timeimmortal

I do wish I could write as eloquently as David Warren does, especially when communicating a point of such profound importance:

To those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. science was stillborn in all other civilizations.

By contrast, an atheistical view involves no such dogma; and the prevailing Darwinist scientistic view involves an actual self-contradiction so glaring that it cannot withstand a moment’s review. For it claims to explain order by the chance accumulation of random events. Such a view is itself in revolt against a tradition which found reason in nature and an answering reason in man. It can only lead to the death of science.

The Christian outlook stood from the beginning on two ancient legs. One was the revelation to the Hebrews, which lights the way to Christ. And the other was our inheritance from the Greeks. For “Western Civ” emerged out of the ancient world as a set of uncannily adequate replies to questions Greek philosophers had raised about time and final causation. Indeed, the rebirth of empirical science in the Christian Middle Ages was a return to Athens and Alexandria, and to the inquiries of e.g. Aristotle, and Aristarchus (“the ancient Copernicus”).

…

One of the historical myths of today is that such pseudo-sciences as astrology and alchemy preceded the emergence of true science, which overcame them by its superior predictive powers.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the actual ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near East, it was the other way around. Astrology, alchemy, and various kinds of sorcery emerged from the decadence of Greek empiricism. The mystery cults that sustained them, began to flourish just as that Greek world was crumbling under the might of an expanding Roman power, in the centuries before Christ. The ancient degeneration of science was predicated not on the rise of an “irrational” religious force, that suppressed it, but on progressive loss of faith in, and growing cynicism towards, the ancient religious and cosmological order.

Indeed, many atheistic commentators often seem to forget, in their zeal to use highly selective examples to claim that the Church is antagonistic towards science, that it was the Church which preserved the accumulated knowledge of the “Old World” through the Dark Ages, that it was the Church which frameworked the ancient academies of learning which became the modern university, and that it was the Church and the scientific inquiry conducted through it during the Middle Ages that laid the groundwork for all the innovations and discoveries of the 17th century onward. Far from being anti-science, or anti-reason, or anti-knowledge, the Church has been at the forefront of reason and discovery through the centuries. Animism, Islam, Hinduism, and other religions have not produced the same vibrant tradition of inquiry and discovery; only the West founded by and upon Christianity has done so. And it is the height of foolishness to deny that the Christian origins of the West have had anything to do with the wondrous discoveries that have been made therein.

~ by Kenneth on February 28, 2008.