How Shall We Then Live 6, “The Scientific Age”

The Scientific Revolution and the Christian Foundations of Science

In 1609, Galileo began to use the telescope, a newly invented instrument, and what he saw and wrote indicated that Aristotle had been mistaken in his basic ideas concerning the makeup of the universe.

When the Roman Church attacked Galileo and Copernicus, it was not because their teaching contained anything contrary to the Bible, but Copernicus and Galileo's teaching did deny the Aristotelian elements which had become a part of the teaching of the Church.

Copernicus taught that the earth went around the sun and not the sun around the earth. And Galileo defended the compatibility of Copernicus and the Bible. Condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1632, Galileo was forced to back down, but his writings continued to testify not only that Copernicus was right, but that Aristotle was wrong.

Blaise Pascal took a tube of mercury up a mountain and measured the changes in the mercury levels according to the altitude. In this way, he made the first successful barometer. Not only that, but some consider that he is the greatest writer of French prose who has.

Ever lived.

He did not see man lost like a speck of dust in the universe, which was so much larger and more complicated than men had thought. For man could comprehend the stars, the stars comprehended nothing. And beside this, for Pascal, man was special because Christ had died on the cross for him.

What I have in my hand is not the proverbial apple that supposedly fell on Newton's head. What I have is a heavier object which would have knocked him out. As I take away my hand, it will fall to the ground.

But listen. What was that second noise?

Listen again. What you heard, of course, was an echo. Here at Cambridge University, Newton worked out the speed of sound by timing the interval of an echo over a known distance. He also came to the conclusion that there was a universal force of attraction between everybody in the universe.

He called this gravity. Newton's mathematical principles of natural philosophy became one of the most influential books in the history of human thought. It has been said that the 17th century scientists had an interest in the how, but not the why.

Not true.

For Newton and many scientists of that period, there was no problem concerning the why because Newton began with the existence of a personal God who had created the universe. Newton had an intense interest in the Bible because, in his view, the same God who had created the universe gave men truth in the Bible.

Newton and the other men of that period would have been utterly astounded at anyone who had an obsession with the how without having a professional interest in the why. Francis Bacon, lawyer, essayist, Lord Chancellor of England, stressed careful observation and systematic collection of information in order to unlock nature's secrets.

He too took the Bible seriously, including the historic fall, the revolt of man in history.

Man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some parts repaired, the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.

To these founders of modern science, man, including his science, is not on his own. He is to take seriously the teaching of the Bible concerning history and the cosmos. And yet, art and science in themselves have value before man and God.

This gave a strong impetus to the creative movings of science, not to be merely a passing thing but to be continuous. God himself had given benevolent dominion over nature to men. And for Bacon, science had a part in this.

To find out about the world was worthwhile because of men investigating God's marvelous.

Creation.

To quote Bacon again, let no man out of weak conceit of sobriety or in ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word or in the book of God's works.

The book of God's word is, of course, the Bible. The book of God's works is the universe which God had made. There was no separation between religious things and the arts and science. The tradition of Bacon and Newton was strongly maintained right up through the 19th century.

The experimental physicist Michael Faraday was a Christian. He believed the secrets of God's creation are for all of us to enjoy, so he gave his famous public demonstrations. The physical world is an open book to explore because God gave it order and gave us the desire to investigate it, not just for a clever scientific elite, no, for all men.

Not all the early scientists were individually consistent Christians. Many were, but all of them were living within the thought forms brought forth by Christianity. In this setting, man's creative stirrings had a base from which to continue and to develop.

Knowing that the universe had been created by a reasonable God, the scientists, upon a Christian base, were able to move out with confidence, expecting to be able to find out about the universe by observation and experiment.

Without this base, this foundation, modern Western science would never have been born. Without this base, Chinese science, though it had promising beginnings, never came to maturity. There was no confidence that the code of nature's laws could be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read.

And this was said by Joseph Needham, an expert on this subject. The same thing could be said about Arab science. Without a Christian base, they lost their interest in science eventually. The Christian base, then, did not hinder science.

The Christian base made modern science possible. In 1962, J. Robert Oppenheimer said that modern science was born out of the Christian life form. His field was that of atomic energy. He was also director for the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.

Alfred North Whitehead, well-known mathematician and philosopher, said that Christianity was the mother of science. These views were held both by the pre-Reformation church and also in the teachings of the reformers.

Both held that the universe was created by God, and that God is a reasonable God, as the Bible says He is. But we may ask, isn't science now in a new state, one in which the concept of an orderly universe is passé?

Relativity, Determinism, and the Loss of a Christian View of the Universe

It is often said that the worldview of relativity, that there are no absolute values and that everything is relative, is supported by Einstein's theory of relativity. But this is wrong. Einstein said that light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum everywhere in the universe.

Therefore, nothing is less relative than the theory of relativity. Einstein himself was strongly opposed to this type of thinking.

I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.

We really do live in a cause and effect universe. If this space vehicle is to fly, it must be constructed according to the existing order of the universe. When something happens, no matter what we may say we believe, we look for something that happened previously as an explanation.

If this were not possible, nothing could be explained, and science could not be applied with reliability. Because we live in a universe where cause produces effect, this space vehicle can fly thousands of miles and land exactly on target.

You see, cause, the flight of the spacecraft is charted. Effect, it lands where it is supposed to. We know we live in a universe that is much more complex than men, including scientists, once thought it to be.

But that is a far cry from the concept of a random universe. What view of the universe did Galileo, Newton, Faraday, and others who shared a Christian base have? They held that the universe was an open universe because God and man are not a part of an all-inclusive cosmic machine.

There is something profound in this. The machine, whether it is the cosmic machine or a machine which men make, is not a master nor a threat because the machine does not include everything. There is a place for man to be man.

Later, when the Christian base was lost, the mechanical laws of cause and effect, which had been applied to chemistry, to astronomy, and to physics, were now applied equally to man and to society. The earlier scientists, the founders of modern science, would not have accepted this concept.

With it, immediately there was no place for God, but equally no place for man as man. Man died, and love died. There is no place for love in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. And there is no place for morals.

And there is no place for the freedom of man. There is no place for the significance of man. Man becomes a zero. Life becomes pointless, devoid of meaning. The older idea of man as someone observing nature was undermined by the idea that man is something to be observed as no different from all of nature.

Darwin, in his Origin of the Species, claimed that all life evolved from more simple forms, through survival of the fittest. The concept of an unbroken line from the molecule to man, merely on the basis of time and chance, does not answer either of the two questions of the how or the why, which occupied Newton and Bacon.

Murray Eden, professor of MIT, has made statistical studies which indicate that pure chance could not have produced the biological complexity of the world out of chaos in any amount of time suggested so far.

Scientific Research Magazine has discussed Murray Eden's work in an article entitled, Mathematicians Question Darwinism. Has there been enough time for natural selection, as is seen through the eyepieces of Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism, to operate and give rise to the observed phenomenon of nature?

No, say these mathematicians. No one has shown how man could have come from non-man on the basis of time and chance. Tragically, after one has accepted the concept of the survival of the fittest, all restraints are removed.

This opened the door for 20th century racism to be sanctioned and made respectable in the name of science. When biblical Christianity ceased to provide the consensus for German society, when political and economic chaos, as well as moral permissiveness prevailed, the stage was set for the Nazi movement.

Heimrich Himmler, who was the head of the Gestapo, stated the law of nature must take its course in the survival of the fittest. Hitler stated numerous times that Christianity and its concept of charity should be replaced by the ethic of strength over weakness,.

The survival of the fittest.

There were many factors in the rise of National Socialism in Germany. But in that setting, the evolutionary survival of the fittest concept sanctioned what occurred. Humanism had set out to make man autonomous, and it turned out poorly.

In a quieter way, and yet importantly, some of today's advocates of genetic engineering use exactly the same arguments to put forth their position. They say that genetic engineering ought to be used for the survival of the fittest rather than medical advances being used to keep the weak alive, to be the producers of the next generation.

When the Christian consensus died, it left a vacuum, and this will tend to be filled by an elite to form an authoritarian state. When we speak of an authoritarian state, we must not think of the model of Hitler or Stalin, but rather a manipulative authoritarian state.

The governments of the world have at their disposal forms of manipulation beyond anything the world has ever known before. Organ transplants are a helpful breakthrough, and we can be glad for it. But to get the needed kidneys and other organs for transplants, the surgeon naturally has to await the donor's death.

The accepted definition of death used to be the cessation of heartbeat and breathing. Now the definition is a flat brain wave. This is not wrong in itself, but it opens the door to harvesting the dead.

With a brain wave flat, these bodies could be kept alive indefinitely to harvest their blood, to harvest their organs, for transplants and for experimentation. Without the absolute line which Christianity gives of man being totally unique, things which are good in themselves can lead to an increasing loss of humanness.

For modern man,.

There is no boundary line between what he should do and what he should not do. And this leaves him with what he can do. Any moral ought is only what is sociologically accepted at the moment. Now, as a Christian, I have a reference point in the Bible.

I have a reference point by what it teaches. And in this way, I have something to judge things by. But on the other hand, if I am left without any fixed point by which to judge things, without any cubbyholes, as it were, to fit the thoughts that are being thrown at me, I have no basis of judgment at all.

I'm just left naked before these things that are thrown at me with no possible way of making a critical analysis. Many couples today cannot have children because of a low sperm count on the part of the husband.

This can often be cured by artificial insemination using the husband's sperm. This is called A-I-H. H standing for the husband. This is surely a help to many couples. There then comes A-I-D. Sperm by a donor.

Another man. Where is the boundary line?

Where does adultery begin?

At present in Britain, such a child would be considered illegitimate. In the book, Our Future Inheritance, Choice or Chance,.

It is written,.

Perhaps the most sensible suggestion made is that the concept of legitimacy be removed altogether. This is not only a change of morals but a weakening of the family. They make this change upon the basis of what they call social hindrance.

It is what I call sociological law.

We would all be glad to see.

The genetic diseases cured. But once the borderlines are removed, which are based upon the biblical absolutes, then humanness can be and is lost increasingly.

And increasingly,.

Full genetic engineering is accepted and so is control. It is B .F. Skinner's thesis that all the people are is the result of conditioning by society and that through positive reinforcers, society should make people into what it wants them to be.

George G. Harris in Psychology Today says,. Nobody would panic at Skinner's attack upon our idea of freedom if he were only talking. But he has a program and followers to push it. Such behaviors are often found where it counts.

At times, they control education in the schools, down to the lowest grades. With all forms of determinism, man as man dies. The determinist has no way to derive his values from what exists, and hence his values and his morals must be chosen arbitrarily.

Once this way of thinking is accepted, it is much easier to impose arbitrary absolutes. To quote B .F. Skinner,. To man as man, we readily say, good riddance. I think we'd have to say, and it's not trite at all, though it's often been said, that science has become our new religion.

We have been conditioned to accept the objectivity of the scientists without realizing that often their views are very clearly shaped by their philosophy or by their worldview. And therefore, having accepted this objectivity almost blindly and having it driven into us, whether it would be the more exact sciences of, for instance, astronomy or chemistry or physics.

Or what now.

Is accepted as.

Almost exact sciences.

Of sociology.

And psychology, having been conditioned to accept these things, people just stop listening. They just take what they're told without any critical analysis. It is well known that in Russia political prisoners are put into mental institutions to be reconditioned and thus they lose their civil rights and they become non-persons.

But conditioning does not have to be so crude in order to be effective. In the West, the flood of books and articles and ideas about psychological, sociological.

And chemical.

Determinism has opened the way for the acceptance of first the idea and then the practice of manipulation. People have been increasingly conditioned to be treated as machines and to treat other people as machines.

And the technical breakthroughs have largely been made for manipulation. No less a person than Arthur Kessler, the noted scientist and author, has suggested that a chemical agent be developed to rid men of aggression and give him tranquility.

In other words, a super tranquilizer. Just like those who wanted to put LSD into the water supply, he suggested that some community may put it in its drinking water so that everyone could get the effects of it.

In this section, I'm giving that which has been reported in various newspapers and news magazines. Kenneth B. Clark, one time president of the American Psychological Association, suggested in 1971.

That all.

Political leaders should have to take anti-aggression pills so they could not be aggressive.

And the head.

Of the Gynecology and Obstetrics Department of the Kansas City University Medical School, Dr. Kermit Cranty, urged that birth control pills be put into the world's drinking supplies to control population.

And some have suggested that the state could dispense yet another drug to certain households to neutralize the pill. This way the state could decide who could have babies.

And who could not.

Russell V. Lee, clinical professor emeritus of Stanford University Medical School, said that all public officials should have to have psychological annual testing in depth. And in the case of a high federal official, if the committee thinks it's necessary, the findings could be turned over to a congressional committee who would have the power to remove the official from office.

One little thing.

The men.

Who dispense the pills and who do the psychological testing will be king. Who will control the controllers? And what will happen now that the line between what man should do and what he can do is obliterated?

And if man is only a conditioned machine, what is the value of the continuation of mankind? The thing that made the difference between the view of the early scientists and that which marks man today, who sees man as being only a part of a cosmic machine, is not something science has demonstrated.

It simply was a shift in the philosophic outlook of the scientists turning away from the early base that science had, of the world having been created by a reasonable God. And the only way that we could return would be to go back to that which the early scientists believed.

A God who exists and is not silent. And he's spoken in a way that people can understand in the Bible and in the revelation in Christ. And in the Bible and in the revelation of Christ, we have truth that gives us the key of the whole of life.

It tells us the origin of the universe, why it has formed. It tells us why man is great as made in the image of God. It tells us why man is cruel because he has turned away from God as his integration point and put himself at the center, the fall.

It gives us all these things. And then of course it gives us also a basis in its absolute teaching for both morals.

And law.