Science Was Born of Christianity

by Stacy Trasancos

  Pierre Duhem, writing early in the twentieth century, saw the condemnation of 1277 as an attack on entrenched Aristotelianism, especially Aristotelian physics, and therefore as the birth certificate of modern science. [. . .] But to place the emphasis here is to miss the primary significance of the condemnations. Duhem viewed the condemnations as the key event in the shattering of Aristotelian orthodoxy, but in 1277 no such orthodoxy existed; the boundaries and the power relationship between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology were still being negotiated, and the degree to which Aristotelianism would acquire the status of orthodoxy was not yet clear.[394]

  As said already, Jaki noted in his 1974 book Science and Creation that one may therefore look with Duhem at the decree of 1277 as the “starting point of a new era in scientific thinking, provided it is kept in mind that the decree expressed rather than produced that climate of thought.”[395] If any “orthodoxy” existed, it was Christian orthodoxy, not Aristotelian, and Duhem knew this. It is doubtful that after writing the ten volumes of his Système du monde Duhem thought that Aristotle’s teaching was orthodox for Christians. Aristotelian thought was orthodox to Greeks and was accepted by the Muslims, so any Christian philosopher who studied the Arab and Greek texts had to deal with the entire system and not merely dismiss what contradicted Christianity without explanation. Obviously this systematic examination took time, so the delineations were not immediately clear. Lindberg referenced Duhem’s Études sur Léonard de Vinci to support the claim that Duhem thought the condemnations shattered the Aristotelian orthodoxy, but that does not seem to be what Duhem meant. In that reference, Duhem actually wrote: “The Christian orthodoxy therefore required, it seems, a waiver of various principles of Aristotelian physics. [. . .] If we were to assign a date to the birth of modern science, we would probably choose 1277.”[396]

  Duhem certainly did not seem to suggest that Aristotelian thought was “orthodox” before the Condemnations of 1277. Nonetheless, Lindberg was clear that he disagreed with Duhem.

  Lindberg viewed the Condemnations of 1277 more as a confrontation between “liberal and radical efforts to extend the reach and secure the autonomy of philosophy” and a “conservative backlash” of a “sizable and influential group of traditionalists not yet ready to accept the brave new world proposed by the . . . Aristotelians.”[397] In his opinion, “to put the event in its proper light, the condemnations represent a victory not for modern science but for conservative thirteenth-century theology.”[398] He saw the condemnations as a “ringing declaration of the subordination of philosophy to theology.”[399] His commentary gives the impression he viewed the Condemnations of 1277 negatively, but considering that this subordination purified and Christianized Aristotelian physics of its pantheism, that “ringing declaration” can also be viewed positively for the development of modern science. At the very least, it was recognition of the limits of philosophy.

  Even though his book title indicated that it was about the “beginnings” of Western science, Lindberg did not actually pinpoint a beginning, but several revolutions that may have led to the beginning. Neither did Lindberg clearly define science. In the first chapter of his book, he wrote that “we have no choice but to accept a diverse set of meanings as legitimate and do our best to determine from the context of usage what the term ‘science’ means on any specific occasion.”[400] This is not to criticize his approach, for it is the masterful work of a master historian, but to contrast it with Jaki’s approach and to defend Jaki’s approach as the one that offers more insight into how science can be advanced in the future. No historian can be absolutely objective in interpreting historical times. (A scientist might even say that it is easier to succumb to bias in the study of historical data than in the assessment of scientific data because history deals with human persons with free will as data points. Quantitative data has no volition of its own; the numbers speak for themselves.) At least for Jaki, who was a theologian, there was an admitted lens through which he explored the history of science–he studied the history of theology along with it to see how the two affected each other in different cultures.

  While both historians delved into the scientific beginnings in ancient cultures, Jaki began by defining what science is and always should have been even before the importance of applying mathematics to observations in nature was finally realized, and he started asking questions about why that importance failed to be realized in some cultures and was ultimately realized in the Christian West. One of Lindberg’s ending conclusions was that Alexandre Koyré “put his finger in the right place” regarding the underlying source of revolutionary novelty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a metaphysical and cosmological revolution toward a view of nature that was mechanical rather than animistic, which Jaki would have agreed is partially true. However, Koyré rejected the century of experimentation after Buridan and Oresme as the real beginning of a new scientific outlook, which is a direct contradiction of Jaki’s conclusion.

  Koyré also had a disagreement with another historian, Alistair Cameron Crombie. Lindberg wrote of both historians, noting that they traded opinions in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Crombie argued, against Koyré, that “a systematic theory of experimental science was understood by enough [thirteenth- and fourteenth-century] philosophers . . . to produce the methodological revolution to which modern science owes its origins.” For Crombie it was the beginning of experimentation that ushered in the Scientific Revolution. While Koyré and Crombie disagreed on the beginning of a new scientific outlook, Jaki disagreed with them both. He did not see the new outlook as a result of either a new view of nature or experimentation, but of something more fundamental.

  Jaki’s reply in Science and Creation was that Koyré did not consider in sufficient detail that the new mechanical view of nature had a great deal to do with the theological rejection of Greek pantheism.[401] Historians of science, as respecters of facts, are not expected to show much sympathy for theological underpinnings, but even so Jaki insisted on a broader view of the facts and he asserted one large fact that cannot be denied by anyone studying the history of science, the “collective faith of the Middle Ages is a fact of history, and so is its enormous impact on the modern mind so proud of its science.”[402] The emphasis was Jaki’s.

  Jaki also wrote in his 2002 autobiography that he was aware that the suggestion that science was owed substantially to Christianity, indeed to Christ’s birth, would exclude him from certain scholarly circles. He noted that Crombie, being a fellow Catholic, could have lent his theological work more support, but Crombie “chose to look the other way.”[403] The relationship between the two men is perplexing. Crombie came to most of Jaki’s Fremantle lectures in 1976, the lectures upon which he based the book The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin, but since Crombie had slighted Duhem in his much earlier 1959 book, Medieval and Early Modern Science, Jaki did not expect Crombie to “take much delight in [his] thesis,” according to his autobiography.[404]

  Jaki and Crombie were both members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Crombie was elected in 1994, four years after Jaki was appointed in 1990 as an honorary member by Pope John Paul II. Jaki even gave a lecture about science and culture in 1994 at the Pontifical Academy when Crombie was elected. The two men met, but for whatever reason, they never agreed. Their meeting at the Pontifical Academy in 1994 was their last meeting, and Jaki wrote in his autobiography that Crombie’s position that Greek rationality was the origin of science remained unchanged.[405] For reasons given in the bulk of this book, Jaki could never have agreed with that decidedly un-theological conclusion. Crombie published a major work that same year, three thick volumes of entitled Style of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. Of that work, among other strong criticism, Jaki wrote that Crombie’s few references to Duhem “remain a classic in disproportionality.”[406]

  The historian Edward Grant, on the other hand, referenced both Duhem and Jaki considerably in his books, though he puts more e
mphasis on the Catholic learning institutions than on Catholic theology. Either way, the two are hardly separable. Grant prefaces his 2010 book, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages, with a quote from another of his books from 1996, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages:

  I would argue that in the Latin Middle Ages of Western Europe an intellectual environment was established that proved conducive to the emergence of early modern science. The new intellectual environment was generated and shaped by “certain attitudes and institutions that were generated in Western society from approximately 1175 to 1500. These attitudes and institutions were directed toward learning as a whole and toward science and natural philosophy in particular. Together they coalesced into what may be appropriately called ‘the foundations of modern science.’ They were new to Europe and unique to the world. Because there is nothing to which we can compare this extraordinary process, no one can say whether it was fast or slow.”[407]

  Grant seems to credit the institutional apparatus, that is the universities, as the chief harbinger of science.

  In 2005 another Catholic historian, political analyst, and New York Times best-selling author actually did delve into Jaki’s thesis and defend it at length. Thomas E. Woods published a book titled How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. The book covered a broad range of topics including the contributions of Catholic monks, universities, art, architecture, international law, economics, charities, and morality. The longest chapter in his book was the fifth chapter, “The Church and Science,” which he divided into sections dealing with the history of the Galileo Affair, the Cathedral Schools of Chartres and the Condemnations of 1277, the scientists who were also priests (like Jaki), and the scientific achievements of the Jesuits. In an entire ten page section, “God ‘Ordered All Things by Measure, Number, Weight,’” Woods presented Jaki’s work regarding the history of science and he gave an accurate description of the “stillbirths” of science in other cultures, the influence of the biblical worldview of the Old Testament, the differences between Aristotelian thought and Christian thought, and the significance of Buridan’s impetus theory. He acknowledged Duhem’s contributions and praised Jaki as a “prizewinning historian of science–with doctorates in theology and physics–whose scholarship has helped give Catholicism and Scholasticism their due in the development of Western science.”[408]

  Following in much the same thought as Whitehead, Grant, and Lindberg, another historian, James Hannam, a Catholic convert, published a book in 2011 titled The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution.[409] Anyone familiar with Jaki’s work would expect a mention of it in such a book, yet not a single reference to Jaki can be found in the twenty-one chapters, suggestions for further reading, or extensive bibliography. Duhem is only mentioned once in the introduction:

  The fight back began 100 years ago with the work of a French physicist and historian called Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). While researching an unrelated matter, he came across a vast body of unread medieval manuscripts. What Duhem found in these dusty tomes amazed him. He quickly realized that science in the Middle Ages had been sophisticated, highly regarded, and essential to later developments. His work was carried forward by the American Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) and the German Anneliese Maier (1905–1971), who refined and expanded it. Today, the doyens of medieval science are Edward Grant and David Lindberg. They have now retired, but their students already occupy exalted places in the universities of North America. As scholars explore more and more manuscripts, they reveal achievements of the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages that are ever more remarkable.

  Popular opinion, journalistic cliché, and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages was a period of enormous advances in science, technology, and culture.[410]

  This idea that the Christian Middle Ages were the foundations of modern science seems to have taken root among historians of science, but without a real appreciation for the Christian theological roots of it. The trending discourse currently is to acknowledge that modern science developed in the Christian Middle Ages, but to downplay the Christian contribution, or even to call it a myth.

  The latter is the case for the Roman Catholic ethicist, Benjamin Wiker whose 2011 book was entitled, The Catholic Church and Science: Answering the Questions, Exposing the Myths. Wiker addressed as the “First Confusion” the myth that the Catholic Church is at “war with science” and that “faith is at war with reason.”[411] Wiker excellently dispelled the myth as promised with reference to the nineteenth-century historians who promoted the now-exposed, thanks to Duhem, false myth that the Middle Ages were a period of intellectual stagnation. Of John William Draper, who is infamous for his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, Wiker wrote that “although he was certainly an excellent scientist, as an historian of the relationship of the Church to science he was a mere anti-Catholic propagandist.”[412] Indeed, posterity seems to view Draper this way. Wiker also described how the Church was a generous patron and protector of reason and faith, but then toward the end of this chapter, he added “an additional warning.”

  As historian of science Noah Efron smartly states, “For every myth there is an equal and opposite myth.” While we might not want to call it a “myth,” it is true that a certain kind of reaction to the warfare thesis has occurred among Christians who, tired of the drubbing given to the Faith by the secularists, are zealous to show that Christianity was actually the source, the cause of modern science. It’s not difficult to understand how this reaction arose. When historians sifted through the great mound of evidence, reaching way back into the Middle Ages, that had been neglected by the Drapers and Whites, they began to recover the full extent to which Christians had contributed to the rise of modern science. To some of them (especially to irritated Christians), it was as natural to overplay the evidence as it had been for secular materialists to ignore it.

  The general argument goes something like this: “Modern science was born in a particular culture, a Christian culture, and we can trace its antecedents backward all the way into the early Middle Ages. No other culture—Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Babylonian, Islamic, African, Mayan—ever gave us anything like modern science. Therefore, the cause of modern science’s success must lie, ultimately, in Christianity, and the more we dig into the Christian origins of modern science, the farther back we find positive evidence for the sustained, sophisticated developments that underlay modern science.”[413]

  The “general argument” Wiker put in quotes seems to be a paraphrase of Jaki’s work, but Jaki’s name is not specifically mentioned. The reference for the passage is a chapter written by Noah Efron (mentioned in the beginning of the quote above), “That Christianity Gave Birth to Modern Science.” This essay is found in the 2009 compilation of essays, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald Numbers who, like Koyré, Needham, Grant, and Lindberg, received the George Sarton Medal for “a lifetime of scholarly achievement” in the history of science.[414] Numbers also is a self-described agnostic, and Noah Efron is a Fellow for the think-tank for Israeli politics, Shaharit.

  While a different faith or a lack of faith certainly should not be taken as a lack of credibility as a historian, which would be presumptuous and arrogant, it is fair nonetheless to wonder why the decades of research from an internationally acclaimed Catholic physicist, theologian, historian, author of over fifty works, Templeton Prize winner, and honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences was not at least mentioned before the essence of his work was dismissed as mythical. Efron quotes Jaki in the opening of his essay, so it is reasonable to assume that Wiker knew the chapter referenced Jaki’s work. In Efron’s essay the quote from Jaki is the sole reference to Jaki, however. Efron does not present any of Jaki’s work in support of the claim that “science was born of Christianity.” Instead he addresses the Protestant historians
(mentioned before) who systematically ignored Jaki. Then he deems all of it a myth without actually addressing Jaki’s research.

  Wiker concluded his first chapter by asserting that it is the “position of the Church” to reject this “myth” of the Christian contribution to the birth of science on the doctrinal case that science is a human endeavor because man is made in the image of God, and therefore uses human reason to understand the order of nature.[415] Perhaps Wiker did not intend to dismiss Jaki’s work specifically. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with it. Perhaps he did not realize who Jaki was when he referenced Efron’s essay with Jaki’s work quoted at the beginning. The benefit of the doubt ought to be given, but at the same time a clarification needs to be made. While it is true that the Church would reject a caricature of Jaki’s argument that the Church was “the source” or “the cause” of modern science, it is not true Jaki’s argument that science was “born” of Christianity, properly understood, has been rejected by the Church.

  After all, Pope St. John Paul II appointed Jaki an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences well after the publication of his books putting forth this claim. Pope Benedict XVI honored Jaki in November 2006 while receiving the members of the Academy, of which Jaki was by then an honorary member of sixteen years, by saying, “Fr. Jaki, I thank you for the books you write on science, religion, and creation.”[416] Furthermore, in the announcement of Jaki’s death, sent to Jaki’s fellow Academicians by the President, Nicola Cabibbo, and the Chancellor, Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, this aspect of Jaki’s work was identified specifically: