Below is an excerpt from Truth Changes Everything: How People of Faith Can Transform the World in Times of Crisis, written by Dr. Jeff Myers, Summit Ministries president.
Assumptions determine conclusions. Christianity was important to the founders of science not just because they happened to be Christians but because they embraced a biblical worldview and a biblical attitude toward science. Let’s look at each.
A Biblical Worldview of Science
As I’ve already mentioned, many today see science as unrelated to faith. Only half of scientists surveyed in 2009 by the Pew Research Center believed in God or a higher power, as compared to 95 percent of the American public.1 How did we move from faith being central to scientific discovery to the sense that it is irrelevant? Harvard professor Steven Shapin lays the blame at the feet of the Enlightenment, which promoted the belief that rationalism could cure humanity’s fall into sin and restore virtue.2 As faith in rationalism began to replace faith in God, science became a nontheistic form of worship. To quote Jonathan Sacks, “In the beginning people believed in many gods. Monotheism came and reduced them to one. Science came and reduced them to none.”3
Yet the principles on which science operates are consistent with a biblical understanding of the world. We might even say that they are based on it. In their book The Soul of Science, Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton list seven such principles:
- Nature is valuable enough to study (as opposed to ancient Greek thought, which said that the mind, not the physical world, was most important).
- Nature is good, but not god (as opposed to animistic religions that left nature alone because it was the exclusive abode of the gods).
- Nature is orderly (as opposed to religions that taught that the world was unpredictable because it was ruled by a pantheon of unruly and unpredictable gods).
- Nature’s laws can be precisely stated and understood (as opposed to ancient religions that taught that creation was too mysterious to be consistently known).
- Humans can discover nature’s order (as opposed to the ancient Eastern belief that nature was not the product of a rational mind and therefore not subject to rational thinking).
- Detailed observation is possible and important (as opposed to Aristotle’s thinking that if an object’s purpose was understood, detailed observation of it was unnecessary).
- The universe is rationally intelligible because God is rationally intelligent (as opposed to philosophies who trusted limited human intelligence as the only kind that really exists).4
All seven of these principles find their place in the Bible’s description of God and the world. As the University of Texas-Austin philosopher Robert C. Koons plainly states, “Without the faith in the rational intelligibility of the world and the divine vocation of human beings to master it, modern science would never have been possible, and, even today, the continued rationality of the enterprise of science depends on convictions that can be reasonably grounded only in theistic metaphysics.”5
Jeff Myers, Truth Changes Everything: How People of Faith Can Transform the World in Times of Crisis (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2022), 114-116. Used by permission. For more content from Baker Publishing, see their website: http://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com.