The Subtle Influence of Secular Ideas - Part 2 - A Tree is Known by Its Fruit

Jesus said that a tree is known by its fruit.[1] A good tree bears good fruit and a corrupt tree corrupt fruit. Even so, discerning whether the fruit is good or corrupt can be a challenge. If a witch doctor heals a man of a disease modern medicine can’t help with, is that good or corrupt fruit?[2] Some would say healing is good fruit, and this is a viable alternative to medicine, but we can’t look solely at the apparent benefit gained and ignore other spiritual implications. We have to look at the fruit the way our Heavenly Father looks at the fruit. The apparently-good fruit may have a hook buried in it like a fishing lure. In the case of the witch doctor, it should suffice to recognize the involvement of ungodly spiritual powers of whatever sort and decide without further evidence that the fruit is corrupt and that there is definitely a hook someplace in it, even though it may not be readily discernible.

With modern science and technology, our daily lives have been benefited immensely, and the fruit appears good. Yet, I want to look at what effect these same scientific advances have had on us as Westerners and as Christians – look at more of the fruit than just that which seems beneficial. I’ll look later at the foundation of modern science to see if it is sound or not. Like a witch doctor, if the tree is found to be corrupt from God’s point of view, then we will have corrupt fruit no matter how lovely it looks – no matter what the apparent benefits may be. A perfect example, of course, is Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit looked fine, but it was deadly. As it turns out, both some of the fruit and the tree of science are seriously flawed in multiple ways, and Christians have historically been unaware or intentionally ignored the danger signs.

I want to begin with the following comment by Herbert Butterfield regarding the general effect of the Scientific Revolution on the West.

… [The Scientific Revolution] changed the character of men’s habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality …[3]

Basically, the Scientific Revolution was not simply the addition of a couple of new ideas or innovations – mere novelties to make life safer, a little easier or more interesting – rather, it not only overturned the way mankind approached scientific knowledge, the Scientific Revolution overturned the foundation of the way Western man viewed reality. Our worldview was fundamentally transformed – for better or worse. Carver T. Yu, however, offers this Asian critique of the fruit born of the Scientific Revolution in the West.

Liang Chi Chao [1873-1929], a politician and philosopher, … became greatly alarmed by the cultural state of affairs he found [in Europe]. As he saw it, the former dream of the omnipotence of science has collapsed in the West. Western science did provide the driving force for material growth, yet the mechanistic world-view implicit in it had rendered moral responsibility meaningless, thus withdrawing moral restraint ... The sense of human freedom was also greatly eroded by the mechanistic, deterministic world-view. The meaning of personal existence was thus becoming more and more ambiguous. … ‘For the last hundred years, Science has brought material abundance more than all the past three thousand years could bring. But man has not become happier. Instead, he is swamped with spiritual predicaments. He is like a traveller lost in the desert; seeing a big shadow from afar, he struggles to go forward, thinking that the shadow may be his guide. After staggering for some distance, the shadow suddenly disappears, and he is overwhelmed with despair.’[4]

Yu and Chao, like many Christian authors of the last 30 years, identify the loss of a moral compass and meaning of life evident in the West. None of the Christian authors I’ve read, however, have linked it to the Scientific Revolution like these Chinese thinkers and some Western historians and philosophers of science. In fact, the authors of The Soul of Science, Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, professing Christians, embrace science as one of the wonders produced uniquely by Christianity and, in their opinion, only a truly Christian worldview could have produced science and all the marvels ensuing from it.[5]

What is interesting in their book is that they fail to show any substantive contribution of a Biblical worldview to the development of science, other than the participation of professing Christians.[6] They do, however, provide extensive evidence for substantive contributions from Greek philosophy, pagan worldviews and occult arts, all of which are antithetical to Biblical teaching. They show this without any critical concern or justification for accepting these origins, nor is there any analysis as to whether there might have been a deleterious effect on Christianity and the West. These pagan ideas were synthesized by Christians and briefly merged with Christian theology until science liberated itself from Christianity and theology not long after Galileo’s confrontation with the Church.

Briefly, in defense of Pearcey and Thaxton, Christians for centuries have uncritically accepted a plethora of ideas from all kinds of pagan sources. Harold P. Nebelsick reports the initial hesitation of Christians in the twelfth century which was quite short lived.

From the middle of the twelfth century onward, the writings of Aristotle began to flow into France from Spain. These were accompanied by the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 193-217) and Simplicius, as well as mystical pseudo-Platonic and Arab works on alchemy. So shocked was the West at the importation of this new knowledge, that in 1209 a provincial council in Paris decreed that neither Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy nor his commentaries should be read either in public or in private. The University of Paris passed the prohibition in 1215. The thought of Aristotle, however, soon overcame the opposition. Within forty years of the prohibition, it had so moved into the culture that, as Dreyer tells us, Aristotle was not only accepted but in 1254 orders were issued prescribing the number of hours which should be devoted to explaining his treatises.[7]

Günter Howe (1908-1968) reports the awe with which Western intellectuals received Aristotle and other Greek philosophers.

…when Greek science which accompanied the works of Aristotle came into the Christian West at the end of the Middle Ages, the Occident saw with wonder and shock what tremendous accomplishments the human mind was able to bring about ‘without the light of divine revelation’.[8]

Christians were thoroughly impressed, awed and envious of such knowledge. It reminds me very much of Israel demanding a king of Samuel so that they could be like the pagan nations around them. They rejected God as their King and preferred the world’s way.[9] They complained that Samuel’s sons were corrupt, but it’s interesting that despite the less than ideal situation at the time, it was in God’s eyes better than setting a king over Israel. In the same way, the situation in the thirteenth century was surely far from ideal, yet Christians were willing to delve into whatever the world had to offer, even at some sacrifice of revelation. Butterfield takes this thought a step further.

The process was not stopped by any reluctance on the part of Catholic Europe to learn from the infidel Arabians or the Byzantine schismatics or even the pagan Greeks. Nor is it known that there was any opportunity which the middle ages missed – any great store of science that they turned their backs upon because it was tainted with paganism or infidelity.[10]

One example Nebelsick offers is that of Johannes de Sacrobosco (c.1195 – c. 1256), a noted English intellectual and astronomer of his day.

Sacrobosco, in contrast to his Christian predecessors, gave no hint of any interference of biblical cosmology with ‘scientific’ cosmology. Nor did he seem aware of the fact that classical understanding of the universe was built upon theological presuppositions which were quite antithetical to the teachings of the Christian faith.[11]

Christians for centuries have uncritically accepted all manner of thinking contrary to a truly Christian worldview – at least it’s been uncritical from the standpoint of identifying the pagan and occult source as potentially damaging to faith. Somehow, there has been the thinking that science specifically, and reason more generally, is quite safe despite warnings from the Lord in various passages of the Old and New Testament, but those will have to wait for another post.

This thinking has carried over for centuries and even into the Scientific Revolution. This awe and respect for science, which manifests in so many ways, is with us even today, and Pearcey and Thaxton are understandably under its spell like the vast majority of Western Christians.

Regarding the moral decline in the West, Christians generally attribute their concerns to post-modernism, relativism and the like without any explanation or analysis as to where these ideologies may have come from. One reason we fail to connect it to science is that, while science divorced itself from Christianity, Western Christianity has embraced science wholeheartedly, with the exception of the Theory of Evolution. Much needs to be said on this, but for now I want to state that I believe that Western Christianity has come to identify with and even base much of theology on science and even interprets much of Scripture in light of science. This is especially true with the advance of post-modernism. Christians find deterministic science to be a kind of safe haven in the storm of post-modernism, yet I believe it to be anything but safe and Christian because of its origin and demonstrable consequences.

What I want to point out for the moment, however, is that some outside of Western Christianity are historically seeing science as a major cause of a significant shift in worldview that is at the root of what concerns Christians today, and Christians are missing it. Science, however, isn’t the whole root. Greek philosophy, the Greco-Roman worldview more generally, and various occult arts pursued in the name of science are right there, too. I’d like to call Christians to at least look critically at what we believe to be a good tree bearing seemingly good fruit. It seems to be barbed.

In my next post, I want to present evidence linking advances in science with this decline in Western culture through some specific examples. I think it will become clear that science isn’t a neutral element that can be used for good or evil. Rather, it is an insidious poison carrying the West far away from a truly Christian worldview and the Western Church with it. The fruit should make evident the type of tree bearing it. Later on, we will see that we really shouldn’t be surprised that this fruit is coming forth.

Rob

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[1] Matthew 12:33

[2] Most Western readers might think this a fictitious case, but there are testimonies of many instances in much, if not all, of the non-Western world today.

[3] Butterfield, Herbert, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 (New York: The Free Press, 1957, 5^th ed. 1966), p. 7.

[4] Yu, Carver T., Being and Relation: A Theological Critique of Western Dualism and Individualism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), pp. xiii-xiv – italics mine.

[5] Pearcey, Nancy R. & Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), p. 17 ff.

[6] They also state that Kepler was driven by his Christian worldview to resolve an eight-minute discrepancy in the orbit of Mars, but this is highly debatable and the only attempt to show a Christian contribution in content to science.

[7] Nebelsick, Harold P., Circles of God: Theology and Science from the Greeks to Copernicus (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. 120 – italics mine.

[8] Nebelsick, p. 82 – italics mine.

[9] 1 Samuel 8:1-7

[10] Butterfield, p. 89 – italics mine.

[11] Nebelsick, p. 125.