EVOLUTION OF SCIENCE ARISING FROM THE BELIEF IN A RATIONAL GOD WHO CREATED A PREDICTABLE UNIVERSE BASED ON LAWS
You may not believe in God. You may deprecate those who do. Yet, you must
admit the debt that religion, even with its many negatives, has given to the
modern world.
The belief in a rational Christian God spawned science. Without this assumption
by Christians, not a single experiment would have been recorded.
In the Renaissance,as the world of Christendom was ripped from the people,
aristocrats began to investigate what they referred to as "Creation" and "The
Body Of God."
Bruised by a hundred years of Black Plague, the reduced population of white
survivors were embittered, yet the plagues had so affected Europe that suddenly
even the lowly Aryan peasant was suddenly worth a fortune. He was needed to work
the fields, buy farms, and start society anew. His strength of arm and mind was
something to be reckoned with.
The aristocrats, shaken by the fall of Europe during the plagues, began to think
upon the broken Creation. Was there not some way to reach God through
materialistic rather than spiritualistic means, a means which had resulted in so
many tragic deaths?
They philosophized on this subject for many years, and a body of argumentation
arose in which these broken Christians began to believe that, if Creation was
from a rational God, it therefore would follow God's laws, which had evidently
been broken, otherwise the plagues would not have been unleashed and the church
itself shattered by the Reformation.
So, using newly found tools of scholarship which fell into their hands fromthe
thousands of books which they purchased from the library of Toledo, Spain, books
from major classical writers which were left there by the escaping Moslems, they
began for the first time in almost 1,000 years to read Plato, Aristotle,
Heroditas, Pathagorus, Sophocles, all of whom had been forgotten in the early
church book burnings. Now, they resurfaced.
In addition, another Arab invention, Arabic Numerals, broke the pathetic
mathematical hold of the difficult Roman Numerals. These new numbers were far
more useful and did not need to be added up to arrive at a number, because the
number was instantly reveal by these new symbols. Arabic numerals suddenly made
possible extensive algebraic calculations useful to an emerging culture of
investigation of the world in the search for God's rationality.
These happenings grew from the wreckage of both Christianity and Islam. Yet,
without the myth of God's rational mind in creating a world which their
religions taught them was based upon reason and law, no one would have begun the
painstaking task in which they spent hundreds of years dsecribing, sorting, and
classifying plants, discovering elements, testing gravity, and performing
thousands of other investigations which have landed us, by mere trial and error
accident, inside our present technological world in which navigation, chemicals,
electromechanics, pneumatics, hydraulics, artificial intelligence, and hundreds
other segments of scientific investigation have resulted in inventiveness which
the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, without a rational God to believe in, could
ever hope to have so utilized.
Therefore, the missing ingredient in the classical world, bonded with the
rational belief, and when classicism's writings again emerged, this time with a
new numerical alphabet that supported algebra, a new entwining of perfection
(God, math, mind) and imperfection (the material world, God's broken body, human
anatomy) grew larger and larger into our modern world after 500 years of
classification, predictions, tests, and theories built up a vast compendium of
knowledge that has been connected together to form what we call science.
So, as much as you hate Christians, Arabs, and Jews, and other religions based
on dreams, the technology of our world grew from their thoughts on God being
rational and, therefore, having created a corresponding rational universe of
which we have stumbled onto many rational scientifically provable laws. We, of
course, added our own flavors during each age of science's development.
However, the entire evolution into science was NEVER certain. The ancient world
missed its chance. It failed. It did not have the spark of reason in its system
of gods and godlets, yet Christianity, faulty as it was, did have that spark.
It was through an act of Christian faith that science emerged.
The long classification period of science took approximately 200 years. These
were years of dissecting plants and animals into their simplest parts and
cataloging them.
The next 300 years were also very slow.
It is the final 150 years in which knowledge has lept forward and blossomed from
those volumes of slow and tedious observation by scientists who had no idea
where they were going, except their belief that God's world was based on laws
and they were determined to discover those laws.
All of our sciences today were based on Christian belief in a God that would
create a rational, predictive world.
Science as expressed and proven that belief in its findings.
So, you say, there is no God.
Perhaps you are correct. But, what there is in this world is law and reason that
holds all of the universe in order, and which science has catalogued and
reported upon for us to use.
The hole in the center of all of this knowledge is the missing God of
Christianity.