A Brief History of Science

I discussed in my last posting that the foundation of ancient Greek philosophy is the crux of the problem in the West today – in terms of our way of thinking. The root is sin, but we haven’t a hope of dealing properly with sin if our thinking is amiss.[1] Most of the Western Church sees the problems in the world outside the walls of the Church as being due to secular man's rejection of the obvious truth that the Church holds out for them. Yet, the Church herself does not see the falsehood she is holding onto nor the effects of it on her relationship with her Husband, Christ.

I want to show - or at least suggest - that the "discoveries" of science have shaped our thinking about reality and, thus, has affected our relationship to our Lord. First, a brief history.

When I started getting into this research, I thought science was science whether today or 1000 years ago. The term science only meant “knowledge about a subject” until the mid to late 19th century.[2] Until that time, the kind of pursuit we now call science was called natural philosophy. Why? Because it dealt with the nature of reality – what is the nature of this universe we live in? There is a technical side to science today, most definitely, but especially theoretical science is an attempt to form a view of reality. You might say it is worldview formation.

Something else I didn't know was many other aspects of what we call science today were once called magic, as well – most notably natural magic and alchemy. Wizards – another word for wise men and wise women – were, like today, people who had much knowledge (science) and could put it to use. Another term is magus, the plural of which is magi as in the wise men who came to visit Jesus soon after His birth. The word translated “wise men” in the Gospel account[3] is the Greek word magos (sing.) which is translated sorcerer in some other places. Strong's defines it as an oritental scientist or magician. See also Acts 13:6,8 where the translation of sorcerer seems to be more clear. I'll use the term magus and magi hence forth for all these people as a group.[4]

These magi weren't necessarily overt occultists as we’d think of them today. I'm not saying they weren’t, but the line between yesterday’s wizards and today’s scientists isn’t so clear. Philosophers of science for the last century or so have been having a hard time distinguishing science from non-science.[5]

Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton are professing Christians who wrote The Soul of Science, a book which discusses modern science from a Christian perspective. In this book, they discuss positivism and the new view of the history of science.[6] Briefly, positivism is a view that man has moved from ignorance to enlightenment over history and that the advances of natural philosophy and, now, science have led man to this greater enlightenment. It also casts off all religion and superstition as having no place in bringing man to this enlightenment. Religion is all well and good in its place, but its place is not in science or enlightenment into Nature.

The new thinking – in the last 40 years or so – in the philosophy of science is that this is not true. So-called superstition – viz. astrology, alchemy, magic and religion – has had a very formative role in getting to where we are today. I took a philosophy of science course last spring where this new view was discussed. On the one hand, it accords more respect to that which the positivists used to shun. Lawrence Principe, a professor of chemistry and the history of science said that we tend to make characters of the past fit modern images we have of scientists, taking the features which fit modern ideas and jettisoning the rest. In so doing, we miss out on the true character of the figures we study and fail to truly appreciate their contributions.[7] In closing his last lecture of the series, he says:

We encountered Babylonians, Greeks and Arabs and Latins. We encountered pagans, Muslims and Christians; Platonists and Aristotelians; Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits; Mechanists and Vitalists; Astrologers and Alchemists; mathematicians and magicians. All of them put their stamp upon the developing notions and content of what we call science. And many of those marks are still there today, if only we can learn to recognize them by a doctrine of historical signatures.

One last comment about magi – for now. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain portrays a 19^th-century man who suddenly finds himself in Medieval England. Because of his knowledge of scientific advancements in the intervening centuries, he is able to wow the people and they think him a magician, rivaling even Merlin.

Perhaps you’ve heard it said that “one man’s magic is another man’s science.” This statement is meant to pooh-pooh any belief in magic where some results are really effected. Aside from charlatans whose magic was/is a con game, this statement is more true than I ever realized before.

In summary, science is philosophical in nature and is a worldview-forming enterprise because it forms our view of reality. Modern science was greatly influenced by practices that were once considered occult to some degree or another. This muddies the waters for us because that boundary line has been blurred to a great extent. Perhaps it’s better to say that it’s been moved to another place.

I was surprised that Pearcey and Thaxton accept these facts uncritically, as have many other Christians to date. I can understand why because I once did myself.

To be continued…
Rob

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[1] Romans 12:2

[2] Principe, Lawrence, History of Science: Antiquity to 1700, video lecture series, (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2002), lecture 1. In 1834, William Whewell (pronounced Hu-ell) coined the term scientist with tongue in cheek. Aldus Huxley said in 1894 that, “The word scientist is about as pleasing as the word electrocution.”

[3] Matthew 2:1,7,16

[4] I’ll grant that some wise men and wise women were more learned than others, not so much scholastically as truly serious about uncovering useful knowledge.

[5] McMullin, Ernan, The Inference that Makes Science (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1995), p. 3. “…the attempt to define ‘the inference that makes science’ is not intended to furnish a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. The issue of demarcation has been actively debated ever since [Karl] Popper made it central to his philosophy of science.”

[6] Pearcey, Nancy R. & Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), pp. 47-49.

[7] Principe, lecture 1.