to technology than its counterpart, which shuns the physical world as
somehow contaminating. For ‘if all things are full of gods’, to tamper with
them is a sacrilege. In Michael Fosters own words, ‘The attitude of the Greek
scientist was an intellectualized form of nature worship. The idea that nature
might be subjected to human mastery and control could hardly have been
entertained by a Greek
____________________________________________
11Taylor, F. S.: A Short History of Science and
Scientific Thought; New York, W. W. Norton, n.d., p.55.
35
thinker’.12 This inhibition about changing nature and adapting it to
human purposes is perfectly symbolized by the figure of Prometheus. In order to
bring the arts of civilization to mankind, he had to steal them from the gods,
who did not want men to have them. The technology of the Greeks that is, was
haunted by a sense of trespass against the gods, and even of guilt.
This kind of superstitious veneration
toward supposedly divine forces within nature survives today in all but name‑perhaps
especially in American nature worship, but also in the form of reverence for
the fiction known as natural law. In the name of this demi‑god, people
oppose things like vaccination, contraception, or fluoridation of the water
supply, all on the ground that they interfere with God’s plan. Far from being a
biblical argument, this attitude is a vestige of pagan idolatry, which in
practice always turns out to justify the status quo. Then as now, it is
opposed to the scientific spirit of progressive transformation of the
environment.
Finally, the third point at which
Greek presuppositions discouraged technology was their low estimate of human
affairs and concerns generally, and a corresponding pessimistic attitude toward
the future. A person is only willing to work for human improvement if he is
convinced that the time and effort spent are worth it. And this entails a
certain confidence in the future, a sense that a posterity whom he will never
see is somehow worthy of present sacrifice and struggle. Such an attitude is
hardly compatible with the strong note of pessimism that runs through Greek
culture. ‘Better never to have been born’, was the Homeric refrain. Or
according to Socrates, in the Phaedo, ‘No human thing is of any great
importance’. Again, as Plato says in the Laws, ‘Human affairs are hardly
worth considering in earnest. And yet, we must be earnest about them. A sad
necessity constrains us’ . . . hardly a ringing call to build a better world.
This attitude of resignation was
enhanced by a fatalistic outlook toward the future. According to all four
schools of Greek philosophy, the events of history repeat themselves in
endless, meaningless recurrence. The effect was to put a damper on the thrill
of discovery, one of the inventor’s special rewards. For, according to Aristotle,
all inventions have been lost and discovered over and over again. There was no
sense of a future big with possibility. On the contrary, Aristotle continued,
applied science, such as it was, had already completed its task: ‘Nearly all
requisites of comfort and social refinement have been secured. Everything of
these kinds has already been provided.’13 The man of intellect consequently need not concern
himself with such mundane matters, but can devote himself entirely to the life
of the mind.
_______________________________________________
12Foster, Michael: in The Christian Newsletter, 26
November, 1947 (no. 229), p. 6.
13Cited by Farrington, op. cit., pp. 121f.
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2. Biblical correctives.
Turning now to the Bible, we again
find that it does provide technology with the presuppositions it requires: the
basis for a positive attitude toward nature and history which the Greeks and
Romans lacked. In the first place, the material world is not an inferior realm,
for ‘God saw that it was good’. Contact with the earth therefore does not
contaminate. God himself sets the example by moulding Adam out of the dust of
the ground. With that example before him, no man need ever be ashamed of manual
labour. In such a context the most important truths of all could be enunciated,
not by savants and academicians, but by shepherds, fishermen, tentmakers, and a
carpenter. Hence the maxim of the medieval monastery, Laborare est orare.
Only on the basis of such
presuppositions was it possible to say, ‘The word became flesh and dwelt among
us’. If the flesh is the locus of grace and truth, then the Greek mind has to begin
all over again, and rethink its most fundamental convictions. Only then is the
scientist free from the compulsion to recoil every time he gets his hands
dirty.
At the same time, the biblical conception
of creation precludes what has been the standing temptation not only of the
Greeks and Romans, but of nearly all other civilizations as well: to fall down
and worship natural forces as though they were divine, whether in the form of
sacred bulls, the solar disc, animal totems, mountains or rivers. That is the
significance of the prophet’s constant campaign against the fertility cults of
Baal and Astarte, with their retinue of temple prostitutes. By thus divesting
them of their mystique, the Bible liberates man from subjection to the
processes of nature: ‘Formerly, when ye knew not God, ye were in bondage to
things which by nature are no gods’ (Galatians 4:8).
Man’s mission is to take up the work
of creation where God left off, to become his co‑worker in building the
Kingdom -- an awesome responsibility. To that end he is not to despoil and
plunder nature, but to take it into partnership. Nor should the role of senior
partner cause him to feel guilt: ‘Thou has given him dominion over the work of
thy hands, thou has put all things under his feet’ (Psalm 8:6). To fashion
nature in the service of human ends is not hybris, as it was for
Prometheus, provided that they are in harmony with God’s design. For biblical
man, as W. J. Z. Werblowsky has pointed out, the danger is not that of aspiring
too high, but not aspiring high enough; of infidelity to a spiritual calling by
harking back to the rhythms of nature, and reverting to the worship of Baal.
Finally, not only is the focus of
human aspiration and effort transposed from the heavenly plane to the present
world by the Bible’s implied philosophy; not only is it charged with
incorporating nature into its goals; it is also oriented toward the future. By
contrast with the great majority of philosophies and religions, the Bible
breaks with the cyclical view of history. For biblical man, the future is open,
a source of novelty and surprise, for it is
37
the milieu in
which God is doing new things in the furtherance of his purposes. It is the
source of promise and hope for men who are willing to join Him in creative
effort. Without this sense of a meaningful history, men lose heart. A colony of
bees will continue to rebuild its hive, no matter how often it is damaged. But
human beings are not like that. Without some rationale, some assurance that
their efforts are not in vain, they lapse into futility.
According to the Roman author
Publius, the wise man is he who has no hope. Perhaps St. Paul had this attitude
in mind when he wrote to the Ephesians that before their conversion they were
‘hopeless, and without God in the world’. The standing testimony to biblical
hope (and sometimes the standing rebuke to Christian defeatists) is the history
of the Jewish people. Their beehive has been knocked down innumerable times.
Yet today they are once again restoring it to good repair, for they have a
purpose which transcends any one historical epoch. Though the grass wither and
the flower fade, the word of their God shall stand forever‑his active,
intelligible, indomitable purpose. This sense of trust in the future was
essential to the pioneers of technology. The enthusiasm and optimism of Francis
Bacon or of the French encyclopedists may seem naive to our own blasé and
disillusioned generation. But without it, would their labours have seemed worth
the effort?
Considerations like this have led
the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray to declare flatly, ‘Science is the
product of Christianity, and its most adequate expression thus far’.14 For it is a matter of record that Greek science remained
hamstrung until the basic premises of classical civilization had been
supplanted by those of the Bible. This revolution of ideas could not be stopped
at an artificial frontier, such as the Church itself at times has tried to
erect. Once biblical concepts had been released into the stream of Western
thought, they could not be retracted, even though their implications might
appear too radical to suit the ecclesiastical establishment. When censored,
they continued to operate underground, leavening the thinking of Western man
until they were finally strong enough to come into the open, with or without
the sanction of official religion.
CONCLUSION
The Inhuman Face of Science
In conclusion, let us go back to
where we left Arthur Koestler, gazing in puzzlement at the broken bridge, and
wondering where to find the missing link. How would he react to the thesis that
modern science is indebted to the Bible for the following basic
presuppositions:
that
the world of time and change is both intelligible and worth knowing;
that
sense perception is as important as abstract reasoning, and can correct it;
_________________________________________________
14Macmurray, John: The Clue to History; London, SCM
Press, 1938, p. 86.
38
that
inductive reasoning reveals more about reality than deductive;
that
the world of nature is neither to be abhorred nor venerated;
and
that it is worthwhile to domesticate nature in the service of human ends.
What would
Arthur Koestler say to this? No doubt he would react with the same incredulity
that overwhelmed Kepler when it first occurred to him that the planets could
have elliptical orbits: ‘The answer could not be as simple as that. If it were,
it would have been thought of long ago.’
But suppose, for the sake of
argument, that the thesis is true; that science could not have got started without
an injection of ideas from the biblical outlook on life. Does this mean that
biblical religion still has a role to play in a scientific society? Or did the
Bible, like Aristarchus, just happen to score a lucky hit? Are its ideas,
divested of their mythological framework and the trappings of anthropomorphism,
now self‑sustaining, quite apart from any reference to religion or to
God? Superficially, the answer seems to be yes. Japan has made the transition
from paganism to science without first becoming Christian. And the Western
world itself has become predominantly secular, without apparent ill effects . .
. . . or at least, not until very, very recently. Today, however, for the first
time, confidence in science has begun to waver. Parables like Goethe’s tale of
the sorcerer’s apprentice, or Huxley’s nightmare of a brave, new world,
suddenly seem less fanciful.
For a solution to the problem, the
last place most people would look is the Bible. And yet, from a purely logical
point of view, the attempt by science to go it alone involved a paralogism. For
the biblical presuppositions which it unknowingly borrows from the Bible are
not ultimate. They depend upon the prior conception of God as Creator. Taken
out of that context, they easily, if not inevitably, run amuck: abstract
theories and formulae begin to take precedence over the individuals with which
science must begin; empiricism begins to ridicule the concept of purpose and
free choice, and consequently of meaning, since such things cannot be measured
in the laboratory; the contingency of creation metamorphoses into ethical
relativism; the manipulation of nature becomes the heedless, greedy destruction
of the environment.
Science, in short, which was once so
closely linked with humanism, has begun to show an inhuman face. The reason is
that science per se is only a means; it cannot supply its own ends. What
happens to a society possessed of means, but without an end, has been
documented in the case of the Roman empire: in the first phase, the mad pursuit
of power for its own sake, followed, in the second phase, by a state of
exhaustion and collapse. If our own society repeats the cycle, the most likely
explanation lies in its attempt to divorce biblical presupposition from their
logical prius, the biblical God. If that is so, then perhaps Arthur Koestler
spoke more truly
39
than he knew
when, á propos of the qualitative leap which separates modern science
from ancient, he said, ‘We know how this happened; if we knew exactly why it
happened, we would probably have the remedy to the ills of our time’.