On the Debt of Science to Christianity

I came across this thought provoking article originally at the Augustine Club of Columbia University.  The original publisher is closed and knowing how ephemeral such College Clubs can sometimes be, I am reposting the article in it's entirety here, as I think the facts and arguments presented here are critical for some individuals in my audience who might take umbrage at the title of the article and this post.

From THE POPE’S PHYSICIST by Fr. Paul Haffner

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The Origin of Science
How is it that science became a self-sustaining enterprise only in the Christian West?

…as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)

To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. This is not to say that the Bible is a science textbook that contains raw scientific truths, as some evangelical Christians would have us believe. The Christian faith contains deeper truths– truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind’s exploration of nature: man’s place in God’s creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.

In large part, the modern mind thinks little of these notions in much the same way that the last thing on a fish’s mind is the water it breathes. It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.

The following selection summarizes the most notable work of Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science and Templeton Prize laureate.

How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science?

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science’s unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

1. “Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms.”
2. “The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures.”
3. “Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man’s rationality as somehow sharing in God’s own rationality and in man’s condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man’s reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm.”
4. “At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix.”

But what about the other monotheistic religions?

Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes:

Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a patheist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle’s works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle’s works in Latin

As we will see below, the break-through that began science was a Christian commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo (On the Heavens).

So how did it all happen? Or fail to happen?

Fr. Paul Haffner writes:

Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.

….The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.

If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.

These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in itsnature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.

The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church’s teaching office.

Buridan’s vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea [in De Caelo] of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle’s approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan’s work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton’s first law of motion.

The doctrine that God created the universe out of nothing and that the universe had a beginning was later to be reiterated at the First Vatican Council, against the errors of materialism and pantheism which enjoyed a new vogue at that time. In addition, Vatican I stated the absolute freedom of God to create, and made clear (against fideism) the possibility of arriving at God’s existence through a rational reflection upon creation. As Jaki states: “The Council, in line with a tradition almost two millenia old, could but insist on the very foundation of that relation which is man’s ability to see the reasonability of revelation, which in turn is inconceivable if man is not able to infer from the world surrounding him the existence of its Creator.

It is precisely the inability of many scientists to trace the grandeur of the Creator in His works that Jaki opposes with great skill. He challenges the atheistic positions of R. Dawkins in the biological sphere and of Stephen Hawking in physics. He shows that the best way to unmask the thought of non-believing scientists is to show how the basis for their reasoning cannot be proven scientifically. In an unjustified way they leave the realm of their own scientific disciplines and make a priori philosophical deductions against Christian belief. Again, one example of this is the pervasive “chance” or “chaos” ideology used to “explain” the coming into being of the material universe, of life and of the human person. Stanley Jaki has also refuted such approaches to the cosmos and creation in his masterly work,The Purpose of It All, published in 1990.

The originality of Jaki’s thought also lies in the link which he describes between the dogmas of the Creation and the Incarnation. He shows how the development of the doctrine of creation out of nothing was “connected with the conceptual refinements of the doctrine of the Incarnation around which raged the great inner debates of the early Church.” Jaki then discusses how the Jewish position on creation underwent a change during the first few centuries of Christianity. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, tried to interpret the first chapter of Genesis, but his view “showed him closer to Greek eternalism than to Biblical creationism.” The earliest midrashim “showed that Jewish theologians were no longer willing to uphold the doctrine of the complete submission of matter to the Maker of all.” In the Mutazalite tradition of Islam there was also a tendency to slide towards emanationism and pantheism, as a result of endorsing the pantheistic necessitarianism of Aristotle.

Jaki clearly affirms that in Christianity, a slide into pantheism was prevented because the doctrine of the creation was bolstered up by faith in the Incarnation. Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world. The dogmas of the Creation and Incarnation mean “an absolute and most revolutionary break with a past steeped in paganism,” and the enunciation of these dogmas and their historical impact is “an uphill fight never to be completed.”

…

But the cosmos and all the specific laws which govern it do not form a self-explanatory system; they point beyond science and call for a metaphysical foundation in the Christian doctrine of creation. It is precisely this Christian doctrine of creation which, according to Jaki, was the stimulus for the unique viable birth of science. The Christian doctrine of creation finds its expression within the Church.

 

How many times did the Risen Christ appear to you this week?

It would be much easier to live a Christian life
if the risen Jesus were merely some ghost of his former self,
but he is not that.

He has hands and feet, arms and legs;
he is short and tall and of every imaginable build;
his face is male and female;
his voice is loud and soft, encouraging and demanding,
commanding, compelling and consoling.

He lives in those we love and he lives in those we don’t love.
He lives in the young and in the old and in those not yet born.

Today in this church he has hundreds of faces,
each one different and each the same because he wears them all.

Who knows how many times in the past week
did the risen Christ appear to you and me
and ask, in some way, for something to eat, something to drink,
for some gesture on our part to show that we recognize him,
that like the first disciples, we too are witnesses of his resurrection.

From the Concord Pastor. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Odd

Sunday mornings, once a month I have the privilege of bringing the Eucharist to people in the hospital.  It is always an experience that reveals the true presence to me in different ways.  The oddest way so far happened to me this past Sunday morning.

I was tasked with both the cancer ward, as well as the maternity ward.  Everyone who I came across in the cancer ward was very grateful to receive the body of Christ.  This was a stark contrast with the maternity ward.  I entered one room as a mother was breastfeeding her newborn baby girl.  I introduced myself as being a Eucharistic Minister from the catholic Community of N. W-B and would she like to receive communion this morning.  The mother replied, "For her?"

"No, for You," I said.  She responded again, "No, not for me, but can she?" indicating her newborn.  this caught me completely off guard.  My first reaction was not one in reference to the age of reason (in my Byzantine background, First communion is often given with baptism) but rather of practicality.  "your newborn is just learning to breastfeed, and I only have the Body of Christ with me."  "Oh, well... when can she receive?"

Another stumper.  Wasn't this woman listed as a Catholic on the call sheet?  I told her it wouldn't be until first communion, then, said God Bless and congratulations, and moved on.

But this young woman has been troubling me all day.  I can understand (sort of) if a parent has no faith, but wants their child brought up in a faith for developmental and intellectual reasons.  The idea being that a child will retain something of an intellectual faith or moral underpinning that the parent sees as valuable.  But in this case, even if the mother didn't understand exactly what I was doing, she at least understood it as being of some sort of spiritual grace or benefit.  The infant could clearly not have any intellectual gain from whatever she thought I was doing.  This being the case, why oh why would the mother acknowledge the spiritual benefit and want her child to have it, but refuse it for herself?

Discipline of Prayer

One other note I picked up from this John Allen book, “Opus Dei – AN Objective Look”.
I mentioned before that I struggle to say the Liturgy of the hours with any regularity.  Since I have been contemplating the Permanent Diaconate, I thought I should get some practice at this.  I am always on the lookout for new tools to help me say this, when really all I need is greater discipline at prayer.
Once upon a time, I thought that saying the Rosary was an onerous chore — who would want to do that?  This of course was back when I would zip through a Hail Mary lickety split without any thought — if even I went that far.  Once I was comfortable with saying one or more (!) rosaries a day, the Liturgy of the hours didn’t seem like such a big hill to climb.  But I still tend to rush through it at times, and mostly just forget about compline or vespers.  Attending Daily Mass — right now that is a Mountain for me to climb.
I mention all this because in the John Allen book, he recounts the daily requirements of prayer for members of Opus Dei — and I nearly fell over.

1. Awaken saying ‘Serviam’ (I will serve)
2. Daily Mass
3. Rosary
4. 1/2 hour mental prayer in the AM and the PM
5. Noontime Angelus or Regina Coeli depending on the season
6. 10 minute meditiation on a spiritual reading
7. 5 minutes reading the New Testament
8. Short prayers throughout the day called ‘aspirations’ such as ‘Everything with Peter to Jesus through Mary’
9. A daily set of prayers in Latin called the Preces, which include invocations to the Holy Spirit, Jeses Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Guardian Angels, then prayers for the Holy Father, the Bishop, unity among those working to spread the gospel, and invocations to Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Peter, Paul, and John (patrons of Opus Dei)
10. A Daily visit to the Blessed Sacrament (often immediately ater supper) and includes 3 Our Fathers, 3 Hail Mary’s, 3 Glory Be’s, and making a “Spiritual Communion” meaning an act of union with Christ that doesn’t involve physically receiving communion during Mass.
11. A daily examination of conscience
12. Saying three Hail Mary’s as an intention for holy purity and blessing onesself with Holy Water before going to bed.

That program is certainly not for the faint of heart.  It probably amounts to 3 or 4 hours of prayer daily.  And to think I can’t make it through 40 minutes of the Liturgy of the hours.
It’s all about discipline I suppose.  And Love.

The Confessional Attitude of Judas Iscariot

I struggle to say the Liturgy of the Hours on a regular basis.  I find great inspiration from it, yet still, I struggle.  I have sought out many ‘helps’ to inspire me to greater discipline — often to little avail, but I digress.  One of those helps is Adrienne von Speyr’ “Book of All Saints.”  For those who don’t know, Adrienne was a 20th century mystic, who amongs other things was granted startling visions of the saints (and others) at prayer.  Much of her experience was the foundation of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological studies.  All of this falls under the domain of private revelation, but I find it to be helpful and at times inspiring.  So for Today, I present Adrienne von Speyyr’s vision of Judas Iscariot at prayer.

Inner Attitude.
Judas’ attitude is that of standing in a growing contradiction to the Lord.  And it is uncomfortable for him.  But above all Jesus feels an unease in relation to Judas.  He allows this unease to occur precisely within the sphere of his human nature.  He does not allow it to grow or diminish through his divine knowledge; he does not hate Judas as the betrayer.  But he is also incapable of simply setting aside his unease and ignoring it until the time of the Passion.  He allows it to follow human laws and development.  Judas has a certain share in this discomfort, with increasing rancor.  He sees more and more that something is not right.  Why does the Lord not intervene, since he in fact sees that it is not right this way?  And because he does not do anything about it, perhaps he is not the messiah.  But Jesus does not make an exception for Judas.  He gives him the entire lesson of Christianity, just as he gives it to the others — no more and no less.  Judas does not receive any ‘private lessons.’  Jesus cannot make any special efforts in order to convert him, for these would have their ground purely in his divine and supernatural knowledge; he would be able to justify an extraordinary effort only on the basis of the whole of his knowledge, which includes the human.  Occasionally he does make use of the higher knowledge, for example, in his prediction of Peter’s denial.  But what he does in relation to Peter he does not do in relation to Judas.  He does not give him any predictions; he does not warn him.  In relation to Judas, he fundamentally avoids doing this.  He turns only his human knowledge toward him.  It is almost as if it were necessary to avoid forcing Judas’ guilt too far, almost as if Judas already had enough to bear, without awakening in him an extraordinary faith through extraordinary graces, which would only burden his betrayal more deeply.  By keeping silent, the Lord protects Judas.  To be sure, an abyss opens up here for us: we are unable to see what law the Son of God is following in administering his divine knowledge, when he uses it and when he does not.
Judas becomes inwardly more and more alienated and stubborn.  He plays in a sense with his inner attitude: he clings to the fact that the Lord called him in spite of everything and, then, again to the fact that the whole thing is not possible; everything he picks up from the Lord’s teaching makes it possible to deny it even more.  And nevertheless he is involved.  He is like the religious who has taken vows and can no longer undo them.  Ultimately, he has no faith.  He acts as if he were trying to decide between belief and unbelief.  He weighs what it would be like to believe…But the most important thing is: he has no hope.  And, therefore, no love and, therefore, no faith.  He does nothope that he could become someone else through his calling, that God would root himself in himself, that he could accept Jesus’ teaching.  He does not hope because he thinks he knows himself.
There is no confessional attitude.  He does not believe in any forgiveness, because ultimately he does not believe in any sin.  When he lies, for example, he is completely aware of the fact that he does not speak the truth.  In fact, he knows this quite clearly.  Indeed, it would be desirable for the majority of Christians to have such a clear understanding of their sin!  But Judas recognizes them, not as sins, but only as facts, which are arranged somehow in his life’s system, in the system of his self-justification.
Prayer is foreign to him.  When the others pray, he blasphemes God inwardly.  In the moment when he betrayed the Lord, there is the glimmer of a possibility of hope in him.  It is the first time he reflects: “Perhaps he truly was the Lord!”  Something like hope is born out of the despair: “If it is the Lord, then he belongs to God, and then the truth is in him and not in me.”  This could have been hope; this could have been liberation form the ego, the recognition that God is the one who is right.  One cannot say that Judas did not know this “hope”.  Nevertheless he does hang himself.  This situation, in any event, is too monstrous, too brutal for him to be able to find a solution for himself.  But he sees that there may be a solution for the Lord.  Because his betrayal would not be able to thwart the Lord if he comes from God.  And it may be that he turned to his Lord for just this reason, … like the evil tenders of the vineyard, who say: he is the Son, and therefore we want to kill him…  And in the hope for Jesus, for the possibility that he could really be the one, is somehow so powerful in Judas that it does not leave any room in him, as it were, for any hope for himself…  The “regret”, which causes him to bring the money back to the Temple , is a fruit of his hope; he would not have been able to achieve this if he did not have this hope.  And if he does hang himself, then it is because he is no longer able to live any longer, because he betrayed the Lord!  If hope — a single hope — had arisen before the betrayal, then it would have been available for himself as well.  He is like an Abraham who really did kill his son Isaac and now realizes the angel was in fact present to keep him from doing it… And thus Judas murders his whole negating subject; his deed appears to him so deserving of destruction that he destroys himself.  He knows no other way of undoing what he has done.

She is running 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction...

An Unlikely Disciple

This weekend I have switched up for some light reading.  I found a really interesting book that I heard about on the radio recently.  Called  "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University", it follws a Brown University Sophomore who goes spends a Semester at Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA.
Rather than go to Europe for a Semester, or spend a semester at sea, like so many of his cohorts in college, the author reasons, "Why go to learn about a culture in another country when there is one in this country that I know nothing about?"

So he tries to live with and understand Evangelical Christians, while being a very very marginal Quaker himself (realistically, he admits he's basically non-Christian).

The most fascinating thing that happens repeatedly in the story, is how the author feels attracted to parts of the Chirstian message, but is turned off by some frankly un-Christian behavior.  He doesn't always recognize the behavior as being specifically un-Christian, which doubles the damage becasue he then thinks that this is what Christians believe, or sees the hypocrisy of certain things as being part of Christianity.

If anthing, the book is an interesting cautionary tale of how the merits of Christ are judged by the (in)actions of his followers.  But also, the most attractive and mysterious of his Christian friends is one guy who consistently and always is filled with the joy of being Christian.  That joy was warm enough to melt the author's heart enough to plant a seed...