{"id":3460,"date":"2017-11-06T21:40:23","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T18:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3460"},"modified":"2017-11-06T21:40:23","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T18:40:23","slug":"christianity-and-reason-the-theological-roots-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3460\/christianity-and-reason-the-theological-roots-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Christianity And Reason: The Theological Roots Of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“We shall first try to manifest the truth that faith professes and reason investigates, setting forth demonstrative and probable arguments, so that the truth may be confirmed and the adversary convinced.” <\/em>\u2014Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles<\/em><\/p>\n

W<\/strong>E HAVE SEEN IN THE <\/strong>previous chapters how Christianity forms the heart of Western civilization, shaping ideas and institutions that have persisted for two millennia. In the next few chapters I will examine the relationship between Christianity and science. Specifically, I will consider whether there is an inherent antagonism between the two; atheist writers often portray an ongoing war between them. The conflict, Sam Harris writes, is “zero sum.”‘ E. 0. Wilson proclaims it an “insoluble” enmity, and the popular media breathlessly publicizes this theme of combat, as when Time <\/em>magazine titled its cover story on November 13, 2006, “God vs. Science.”<\/p>\n

Yet science as an organized, sustained enterprise arose only once in human history. And where did it arise? In Europe, in the civilization then called Christendom. Why did modern science develop here and nowhere else? In his September 12, 2006, speech in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI argued that it was due to Christianity’s emphasis on the importance of reason. The pope argued that reason is a central distinguishing feature of Christianity. While the Regensburg address became controversial because of the pope’s remarks about Islam, on his point about Christianity and reason he was right. An unbiased look at the history of science shows that modernscience is an invention of medieval Christianity, and that the greatest breakthroughs in scientific reason have largely been the work of Christians. Even atheist scientists work with Christian assumptions that, due to their ignorance of theology and history, are invisible to them.<\/p>\n

Before religion as we understand the term, there was animism, which was based on the idea of an enchanted universe. Every river, every tree, and every stone was thought to be populated by spirits. The world was mysterious, capricious, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Then came the various polytheistic religions, like those of the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks. Each of these religions posited divine beings\u2014sometimes immortal, sometimes not\u2014who involved themselves in the daily workings of nature, creating storms and earthquakes, turning humans into stags, and so on. Then appeared the great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, followed by the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.<\/p>\n

Of these, only one\u2014Christianity\u2014was from the beginning based on reason. Judaism and Islam are primarily religions of law; there is a divine lawgiver who issues edicts that are authoritative both for nature and for human beings. In the case of Judaism these edicts apply mainly to God’s chosen people, the Jews. In the case of Islam they apply to everyone. In both cases, however, the laws are divinely revealed and humans must follow them. Both Jews and Muslims may engage in extensive debates, but these are confined to the best way to interpret and apply the written codes. Christianity, by contrast, is not a religion of law but a religion of creed. Christianity has always been obsessed with doctrine, which is thought to be a set of true beliefs about man’s relationship to God.
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\nPhilosopher Ernest Fortin writes that while the highest discipline in Judaism and Islam is jurisprudence, the highest discipline in Christianity is theology. The Christian theologian is charged with employing reason to understand the ways of God. There are no theologians in Hinduism and Buddhism because human beings are not called to investigate God’s purposes in this manner.<\/p>\n

But what is a theologian good for? We can answer this question by looking at the church father Augustine. Augustine was faced with a deep and serious theological problem: Before today, there was yesterday, and before yesterday, there was the day before yesterday, and so on. But how can this be? Does the series of yesterdays extend infinitely into the past? If so, then how could God have created a universe that has always existed? If not, there must have been a beginning, but what had been going on before that? If the universe was created by God, then what was God doing before He created the universe?<\/p>\n

To these questions Augustine gave an astounding answer that does not seem to have occurred to anyone before him: God created time along with the universe. In other words, “before” the universe there was no time. The universe is like a series, which may or may not extend infinitely backward and forward in time. But God stands outside the series, and this is what we mean when we say God is “eternal.” Eternal does not mean “goes on forever”; it means “stands outside of time:’ Notice that Augustine was not engaging in vague theological speculation. He was making a radically counterintuitive claim about the nature of physical reality. Today we know from modern physics and astronomy thatAugustine was correct; time is a property of our universe, and time came into existence with the universe itself. Augustine’s reflections on the nature of time, which were generated entirely through theological reasoning, are some of the most penetrating insights in the history of thought.<\/p>\n

In order to get a sense of how Christians reasoned about God, I’d like to consider two famous arguments for the existence of God and match the wits of ancient Christian thinkers against those of their modern atheist detractors. The first is Aquinas’s argument based on causation. Aquinas argues that every effect requires a cause, and that nothing in the world is the cause of its own existence. Whenever you encounter A, it has to be caused by some other B. But then B has to be accounted for, so let us say it is caused by C. This tracing of causes, Aquinas says, cannot continue indefinitely, because if it did, then nothing would have come into existence. Therefore there must be an original cause responsible for the chain of causation in the first place. To this first cause we give the name God.<\/p>\n

Leading atheists are unimpressed. “If God created the universe,” Sam Harris writes, “what created God?” His sentiments are echoed by several atheist writers: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg. They raise the problem of infinite regress. Yes, there has to be a chain of causation, but why does it have to stop with God? Why can’t it go on forever? Dawkins makes the further point that only a complex God could have created such a complex universe, and we cannot account for one form of unexplained complexity (the universe) by pointing to an even greater form of unexplained complexity (God). Consequently Dawkins concludes that “the theist answer has utterly failed” and he sees “no alternative but to dismiss it.\u201d
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\nThe real force of Aquinas’s argument, however, is not that every series must have a beginning but that every series, in order to have being or existence, must depend on something outside the series. It is no rebuttal to say that as everything must have a cause, who caused God? Aquinas’s argument does not use the premise that everything needs a cause, only that everything that exists in the universe needs a cause. The movement and contingency of the world cannot be without some ultimate explanation. Since God is by definition outside the universe, He is not part of the series. Therefore the rules of the series, including the rules of causation, would not logically apply to Him.<\/p>\n

Think of God as the author of a novel. The events in the narrative have a certain coherence and logic. Something that occurs in the beginning of the story causes a crisis for one of the characters in the middle of the story. Raskolnikov’s actions in Crime and Punishment <\/em>cause the death of the old woman. But the author is the cause of the story on an entirely different level. The rules of causation that apply within the novel do not apply to its creator. It makes sense to ask of a character that suddenly appears, “Where did he come from? How do you account for him?” It makes no sense in this context, however, to ask, “Where did this fellow Dostoevsky come from? How do you account for him?” The author is outside the narrative, and his act of creation cannot be understood as an episode within it. From this discussion it should be evident that Harris and Dawkins have not even come close to answering Aquinas’s argument.<\/p>\n

Next I turn to Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.9 Anselm begins whimsically with the passage from Psalm 13:1, “The fool has said in his heart that there is no God.” Anselm intends to demonstrate that those who deny the existence of God are indeed fools. They are fools because once you understand the meaning of the term God, <\/em>you are rationally compelled to assent to God’s existence. Anselm is not joking about this.Unlike the inductive argument of Aquinas, Anselm’s argument is purely deductive and relies on no data from experience. Anselm defines God as “that than which no greater can be thought.” Presumably, this is a reasonable and widely accepted definition. Even an atheist should have no problem with it. We all understand the idea of God to correspond to a supreme being that stretches\u2014even transcends\u2014 the limits of our imagination. Anselm proceeds to say that as we acknowledge and understand the definition, we must have some idea of God in our mind. He doesn’t mean a pictorial representation. He simply means that our minds comprehend as a logical possibility the idea of God as “that than which no greater can be thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if this is true, Anselm says, then God exists. We have proved God’s existence. Why? Because if “that than which no greater can be thought” exists in the mind, then it must also exist in reality. The reason is that to exist in reality is, according to Anselm, “greater” than to exist merely in the mind. What is possible and actual is obviously greater than what is merely possible. Anselm gives the example of a portrait painter whose portrait, actually painted, is the realization of an intuition or idea in his head; thus the actual painting is “greater” than the mere intuition or idea of it. In the same way, in order for “that than which no greater can be thought” to satisfy its own definition, it must exist. Otherwise it would be “that than which a greater can <\/em>be thought.” Anselm claims to have shown not only that God exists, but that He exists necessarily. If He existed only in fact and not by necessity, He would be a great being indeed, but He would not be “that than which no greater can be thought.\u201d
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\nI offer Anselm’s proof not because it is immediately convincing\u2014 we feel sure that Anselm has drawn a theological rabbit out of a rhetorical top hat\u2014but because it is notoriously hard to refute. Descartes and Leibniz considered the argument to be a valid one, and produced their own versions of it. Yet in his book God Is Not Great <\/em>Christopher Hitchens seeks to expose Anselm’s shortcomings. He offers the example of a child in a novel who is asked why she believes in dragons. The child replies, “If there is a word dragon, then once there must have been dragons.” Clearly it is childish reasoning to infer the object from the mere idea of it. Hitchens triumphantly proclaims Anselm’s argument “overthrown.”<\/p>\n

Hitchens’s argument was first made by a contemporary of Anselm, a monk named Gaunilo, and Gaunilo’s version is much more effectively argued than Hitchens’s. Gaunilo accused Anselm of making an illicit transition from the conceptual to the existential. Gaunilo’s point was that just because we can imagine unreal things like unicorns, mermaids, and yellow flying dogs does not mean that any of these creatures exist. Anselm answered Gaunilo by pointing out his ontological argument does not say that everything we can imagine in our heads necessarily exists. The argument merely insists that “that than which no greater can be thought” exists and exists by necessity. In other words, Anselm is only making his claim in one particular case. It is precisely the character of “that than which no greater can be thought” to exist necessarily: there is nothing in the definition of unicorns and yellow flying dogs that confers existence on them, much less necessary existence.”<\/p>\n

There have been other objections to Anselm, and I don’t propose to discuss them here. My point is that theology gives evidence of a high order of reason at work, and one cannot, as many atheists do, dismiss these arguments as unreasonable even if you don’t agree with them. Consider many of the famous arguments in philosophy, say, Locke’s argument aboutprivate property or Wittgenstein’s argument about the possibility of a private language. Whether or not we think these arguments successful, it can hardly be said that they are irrational. Rather, they represent powerful rational claims about the nature of reality.<\/p>\n

So it is with Aquinas and Anselm. In proving God’s existence they at no point appeal to supernatural revelation. Theirs are arguments based on reason alone. They were, of course, devised in a very different historical and philosophical context than the one we now inhabit, so they need to be updated to be persuasive. And when they are reformulated in modern terms, they are persuasive. I intend, as you will see, to make an argument very similar to Aquinas’s in a later chapter on the origin of the universe. My point is that the kind of reasoning about God that we see in Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm is typical of Christianity. There is very little of this in any other religion. And out of such reasoning, remarkably enough, modern science was born.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “We shall first try to manifest the truth that faith professes and reason investigates, setting forth demonstrative and probable arguments, so that the truth may be confirmed and the adversary convinced.” \u2014Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7359,7360,48,7284,2223,7361,7362,469,155,7363,7364,7291,3434,482],"class_list":["post-3460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-antagonism","tag-aquinas-summa-contra-gentiles","tag-benedict-xvi","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-enmity","tag-history-of-science","tag-medieval-christianity","tag-modern-science","tag-pope-benedict-xvi","tag-sam-harris","tag-summa-contra-gentiles","tag-theological-roots","tag-thomas-aquinas","tag-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}