Under the microscope:It is commonly thought that science arose in the teeth of opposition from religion, succeeding because it threw off the shackles of religious dogmatism and superstition.
Not so, says social scientist Rodney Stark in his recent book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success (Random House 2006). Stark proposes that real science arose in Christian Europe, and nowhere else, because only Europe had the fertile soil and climate in which this new plant could germinate. This fertile soil was the deeply embedded Christian tradition of respect for the notion of progress through the exercise of reason.
I am not baldly asserting that science arose because of Christianity. In order to test that hypothesis you would have to re-run history several times, with and without Christianity, and note whether science arose only in a Christian background. This isn't possible, so the hypothesis cannot be proved. However, Stark makes his case well.
Christian theology is the "science of religion" and devotes itself to developing understanding through rational analysis of the nature of God and His intentions. This understanding is progressive, ie understanding can develop, deepen and change over time. St Augustine (354-430), for example, strongly held that reason was indispensable to faith. He reasoned that astrology must be false, though it is not condemned in the Bible, and even seems validated by the Three Wise Men story. Augustine reasoned that to believe one's fate is predestined in the stars must be false because it opposes God's gift of free will.
Only the all-powerful, conscious, rational God of monotheism, who created the world out of nothing, and who cares about humans and imposes responsibilities on them, can sustain theology and serious intellectual questions. The eastern traditions of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, in their pure forms, speak of an underlying supernatural essence governing life which is remote, impersonal and lacking consciousness. Stark says - "one might meditate forever on such an essence, but it offers little to reason about". Therefore there are no theologians in the East.
The image of God embraced by Judaism and Islam is also sufficient to sustain theology, but, according to Stark, their scholars have not been inclined to pursue this matter, approaching scripture as law to be understood and applied and not to serve as the basis for enquiry about questions of ultimate meaning.
China developed a sophisticated culture long before Europe, but it didn't develop science. Chinese intellectuals believed in a supernatural essence governing life but which doesn't actually do anything. They believed the universe simply is and always was and that there is no compelling reason to believe it works in accordance with rational laws. The world is not to be understood in physical terms, but in mystical terms.
The ancient Greeks looked on the universe as uncreated and eternal and locked into endless cycles of progress and regress. They tended to transform inanimate bodies into living creatures with emotions and desires, short-circuiting the need to develop physical theories. The Greeks "mostly achieved speculative philosophies and atheoretical collections of fact", Stark says.
Islam preserved Greek scholarship when it was lost elsewhere. Stark proposes that Muslims never developed real science because of the stifling effect of Greek scholarship and the Islamic concept of God - "Allah is not presented as a lawful creator, but as a very active God who intrudes on the world as He deems it appropriate". This inhibits the intuition that the world runs on immutable physical laws as this would seem to limit God's freedom to act. My view is real science did arise under Islam but declined from the 12th century.
The conventional explanation for the rise of science in 17th-century Christian Europe was the re-discovery of Greek learning and the beginnings of resistance to the Church. Stark points out that classical learning was an impediment to the rise of science and that its loss to Europe throughout Medieval times allowed the scholastics to develop alternative modes of thinking and to embed them in the universities they founded. When classical learning was re-discovered in Europe, its effect was greatly tempered by this independent way of thinking.
In summary, Stark proposes that the rise of science in Europe was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine because (a) Christians expect the world to be the orderly product of a rational and consistent creator, free to create the world whichever way He chose; (b) The world is worthy of study because it is God's creation; (c) The creation is not divine and it is not impious of us to investigate it; (d) We can't understand the order of the world just by thinking about it, we must observe and experiment.
William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC http://understandingscience.ucc.ie