As outlined in the Introduction, this chapter is a four-part review based on, but not limited to, the information provided in Science and Creation. First, the scientific successes of each culture are described and then the reasons for the “stillbirths” of science within each one. Second, the Old Testament worldview and how that biblical view purified a truly scientific worldview is discussed with ample quotation. Third, a brief presentation of the scientific attitudes of the early Church Fathers is given to show the continuity from the biblical cultures into the Middle Ages. Fourth, a lengthy section that addresses the contributions of ten medieval Christian scholars is given in chronological order to show how the progression toward a breakthrough in scientific thought was based on divine revelation. This is by far the longest chapter of the book, and it covers a lot of history but highlights the aspects relevant to Jaki’s research.
Stillbirths in Ancient Cultures
Stillbirths in Ancient Cultures
“In the cycle of existence I am like a frog in a waterless well.”[62]
History is a curious discipline because although the researcher is searching for facts, the facts are collected by interpreting what the original writer meant to convey. Jaki preferred original sources to secondary ones for that reason.
There is no substitute to the perusal of primary texts, which, incidentally, hardly ever fail to reveal something that has not yet been noticed by others. Engrossment with the secondary literature can readily trap one's vision along tracks that have little in common with the thrust of the primary sources.[63]
Since this is a sifting through of Jaki’s writings on this question about the birth of science, it was tempting to merely repeat what Jaki wrote, but that would have violated the above warning of potential entrapment. Therefore, throughout this chapter, original sources were found, read, quoted, and cited, except for the small amount of instances where footnoted.
Haffner noticed that Jaki even described in The Relevance of Physics that he saw the development of science as an “ongoing process” that is something “genuinely human” and a “mixture of achievements and failures characterized by incessant changes.”[64] Jaki understood that science (even before it was called science) evolved throughout human history. When Jaki referred to the “birth” of modern science (or exact science), he was referring to the application of mathematics (quantification) to physics (objects in motion), the change from classical physics to Newtonian physics, or what some call the Scientific Revolution.[65]
When Jaki coined the term “stillbirth of science” in reference to the Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Muslim, Chinese, and Hindu cultures, he was, therefore, not implying that there was never any progress or breakthroughs in science. He was referring to a specific, but vitally significant, breakthrough. He used that phrase “stillbirth” to demonstrate that no culture before the Christian culture made the leap to measure changes in material objects with quantities in a systematic and self-sustaining “viable” way. Here is how Jaki put it:
It is not a pleasant task to call attention to the obvious. To make others appear to be shortsighted, let alone blind, may easily evoke resentment. But it had to be obvious and clearer than daylight that in none of those cultures, although they lacked no talent and ingenuity, did science become a self-sustaining enterprise in which every discovery generates another. In all those cultures the scientific enterprise came to a standstill. It is this phenomenon which I called the stillbirths of science.[66]
In the 1986 volume of 377 pages, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe, Jaki presented his historical research for these stillbirths.[67] In the briefer book The Savior of Science, he summarized these stillbirths in the first chapter.[68]
The history of science has been presented to modern students (if the history is taught at all) as a linear climb out of darkness, a development of mankind that heightened him to where he is today. This is how the history, for example, was set forth in the 1904 five-volume account, A History of Science, by Henry Smith Williams and Edward Huntington. These authors held that for all the history of mankind, science was developing neatly in a linear fashion, one step necessarily leading to the next, culminating to the present day.
We shall best understand our story of the growth of science if we think of each new principle as a stepping-stone which must fit into its own particular niche; and if we reflect that the entire structure of modern civilization would be different from what it is, and less perfect than it is, had not that particular stepping-stone been found and shaped and placed in position. Taken as a whole, our stepping-stones lead us up and up towards the alluring heights of an acropolis of knowledge, on which stands the Temple of Modern Science. The story of the building of this wonderful structure is in itself fascinating and beautiful.[69]
It is significant to note that Jaki rejects this faulty, but popularly received, stepping-stone, linear historical model for the development of science. Not only would such a stepping-stone model be impossible before the invention of global communication, 1904 obviously did not turn out to be the pinnacle for science they claimed it was. Instead Jaki described the history of science more naturally, as an evolutionary tree that had many dead branches before it flourished into a vital and self-sustaining, living discipline.
Jaki also described the history of science as a theological history. Science is a work of mankind, and as such, it must take into account different cultures and cultural mindsets. Since every culture in the history of man sought God, the evolution of science must take into account the religions of those cultures too and ask some “searching questions.”[70] This is why Jaki takes the analogy another step further in arguing that empirical science–exact science based on quantities, as discussed before–was born of Christianity, which means it was born of a woman, a Virgin Birth. Jaki referred to the dead branches, as it were, on the evolutionary tree as stillbirths, as living entities that developed for a while in a womb (a certain culture) but died before becoming viable as a universal discipline recognized for its own methods.[71]
Science and Creation was not just about the history of civilizations, it was about the history of science “in its relation to civilizations, ancient and modern.”[72] The book centered on the role of religion in civilizations, exhaustively citing prose and verse to confirm the theological convictions that hindered the viable birth of science. Science and Creation treats ancient cultures/periods in this order: India (Hinduism, Buddhism); China (Taoism, Moism, Confucianism); the Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations in pre-Columbian American; Egypt; Mesopotamia and Babylon; Greece; Hebrew (Judaism); the Roman Empire (early Christianity); Arabia (Muslim and Islam); European Middle Ages; the Renaissance; Galileo and Kant; Romanticism; and Modern Science.
As mentioned previously, the Science and Creation volume contains 377 pages, much of which contains references to original and secondary documents. Jaki built the case that was forming in his mind then and crystallized in his later works: There was no shortage of cultures ripe with skill, talent, and yearning in which a scientific birth could have taken place, yet it did not until the Christian Middle Ages, not so much by any monumental breakthrough in ability, but by acknowledging a rational world, a rational mind of man, and an application of mathematics to objects in the real world, a world with an absolute beginning and end of time. While researching this book, Jaki began to realize that the only “viable birth” of science took place in a matrix “that was not merely monotheistic, but also Christologically monotheistic.”[73]
Meanwhile I took immense delight in enlarging my mind by delving into ancient Hindu, Chinese, pre-Columbian American, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek history, into a re-reading of biblical history and of patristic literature. They contained many indications that I was on the right track in unfolding a new vision of the history of science, not attempted beforehand. Some of the indications were a sheer delight to stumble on.[74]
He concluded the book with a speculation that if the psychology o
f the modern world returns to the psychologies of past cultures, symbolized by the treadmill of eternal cycles, science will not survive.
In The Savior of Science, Jaki only devoted the first chapter, which is forty-eight pages long, to the “stillbirths” of science, and it is a summary of the work found in Science and Creation. That chapter, however, only considered six ancient religions and civilizations, following a commentary on the progress of science and a commentary on what Jaki means by “stillbirths” of science. He addressed the religions and civilizations in a different order than in Science and Creation: Egypt, India, China, Babylon, Greece, and Arabia. The reason for this order appears to be in terms of the religion, first the pantheistic religions which did not communicate with each other and therefore did not form a “critical mass of knowledge resulting in a chain reaction, or rise to the intellectual temperature where self-ignition takes place” (Egypt, India, and China) and then the polytheistic and monotheistic ones which developed in “direct succession” of one another (Babylon, Assyria, and Persia to the Greece, and from them to the Arabia).[75] His purpose in that book, and elsewhere, was to further the argument, an “entirely original” argument, that the birth of Christ was “The Birth that Saved Science.”[76]
For the remainder of this section, the cultures taken up in The Savior of Science will be reviewed, but not exactly as presented in that book. The review, having the benefit of Jaki’s hindsight offered in his intellectual autobiography and the benefit of wide accessibility to resources through the internet, will include some of the references Jaki used in both books, along with some other resources to support his thesis, with a preference for the examples that would be most beneficial to someone arguing this claim in current times.
The difficulty in making this argument that science was born of Christianity is that anyone who is unfamiliar with the revolutionary historiography put forth in Science and Creation will obscure the conclusion by pointing out all the contributions to science that other cultures made, contributions that Jaki does not ignore. No legitimate criticism can be made unless Jaki’s detailed work in Science and Creation has actually been read, considered, and if desired, verified. What follows are the historical details useful in understanding his approach. The scientific successes of each culture will be described and then the reasons for the stillbirths of science within each one, as Jaki saw it, will be presented. What will emerge is the meaning of the opening quote, that all stillbirths were owed to a worldview that the whole universe, including man, is an eternal cycle of no escape.
Egypt
The first stillbirth Jaki discussed in the Savior of Science is the stillbirth of science in Egypt, “an Egypt to be buried in the sand.”[77] In ancient Egypt (from about 3000 B.C.), impressive discoveries and achievements were recorded in history. The Egyptians constructed grand pyramids of such majesty and awe that no one today knows how they did it. They invented hieroglyphics, a highly developed form of phonetic writing which may have been the greatest intellectual feat of its kind. They had medical arts. They were successful in using the Nile as an abundant resource. They adopted better weaponry and the use of chariots from other countries. The Egyptian king, Wehimbre Neco, who ruled from 610–595 B.C., sent a fleet to sail West, and the sailors traveled from the Arabian gulf into the southern ocean for three years until they returned to Egypt.[78]
Egyptian social life revolved around practical skill. For the proper distribution of grain and other commodities, ancient Egypt relied on a system of arithmetic in which they took stock of and divided out resources with impressive book-keeping skills.[79] They invented a decimal system with special glyphs for powers of ten up to one million. Their calendar endured uninterrupted use during all of Egyptian history, and the Hellenistic astronomers adopted it for their calculations.[80] Ptolemy based his tables on this calendar in the Almagest on Egyptian years, as did Copernicus to some extent.[81]
Ancient Egyptian craftsmen showed great ingenuity in using their tools. They had a simple but effective method of producing sheets of paper from the leaves of the papyrus plant, much more efficient than the use of animal skin as writing substrates.[82] They were the first to produce plywood as many as six layers deep and made of mixtures of woods. Carpentry among Egyptians used methods of joining wood in intricate patterns for the hulls of boats as well as inlaying, veneering, and overlaying techniques.[83] The burial chambers of Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty from the sixteenth century B.C. have received much publicity for their highly developed architectural planning containing secret chambers that even space-age technology and sensitive cosmic-ray methods could not detect.[84]
The pyramids, however, constitute the real mystery in Egyptian marvel and ability. Their proportions were enormous. The Egyptian stonecutter placed the huge blocks of stone together with only 1/50 of an inch separation at the base of the pyramid and covered them with marble plates of such smoothness that the pyramids looked like mirrors.[85] They managed to quarry, shape, and polish great stones despite the fact that they had no metal tools. Transportation of the great stones was done with wooden sleds. The overall master plan of the pyramids formed a superbly constructed facility to ensure the king’s journey to the Sun God.[86]
Even with these achievements, the underlying theology and cultural mindset regarding the universe thwarted scientific advancement. “In their deepest meaning the pyramids were symbols of a conception about the world that nipped in the bud all scientific endeavors.”[87] The Egyptians were caught up in an animistic, cyclic outlook that made them insensitive to science as well as history. In their hymns they pictured most parts of the world as animal gods, the whole world itself being one huge animal often depicted as a serpent bent into a circle. In a hymn from ancient texts, the animistic, organismic, rhythmic, and cyclic worldview is explicitly described:
He [the Indwelling Soul] it was who made the universe in that he copulated with his fist and took the pleasure of emission. I bent right around myself, I was encircled in my coils, one who made a place for himself in the midst of his coils. His utterance was what came forth from his own mouth.[88]
The Egyptians believed that the circularity in the sky and in nature was proof that the cosmos was changeless and cyclical too, and that single events or processes had little or no significance, which meant that they “simply could not serve as the carriers of special intellectual content.”[89]
The Egyptians had the talent and the skill to notice that everything in the material world is in motion and is, thus, observable and quantifiable. They had the talent to realize that the scientific method could be applied repeatedly to answer questions about the universe, to determine scientific laws. They had the ability to innovate and the ability to communicate it. They demonstrated the ability to learn from other cultures. Science could have been born in ancient Egypt, but it was not. All of that progress came to a standstill, a stillbirth.
Jaki also pointed out that to argue that “the Egyptians of old failed to develop more science because they did not feel the need for more is an all too transparent form of begging a most serious question,” a conceited psychology.[90] If they had been but an animal species, they would have never even tried to innovate. They would have continued on their way with things as they were, just as all other animals do. There was plenty of evidence that they did long for something better. During the reign of Akhenaton, the Pharaoh known for abandoning traditional Egyptian polytheism and introducing worship of Aten, a monotheistic religion’s view, Egyptians responded in great number to dispose of long-established rigid art forms and seek “warmly humane representations of life and nature.”[91] Egyptians seemed to want something better.
Yet after Akhenaton’s death the traditional religion was restored and Akhenaton became archived as an enemy.[92] The longing is evident in the poetry the Egyptians sang, the inspiration they took from the animal kingdom in their carvings of animal and human combined bodies, effigies which now are, as Jaki put it, “buried in the sand as if to symbolize
that there was no future in store for the Egypt of old.”[93] In a culture of pantheism, where the people saw themselves as part of an animate universe, modern science could have been born, but was not. Eternity consisted in assimilating to the cyclic motion of nature; souls that reached the stars were considered transfigured spirits absorbed into the great rhythm of the universe.[94]
China
There is so much written about China’s rich and illustrious past that no case could ever be made – — from the Shang Dynasty (1523–1028 B.C.) to the Ch’ing Dynasty (A.D. 1644–1912 ) ) — that there was no progress in civilization, art, or literature. Likewise, volumes have been written on the question of the history of science and Chinese civilization. In Science and Creation and The Savior of Science, Jaki referred to the extensive research of British biochemist Joseph Needham.[95] In seven volumes comprised of twenty-seven books, Needham and his team of international collaborators reviewed the history of science and technology in China. The massive work was eventually published by the Cambridge University Press under the title Science and Civilisation in China; and the project, which began in 1954, continues to the present day.[96]
A brief overview of the content of these volumes will demonstrate the extent of cultural development in China and the futility of ignoring such a rich history. Needham’s first volume (1954) is an introduction to the rest of the work. Volume Two (1956) covers the history of scientific thought in China, including the organic naturalism of the great Taoist school, the scientific philosophy of the Mohists and Logicians, and the quantitative materialism of the Legalists.[97] Volume Three and the three-part Volume Four (1959–1971) addresses mathematics and the sciences of the heavens and earth, physics, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and nautics. Volume Five (1985–1999) has thirteen parts: the first on paper and printing; the second through the fifth on spagyrical discovery and inventions including gold and immortality, cinnabar elixirs, synthetic insulin, apparatus, and physiological alchemy; the sixth and seventh on military technology from missiles and sieges to the “gunpowder epic;” the ninth on the textile industry while the eighth and tenth are still works in progress; the eleventh on ferrous metallurgy; the twelfth on ceramic technology; and the thirteenth on mining. Volume Six (1986–2000) deals with botany, agriculture, agroindustry, and forestry in the first three parts and fermentations, food science, and medicine in the fifth and sixth parts, while the fourth part of Volume Six is still in progress. Finally, Volume Seven (1998–2004) covers language and logic, and then gives the general conclusions and reflections.[98] The purpose of listing these volumes published over a span of six decades is to demonstrate that intensive work has been devoted to the history of science in China, and Jaki was aware of this. He acknowledged it in the development of the “stillbirths” argument.
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