Faith and reason and Father Stanley Jaki

      In my first year of calculus, I did not understand differentiation until halfway through integration. Understanding integration came much later, after the semester had finished and we were studying linear algebra and power series.

      Another example is basic formulas in geometry, such as the volume of a sphere. I learned the formula for the volume of a sphere in high school, and memorised it with many others. The derivation was presented two or three years later, in thirdsemester calculus, as an application of triple integrals.

      Very few students understand the maths they learn straight away. Like most of my fellow students, I listened to the teacher, read the textbook, learned the recipes, did lots of problems, and passed the exam — faith. Understanding — the proof — followed later.

      Thank God for faith. There is no way society and technology could have advanced past the Stone Age without it. Without faith, mankind would have been doomed to forever reinvent the wheel; and we probably would have died out thousands of years ago.

      In my work as a physicist and teacher, I rely on the above seven articles of faith underpinning science every day. In fact, they are second nature to me so much that I do not take notice of them. I simply accept them as given and get on with my work.

      But did mankind always accept these assumptions at the foundation of science? In the Ancient World, mostly no. Studying most of the great ancient cultures of Antiquity reveals a very different picture of how the world was viewed. Nature was more an animal than a machine, with a will of its own; eternal, without beginning or end, spinning and repeating itself in cycles that go on forever.

      Where does science have its roots, its beginning, its infancy?

      Most history books tell us that science had its beginnings in the late medieval period, with Nicholas Copernicus, who proposed that the earth moved around the sun in a circular orbit. Following him was Galileo Galilei, who without a doubt made great advances in fields such as astronomy and mechanics. Following Galileo was Isaac Newton, who, with his three laws of motion, marked the time when the scientific revolution really got going.

      Did the Christian Church have anything to do with it? History books tell us no. In fact, most history books tell us that the Church was more of a hindrance than a help, and the dispute between Galileo and the Catholic Church is usually presented as evidence that science suffers when religion meddles with it.

      Father Stanley Jaki argued that, contrary to what we read in most history books, Christian thought, or philosophy, was essential for the rise of science in the first place. The worldview of the Jewish and Christian cultures was necessary for science to develop as a self-sustaining enterprise. In other words, the seven foundational principles of science can be found in Judeo-Christian thought.

      Jaki points to the fact that the only place in history where all seven can be found, practised, and taught over many generations is the Judeo-Christian world. Many great scientific, mathematical and technological discoveries were made in other cultures, ancient Greece being the most prominent. But a closer examination reveals that these discoveries, while important, were for the most part isolated from one another and did not lead to further, self-sustaining discoveries.

      As Jaki puts it, it is almost as if science and technology experienced a stillbirth in each of the other great cultures of antiquity. He considered in a wealth of detail the other great cultures of history, including India, China, America, and Greece.

      All these cultures shared two important beliefs that militated against the birth and development of science. The first was the mistrust of nature. Nature was seen as a living being, an animal, with its own will. Mother Nature does what she wants, when she wants. The only rules she follows are her own, and she is free to change those rules. Trying to understand the laws of nature is pointless, because they certainly are not consistent, if they exist at all.

      The second concept that existed in all ancient cultures except Judeo-Christianity, was that time runs in a repeating circle, not a straight line. Like the seasons, time travels in an endlessly repeating fashion; and, with it, both history and human events.

The stillbirths of science

      We can consider Christendom to be the latest great civilisation. But before ours, in which science as a flourishing, self-sustaining and growing entity was born, there were, as we all know, several great civilisations that lasted for centuries in various parts of the world.

      These include ancient Egypt and Babylon, India, China, Greece, Rome, and the Islamic world of the Middle East. Each of these made contributions to science and technology, many of them major. But they all possessed one common trait in which they differed from Christendom.

      Scientific knowledge made some major advances in some areas within these cultures, but it never ignited into a self-perpetuating flame, where one scientific discovery or advance led to another, which then led to another, and so on. This only occurred in the Christian culture. I am speaking from the physicist’s point of view, where science really got up on its feet with the laws of mechanics.

      Jaki examined these ancient empires and considered their scientific achievements. The principal ones are recounted here.

Egypt

      We know well the technological feats of ancient Egypt. They include the pyramids, an advanced writing that helped lead to the Phoenician and Greek alphabets, developing and using the Nile River for their benefit, and adopting neighbouring technology to produce chariots.

      Interestingly, though, the ancient Egyptians developed writing that was quite advanced for their time, but not mathematics, although both require abstract reasoning.

      There is some evidence that Egyptian sailors travelling south of Africa could have been led to the conclusion that the earth is round, centuries before the Greeks suggested it. Egyptian poetry points to their desire for more knowledge and thus a better way of life.

      But, in spite of a few bright sparks of in intellectual and technological achievement, science in ancient Egypt fizzled out. Why? Could it be that Egyptian lore used animals as the model of how the universe behaves, as shown in the numerous images of half-animal half-human gods and other beings?

Babylon

      Archeological diggings in the Euphrates Valley have found 4000-year-old tablets on which are recorded mathematical puzzles equivalent to second-degree polynomials, lists of hundreds of plants and chemicals with highly accurate medicinal properties, and long lists of planetary positions. The writing itself seems not to have been derived from images of objects. Thus the Babylonians were able to develop abstract characters for language, perhaps even more so than Egypt.

      But also on the tablets are stories of Babylon’s lore and cosmology. The universe was seen as a large, irrational, and dangerous animal, which could be appeased only by people engaging in wild rituals. The ferociousness and apparent irrationality of nature could be kept in bounds only by having similar kinds of rituals now and then. From this philosophy follows the account of the world’s coming to be from a bloody battle among the gods of nature. In other words, nature is at the whim of the gods. How could science develop within the context of this worldview?

India

      Ancient India was home to some of science’s most important individual discoveries. Among its greatest accomplishments were the development of decimal counting, decimal positions for multiples of 10, and the integer number zero. Decimal counting has been at the foundation of mathematics for centuries.

      But India had the philosophy that real continuous, linear progress of any kind never happens, because history moves round and round in endless cycles. The ancient Hindus had four ages in each cycle, called Yugas. The worst and shortest age was the Kaliyuga, where history finds itself now, to be followed by the new golden age, the Kritayuga, which was to last around 4000 years, four times longer than the Kaliyuga.

      The Kritayuga was due to arrive by the year 300 BC. When it did not arrive, the Hindus did not scrap the Yuga theory. No, they recalculated the length of the ages by multiplying the time of each by 360, the length of a divine year. The original Kaliyuga was supposed to last 1200 years but, on the new calculation, it was to last 432,000 years; a long time to be in an age of ignorance, poverty, and disease.

      The ancient Hindus no doubt longed for the return of the Kritayuga golden age, but, in the long run, this too was going to be followed inevitably by the remaining four ages, repeating themselves for all eternity. The only way that mankind is able to endure this is to become detached from the world, and to accept that every human enterprise at the end of the day comes to naught, even those that are great and noble.

      Today India is a rapidly developing society that takes science and technology very seriously. Especially in the past 80 years or so, it has been absorbing and applying Western technology as fast as it can. I wonder, then, how devout Hindus reconcile their traditions and beliefs with India’s very rapid economic and technological development?

      The BBC reported (January 7, 2019) prominent Indian politicians as stating that the technological and scientific advances we enjoy today were already discovered thousands of years ago and are documented in ancient Hindu texts. The trouble is that, with the cycle of the Hindu cosmos, those discoveries were lost, only to be painfully re-learned in the modern age.

Greece

      The intellectual and scientific accomplishments of ancient Greece are seen as the greatest of antiquity. Mathematical discoveries such as geometry were its crowning achievements. Indeed, if you ask anyone who is responsible for paving the way for science in the West, you will almost invariably be told ancient Greece.

      But the physics as taught by Aristotle which came out of Greece (such as regarding the motion of objects) was not only wrong, but was believed for centuries in spite of plenty of opportunities to discover that things were otherwise. The principle that an object’s acceleration towards the earth is proportional to its weight is one of the greater errors of Aristotle’s physics. Surely, says Jaki, over the centuries men working high above the ground on temples or other construction sites saw with their own eyes from time to time that objects of different weights fell with the same increasing speed!

      Underlying the Greek advances in knowledge was the religious and philosophical belief in the eternalness and cyclic nature of history. The “Great Year”, represented by one full cycle of the movement of the planets and stars relative to the Earth, lasts around 26,000 years. But, unlike the ancient Hindus, who saw themselves at the bottom of the cycle in terms of human happiness and advancement, the Greeks saw themselves at the top.

      Jaki points out that, in four different works, Aristotle notes that not only does the cosmos move in eternally recurring cycles, so too do human affairs, including all the advances in culture and knowledge. For instance, Jaki quotes Aristotle’s comments in the Meteorologica: “We cannot help believing that the same opinions recur to men not once or twice but over and over again.” In the Metaphysics, Aristotle cites the divine nature of the sky as evidence that the same ideas are developed, then forgotten, then thought up again over and over in the cycles of the universe.

      That science was not viable in ancient Greece is perhaps the most disappointing because of the multitude of discoveries made there. An example is that, in spite of the genius of many ancient Greeks, they never developed the science of motion correctly, from which the discoveries of physics and mechanics could follow.

      Jaki lays the blame for this on the notion, shared by all the ancient cultures except that of the Hebrews, that the universe itself is a divine being and naturally runs through eternal, repetitive cycles. This philosophy stifled the development of science because psychologically, if every innovation and advance was thought up before numerous times, forgotten, and rediscovered only to be forgotten again, then thought up again in the future, only to be re-forgotten, over and over, why would anyone go through the trouble of trying to advance knowledge?

      Jaki calls this the “treadmill of perennial returns”, and a treadmill it would be, on which one expends a great deal of effort but goes nowhere. This treadmill would make anyone pessimistic about the real, long-term advance of knowledge and, as a result, long-term cultural goals would be set quite low.

      He quotes Aristotle in the Metaphysics: “Probably every art and every philosophy has often reached a stage of development as far as it could and then again has perished.” This would also apply to social and technological development.

      The Great Year pops up here and there in modern culture. Apart from the horoscope pages that can still be found in newspapers, a good example is in the Disney film, The Lion King. In this movie, the wise Mufasa repeatedly calls on his son to take his place in the “Circle of Life”. This is the chief message in the song of the same name, which features prominently in the movie.

      Among the song’s lyrics are the lines:

      But the Sun rolling high through the sapphire sky
      Keeps great and small on the endless round
      In the circle of life
      It’s the wheel of fortune
      It’s the leap of faith
      It’s the band of hope
      Till we find our place
      On the path unwinding
      In the circle, the circle of life.

      (I wonder whether Tim Rice, who wrote the lyrics, read Greek philosophy?)

      Interestingly, James Earl Jones, who played the voice of Mufasa in the movie, narrated a documentary film in 2004 called The Great Year.

      According to the film’s website, “as the Sun curves through space carrying the Earth with it, our bodies and our planet move to a region where they are affected by different cosmic forces that indirectly result in the rise and fall of civilisation. As man’s consciousness expands and contracts, and the cycle plays out, just like a solar year with its seasons, it results in great ages of enlightenment and dark ages of misery.”

      What would happen if our modern scientific and technological culture took the lessons from the Great Year to heart? I for one wouldn’t have bothered putting six years of my blood, sweat and tears into producing an original footnote in the annals of knowledge, called a PhD, if I believed that it had already been done before numerous times and will be redone in the future with the cycles of the eternally recurring cosmos.

      And what of our belief in the linearity of time? Putting the speculations of mathematicians aside, science and engineering are done in practice by assuming that time is best expressed as an increasing positive number. If the cosmos moves in eternal cycles, and with it civilisation, how can anyone believe in the linearity of time, let alone use time as an instrument of measurement?

China

      Jaki found similar patterns in Chinese history. The ancient Chinese invented printing, magnets, and gunpowder long before the West had them.

      An interesting case. China had printing for centuries. Once it was introduced to the West, it developed and improved drastically in just a few hundred years. Why, one might ask, did China miss what was obvious?

      China itself was slow and reluctant to adopt Western science. Just a few generations ago Chinese scholars saw science as a means to exploit nature and make man less human. They denounced the microscope, for example, as forcing nature into a straitjacket. As late as the early 1920s, some Chinese commentators, such as philosopher Yu-Lan Fung, claimed publicly that Chinese culture was better off without science.

      Why science did not take off in China may be due to its long relationship with Confucianism. Confucianism is one of the best-known pantheistic philosophies, where everyone and everything is essentially part of one cosmic deity. “The Force” from Star Wars is an expression of pantheism. Everyone is Nature. Nature is everyone and everything, and is eternal.

      If this is the case, and if people really believe this and put it in practice, then there is no point in even trying to understand it, let alone be its master. Since ancient China apparently lacked confidence in man’s ability to understand and control nature, it is not surprising that, in spite of some impressive technological achievements, science did not grow into a self-perpetuating reality there.

      Jaki is fond of a quote by Albert Einstein, reportedly written in a letter in 1953: “The development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers; and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion, one need not be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.”

The Islamic world

      Here is a more recent tragedy for science. Once established, the Muslim empire quickly absorbed all the Greek philosophy, science, and mathematics it could. It stretched from Spain to Afghanistan; for hundreds of years it enjoyed peace and prosperity that far surpassed the Christian West. The Muslims developed medicine, including ophthalmology (which required the study of optics). They developed trigonometry and algebra, building on what the Greeks had discovered, and adopted both the Chinese art of making paper and the Hindu decimal counting system (which had commercial uses).

      Scholars from the West went to Cordova in Spain to learn Greek philosophy and science. But a few hundred years later, the Muslim empire stagnated while Christendom in the West flourished and, by the 18^th century, Western Europe left the Middle East far behind in scientific achievement.

      The Muslim world was in possession of Greek science for 500 years before that science was passed on to the Christian West in the late 13^th century. But it never produced a Copernicus or a Galileo. The Muslim world saw great advances in medicine, but not so much in physics. One wonders why? After all, Islam is a monotheistic religion with a single Creator.

      Jaki says that, philosophically, Islam was divided into two camps, both whose ideas were of no help in developing science. On the one hand, some Muslim thinkers thought that restricting the Creator to following any necessarily physical laws was blasphemous and denied him the freedom to do as he chooses with nature. Others said that the laws of nature would be a priori— must necessarily be what they are — following the Greeks, whose ideas they absorbed.

      Following Jaki, in her book, Science Was Born of Christianity, Stacy Trasancos, suggests that thinkers in the Islamic world separated science and religion with no reconciliation between the two, and were unable to break free from Greek concepts such as the Great Year. This apparent contradiction in the Islamic mind denied it the social psychology necessary for the birth of science.

The only viable birth of science

      Once the Christian West did obtain Greek scientific works, within 150 years Copernicus had proposed the orbit of Earth around the sun. Within 300 years there were the discoveries and advances of Galileo and Kepler, and shortly after that, Isaac Newton produced his great work on mechanics and his three laws of motion.

      The seeds of science, although planted in a variety of powerful empires and cultures, found fertile ground only in Christendom, where it grew and flourished. Everywhere else, after some promising starts, it went nowhere.

      Some of the reasons why in these other cultures science did not develop seem to be: first, that nature was seen to be some kind of cyclical animal; second, nature was viewed as being irrational; and, third, nature was necessarily what it was. Man then did not seem to have enough confidence either in nature, or in his mind to understand it and manipulate it to his advantage.

      The ancient Jews, as illustrated by numerous passages in the Old Testament, had a very different view of how the universe worked. As Genesis 1 tells the story, in the beginning, that is, at the dawn of time, God created the heavens and the earth, the expression used to describe the universe in those times.

      The ancient Jewish cosmos resembled the cosmos as conceived by most if not all ancient Middle-Eastern cultures. The difference that made the difference, is that, for the Jews, God is separate from the cosmos, above it and governing it. In the cosmic visions of all their neighbours, the cosmos is god or gods or bits of gods and everything in the cosmos is a god, gods and bits of gods.

      In Jaki’s thinking, two points are important here. First, that, before creation, the universe did not exist. The doctrine is called creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing and in time. The universe did not exist, then it did, by a wilful act of the Creator. This contrasts with the Aristotelian notion of the universe (and that of other ancient cultures), that the universe is eternal and always existed. Second, God said that his creation was good. In the human mind, this can be taken in part as meaning that Creation is ordered and rational.

      The Old Testament, though, not only describes the power of God in his miracles, such as the parting of the Red Sea, but also in his ordering and control of nature. Time and time again reference is made to God’s fidelity to his people Israel, and evidence is given in the regularity and stability of nature.

      We can start with some examples from the Psalms, which express God’s mastery over creation and his fidelity to the house of Israel.

      Psalm 89 says:

      O Lord I will always sing of your constant love;
      I will proclaim your faithfulness forever.
      I know that your love will last for all time,
      that your faithfulness is as permanent as the sky. (1–2)

      Heaven is yours, and the Earth also;
      you made the world and everything in it. (11)

      In a vision long ago you said to your faithful servants...
      “But I will not stop loving David
      or fail to keep my promise to him.
      I will not break my covenant with him
      or even take back one promise I made him.
      Once and for all I have promised by my holy name:
      I will never lie to David.
      He will always have descendants,
      and I will watch over his kingdom as long as the sun shines.
      It will be as permanent as the moon,
      that faithful witness in the sky.” (19, 33–37)

      Psalm 19 says:

      How clearly the sky reveals God’s glory!
      How plainly it shows what he has done!
      Each day announces it to the following day;
      each night repeats it to the next. (1–2)

      And Psalm 136 says:

      Give thanks to the Lord, because he is good; his love is eternal...
      He alone performs great miracles; his love is eternal.
      By his wisdom he made the heavens; his love is eternal;
      he built the earth on the deep waters; his love is eternal.
      He made the sun and the moon; his love is eternal;
      the sun to rule over the day; his love is eternal;
      the moon and the stars to rule over the light; his love is eternal. (1, 4–9)

      Psalm 104 recounts God’s creation and mastery of the physical world:

      Praise the Lord my soul!
      O Lord, my God, how great you are!
      You are clothed with majesty and glory;
      you cover yourself with light.
      You spread out the heavens like a tent
      and built your home on the waters above.
      You use the clouds as your chariot
      and ride on the wings of the wind.
      You use the winds as your messengers
      and flashes of lightning as your servants.
      You have set the earth firmly on its foundations,
      and it will never be moved. (...)
      You created the moon to mark the months;
      the sun knows the time to set. (1–5, 19)

      God’s control of nature was often cited to strengthen the faith of the Jewish people, especially when times were hard. In Jeremiah their wavering faith was strengthened by the faithfulness of God as witnessed in the obvious faithfulness of nature:

      “The Lord said to me, ‘I have made a covenant with the day and with the night, so that they always come at their proper times; and that covenant can never be broken. In the same way I have made a covenant with my servant David that he would always have a descendant to be king, and I have made a covenant with the priests from the tribe of Levi that they would always serve me; and these covenants can never be broken’.” (Jeremiah 33: 19–22)

      Earlier on in Jeremiah, God assures his fidelity to Israel with reference to the stability of day and night:

      The Lord provides the sun for light by day,
      the moon and the stars to shine at night.
      He stirs up the sea and makes it roar;
      his name is the Lord Almighty.
      He promises that as long as the natural order lasts,
      so long will Israel be a nation. (31: 35–36)

      In Sirach, echoing the first chapter of Genesis, the author points out the creation of the universe, and man’s ability and confidence to understand and master it:

      In the beginning the Lord did his work of creation,
      and gave everything a place of its own.
      He arranged everything in an eternal order
      and decreed that it should be that way forever.
      Not one part of creation ever grows hungry;
      no part grows tired or stops its work.
      The parts do not crowd one another,
      and they never disobey his word.
      When the Lord made all this,
      he looked at the earth and filled it with good things. (...)
      Then the Lord formed human beings from the dust
      and sent each of them back to it again.
      He gave them only a limited time to live,
      but he gave them authority over everything on earth.
      He made them to be like himself,
      and gave them his own strength.
      He made all other creatures afraid of them;
      he gave them authority over all the animals and birds.
      He gave them their tongues, their eyes,
      their ears, their mind, and their consciences.
      He filled them with knowledge and understanding
      and showed them the difference between good and evil.
      He gave them his own insight
      to let them see the majesty of his creation. (Sirach 16:26-29, 17:1-8)

      Finally, creation from nothing at all is explicitly mentioned in 2 Maccabees, by the Jewish mother urging her son to remain steadfast in the face of death: “So I urge you, my child, to look at the sky and the earth. Consider everything you see there, and realise that God made it all from nothing, just as he made the human race” (7:28).

      Let’s now move to the New Testament, where the chief message is the fulfillment of salvation history in the coming of Christ. In Jaki’s mind, the Christian doctrine that comes from belief in God becoming man in the person of Jesus Christ was pivotal in casting off the intellectual baggage that prevented science as a self-sustaining enterprise from developing in Greece, or for that matter anywhere else. And there is more to the story than just Jesus’ words that all authority in heaven and earth (a Hebrew term for the universe) had been given to him by the Father (Matthew 28:16); or Paul’s discourse on the “unknown God” at Athens (Acts 17:23).

      Belief in Christ provided two essential ingredients necessary for the birth of science. The first was hammering home the concept that the physical world is rational. St Paul ties this rationality to Jesus.

      While some in Athens laughed at Paul, Jaki notes: “Many others discovered in the risen Christ the supreme evidence of God’s love... and the proof of the reasonableness of all He made both in space and in time, that is, in cosmic and human history. The Christian certitude about the rationality of nature, about man’s ability to investigate its laws, owes its vigour to the concreteness by which Christ radiated the features of God creating through that fullness of rationality which is love.” (Science and Creation, p. 158)

      The second key ingredient, found only in the New Testament, helped to kill off the concept of the Great Year and the divinity of the cosmos. Here we turn to the beginning of St John’s gospel:

      In the beginning was the Word,
      the Word was with God,
      and the Word was God.
      He was with God in the beginning.
      Through him all things came to be,
      not one thing had its being but through him.
      All that came to be had life in him
      and that life was the light of men,
      a light that shines in the dark,
      a light that darkness could not overpower. (1:1-3)

      A more technical term for Word is Logos. Dictionary.com states that this word is from Greek, and has two meanings. The first meaning is: “philosophy: the rational principle that governs and develops the universe.” The second is: “theology: the divine word or reason incarnate in Jesus Christ.” Encyclopedia Britannica says that, in ancient Greek thought, the Logos was the reasoning power of the divine, the rational and spiritual principle that connected the divine to physical reality. The Logos was then for the Greeks an impersonal thing, a bridge of sorts between the divine and physical reality. Physical reality, the universe as we see it, was begotten from the divine through the Logos.

      The Greek word for begotten is monogenes; in Latin the word is unigenitum. Ancient Greek and Roman thought said that the physical universe was begotten, or emanated, from the divine. St John clearly rejected that proposition. Christian thought, which in its early days had Greek thought firmly in its sights, says that the Word (Logos) is God, the divine being. The only being begotten from God is the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

      This Person, the Son, was incarnated as a real, flesh-and-blood man, Jesus Christ. Thus the Nicene Creed refers to Christ as Filium Dei unigenitum, “eternally begotten of the Father”. The early Christian Church spent hundreds of years hammering this out in detail.

      This was also a key argument used to convert pagans in the Roman world to Christianity.

      For the development of science, this doctrine was critical, because the pantheistic concept of the universe had to be abandoned in order to give mere mortals the confidence to presume nature could be studied and understood. Jaki puts it this way: “John’s use of monogenes dethroned the cosmos and saved it by the same stroke. By putting a flesh-and-blood being on the pedestal of monogenes, John erected a powerful barrier against pantheistic emanationism.” (The Only Chaos and Other Essays, p. 254)

      St Paul follows similar reasoning in his letter to the Colossians. In the opening discourse on Christ, Paul states that Christ “is the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation, for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, everything visible and everything invisible”.

      Paul’s words here and elsewhere were written in terms that aimed at the Greek Stoics and served to fortify early Christians against pantheism.

      The other unique feature of the life of Christ in Jaki’s mind is that it was a one-off event. It happened once, in history, “in the fullness of time”, never to be repeated again. The idea of the Great Year is that the world’s chief events, discoveries, and calamities happen over and over again, in repeating cycles, forever. According to this belief, the Incarnation is an event that has happened over and over again in past ages, and will happen again and again in the distant future.

      Christian doctrine says “no”. The coming of Christ happened once and only once. From this, the early Christians concluded that the Great Year simply could not be a reality, and they argued strenuously against it. Time then for Christians follows a linear pattern, from the moment of creation to the end of the world.

A 1300-year incubation

      It took another 1300 years for Christian thought to develop and be related to the physical world, when some of the first small shoots began to appear that later grew into Newton’s laws of motion.

      While the world did have a workable model of how planets and stars behave in the Ptolemaic system, in the sense that the motion could be predicted, Western thought was still tied to the notion that the physics of celestial bodies was fundamentally different from physics on earth. Aristotle’s physics was still considered to be the last word on the matter. The motion of all bodies on earth follows their natural inclinations, which is to fall towards the centre.

      This follows the Greek idea that there is a hierarchy of emanationism; the highest is the sky (heavens, stars and planets) and the lowest is the earth. In terms of physics, celestial bodies are fundamentally different from earthly bodies, and if either follows any rules at all, the rules for each are quite different.

      Throughout late Roman times, Christian thinkers pondered over the lessons taught by the Christian faith and compared them with the philosophy they inherited from the Greeks. Gradually the idea that the heavens and the earth might be governed by the same principles began to take shape, once the idea of a divine universe and the Great Year were banished from the collective consciousness.

      The eternity of the universe and the Great Year were denounced over and over again by a succession of thinkers, always on the grounds of Christian faith. Stacy Trasancos gives a summary of this history in chapter two of Science Was Born of Christianity. Jaki goes into great detail about this in chapter eight of Science and Creation. The apologists during the earlier period include Justin Martyr and St Irenaeus (second century AD), St Clement and Origen of Alexandria (third century), and St Augustine (fourth and fifth centuries).

      In The City of God, Augustine devotes several chapters to look at theories of creation and the universe. As Trasancos notes, he could not understand how any deep thinker could be satisfied “with the doctrine of eternal cycles alternating forever between birth and decay, happiness and misery” (Science Was Born of Christianity, p. 114). Rather, he preached: “Let us therefore keep to the straight path, which is Christ,... and let us turn away in heart and in mind from the unreal and futile cycles of the godless.”

      For Augustine, the doctrine of Christ’s mission on earth was absolutely incompatible with the doctrine of the Great Year. Augustine expressed his bewilderment that anyone could look seriously at the world and not recognise the handiwork of its Creator. He repeatedly referred to the biblical text that states that God looked on his creation, and (contrary to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), “saw that it was good”. He also referred many times to the passage in Wisdom, that God “ordered all things by measure, number, and weight” (11:27). (See Science and Creation, p. 181)

      The same thought continued to develop into the Middle Ages, with writers such as Adelard of Bath, Thierry of Chartres, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. In the middle of the 12^th century, Thierry proposed that the rapid motion of the stars and planets might be akin to a thrown projectile. This is very much at odds with the Greek notion that the stars and planets were fundamentally different from objects on Earth, and anticipated the impetus theory that centuries later developed into Newton’s first law.

      At the forefront of Thierry’s mind was a firm belief in the Creator, and following the quote from Wisdom, a belief that the world had a mathematical character to it: “There are four kinds of reasons that lead man to the recognition of the Creator: the proofs taken from arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.” (Science and Creation, p. 221)

      In her discussion of this period, Trasancos points out that Albert, who believed that nature could and should be investigated, condemned magic and astrology, two very Greek notions that follow from the idea that the behaviour of the stars and planets have a causal affect on human affairs.

      Aquinas was a great admirer of Aristotle, yet, where Aristotle’s philosophy was in conflict with Christian doctrine, Aquinas took the Christian side. Thus, while he was happy to accept that nature had a limited cyclic aspect, on the grounds of faith he rejected the Great Year.

      For instance, the Great Year resets itself according to the precession of the equinoxes. One can calculate when that will be, and thus it follows that one can calculate when the world will end in each cycle. But this contradicts Christian doctrine, which states that no one knows when the world will end except God himself. Thus one has to reject the Great Year.

      Another reason to reject the Great Year was that it implies that the population of heaven would ultimately be infinite, yet Christian faith teaches that the number of inhabitants of heaven, while a very large number, was not infinite.

      Three years after Aquinas died in 1274, the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, formally condemned 219 propositions that resulted from Aristotle’s worldview, as being incompatible with the Christian worldview. In this list, propositions 83–92 were about the eternity of the universe and the Great Year. Other ideas on this list include that the stars and planets are organs of a cosmic being, the motion of the stars and planets can only be circular and are the result of “animal desire”, and that the stars and planets directly influence people (astrology).

      The Christian doctrine of God’s creation of the universe in space and in time compelled the Christian world to abandon any cosmic view that was not compatible with it. Following 19^th-century French physicist Pierre Duhem, Jaki notes that the year 1288 could mark the beginning of “a new era of scientific thinking”, keeping in mind that the ideas that escaped Tempier’s censure had been in gradual development for several centuries.

      The philosophy that was built up in Christian thought and tradition was certainly kept in mind by the Christian fathers of science: John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, and many others. Christian teaching led them to believe that, since God was reliable, so too was the nature he created. And man, created in God’s image, was able to obtain with confidence an understanding of nature and the ability to manipulate it.

      Let’s now look at how my branch of science, physics, developed in Europe before the time of Newton.

      Generally we are taught that the rise of physics came about, rather suddenly, in the Renaissance of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, starting with Copernicus, further developed by Francis Bacon and Galileo, then Kepler and Descartes, and culminating with Isaac Newton. I will limit myself to the laws of mechanics, upon which most discoveries in physics in the 17^th and 18^th centuries rest.

      The foundations of mechanics are Newton’s laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation. These laws describe the motion of cricket balls, rockets, and planets. Newton’s Third Law follows from his Second Law, and the Second from the First.

      The first law is the law of inertia: an object at rest remains at rest, and once an object is in motion, it will remain in motion in a straight line unless pushed by an unbalanced external force. Did Newton in all his genius think this law up by himself? Some people give Descartes credit for developing similar ideas a little before Newton’s time. Others say that Galileo developed the law of inertia, and Newton built on his earlier work.

      Jaki (following Duhem) traces the law of inertia to the 14^th-century Sorbonne, in Paris, where John Buridan proposed the theory of impetus (inertia) as a reaction against Aristotle’s mechanics.

      Aristotle had a theory of motion that followed from his cosmology. The universe owes its existence to the Prime Mover and, like the Prime Mover, it is uncreated and eternal. Earth is at the centre, and the outer sphere of fixed stars is propelled by the Prime Mover. From this cosmology it follows that, on the small scale, objects in motion must be continuously pushed. The classic absurd example is that a stone thrown through the air is pushed by the very air it separates during its motion.

      Buridan challenged this view, citing common examples where Aristotle’s physics made no sense, such as why someone wishing to jump a long distance takes a running start to build up his momentum (inertia). Such a jumper feels the air resisting his motion, rather than pushing him.

      Over the centuries, men no doubt made the same sorts of observations, yet they did not challenge Aristotle. Perhaps they decided that their observations were wrong or their reason could not be trusted. Here is where Christian theology came to science’s rescue. Buridan was able to break the stranglehold that Aristotle had on science by appealing to the doctrine that God created the universe, in space and in time, and from nothing.

      In commentaries on Aristotle, Buridan wrote that, since the universe was created in time, its past history was not eternal. Contrary to Aristotle’s theory, the Creator gave the universe a certain amount of inertia, which its bodies keep as they move through frictionless space.

      Buridan wrote: “Since the Bible does not state that appropriate intelligences move the celestial bodies, it could be said that it does not appear necessary to posit intelligences of this kind, because it would be answered that God, when He created the world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving them He impressed in them impetuses which moved them without his having to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby he concurs as a co-agent in all things which take place; ‘for thus on the seventh day He rested from all the work which He had executed by committing to others the actions and passions in turn’.”

      “And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased nor corrupted afterwards, because there was no inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which would be corruptive or repressive of that impetus. But this I do not say assertively, but rather tentatively so that I might seek from the theological masters what they might teach me as to how these things take place.”

      This essentially is an early statement of Newton’s First Law. Because God is fully transcendent from His creation (the universe), there is no need for Him to continually push objects and remain in contact that their motion might continue, as did Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

      In Aristotle’s case, a philosophy determined a theory of physics. In Buridan’s case, too, a different philosophy determined another physics, one infinitely more successful. Jaki notes that Buridan’s famous statement was reproduced many times in manuscripts, lecture notes and books throughout the 15^th and 16^th centuries (The Absolute Beneath the Relative, pp. 142-143).

      Buridan had two famous students: Nicole Oresme and Albert of Saxony. Oresme was an early promoter of the idea that the earth spun and travelled around the sun. He also answered the objection that if the earth moved, there would be a constant wind blowing, and objects thrown straight up would not return to their starting point. These things do not happen because, like the earth, air and other objects have an impetus which carries them along with the earth (an application of Buridan’s theory).

      Albert of Saxony developed the impetus theory further, and his writings strongly influenced Galileo.

      The rest of the story is well known. The great synthesis of all that had been developed in mathematics, geometry, natural philosophy, and experimentation came together in Newton’s Principia, which was first published in 1687. From then on, history saw the triumph of science and the scientific method: natural phenomena are described with numbers and explained by mathematical theories; then the theories are tested by further experimentation, and one scientific discovery leads to the next.

      Within 150 years, Western science had become the wonder of the world, and on its heels came the Industrial Revolution, which could not have happened without that science.

Christians, keep your chins up

      At the present time, when being a Christian is not necessarily greeted with respect and courtesy, and when in some parts of the world it can land one in jail, is there any comfort to be found in the fact that the antecedents of science were an integral part of a very Christian story?

      I have spent much of my adult life in universities, where Christianity is at best ignored, more often challenged, and not infrequently sneered at. In the late 1980s, when I commenced doctoral studies, university bookshops were lined with Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time. He is often quoted as saying, “What place, then, for a creator?” The universe simply is. We don’t need a Creator to explain it.

      These days an act of Christian charity, such as offering to pray for someone, can land the hapless Christian student in the campus dock, where threats of expulsion are very real.

      To make matters worse, much worse, the shameful actions of some churchmen have led to enormous harm, and the result is that the credibility of many Christian churches has been shot to pieces. Faithful Christians are left reeling in bewilderment, and in their own personal and deep pain. What Christian in recent times has not had his faith shaken down to its boots, as mine has?

      What is Christianity to do now, when seemingly the whole world laughs at it, as the Psalmist says: “My tears have become my bread, by night, by day, as I hear it said all day long, ‘where is your God?’” However, the Psalmist continues: “Why are you cast down, my soul. Why groan within me? Hope in God, I will praise him still, my saviour and my God.” (Psalm 41) Indeed, why should we hope in God, in these increasingly dark and troubling times?

      Perhaps we should recall those very passages in Scripture that were used to comfort and strengthen the Israelites when they were getting kicked around by their enemies, dragged off into exile, and forced to pay homage to foreign gods. Perhaps we need to be reminded of God’s faithfulness as witnessed in the reliability of the nature He created, or at least in the rock-solid laws of physics that mankind has discovered with the psychological assistance of confidence in the Creator.

      Perhaps we should look again at the words of Jeremiah: “Have you noticed how people are saying that I have rejected Israel and Judah, the two families that I chose? And so they look with contempt on my people and no longer consider them a nation. But I, the Lord, have a covenant with the day and night, and I have made the laws that control earth and sky. And just as surely as I have done this, so I will maintain my covenant with Jacob’s descendants and with my servant David.” (33: 23-26)

      Or perhaps we should remember Christ’s words in John’s Gospel, spoken in a real cosmic sense: “But take courage! I have overcome the world.” (16:33) People may fail, but nature will never deviate from the path ordained by God himself.

      Stanley Jaki spent 50 years studying in great depth the interrelationships among science in general (physics in particular), history, philosophy, and theology. Towards the end of his book, The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin, he sums up one of the chief points from his numerous writings: that after several “stillbirths” in numerous ancient cultures, science was born only within a firmly Christian context.

      The only worldview that had the ability to generate science was “a view of which the principle disseminator was the Gospel itself. It was the Gospel that turned into a widely shared conviction the belief in the Father, maker of all things visible and invisible, who created all in the beginning and disposed everything in measure, number, and weight: that is, with a rigorous consistency and rationality” (p. 99). These are the consistency and rationality that are demanded if science is to make any sense at all.

      This is the same science that put men on the moon, allows the Hubble telescope to look billions of light years to distant galaxies in the distant past, and allows scientists to probe deeply into the subatomic realm. This is the same science that led to the marvellous feats of engineering that society enjoys today and that we can no longer live without; all because, as Jaki would put it, the universe was created from nothing, in space and in time, and is given by its Creator order by measure, number and weight.

      The early Christian fathers, including the apostles, looked at the cosmic view their world inherited from ancient Greece, and said, we can do better than this. In hindsight, they were right.

Bibliography

      S.L. Jaki, The Relevance of Physics, University of Chicago Press, 1966.

      S.L. Jaki, The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin, Scottish Academic Press, 1978.

      S.L. Jaki, The Savior of Science, Regnery Gateway, 1988.

      S.L. Jaki, The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays, University Press of America, 1988.

      S.L. Jaki, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe, University Press of America, 1990.

      S.L. Jaki, The Only Chaos and Other Essays, University Press of America, 1990.

      S.A. Trasancos, Science Was Born of Christianity: The Teaching of Fr Stanley L. Jaki, Habitation of Chimham Publishing, 2014.

      John Long has undergraduate qualifications in physics and philosophy from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in physics from Monash University. He has taught physics and engineering at an Australian university for over 20 years.