Science Was Born of Christianity Read online

  Listen to me, then, you that are my sons, that follow, to your happiness, in the paths I show you; listen to the teaching that will make you wise, instead of turning away from it.[234]

  The Old Testament is the story of the unity of cosmic and human history. The Maker of the World is also the Shepherd of His People.[235] The Book of Wisdom was written in Alexandria around the first century before Christ as Jewish thinkers came into contact with Hellenistic learning in Alexandria. There was a cultural refinement between the polytheistic nature worship of the Greeks and the creation ex nihilo in the unique worldview of the people of the Covenant.[236] The author of the Book of Wisdom appreciates the knowledge of the Hellenistic culture but views it through the perspective gained by a belief in a Creator of the universe, the source of all wisdom:

  Sure knowledge he has imparted to me of all that is;

  how the world is ordered, what influence have the elements,

  how the months have their beginning, their middle, and their ending,

  how the sun’s course alters and the seasons revolve,

  how the years have their cycles, the stars their places.

  To every living thing its own breed, to every beast its own moods;

  the winds rage, and men think deep thoughts;

  the plants keep their several kinds, and each root has its own virtue;

  all the mysteries and all the surprises of nature were made known to me;

  wisdom herself taught me, that is the designer of them all.[237]

  The Hellenistic Jews held a sacred respect for the Two Books of Maccabees where the first biblical appearance of the phrase creation ex nihilo is found.[238] It is the story of the mother who was martyred after watching her seven sons be tortured and martyred first. The sons were tortured as she watched because they refused to break God’s command and eat the flesh of swine. Their tongues were cut out, scalps torn off, hands and feet mutilated, while the mother and remaining brothers stood by. Then each one was roasted alive, maimed and suffering as they were. The brothers comforted each other as they died bravely, “God sees true,” they said, “and will not allow us to go uncomforted.”[239] As they died, the mother continued to hearten her sons:

  Into this womb you came, who knows how? Not I quickened, not I the breath of life gave you, nor fashioned the bodies of you one by one! Man’s birth, and the origin of all things, he devised who is the whole world’s Maker; and shall he not mercifully give the breath of life back to you, that for his law’s sake hold your lives so cheap?[240]

  Outraged at the defiance of his authority, the king turned to the youngest and only still-living son whom the mother counseled in her native tongue:

  Nine months in the womb I bore thee, three years at the breast fed thee, reared thee to be what thou art; and now, my son, this boon grant me. Look round at heaven and earth and all they contain; bethink thee that of all this, and mankind too, God made out of nothing. Of this butcher have thou no fear; claim rightful share among thy brethren in yonder inheritance of death; so shall the divine mercy give me back all my sons at once.[241]

  Jaki tied this story to the history of science because it demonstrates the radically different view of creation held by the Old Testament cultures. He explains, “No martyrdom with a hope of bodily resurrection was ever inspired by a Demiourgos whose ‘creative’ power consisted in the ability to manipulate the already existing ‘formless’ matter into actual shapes.”[242] The Demiourgos (also called Demiurge) is the name for the Maker or Creator of the world in Platonic and Gnostic philosophy. This intensity of martyrdom is relevant to the uniqueness of Jaki’s insight into the history of science and the saving Birth of Christ, the core of his theological fullness. The faith in the mercy of God the Creator was not just an intellectual exercise, it was held so strongly that believers would give up their lives before denying the laws and the faithfulness of God.

  Nor was the view of the cosmos an independent view held by cultural thinkers trying to reconcile the search for God with what they observed in nature; it was a view that originated from what God revealed in Scripture to Moses, to the prophets, and to His people. This view did not suddenly come into Christian thought after the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; it was fulfilled by those events and revelations. Christians already saw the universe as a work of the Creator who is a personal God and not creation itself. They saw the order in the universe originating from the same source as the order of the laws, and the stability of creation gave witness to the faithfulness of God who loves all that exists and holds nothing of what He made in abhorrence.[243] He is a God who holds everything in existence and can destroy it in one blow, or interact in the history of mankind in the same manner, because He rules the cosmos and “ordered all things by measure, number, and weight.”[244]

  Early Christianity

  Early Christianity

  “Let none of you worship the sun. Let no one deify the universe; rather let him seek after the creator of the universe.”[245]

  The mindset toward nature and the mindset toward religion were united, and this basic, intrinsic psychology was present in the Old Testament as well as in the New, thriving among the early Christians. If an imperfect religious mindset caused the stillbirths for the cyclic eternal “cosmic treadmills” of Egypt, India, China, Babylon, and Greece, then the break from that psychology is most significant. This devotion to the Old Testament worldview is seen, for instance, in the early Church of the Roman Empire’s ancient catechesis which contained a striking number of allusions to this same psalm mentioned in the previous section.

  The Lord is my shepherd; how can I lack anything?

  He gives me a resting-place where there is green pasture,

  leads me out to the cool water’s brink, refreshed and content.

  As in honour pledged, by sure paths he leads me;

  dark be the valley about my path,

  hurt I fear none while he is with me;

  thy rod, thy crook are my comfort.

  Envious my foes watch, while thou dost spread a banquet for me;

  richly thou dost anoint my head with oil, well filled my cup.

  All my life thy loving favour pursues me;

  through the long years the Lord’s house shall be my dwelling-place.[246]

  In the writings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Ambrose, Didymus of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and St. Cyprian, among others, a catechetical reference to this psalm is found.[247] The shepherd is of course a reference to Christ. The pasture is the fresh and green words of Scripture that nourishes the hearts of believers and gives them spiritual strength, a place of repose. The cool, still water is the water of Baptism where sin is destroyed and a new creature is born. The sacraments, being protective, lead on a sure path safe from fear or harm from demons. The rod and the staff are understood to be the outpouring of the Holy Spirit who guides. On the Paschal night, the newly-baptized catechumens are led to the table prepared for them, the Eucharist, to assist at Mass for the first time. Their heads are anointed with oil, the sign of the Cross, a mark of protection and of identity. The overflowing cup, the chalice, is the Eucharistic wine, a sober inebriation that fills the heavy and gloomy heart with the joy of divine goodness. All the days of life are a process of conversion, a journey toward the dwelling in the Lord’s house forever, a journey in the visible Church, a membership in the people of God, hoping for the Kingdom of Heaven. The same worldview of a rational and pre-scientific psychology was also the worldview of Christian religious initiation. It was a united worldview.

  In Science and Creation, Jaki devoted the eighth chapter to the writings of early Church Fathers to show that although much of the writing was dedicated to Christian ethics, scriptural exegesis, and theology, there was also a considerable effort to defend the superiority of the Christian message over paganism and pantheism.[248] Jaki noted that the classic textbook Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (1944) gave no accou
nt of the Church Fathers’ attitudes toward Greek and Roman science, and at the time of writing Science and Creation (1974), a “careful and comprehensive study of all such texts relevant to the question [was] still wanting” then, and that seems to be the case today as well.[249]

  The more modern textbook Backgrounds of Early Christianity (1987, 1993, 2003) gave some detail of the differences in the worldview of pantheistic Greek and biblical cultures, including the ways Aristotelian philosophy conflicted with Christian thought, but it still was not the focused study on the scientific attitudes of the Church Fathers that Jaki called for.[250] Given the connection Jaki made between the biblical worldview of Creation out of nothing and the birth of science in the Christian West, a closer evaluation of these texts would be a most beneficial addition to Jaki’s thesis that science was born of Christianity.[251] For the purpose of this present work, a brief discussion of the attitudes of some of the Church Fathers is offered and supported with quotes and contexts of the early writings, enough to show that such a study would be warranted.

  St. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 A.D.) made the point in his First Apology that Christians should not be hated since their beliefs were similar, but superior to, the Stoic doctrines. In Chapter XX, “Heathen analogies to Christian doctrine,” he clarified the distinction: “And philosophers called Stoics teach that even God Himself shall be resolved into fire, and they say that the world is to be formed anew by this revolution; but we understand that God, the Creator of all things, is superior to the things that are to be changed.”[252] In his Second Apology to the Roman Senate, he tried to explain why the Stoic morality did not hold under the doctrine of eternal cycles:

  For if they say that human actions come to pass by fate, they will maintain either that God is nothing else than the things which are ever turning, and altering, and dissolving into the same things, and will appear to have had a comprehension only of things that are destructible, and to have looked on God Himself as emerging both in part and in whole in every wickedness; or that neither vice nor virtue is anything; which is contrary to every sound idea, reason, and sense.[253]

  This quote is to show that in the first century, just as in biblical times, just as in the next millennium, and just as still today, the Christian dogma of creation out of nothing by the Creator who is distinct and separate from His creation has always been a different worldview with radically different logical conclusions about the cosmos. Either the world is eternal and God and man alike are caught up in the cycles, or the world has a beginning and an end in a universe that is ordered by the Creator.

  Another apologist, Athenagoras (ca. 133–190 A.D.), made the distinction between God and creation. He taught that Christians, not the pagans, were the ones “who distinguished God from matter, and teach that matter is one thing and God another, and that they are separated by a wide interval, for the Deity is uncreated and eternal, to be beheld by the understanding and reason alone, while matter is created and perishable . . . ”[254] He also taught that the world was “an instrument in tune, and moving in well-measured time,” and that the Deity is the only one who deserved worship because He gave the world “its harmony, and strikes its notes, and sings the accordant strain.”[255] Athenagoras, consistent with his fellow Christians of the future Middle Ages, noted that the failure of philosophers to realize this distinction led them into inconsistencies about the origin and permanence of the world. He cited Plato and the Stoics as having such an inconsistency, noting that the eternal and cycling conception of the cosmos contradicts the very idea of a God who is the Creator because there is no account for how the providential and governing cause can exist without the passive and changeable cause.

  Discoursing of the intelligible and the sensible, Plato teaches that that which always is, the intelligible, is unoriginated, but that which is not, the sensible, is originated, beginning to be and ceasing to exist. In like manner, the Stoics also say that all things will be burnt up and will again exist, the world receiving another beginning. But if, although there is, according to them, a twofold cause, one active and governing, namely providence, the other passive and changeable, namely matter, it is nevertheless impossible for the world, even though under the care of Providence, to remain in the same state, because it is created—how can the constitution of these gods remain, who are not self-existent, but have been originated? And in what are the gods superior to matter, since they derive their constitution from water? But not even water, according to them, is the beginning of all things. From simple and homogeneous elements what could be constituted? Moreover, matter requires an artificer, and the artificer requires matter. For how could figures be made without matter or an artificer? Neither, again, is it reasonable that matter should be older than God; for the efficient cause must of necessity exist before the things that are made.[256]

  St. Irenaeus (A.D. 2nd century–c. 202) recounted heresies in his monumental work, Against Heresies. The ideas of the Valentinians, Marcosians, Nicolaitans, Encratites, Borborians, Ophites, Sethians, and others listed were pagan forms of Christianity, efforts to reconcile both thoughts. They led to such ideas as dualism, demonology, fatalism, reincarnation, emanationism, and pantheism fused with Christian details.[257] Irenaeus’ purpose was to teach the faithful, and to do this he emphasized two points: 1) that faith in the Creator of all was the basis of Christian belief, and 2) that only a firm adherence to the Church could guard the intellectual vision derived from that faith.[258] In order to move on in his chapter having noted that deeper studies might ensue, Jaki summarized the earliest Christian apologists as such: “To mention after all this Irenaeus’ insistence on a creation out of nothing, or his needling of the inner contradictions of the eternal recurrence through reincarnations, would be to belabor already familiar points.”[259]

  As Christianity spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, Christian thought and fundamental characteristics of Greek science achieved a “sophisticated awareness” crystallizing in Alexandria where the first school of Christian thought emerged at the Alexandrian School which had been founded by Alexander the Great in 322 B.C.[260] Clement of Alexandria (died A.D. 215) was an intellectual who studied with Christian teachers elsewhere before coming to Alexandria to teach at the school and refute paganism and pantheism.[261] One of his students was Origen (c. A.D. 182–251), whose general outlook was affected by the Platonism prevalent in Alexandria where he was born. Origen is known his systematic study of Scripture, his theological cosmology, and for his refutation of paganism.[262] Clement and Origen had a “double task” of fully expressing the existing Christian intellectual tradition in that they had to articulate the Covenant to the faithful and serve as apologists to the pagan world, which required them to address the cosmology.[263]

  To set the tone of the time of Clement and Origen, there is a quote found at the end of The Pastor of Hermas (sometimes called the Shepherd of Hermas) which was so valued a book in the first and second century as to be considered canonical scripture by some of the Fathers. There is clearly a strong emphasis on the same biblical worldview of the Old Testament cultures and the same worldview of the Middle Ages when science was born, a worldview that asserted the power and wisdom of God, an ordered cosmos that He created, with laws of nature and laws for man to live by.

  Lo, the God of powers, who by His invisible strong power and great wisdom has created the world, and by His glorious counsel has surrounded His creation with beauty, and by His strong word has fixed the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth upon the waters, and by His own wisdom and providence has created His holy Church, which He has blessed, lo! He removes the heavens and the mountains, the hills and the seas, and all things become plain to His elect, that He may bestow on them the blessing which He has promised them, with much glory and joy, if only they shall keep the commandments of God which they have received in great faith.[264]

  In his Exhortation to the Greeks, Clement taught that a result of idol worship was the mental chaining of the intellec
t to the blind forces of nature, and he refused to follow the pagans in regards to motion and the idolizing of natural forces:

  Far in deed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such tales. Even to our own children, when they are crying their heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling fabulous stories to soothe them; for we shrink from fostering in the children the atheism proclaimed by these men, who, though wise in their own conceit, have no more knowledge of the truth than infants. Why, in the name of truth, do you show those who have put their trust in you that they are under the dominion of “flux” and “motion” and “fortuitous vortices”? Why, pray, do you infect life with idols, imagining winds, air, fire, earth, stocks, stones, iron, this world itself to be gods? Why babble in high-flown language about the divinity of the wandering stars to those men who have become real wanderers through this much-vaunted,—I will not call it astronomy, but—astrology?[265]

  Clement urged for a more confident attitude toward nature, a view of a world created by a rational Creator. Not only did he exhort the Greeks to view the world as creation, a robust confidence in human and cosmic existence, but he exhorted them to have faith in Christ who generated that confidence:

  How great is the power of God! His mere will is creation; for God alone created, since He alone is truly God. By a bare wish His work is done, and the world’s existence follows upon a single act of His will. Here the host of philosophers turns aside, when they admit that man is beautifully made for the contemplation of heaven and yet worship the things which appear in heaven and are apprehended by sight. For although the heavenly bodies are not the works of man, at least they have been created for man. Let none of you worship the sun. Let no one deify the universe; rather let him seek after the creator of the universe.[266]