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Four Keys to Modern Prosperity: Scientific Rationalism

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Scientific Rationalism

“Thou has ordered all things in measure and number and weight.” (Wisdom of Solomon 11:20)

The second factor that led to unprecedented prosperity, according to William J. Bernstein, is reason, specifically science. (1) While I agree with Bernstein about the centrality of reason to the expansion of prosperity, I differ with him on his analysis of the origins of scientific rationalism.

Bernstein subscribes to a widely held view that places Greek science at the height of ancient science. When Rome collapsed in the fifth century, scientific knowledge was lost to the West for nearly a thousand years until the rediscovery of classical studies during the Renaissance. Only then did science recover and become what it is today.

Rodney Stark has a different take. Despite its notable achievements, stark points out that Greek science was fatally flawed.

There are three reasons for this. First, Greek conceptions of the gods were inadequate to allow them to serve as conscious creators. Second, the Greeks conceived of the universe as not only eternal but as locked into endless cycles of progress and decay. Third, prompted by defining various heavenly bodies as actual gods, the Greeks transformed inanimate objects into living creatures capable of aims, emotions, and desires – thus short-circuiting the search for physical theories. …

Moreover, for Plato the universe had been created in accord with firm operating principles but in accord with ideals. (2)

Science is not merely the development of technology. Science, at a minimum, consists of theorizing and then conducting systematic experiments to observe the integrity of the theory. Ultimately, Greek learning stagnated of its own inner logic. (3) Aristotle taught that two objects of different weights would fall to the earth at different speeds. All he had to do was conduct simple experiments, and he would see his teaching was in error. Plato was constrained to ideas about ideal shapes. Greek philosophers talked about rocks falling to the earth because they had an affinity for the earth as if they were persons with wills and desires.

In contrast, Stark writes:

The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand. (4)

Only in Judaism and Christianity is there the idea of a rational personal God who has created the universe according to rational principles and is bringing history toward some great end. Judaism tends to see a procession through history, whereas Christianity tends to see progression through history. Only within the Christian milieu do we find the appropriate intellectual orientations that gave modern science its birth.

Most religions are backward-looking. They seek to live according to a regimen laid down in the past. The goal of many religions is to honor and conform to the cycles of nature. In contrast, Stark points to the way the Christian faith is communicated and how it gives birth to rational inquiry:

Things might have been different had Jesus left a written scripture. But unlike Muhammad or Moses, whose texts were accepted as divine transmissions and therefore have encouraged literalism, Jesus wrote nothing, and from the very start the church fathers were forced to reason as to the implications of a collection of his remembered sayings – the New Testament is not a unified scripture but an anthology. Consequently, the precedent for a theology of deduction and inference and for the idea of theological progress began with Paul: “For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect.” Contrast this with the second verse of the Qur’an which proclaims itself to be “the scripture whereof there is no doubt.” (5)

Bernstein writes:

For over a thousand years, Western man’s approach to understanding the natural could be summed up in two words: Don’t try.

But where did this attitude come from? It was not grounded in essential Christian thinking but in Christian thinking that had become captive to Greek philosophy. It was the abandonment of Greek philosophy that spawned the rise of modern science. Centuries before the “rediscovery” of Greek classics in the fifteenth century, Christian scholars had already rejected Greek thinking and were well on their way to the establishment of modern science.

Stark makes the case that the designation of “the Dark Ages” for the historical period in Europe from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance is a holdover from Enlightenment propagandists who sought (successfully) to distance themselves from Christian influence. The reality is a very mixed picture wherein the Church was both the greatest catalyst and the greatest obstacle to the rise of the modern world. Stark writes:

The decline of Rome did not interrupt the expansion of human knowledge any more than the “recovery” of Greek learning enabled this process to resume. Greek learning was a barrier to the rise of science! It did not lead to science among the Greeks or the Romans, and it stifled intellectual progress in Islam, where it was carefully preserved and studied. (7)

Alfred W. Crosby’s fascinating book The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600 (8) shows that breaking reality down into measurable quanta preceded the rediscovery of Greek scholarship. This development would ultimately lead to modern science. The intellectual achievement that finally established modern science and took it beyond Greek accomplishments was the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rodney Stark offers a list of the top fifty-two scientists from this era. He identifies thirty-two as devout Christians, eighteen as conventional Christians, and two as skeptics. (Edmund Halley, 1656-1742, and Paracelsus 1493-1541). (9) The rise of science grounded in the scientific method let loose a revolution that reverberates today.

We could trace the various developments of science over the centuries, but that is beyond our scope. What is important to realize is that the rise of science enabled the West to have an ever-expanding and ever more accurate and precise comprehension of the natural world. It has allowed humanity to manipulate and transform the material world in ways utterly unimaginable not long ago. We will have more to say about this when we turn to technology and infrastructure.

(1) William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 52.

(2) Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, (New York: Random House, 2005), 18.

(3) Stark, 20.

(4) Stark, 11-12.

(5) Stark, 9.

(6) Bernstein, 103.

(7) Stark, 20.

(8) Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

(9) Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) 198-199.

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Comments

4 responses to “Four Keys to Modern Prosperity: Scientific Rationalism”

  1. ZZMike Avatar
    ZZMike

    I don’t agree with Stark’s assessment of Greek science. Not to say that he may be right, but I think he overlooks a simpler explanation: they were not experimentalists. So when it seemed obvious to them that heavier things fell faster than lighter ones, that was enough. No need to drop things.
    I used to think that they disdained experiments because, being at the top of a slave culture, they thought that manual labor was beneath them. But it turns out that they simply distrusted any evidence that came in through the senses. (I think that’s somewhere in the Dialogues.) They had lots of evidence that the senses were not to be trusted – they knew about mirages, for example.
    And they thought somewhat along these lines: suppose we do an experiment involving dropping and bouncing balls – how do we know that the next time we do it there might be different forces affecting the outcome? Of course the results will be different – what’s the point?
    They excelled in mathematics and geometry, because those were (and still are) things you can do entirely in your mind.
    “The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand. (4)”
    Now that’s an interesting point. I’ve been reading Friedman’s “The Hidden Face of God”, in which he traces the disappearance of God in the Bible as the OT progresses. (Early on, God was right there with Adam And Eve and their family – even after the Fall. He speaks to the prophets, but as time goes on, less and less. I think Solomon was the last person God ever spoke to directly.) So as humankind grew and grew, God dealt directly with them (us) less and less.
    I suppose you could say that Stark means “spiritually revealing”.

    Reply
  2. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    Mike, I think your observations about the Greeks probably is an extension of Stark’s thoughts here. Anthropomorphizing inanimate objects would certainly lead you away from experiments and testing. I think suspect your observations about math or on target as well.
    Interesting thoughts by Friedman. Seems to me like there is a movement from speaking only to a central representative like Abraham or Moses toward everyone being filled with the Spirit in Acts. I think particularly we get a sense that life should be a deepening relationship with God. As there are more and more people going deeper and deeper it seems that would be a tendency over time to see more of God revealed.

    Reply
  3. Sue Avatar
    Sue

    Scientific “rationalism” and the technologies that flow from it are all about the motive of power and control which has always been THE FUNDAMENTAL DRIVE of the entire Western “cultural” project–even its so called “religion”.
    My favourite book(s) re the origins, development, and consequences of this drive to total power and control at the root of the entire Western “cultural” project are:
    1. Technics and Civilization
    2. The Pentagon of Power (both under the subtitle of the The Myth of the Machine–or rather MEGAMACHINE) by Lewis Mumford.
    With the scientific revolution the quest for total power and control became really big time due to the new powerful technologies thus developed.
    Mumford was profoundly pessimistic re the future of humankind. In his last interview before he died in 1989, he expressed profound dismay/despair because ALL of the dreadful
    de-humanising trends and tendencies that he described had warned us about had gotten “profoundly” worse. And he quite rightly could see that there was no counter-vailing force that could/would make any difference.
    Meawhile every aspect of USA “culture” (and increasingly by extension the entire world) is now totally dominated by the “values” of the Pentagon military-industrial-“entertainment” complex.
    The “culture” of death literally rules in the USA. What Mumford called the NECROPOLIS.
    And what is science anyhow. It is a method of objectifing every one and every thing and thus of gaining control over every one and everything. And thus of eventually DESTROYING everything—that is both humankind altogether, and the biosphere too.
    It (science) arose at a time when the focus of Western “culture” shifted from contemplation of The Divine to that of focusing exclusively on the mortal human being and his/her possibilities fo “self”-fulfilment.
    The Divine Light and even the possibility of Divine Life, was thus in very short time eliminated from the cultural landscape of Europe—thus we has Niezsche’s famous “god is dead” declaration.
    Or as William Blake told us in all of his works (poetry/art/writings) everyone, was put to sleep by Newtons’s single (godless) vision. The sleep that IS left-brained reason or the reductonist method of scientism divorced from The Wisdom of The Heart, inevitably produces monsters.
    There is NO Wisdom within the Protestant tradition because it shares the same dismally reductionist (meat-body only) model of what we are as human beings that scientism has produced or describes.
    Have you read the news recently or turned on your TV. What you see on TV is ALL that there is of USA “culture” now—nothing more, thats it. “Reality” TV rules.
    And of course “jesus” is just another banal consumer product, and effectively advertised as such too.
    Unless the thus inherent power drive is tempered by the Wisdom of The Heart or the disposition of Prior Unity with The Divine Conscious Light we inevitably have ended up with the scenarios described by Mumford and all the other critics of the technopolis–both scholarly and the many works of dis-topian science “fiction”.
    And as Mumford pointed out there was (and is not now) any countervailing force that is capable of turning the MEGAMACHINE around.
    The megamachine has an immense power/force behind it with its own inevitable “logic” or pattern pattening. And ALL possible alternatives have long since been ground to rubble or turned into a consumer or life-style product.
    Any seemingly new possibility immediately gets coopted, banalised or emptied of any virtue, and is turned into another consumer product.

    Reply
  4. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    Sue, we are not as far apart as you may think. The Enlightenment and Modernist projects have ultimately been about achieving human autonomy. While science emerged out of desire to understand God through the ordered world that God had created, It was co-opted by the Enlightenment project and elevated to idolatry.
    As with most things we make idols of, the thing itself is often quite good in its proper context. That is why it makes such an attractive idol. Many good things have come from science even in its distorted state. The issue is not science but rather the drive toward human autonomy. Science has been a means to an inappropriate end.
    My hope is the recapture of science from the Modernist agenda which holds it captive, and restoring it to its important role as one of the ways in which interact with God and God’s creation.

    Reply

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