Introduction:
Science
began with the Greeks in Western civilization. They were the first to advance
the scientific explanation of the universe. Western science was greatly
influenced by Greek thought. Until the seventeenth century, objects were
thought to be governed by their own inner nature (substances and properties -
this was Aristotle's philosophy), but during the Scientific Revolution
scientists such as Isaac Newton and Descartes began to reject the idea of
nature and use the language of law. The idea of laws governing the movement
of objects, chemical processes, and so on, originally came from the Bible. The
Old Testament, in particular, places a strong emphasis on God maintaining the
world in regular ways: day and night, cycles of the moon, birth and death,
winter and summer.
Scientific
Revolution:
The
scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changed
people's view of the world. Scientific Research was the most important event
that led to the creation of new knowledge in the 17th and 18th centuries, known
as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Scientific Revolution was
technically started with the publication of Copernicus' work - On the
Revolution of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, where he challenged the geocentric
conception of the universe and argued for a heliocentric universe, and ended
with Newton proposing universal laws and a mechanical universe, in the second
half of the XVII century. During this period, a number of scientific
discoveries were made that completely changed the way we perceive the universe,
what was previously an earth-centered Cosmos exploded into an infinite
universe.
The
interest of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) arose with the need to support the
Church in its understanding of cosmology based on planetary predictions to
reform the old Aristotle-Ptolemaic geocentric understanding of the universe.
Johannes Kepler's (1571-1630) understanding of the Holy Trinity and the arrangement
of the universe led him to the ideas of his three laws of planetary motion,
which completely corrected the Greek postulate of the circular motion of the
heavenly bodies by establishing the motions of the planets in ellipses. , not
in circles, it completely changed what human beings perceived about the
movements of the planets forever. Galileo Galilei, a devout Catholic who lived
in the company, believes that the author of the Bible and the creator of the
universe understands the wonderful world. Newton's Principia of 1687 formulated
the laws of motion and universal gratitude, and also taught scientific theory
to be complemented by the rigorous experimentation that became the cornerstone
of modern science. It is significant that the scientific revolution took place
in a culture permeated by a Christian worldview and strikingly, almost all of
its leaders were deeply committed to the Christian faith. Both Copernicus, the
administrator of the Roman Catholic Church, and Johannes Kepler, a Protestant,
were devout Christian believers. Galileo remained faithful; to his church,
despite opposition from individuals in the academic and ecclesiastical
establishment who were unable to accommodate his discoveries to their
Aristotelian worldview. Newton spent more time studying the Bible than science
and was a prodigious theological writer.
Christianity
and the Rise of Western Science:
The
beginning of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought
about changes in man's thinking about the universe and improved people's lives
immensely. Christian is intricately intertwined with the history and
development of Western science and has its roots in it. Christian faith
provided moral sanction for the practice of science and ensured that it would
become a permanent and central feature of modern Western culture.
God
and the Laws of Nature:
Natural
law in the scientific sense was a seventeenth-century innovation and resulted
from the extension of God's law-making moral power to the physical world. One
of the pioneers of this new understanding of natural laws was the French
philosopher and scientist René Descartes (1596–1650), who wrote that "one
God is the author of all motions in the world." Robert Boyle, the father
of modern chemistry and author of the law of the same name, noted that God's
creation operates according to fixed laws "which were at first Establis'd
in themselves". God's authorship of natural laws guaranteed their
universality and immutable nature. Descartes argued that these laws have their
source in an eternal and immutable God, the laws of nature must themselves be
eternal and immutable.
Mathematics
and cosmic order:
The
introduction of mathematical explanation into the natural sciences is closely
related to the new idea that nature is governed by universal and immutable
laws. Once we were done with natural laws, the idea that mathematical
relationships were real had theological justification. Individuals such as
Galileo, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton were convinced that
mathematical truths were not products of the human mind, but of the divine
mind. Kepler argues that God used mathematical archetypes in the creation of
the universe. Descartes argued that God created the laws of logic and
mathematics, arguing that the equation 2+2=4 was only true because God willed
it to be. In support of the idea that God is a mathematician, he quoted the
Bible verse: "You have arranged all things by measure and number and
weight" (Wisdom of Solomon 11:20). Newton subsequently described the
universe as inhabited by "an infinite and omnipresent spirit, in which
matter moved according to mathematical laws".
Conclusion:
The
pattern and understanding of the world from the point of view of Plato and
Aristotle of the geocentric theory was replaced by the new discovery of
Copernicus' heliocentric theory, which then served as inspiration for scholars
such as Kepler, Galileo and Isaac Newton. Admiration of the God of the Bible
led them to discover the mysterious laws governing the natural world, and the
Bible played a vital role throughout its creation.
Bibliography:
Ralte, RodinmawiaThe Interface of Science and Religion: An
Introductory Study. New Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2007.
Webliography:
James Hannam, “Christianity and the Roots of Science”, 22 July 2010, https://www.bede.org.uk/sciencehistory.htm.
Peter Harrison, “Christianity and the rise of western science”, 8 May 2012, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/christianity-and-the-rise-of-western-science/10100570.
TheScientificRevolutionandtheEnlightenment,
www.tamaqua.k12.pa.us>cms,pdf(1500-1780),
The
Christian roots of science, June3 2011, https://www.farady.cam.ac.uk/churches/church-resources/posts/the-christian-roots-of-science/
 The Christian Roots of Western Science){kind=link}
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