This is part one of a four-week series expanding on my review of Stephen Meyer's book Return of the God Hypothesis. Subscribe to get the next installment in your inbox!
You'll occasionally hear apologists talk about science losing its Christian roots. As the story goes, some of the most prominent historical scientists were Christians. And that wasn't a coincidence. It was their Christianity that drove them to study the natural world. Because they believed in a perfect Creator, they believed the world was orderly, beautiful, and knowable – and that humans were made to know it. But then, over time, scientists mysteriously forgot about the Christian foundations of their own discipline.
Again, that's the story.
I'm not going to dispute the story here, but one of the best things about Stephen Meyer's book Return of the God Hypothesis is that he complicates the story. For Meyer, science does have Christian roots – but in a different way. If you haven't, I encourage you to read my review of Meyer's book for context on February's series.
Jack VanDrunen
In the first two posts of this new series, I'll be expanding on something that Meyer glosses over: how science came to be untethered from Christianity, and how we arrived at our modern perception that science "won." In this first post, I suggest that science might not have left Christianity behind at all. Maybe it's Christianity that lost the things that made it the perfect incubator for modern science.
To be a scientist, in the modern sense, requires more than just believing in an orderly universe that can be known through reason. It also requires you to believe that reason alone is insufficient for knowing the world. Modern science is not built on the back of reason, but of observation. How are you supposed to know the world if you don't go out, perform experiments, and see what happens?
This was the great break that came during the Middle Ages. Up until that point, the West had been under the sway of Greek thought. The Greeks didn't reject experimentation and observation completely. But they assigned high value to rational intuition. So, for example, why did Aristotle and Ptolemy assert that planets move in circular orbits? Here's Meyer:
[A]ccording to Greek cosmology, the planets moved in the "quintessential" realm of crystalline spheres, a heavenly realm in which only perfection was possible. Since, they deduced, the most perfect form of motion was circular, the planets must move in circular orbits. What could be more logical? (22)
Medieval theologians imported these Greek ideas into their theology, asserting not only that the planets move in circular orbits but also that it would be impossible for God to create planets with noncircular orbits!
Of course, today we know that planetary orbits are actually elliptical. We've known this since Johann Kepler's pioneering work in the early 17th century. But how did we get there?
Everything began to change in the 13th and 14th centuries. A group of theologians, who for our purposes can be lumped together under the label "nominalists," began to stress the absolute power (omnipotence) of God in creation. Who are we to say how God had to create? God could have created in any number of ways!
With this shift came the understanding that reason alone was insufficient for understanding the world. Science is not the process of deducing how God must have created the world. It is the process of discovering the world God actually did create. The only way to find that out is to go outside and investigate. It is careful experimentation that opened the floodgates of modern science. But it was nominalism that made this possible. It was Christian theology that liberated the West from Greek superstition.
But if theology made modern science possible, how did science forget so easily? Why is it that we see so little respect for religion among so many scientists?
Meyer doesn't talk about this, but I have a suspicion. It seems to me that many Christians today think more like Greeks than like nominalists – at least in my own circles of American evangelicalism. Sadly, we as Christians often close ourselves off to the ways the world could be, because we believe we know how the world must be.
Take the discourse around climate change in evangelical Christian circles, for example. This is a complicated issue, because part of the controversy lies with proposed policies, and another part lies in disputes over the scientific evidence. But there's also a theological undercurrent that I find worrying. I often hear variations on the same basic argument, and I worry that it exhibits "Greek" thinking.
The basic argument goes like this. God created the earth. He also promised to sustain it, when he made a covenant with Noah in Genesis 9. There, he promised to preserve periods of "seedtime and harvest" for as long as the earth endures. So – the argument goes – this means that it just isn't possible for humans to mess things up very badly. Theologically, the very possibility of climate catastrophe takes on the appearance of being anti-Christian.
A lot hinges on what it means to "mess things up very badly." If by that we mean the extinction of all (at least human) life on earth, this makes sense biblically. God has promised to preserve life on earth. But very few climate scientists predict the total extinction of human life. Instead, the usual predictions are (i) the extinction of some forms of animal life, and (ii) a dramatic increase in human suffering – as coastal areas flood, populations are displaced, and the world's food supply is restructured.
We may not all agree with the "evidence," or the models, or the policy recommendations. But should we really write off climate catastrophe theologically? If we do this, we risk committing the same basic error the medieval theologians did – of infusing our view of the status quo with theological significance. This is especially problematic if the theological reasoning is built more on intuition than on Scripture. And in this case, I think it is. Genesis 9 promises the preservation of life on earth, and some amount of seasonal regularity. It doesn't promise protection from all ecological catastrophes. Nor does it imply that human sinfulness can't have world-changing consequences. Human suffering continues, even after the flood.
If we let our intuitions become our theology, and our theology become a conversation-stopper, environmental damage isn't the only risk we take on. We are in danger of repeating the same errors the Catholic Church made during the scientific revolution. The Church's opposition to Galileo ended up costing it its reputation – even down to the present day. If climate scientists turn out to be even partly right, what will become of the Church in the eyes of the world? Can her prophetic witness survive?
The worry is not just about an unwarranted loss of reputation. What if the loss is warranted after all? What if our theology has lost the vitality that first allowed it to birth modern science? What if Christianity really has lost its scientific roots?
But the Galileo affair wasn't the only thing that cost theology its authority. Next week, we'll look at what else went wrong.
This is part one of a four-week series expanding on my review of Stephen Meyer's book Return of the God Hypothesis. Subscribe with your email, or follow on Bluesky to get the next post in a convenient place!
Jack VanDrunen